Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/379

RV 367 (BUDDENBROOKS) “And from Berlin! What is she doing in Berlin? How did she get to Berlin?”

“I don’t know, Tom; I don’t understand it. The dispatch only came ten minutes ago. But something must have happened, and we must just wait to see what it is. God in his mercy will turn it all to good. Sit down, my son, and eat your luncheon.”

“He took his chair, and mechanically he poured out a glass of porter.

“&ThinSpace;‘All is over,’&ThinSpace;” he repeated. And then “&ThinSpace;‘Antonie.’ How childish!”

He ate and drank in silence.

After a while the Frau Consul ventured to say: “It must be something about Permaneder, don’t you think, Tom?”

He shrugged his shoulders without looking up.

As he went away he said, with his hand on the door-knob, “Well, we must wait and see. As she is not likely to burst into the house in the middle of the night, she will probably reach here some time to-morrow. You will let me know, won't you?”

The Frau Consul waited from hour to hour. She had slept very badly, and in the night she rang for Ida Jungmann, who now slept in the back room of the entresol. She had Ida make her some eau sucrée; and she sat up in bed for a long time and embroidered. And now the forenoon passed in nervous expectancy. When the Consul came to second breakfast, he said that Tony could not arrive before the three-thirty-three train from Buchen. At that hour the Frau Consul seated herself in the landscape-room and tried to read, out of a book with a black leather cover decorated with a gold palm-leaf.

It was a day like its predecessor: cold, mist, wind. The stove crackled away behind its wrought iron screen. The old lady trembled and looked out of the window whenever she heard a wagon. At four o’clock, when she had stopped watch-

RV 367 (367)