Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/134

RV 124 (BUDDENBROOKS) to match: neglected, uncombed, and none too clean, but endowed by nature with all the marks of pure and noble birth. The carelessly parted hair, reddish-blond in colour, waved back from a white brow, and a pair of light blue eyes gleamed bright and keen from beneath. The cheek bones were slightly prominent: while the nose, with its delicate nostrils and slightly aquiline curve, and the mouth, with its short upper lip, were already quite unmistakable and characteristic.

Hanno Buddenbrook had seen the little count once or twice, even before they met at school, when he took his walks with Ida northward from the Castle Gate. Some distance outside the town, nearly as far as the first outlying village, lay a small farm, a tiny, almost valueless property without even a name. The passer-by got the impression of a dunghill, a quantity of chickens, a dog-hut, and a wretched, kennel-like building with a sloping red roof. This was the manor-house, and therein dwelt Kai’s father, Count Eberhard Mölln.

He was an eccentric, hardly ever seen by anybody, busy on his dunghill with his dogs, his chickens, and his vegetable-patch: a large man in top-boots, with a green frieze jacket. He had a bald head and a huge grey beard like the tail of a turnip; he carried a riding-whip in his hand, though he had no horse to his name, and wore a monocle stuck into his eye under the bushy eyebrow. Except him and his son, there was no Count Mölln in all the length and breadth of the land any more: the various branches of a once rich, proud, and powerful family had gradually withered off, until now there was only an aunt, with whom Kai’s father was not on terms. She wrote romances for the family story-papers, under a dashing pseudonym. The story was told of Count Eberhard that when he first withdrew to his little farm, he devised a means of protecting himself from the importunities of peddlers, beggars, and busy-bodies. He put up a sign which read: “Here lives Count Mölln. He wants nothing, buys

RV 124 (124)