Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/147

RV 137 (BUDDENBROOKS) pallor gave the lie to his alert, energetic, humorous expression; Gerda, his wife, leaning back in her chair, the gleaming, blue-ringed eyes in her pale face gazing fixedly at the crystal prisms in the chandelier; his sister, Frau Permaneder: his cousin, Jürgen Kröger, a quiet, neatly-dressed official; Friederike, Henriette, and Pfiffi, the first two more long and lean, the third smaller and plumper than ever, but all three wearing their stereotyped expression, their sharp, spiteful smile at everything and everybody, as though they were perpetually saying “Really—it seems incredible!” Lastly, there was poor, ashen-grey Clothilde, whose thoughts were probably fixed upon the coming meal.—Every one of these persons was past forty. The hostess herself, her brother Justus and his wife, and little Therese Weichbrodt were all well past sixty; while old Frau Consul Buddenbrook, Uncle Gotthold’s widow, born Stüwing, as well as Madame Kethelsen, now, alas almost entirely deaf, were already in the seventies.

Erica Weinschenk was the only person present in the bloom of youth; she was much younger than her husband, whose cropped, greying head stood out against the idyllic landscape behind him. When her eyes—the light blue eyes of Herr Grünlich—rested upon him, you could see how her full bosom rose and fell without a sound, and how she was beset with anxious, bewildered thoughts about usance and book-keeping, witnesses, prosecuting attorneys, defence, and judges. Thoughts like these, un-Christmaslike though they were, troubled everybody in the room. They all felt uncanny at the presence in their midst of a member of the family who was actually accused of an offence against the law, the civic weal, and business probity, and who would probably be visited by shame and imprisonment. Here was a Christmas family party at the Buddenbrooks’—with an accused man in the circle! Frau Permaneder’s dignity became majestic, and the smile of the Misses Buddenbrook more and more pointed.

And what of the children, the scant posterity upon whom

RV 137 (137)