Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/202

RV 192 (BUDDENBROOKS) his senses felt misty with the scent from countless bouquets and wreaths—and with another odour that came wafted now and then on a current of air, and smelled strange, yet somehow familiar.

He stood beside the bier and looked at the motionless white figure stretched out there severe and solemn, amid white satin. This was not Grandmamma. There was her Sunday cap with the white silk ribbons, and her red-brown hair beneath it. But the pinched nose was not hers, nor the drawn lips, nor the sharp chin, nor the yellow, translucent hands, whose coldness and stiffness one could see. This was a wax-doll—to dress it up and lay it out like that seemed rather horrible. He looked across to the landscape-room, as though the real Grandmamma might appear there the next minute. But she did not come: she was dead. Death had turned her for ever into this wax figure that kept its lids and lips so forbiddingly closed.

He stood resting on his left leg, the right knee bent, balancing lightly on the toe, and clutched his sailor knot with one hand, the other hanging down. He held his head on one side, the curly light-brown locks swaying over the temples, and looked with his gold-brown, blue-encircled eyes in brooding repugnance upon the face of the dead. His breath came long and shuddering, for he kept expecting that strange, puzzling odour which all the scent of the flowers sometimes failed to disguise. When the odour came, and he perceived it, he drew his brows still more together, his lip trembled, and the long sigh which he gave was so like a tearless sob that Frau Permaneder bent over and kissed him and took him away.

And after the Senator and his wife, and Frau Permaneder and Erica, had received for long hours the condolences of the entire town, Elisabeth Buddenbrook, born Kröger, was consigned to earth. The out-of-town families, from Hamburg and Frankfort, came to the funeral and, for the last time, received hospitality in Meng Street. And the hosts of the sympathizers filled the hall and the landscape-room, the corridor

RV 192 (192)