Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/249

RV 239 (BUDDENBROOKS) begin again where they had left off, and go on to this and that.

The laden carriage stood before the door. The day had come. Early in the morning Hanno had said good-bye to sea and strand. Now he said it to the waiters as they received their fees, to the music pavilion, the rose-beds, and the whole long summer as well. And amid the bows of the hotel servants the carriage drove off.

They passed the avenue that led to the little town, and rolled along the front. Ida Jungmann sat, white-haired, bright-eyed, and angular, opposite Hanno on the back seat, and he squeezed his head into the corner and looked past her out of the window. The morning sky was overcast; the Trave was full of little waves that hurried before the wind. Now and then rain-drops spattered the pane. At the farther end of the front, people sat before their house doors and mended nets; barefoot children ran past, and stared inquisitively at the occupants of the carriage. They did not need to go away!

As they left the last houses behind, Hanno bent forward once more to look after the lighthouse; then he leaned back and closed his eyes. “We’ll come back again next year, darling,” Ida Jungmann said in her grave, soothing voice. It needed only that to make Hanno’s chin tremble and the tears run down beneath his long dark lashes.

His face and hands were brown from the sea air. But if his stay at the baths had been intended to harden him, to give him more resistance, more energy, more endurance, then it had failed of its purpose; and Hanno himself was aware of this lamentable fact. These four weeks of sheltered peace and adoration of the sea had not hardened him: they had made him softer than ever, more dreamy and more sensitive. He would be no better able to endure the rigours of Herr Tietge’s class. The thought of the rules and history dates which he had to get by heart had not lost its power to

RV 239 (239)