Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/311

RV 301 (BUDDENBROOKS) it appeared that Herr Kistenmaker was not minded to allow any interference in what he considered his prerogative. He mistrusted Herr Gosch’s offer; he laughed at it, and swore that he could easily get much more. He continued to swear this, until at length he was forced to dispose of the property for seventy-five thousand marks to an elderly spinster who had returned from extended travel and decided to settle in the town.

Herr Kistenmaker also arranged for the purchase of the new house, a pleasant little villa for which he paid rather too high a price, but which was about what Gerda Buddenbrook wanted. It lay outside the Castle Gate, on a chestnut-bordered avenue; and thither, in the autumn of the year 1876, the Frau Senator moved with her son, her servants, and a part of her household goods—the remainder, to Frau Permaneder’s great distress, being left behind to pass into the possession of the elderly gentlewoman.

As if these were not changes enough, Mamsell Jungmann, after forty years in the service of the Buddenbrook family, left it to return to her native West Prussia to live out the evening of her life. To tell the truth, she was dismissed by the Frau Senator. This good soul had taken up with little Johann when the previous generation had outgrown her. She had cherished him fondly, read him fairy stories, and told him about the uncle who died of hiccoughs. But now little Johann was no longer small. He was a lad of fifteen years, to whom, despite his lack of strength, she could no longer be of much service; and with his mother her relations had not for a long time been on a very comfortable footing. She had never been able to think of this lady, who had entered the family so much later than herself, as a proper Buddenbrook; and of late she had begun, with the freedom of an old servant, to arrogate to herself exaggerated authority. She stirred up dissension in the household by this or that encroachment; the position became untenable; there were disagreements—and though Frau Permaneder made an impas-

RV 301 (301)