“Monkey, little, merry fellow,Thou art nature’s punchinello....”
“Monkey, little, merry fellow,Thou art nature’s punchinello....”
“Monkey, little, merry fellow,
Thou art nature’s punchinello....”
There were endless verses—Kassbaum read them, quite simply, out of his book. Nobody needed to trouble himself about what Herr Modersohn thought. The noise grew worse and worse, the feet shuffled and scraped on the dusty floor, the cock crowed, the pig grunted, peas filled the air. The five-and-twenty were drunk with disorder. And the unregulated instincts of their years awoke. They drew obscene pictures on pieces of paper, passed them about, and laughed at them greedily.
All at once everything was still. The pupil who was then reciting interrupted himself; even Herr Modersohn got up and listened. They heard something charming: a pure, bell-like sound, coming from the bottom of the room and flowing sweetly, sensuously, with indescribably tender effect, on the sudden silence. It was a music-box which somebody had brought, playing “Du, du, liegst mir am Herzen” in the middle of the English lesson. But precisely at that moment when the little melody died away, something frightful ensued. It broke like a sudden storm over the heads of the class, unexpected, cruel, overwhelming, paralyzing.
Without anybody’s having knocked, the door opened wide with a great shove, and a presence came in, high and huge, growled, and stood with a single stride in front of the benches. It was the Lord God.
Herr Modersohn grew ashy pale and dragged down the chair from the platform, dusting it with his handkerchief. The pupils had sprung up like one man. They pressed their armsto their sides, stood on their tip-toes, bent their heads, and bit their tongues in the fervour of their devotion. The deepest silence reigned. Somebody gasped with the effort he made—then all was still again.
Director Wulicke measured the saluting columns for a while with his eye. He lifted his arm with its dirty funnel-shaped cuff, and let it fall with the fingers spread out, as if he were attacking a keyboard. “Sit down,” he said in his double-bass voice.
The pupils sank back into their seats. Herr Modersohn pulled up the chair with trembling hands, and the Director sat down beside the dais. “Please proceed,” he said. That was all, but it sounded as frightful as if the words he uttered had been “Now we shall see, and woe to him who—”
The reason for his coming was clear. Herr Modersohn was to give evidence of his ability to teach, to show what the lower second had learned in the six or seven hours he had been with them. It was a question of Herr Modersohn’s existence and future. The Candidate was a sorry figure as he stood on the platform and called again on somebody to recite “The Monkey.” Up to now it had been only the pupils who were examined, but now it was the master as well. Alas, it went badly on both sides! Herr Director Wulicke’s appearance was entirely unexpected, and only two or three of the pupils were prepared. It was impossible for Herr Modersohn to call up Adolf Todtenhaupt for the whole hour on end; after “The Monkey” had been recited once, it could not be asked for again, and so things were in a bad way. When the reading from Ivanhoe began, young Count Mölln was the only person who could translate it at all, he having a personal interest in the novel. The others hemmed and hawed, stuttered, and got hopelessly stuck. Hanno Buddenbrook was called up and could not do a line. Director Wulicke gave utterance to a sound that was as though the lowest string of his double-bass had been violently plucked, and Herr Modersohn wrung his small, clumsy, inky hands repeating plaintively overand over. “And it went so well—it always went so well!”
He was still saying it, half to the pupils and half to the Director, when the bell rang. But the Lord God stood erect with folded arms before his chair and stared in front of him over the heads of the class. Then he commanded that the register be brought, and slowly marked down for laziness all those pupils whose performances of the morning had been deficient—or entirely lacking—six or seven marks at one fell swoop. He could not put down a mark for Herr Modersohn, but he was much worse than the others. He stood there with a face like chalk, broken, done for. Hanno Buddenbrook was among those marked down. And Director Wulicke said besides, “I will spoil all your careers for you.” Then he went.
The bell rang; class was over. It was always like that. When you expected trouble it did not come. When you thought all was well—then, the catastrophe. It was now impossible for Hanno to go up at Easter. He rose from his seat and went drearily out of the room, seeking the aching back tooth with his tongue.
Kai came up to him and put his arm across his shoulders. Together they walked down to the courtyard, among the crowd of excited comrades, all of whom were discussing the extraordinary event. He looked with loving anxiety into Hanno’s face and said, “Please forgive, Hanno, for translating. It would have been better to keep still and get a mark. It’s so cheap—”
“Didn’t I say what ‘patula Jovis arbore’ meant?” answered Hanno. “Don’t mind, Kai. That doesn’t matter. One just mustn’t mind.”
“I suppose that’s true. Well, the Lord God is going to ruin your career. You may as well resign yourself, Hanno, because if it is His inscrutable will—. Career—what a lovely word ‘career’ is! Herr Modersohn’s career is spoilt too. He will never get to be a master, poor chap! There are assistant masters, you may know, and there are head masters; but neverby any chance a plain master. This is a mystery not to be revealed to youthful minds; it is only intended for grown-ups and persons of mature experience. An ordinary intelligence might say that either one is a master or one is not. I might go up to the Lord God or Herr Marotzke and explain this to him. But what would be the result? They would consider it an insult, and I should be punished for insubordination—all for having discovered for them a much higher significance in their calling than they themselves were aware of! No, let’s not talk about them—they’re all thick-skinned brutes!”
They walked about the court; Kai made jokes to help Hanno forget his bad mark, and Hanno listened and enjoyed.
“Look, here is a door, an outer door. It is open, and outside there is the street. How would it be if we were to go out and take a little walk? It is recess, and we have still six minutes. We could easily be back in time. But it is perfectly impossible. You see what I mean? Here is the door. It is open, there is no grating, there is nothing, nothing whatever to prevent us. And yet it is impossible for us to step outside for even a second—it is even impossible for us to think of doing so. Well, let’s not think of it, then. Let’s take another example: we don’t say, for instance, that it is nearly half-past twelve. No, we say, ‘It’s nearly time for the geography period’! You see? Now, I ask, is this any sort of a life to lead? Everything is wrong. Oh, Lord, if the institution would just once let us out of her loving embrace!”
“Well, and what then? No, Kai, we should just have to do something then; here, at least we are taken care of. Since my Father died Herr Stephan Kistenmaker and Pastor Pringsheim have taken over the business of asking me every day what I want to be. I don’t know. I can’t answer. I can’t be anything. I’m afraid of everything—”
“How can anybody talk so dismally? What about your music?”
“What about my music, Kai? There is nothing to it. Shall I travel round and give concerts? In the first place,they wouldn’t let me; and in the second place, I should never really know enough. I can play very little. I can only improvise a little when I am alone. And then, the travelling about must be dreadful, I imagine. It is different with you. You have more courage. You go about laughing at it all—you have something to set against it. You want to write, to tell wonderful stories. Well, thatissomething. You will surely become famous, you are so clever. The thing is, you are so much livelier. Sometimes in class we look at each other, the way we did when Petersen got marked because he read out of a crib, when all the rest of us did the same. The same thought is in both our minds—but you know how to make a face and let it pass. I can’t. I get so tired of things. I’d like to sleep and never wake up. I’d like to die, Kai! No, I am no good. I can’t want anything. I don’t even want to be famous. I’m afraid of it, just as much as if it were a wrong thing to do. Nothing can come of me, that is perfectly sure. One day, after confirmation-class, I heard Pastor Pringsheim tell somebody that one must just give me up, because I come of a decayed family.”
“Did he say that?” Kai asked with deep interest.
“Yes; he meant my Uncle Christian, in the institution in Hamburg. One must just give me up—oh, I’d be so happy if they would! I have so many worries; everything is so hard for me. If I give myself a little cut or bruise anywhere, and make a wound that would heal in a week with anybody else, it takes a month with me. It gets inflamed and infected and makes me all sorts of trouble. Herr Brecht told me lately that all my teeth are in a dreadful condition—not to mention the ones that have been pulled already. If they are like that now, what will they be when I am thirty or forty years old? I am completely discouraged.”
“Oh, come,” Kai said, and struck into a livelier gait. “Now you must tell me something about your playing. I want to write something marvellous—perhaps I’ll begin it to-day, in drawing period. Will you play this afternoon?”
Hanno was silent a moment. A flush came upon his face, and a painful, confused look.
“Yes, I’ll play—I suppose—though I ought not. I ought to practise my sonatas and études and then stop. But I suppose I’ll play; I cannot help it, though it only makes everything worse.”
“Worse?”
Hanno was silent.
“I know what you mean,” said Kai after a bit, and then neither of the lads spoke again.
They were both at the same difficult age. Kai’s face burned, and he cast down his eyes. Hanno looked pale and serious; his eyes had clouded over, and he kept giving sideways glances.
Then the bell rang, and they went up.
The geography period came next, and an important test on the kingdom of Hesse-Nassau. A man with a red beard and brown tail-coat came in. His face was pale, and his hands were very full of pores, but without a single hair. This was “the clever one,” Dr. Mühsam. He suffered from occasional haemorrhages, and always spoke in an ironic tone, because it was his pose to be considered as witty as he was ailing. He possessed a Heine collection, a quantity of papers and objects connected with that cynical and sickly poet. He proceeded to mark the boundaries of Hesse-Nassau on the map that hung on the wall, and then asked, with a melancholy, mocking smile, if the gentlemen would indicate in their books the important features of the country. It was as though he meant to make game of the class and of Hesse-Nassau as well; yet this was an important test, and much dreaded by the entire form.
Hanno Buddenbrook knew next to nothing about Hesse-Nassau. He tried to look on Adolf Todtenhaupt’s book; but Heinrich Heine, who had a penetrating observation despite his suffering, melancholy air, pounced on him at once and said: “Herr Buddenbrook, I am tempted to ask you to close your book, but that I suspect you would be glad to have me do so. Go on with your work.”
The remark contained two witticisms. First, that Dr. Mühsam addressed Hanno as Herr Buddenbrook, and, second, that about the copy-book. Hanno continued to brood over his book, and handed it in almost empty when he went out with Kai.
The difficulties were now over with for the day. The fortunate ones who had come through without marks, had light and easy consciences, and life seemed like play to them as they betook themselves to the large well-lighted room where they might sit and draw under the supervision of Herr Drägemüller. Plaster casts from the antique stood about the room, and there was a great cupboard containing divers pieces of wood and doll-furniture which served as models. Herr Drägemüller was a thick-set man with a full round beard and a smooth, cheap brown wig which stood out in the back of the neck and betrayed itself. He possessed two wigs, one with longer hair, the other with shorter; if he had had his beard cut he would don the shorter wig as well. He was a man with some droll peculiarities of speech. For instance, he called a lead pencil a “lead.” He gave out an oily-alcoholic odour; and it was said of him that he drank petroleum. It always delighted him to have an opportunity to take a class in something besides drawing. On such occasions he would lecture on the policy of Bismarck, accompanying himself with impressive spiral gestures from his nose to his shoulder. Social democracy was his bugbear—he spoke of it with fear and loathing. “We must keep together,” he used to say to refractory pupils, pinching them on the arm. “Social democracy is at the door!” He was possessed by a sort of spasmodic activity: would sit down next a pupil, exhaling a strong spirituous odour, tap him on the forehead with his seal ring, shoot out certain isolated words and phrases like “Perspective! Light and shade! The lead! Social democracy! Stick together!”—and then dash off again.
Kai worked at his new literary project during this period, and Hanno occupied himself with conducting, in fancy, anoverture with full orchestra. Then school was over, they fetched down their things, the gate was opened, they were free to pass, and they went home.
Hanno and Kai went the same road together as far as the little red villa, their books under their arms. Young Count Mölln had a good distance farther to go alone before he reached the paternal dwelling. He never wore an overcoat.
The morning’s fog had turned to snow, which came down in great white flocks and rapidly became slush. They parted at the Buddenbrook gate; but when Hanno was half-way up the garden Kai came back to put his arm about his neck. “Don’t give up—better not play!” he said gently. Then his slender, careless figure disappeared in the whirling snow.
Hanno put down his books on the bear’s tray in the corridor and went into the living-room to see his mother. She sat on the sofa reading a book with a yellow paper cover, and looked up as he crossed the room. She gazed at him with her brown, close-set, blue-shadowed eyes; as he stood before her, she took his head in both her hands and kissed him on the brow.
He went upstairs, where Fräulein Clementine had some luncheon ready for him, washed, and ate. When he was done he took out of his desk a packet of little biting Russian cigarettes and began to smoke. He was no stranger to their use by now. Then he sat down at the harmonium and played something from Bach: something very severe and difficult, in fugue form. At length he clasped his hands behind his head and looked out the window at the snow noiselessly tumbling down. Nothing else was to be seen; for there was no longer a charming little garden with a plashing fountain beneath his window. The view was cut off by the grey side-wall of the neighbouring villa.
Dinner was at four o’clock, and Hanno, his mother, and Fräulein Clementine sat down to it. Afterward Hanno saw that there were preparations for music in the salon, and awaited his mother at the piano. They played the Sonata Opus 24 of Beethoven. In the adagio the violin sang like anangel; but Gerda took the instrument from her chin with a dissatisfied air, looked at it in irritation, and said it was not in time. She played no more, but went up to rest.
Hanno remained in the salon. He went to the glass door that led out on the small verandah and looked into the drenched garden. But suddenly he took a step back and jerked the cream-coloured curtains across the door, so that the room lay in a soft yellow twilight. Then he went to the piano. He stood for a while, and his gaze, directed fixed and unseeing upon a distant point, altered slowly, grew blurred and vague and shadowy. He sat down at the instrument and began to improvise.
It was a simplemotifwhich he employed—a mere trifle, an unfinished fragment of melody in one bar and a half. He brought it out first, with unsuspected power, in the bass, as a single voice: indicating it as the source and fount of all that was to come, and announcing it, with a commanding entry, by a burst of trumpets. It was not quite easy to grasp his intention; but when he repeated and harmonized it in the treble, with a timbre like dull silver, it proved to consist essentially of a single resolution, a yearning and painful melting of one tone into another—a short-winded, pitiful invention, which nevertheless gained a strange, mysterious, and significant value precisely by means of the meticulous and solemn precision with which it was defined and produced. And now there began more lively passages, a restless coming and going of syncopated sound, seeking, wandering, torn by shrieks like a soul in unrest and tormented by some knowledge it possesses and cannot conceal, but must repeat in ever different harmonies, questioning, complaining, protesting, demanding, dying away. The syncopation increased, grew more pronounced, driven hither and thither by scampering triplets; the shrieks of fear recurred, they took form and became melody. There was a moment when they dominated, in a mounting, imploring chorus of wind-instruments that conquered the endlessly thronging, welling, wandering,vanishing harmonies, and swelled out in unmistakable simple rhythms—a crushed, childlike, imposing, imploring chorale. This concluded with a sort of ecclesiastical cadence. Afermatefollowed, a silence. And then, quite softly, in a timbre of dull silver, there came the firstmotifagain, the paltry invention, a figure either tiresome or obscure, a sweet, sentimental dying-away of one tone into another. This was followed by a tremendous uproar, a wild activity, punctuated by notes like fanfares, expressive of violent resolve. What was coming? Then came horns again, sounding the march; there was an assembling, a concentrating, firm, consolidated rhythms; and a new figure began, a bold improvisation, a sort of lively, stormy hunting song. There was no joy in this hunting song; its note was one of defiant despair. Signals sounded through it; yet they were not only signals but cries of fear; while throughout, winding through it all, through all the writhen, bizarre harmonies, came again that mysterious firstmotif, wandering in despair, torturingly sweet. And now began a ceaseless hurry of events whose sense and meaning could not be guessed, a restless flood of sound-adventures, rhythms, harmonies, welling up uncontrolled from the keyboard, as they shaped themselves under Hanno’s labouring fingers. He experienced them, as it were; he did not know them beforehand. He sat a little bent over the keys, with parted lips and deep, far gaze, his brown hair covering his forehead with its soft curls. What was the meaning of what he played? Were these images of fearful difficulties surmounted flames passed through and torrents swum, castles stormed and dragons slain? But always—now like a yelling laugh, now like an ineffably sweet promise—the originalmotifwound through it all, the pitiful phrase with its notes melting into one another! Now the music seemed to rouse itself to new and gigantic efforts: wild runs in octaves followed, sounding like shrieks; an irresistible mounting, a chromatic upward struggle, a wild relentless longing, abruptly broken by startling, arresting pianissimi which gave a sensationas if the ground were disappearing from beneath one’s feet, or like a sudden abandonment and sinking into a gulf of desire. Once, far off and softly warning, sounded the first chords of the imploring prayer; but the flood of rising cacophonies overwhelmed them with their rolling, streaming, clinging, sinking, and struggling up again, as they fought on toward the end that must come, must come this very moment, at the height of this fearful climax—for the pressure of longing had become intolerable. And it came; it could no longer be kept back—those spasms of yearning could not be prolonged. And it came as though curtains were rent apart, doors sprang open, thorn-hedges parted of themselves, walls of flame sank down. The resolution, the redemption, the complete fulfilment—a chorus of jubilation burst forth, and everything resolved itself in a harmony—and the harmony, in sweetritardando, at once sank into another. It was themotif, thefirst motif! And now began a festival, a triumph, an unbounded orgy of this very figure, which now displayed a wealth of dynamic colour which passed through every octave, wept and shivered in tremolo, sang, rejoiced, and sobbed in exultation, triumphantly adorned with all the bursting, tinkling, foaming, purling resources of orchestral pomp. The fanatical worship of this worthless trifle, this scrap of melody, this brief, childish harmonic invention only a bar and a half in length, had about it something stupid and gross, and at the same time something ascetic and religious—something that contained the essence of faith and renunciation. There was a quality of the perverse in the insatiability with which it was produced and revelled in: there was a sort of cynical despair; there was a longing for joy, a yielding to desire, in the way the last drop of sweetness was, as it were, extracted from the melody, till exhaustion, disgust, and satiety supervened. Then, at last; at last, in the weariness after excess, a long, soft arpeggio in the minor trickled through, mounted a tone, resolved itself in the major, and died in mournful lingering away.
Hanno sat still a moment, his chin on his breast, his hands in his lap. Then he got up and closed the instrument. He was very pale, there was no strength in his knees, and his eyes were burning. He went into the next room, stretched himself on the chaise-lounge, and remained for a long time motionless.
Later there was supper, and he played a game of chess with his mother, at which neither side won. But until after midnight he still sat in his room, before his harmonium, and played—played in thought only, for he must make no noise. He did this despite his firm intention to get up the next morning at half-past five, to do some most necessary preparation.
This was one day in the life of little Johann.