CHAPTER VIII
Wars and rumours of war, billeting and bustle! Prussian officers tread the parquetry floors of Senator Buddenbrook’s bel-étage, kiss the hand of the lady of the house, and frequent the club with Christian, who is back from Öynhausen. In Meng Street Mamsell Severin, Riekchen Severin, the Frau Consul’s new companion, helps the maids to drag piles of mattresses into the old garden-house, which is full of soldiers.
Confusion, disorder, and suspense reign. Troops march off through the gate, new ones come in. They overrun the town; they eat, sleep, fill the ears of the citizens with the noise of rolling drums, commands, and trumpet calls—and march off again. Royal princes are fêted, entry follows entry. Then quiet again—and suspense.
In the late autumn and winter the victorious troops return. Again they are billeted in the town for a time, are mustered out and go home—to the great relief of the cheering citizens. Peace comes—the brief peace, heavy with destiny, of the year 1865.
And between two wars, little Johann played. Unconscious and tranquil, with his soft curling hair and voluminous pinafore frocks, he played in the garden by the fountain, or in the little gallery partitioned off for his use by a pillared railing from the vestibule of the second storey—played the plays of his four and a half years—those plays whose meaning and charm no grown person can possibly grasp: which need no more than a few pebbles, or a stick of wood with a dandelion for a helmet, since they command the pure, powerful, glowing, untaught and unintimidated fancy of those blissful years before life touches us, when neither duty nor remorse dares to lay upon us a finger’s weight, when we may see, hear, laugh, dream, and feel amazement, when the world yet makes upon us not one single demand; when the impatience of those whom we should like so much to love does not yet torment us for evidence of our ability to succeed in the impending struggle. Ah, only a little while, and that struggle will be upon us—and they will do their best to bend us to their will and cut us to their pattern, to exercise us, to lengthen us, to shorten us, to corrupt us. . . .
Great things happened while little Hanno played. The war flamed up, and its fortunes swayed this way and that, then inclined to the side of the victors; and Hanno Buddenhrook’s native city, which had shrewdly stuck to Prussia, looked on not without satisfaction at wealthy Frankfort, which had to pay with her independence for her faith in Austria.
But with the failure in July of a large firm of Frankfort wholesale dealers, immediately before the armistice, the firm of Johann Buddenbrook lost at one fell swoop the round sum of twenty thousand thaler.