CHAPTER VII
Thomas Buddenbrook was, in his heart, far from pleased with the development of little Johann.
Long ago he had led Gerda Arnoldsen to the altar, and all the Philistines had shaken their heads. He had felt strong and bold enough then to display a distinguished taste without harming his position as a citizen. But now, the long-awaited heir, who showed so many physical traits of the paternal inheritance—did he, after all, belong entirely to the mother’s side? He had hoped that one day his son would take up the work of the father’s lifetime in his stronger, more fortunate hands, and carry it forward. But now it almost seemed that the son was hostile, not only to the surroundings and the life in which his lot was cast, but even to his father as well.
Gerda’s violin-playing had always added to her strange eyes, which he loved, to her heavy, dark-red hair and her whole exotic appearance, one charm the more. But now that he saw how her passion for music, strange to his own nature, utterly, even at this early age, possessed the child, he felt in it a hostile force that came between him and his son, of whom his hopes would make a Buddenbrook—a strong and practical-minded man, with definite impulses after power and conquest. In his present irritable state it seemed to him that this hostile force was making him a stranger in his own house.
He could not, himself, approach any nearer to the music practised by Gerda and her friend Herr Pfühl; Gerda herself, exclusive and impatient where her art was concerned, made it cruelly hard for him.
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