The inspection of the school report, with its record of examinations
well or badly got through, would be at last over, and the journey in
the overcrowded carriage. Hanno would wake the first morning in his
room at the Kurhouse, in one of the Swiss cottages that were united
by a small gallery to the main building and the pastry-shop. He would
have a vague feeling of happiness that mounted in his brain and made
his heart contract. He would open his eyes and look with eager pleasure
at the old-fashioned furniture of the cleanly little room. A moment
of dazed and sleepy bliss: then he would be conscious that he was in
Travemünde--for four immeasurable weeks in Travemünde. He did not stir.
He lay on his back in the narrow yellow wooden bed, the linen of which
was extremely thin and soft with age. He even shut his eyes again and
felt his chest rising in deep, slow breaths of happy anticipation.
The room lay in yellow daylight that came in through the striped blind.
Everything was still--Mamma and Ida Jungmann were asleep. Nothing was
to be heard but a measured, peaceful sound which meant that the boy was
raking the gravelled paths of the Kurgarden below, and the buzzing of
a fly that had got between the blind and the window and was storming
the pane--you could see his shadow shooting about in long zigzag lines.
Peace! Only the sound of the rake and the dull buzzing noise. This
gently animated quiet filled little Johann with a priceless sensation:
the feeling of quiet, well-cared-for, elegant repose which was the
atmosphere of the resort, and which he loved better than anything
else. Thank God, none of the shiny worsted-coats who were the chosen
representatives of grammar and the rule of three on this earth was in
the least likely to come here--for here it was rather exclusive and
expensive.
An access of joy made him spring up and run barefoot to the window. He
put up the blind and unfastened the white-painted hook of the window;
and as he opened it the fly escaped and flew away over the flower-beds
and the gravelled paths. The music pavilion, standing in a half-circle
of beech-trees opposite the main building, was still empty and quiet.
The Leuchtenfield, which took its name from the lighthouse that stood
on it, somewhere off to the right, stretched its extent of short sparse
grass under the pale sky, to a point where the grass passed into a
growth of tall, coarse water-plants; and then came the sand, with its
rows of little wooden huts and tall wicker beach-chairs looking out to
the sea. It lay there, the sea, in peaceful morning light, striped blue
and green; and a steamer came in from Copenhagen, between the two red
buoys that marked its course, and one did not need to know whether it
was the _Naiad_ or the _Friederike Överdieck_. Hanno Buddenbrook drew
in a deep, quiet, blissful breath of the spicy air from the sea and
greeted her tenderly, with a loving, speechless, grateful look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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