Buddenbrooks/Volume 1/Part 5/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
The head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook had measured his brother on his arrival with a long, scrutinizing gaze. He had given him passing and unobtrusive observation during several days; and then, though he did not allow any sign of his opinion to appear upon his calm and discreet face, his curiosity was satisfied, his mind made up. He talked with him in the family circle in a casual tone on casual subjects and enjoyed himself like the others when Christian gave a performance. A week later he said to him: “Well, shall we work together, young man? So far as I know, you consent to Mamma’s wish, do you not? As you know, Marcus has become my partner, in proportion to the quota he has paid in. I should think that, as my brother, you could ostensibly take the place he had—that of confidential clerk. What your work would be—I do not know how much mercantile experience you have really had. You have been loafing a bit, so far—am I right? Well, in any case, the English correspondence will suit you. But I must beg one thing of you, my dear chap. In your position as brother of the head of the house, you will actually have a superior position to the others; but I do not need to tell you that you will impress them far more by behaving like their equal and doing your duty, than you will by making use of privileges and taking liberties. Are you willing to keep office hours and observe appearances?”
And then he made a proposal in respect of salary, which Christian accepted without consideration, with an embarrassed and inattentive face that betrayed very little love of gain and a great zeal to settle the matter quickly. Next day Thomas led him into the office; and Christian’s labours for the old firm began.
The business had taken its uninterrupted and solid course after the Consul’s death. But soon after Thomas Buddenbrook seized the reins, a fresher and more enterprising spirit began to be noticeable in the management. Risks were taken now and then. The credit of the house, formerly a conception, a theory, a luxury, was consciously strained and utilized. The gentlemen on ’Change nodded at each other. “Buddenbrook wants to make money with both hands,” they said. They thought it was a good thing that Thomas had to carry the upright Friederich Wilhelm Marcus along with him, like a ball and chain on his foot. Herr Marcus’ influence was the conservative force in the business. He stroked his moustache with his two fingers, punctiliously arranged his writing materials and glass of water on his desk, looked at everything on both sides and top and bottom; and, five or six times in the day, would go out through the courtyard into the wash-kitchen and hold his head under the tap to refresh himself.
“They complement each other,” said the heads of the great houses to each other; Consul Heneus said it to Consul Kistenmaker. The small families echoed them; and the dockyard and warehouse hands repeated the same opinion. The whole town was interested in the way young Buddenbrook would “take hold.” Herr Stuht in Bell Founders’ Street would say to his wife, who knew the best families: “They balance each other, you see.”
But the personality of the business was plainly the younger partner. He knew how to handle the personnel, the ship-captains, the heads in the warehouse offices, the drivers and the yard hands. He could speak their language with ease and yet keep a distance between himself and them. But when Herr Marcus spoke in dialect to some faithful servant it sounded so outlandish that his partner would simply begin to laugh, and the whole office would dissolve in merriment.
Thomas Buddenbrook’s desire to protect and increase the prestige of the old firm made him love to be present in the daily struggle for success. He well knew that his assured and elegant bearing, his tact and winning manners were responsible for a great deal of good trade.
“A business man cannot be a bureaucrat,” he said to Stephan Kistenmaker, of Kistenmaker and Sons, his former school-fellow. He had remained the oracle of this old playmate, who listened to his every word in order to give it out later as his own. “It takes personality—that is my view. I don’t think any great success is to be had from the office alone—at least, I shouldn’t care for it. I always want to direct the course of things on the spot, with a look, a word, a gesture—to govern it with the immediate influence of my will and my talent—my luck, as you call it. But, unfortunately, personal contact is going out of fashion. The times move on, but it seems to me they leave the best behind. Relations are easier and easier; the connections better and better; the risk gets smaller—but the profits do too. Yes, the old people were better off. My grandfather, for example—he drove in a four-horse coach to Southern Germany, as commissary to the Prussian army—an old man in pumps, with his head powdered. And there he played his charms and his talents and made an astonishing amount of money, Kistenmaker. Oh, I’m afraid the merchant’s life will get duller and duller as time goes on.”
It was feelings like these that made him relish most the trade he came by through his own personal efforts. Sometimes, entirely by accident, perhaps on a walk with the family, he would go into a mill for a chat with the miller, who would feel himself much honoured by the visit; and quite en passant, in the best of moods, he would conclude a good bargain. His partner was incapable of that sort of thing.
As for Christian, he seemed at first to devote himself to his task with real zest and enjoyment, and to feel exceptionally well and contented. For several days he ate with appetite, smoked his short pipe, and squared his shoulders in the English jacket, giving expression to his sense of ease and well-being. In the morning he went to the office at about the same time as Thomas, and sat opposite his brother and Herr Marcus in a revolving arm-chair like theirs. First he read the paper, while he comfortably smoked his morning cigarette. Then he would fetch out an old cognac from his bottom desk drawer, stretch out his arms in order to feel himself free to move, say “Well!” and go to work good-naturedly, his tongue roving about among his teeth. His English letters were extraordinarily able and effective, for he wrote English as he spoke it, simply and fluently, without effort.
He gave expression to his mood in his own way in the family circle.
“Business is really a fine, gratifying calling,” he said. “Respectable, satisfying, industrious, comfortable. I was really born to it—fact! And as a member of the house!—well, I’ve never felt so good before. You come fresh into the office in the morning, and look through the paper, smoke, think about this and that, take some cognac, and then go to work. Comes midday; you eat with your family, take a rest, then to work again. You write, on smooth, good business paper, with a good pen, rule, paper-knife, stamp—everything first-class and all in order. You keep at it, get things done one after the other, and finish up. To-morrow is another day. When you go home to supper, you feel thoroughly satisfied—satisfied in every limb. Even your hands—”
“Heavens, Christian,” cried Tony. “What rubbish! How can your hands feel satisfied?”
“Why, yes, of course—can’t you understand that? I mean—” he made a painstaking effort to express and explain. “You can shut your fist, you see. You don’t make a violent effort, of course, because you are tired from your work. But it isn’t flabby; it doesn’t make you feel irritable. You have a sense of satisfaction in it; you feel easy and comfortable—you can sit quite still without feeling bored.”
Every one was silent. Then Thomas said in a casual tone, so as not to show that he disagreed: “It seems to me that one doesn’t work for the sake of—” He broke off and did not continue. “At least, I have different reasons,” he added after a minute. But Christian did not hear. His eyes roamed about, sunk in thought; and he soon began to tell a story of Valparaiso, a tale of assault and murder of which he had personal knowledge. “Then the fellow ripped out his knife—” For some reason Thomas never applauded these tales. Christian was full of them, and Madame Grünlich found them vastly entertaining. The Frau Consul, Clara, and Clothilde sat aghast, and Mamsell Jungmann and Erica listened with their mouths open. Thomas used to make cool sarcastic comments and act as if he thought Christian was exaggerating or hoaxing—which was certainly not the case. He narrated with colour and vividness. Perhaps Thomas found unpleasant the reflection that his younger brother had been about and seen more of the world than he! Or were his feelings of repulsion due to the glorification of disorder, the exotic violence of these knife- and revolver-tales? Christian certainly did not trouble himself over his brother’s failure to appreciate his stories. He was always too much absorbed in his narrative to notice its success or lack of success with his audience, and when he had finished he would look pensively or absently about the room.
But if in time the relations between the two brothers came to be not of the best, Christian was not the one who thought of showing or feeling any animosity against his brother. He silently took for granted the pre-eminence of his elder, his superior capacity, earnestness, and respectability. But precisely this casual, indiscriminate acknowledgment irritated Thomas, for it had the appearance of setting no value upon superior capacity, earnestness, or respectability.
Christian appeared not to notice the growing dislike of the head of the firm. Thomas’s feelings were indeed quite justifiable; for unfortunately Christian’s zeal for business visibly decreased, even after the first week, though more after the second. His little preparations for work, which, in the beginning, wore the air of a prolonged and refined anticipation: the reading of the paper, the after-breakfast cigarette, the cognac, began to take more and more time, and finally used up the whole morning. It gradually came about that Christian freed himself largely from the constraint of office hours. He appeared later and later with his breakfast cigarette to begin his preparations for work; he went at midday to eat at the Club, and came back late or not at all.
This Club, to which mostly unmarried business men belonged, occupied comfortable rooms in the first story of a restaurant, where one could eat and meet in unrestrained and sometimes not altogether harmless conversation—for there was a roulette table. Even some of the more light-minded fathers of families, like Justus Kröger and, of course, Peter Döhlmann, were members, and police senator Crema was here “the first man at the hose.” That was the expression of Dr. Gieseke—Andreas Gieseke, the son of the Fire Commissioner and Christian’s old schoolmate. He had settled as a lawyer in the town, and Christian renewed the friendship with him, though he ranked as rather a wild fellow. Christian—or, as he was called everywhere, Chris—had known them all more or less in the old days, for nearly all of them had been pupils of Marcellus Stengel. They received him into the Club with open arms; for, while neither business men nor scholars found him a genius, they recognized his amusing social gifts. It was here that he gave his best performances and told his best stories. He did the virtuoso at the club piano and imitated English and transatlantic actors and opera singers. But the best things he did were stories of his affairs with women, related in the most harmless and entertaining way imaginable—adventures that had befallen him on shipboard, on trains, in St. Paul’s, in Whitechapel, in the virgin forest. There was no doubt that Christian’s weakness was for women. He narrated with a fluency and power that entranced his listeners, in an exhaustless stream, with his somewhat plaintive, drawling voice, burlesque and innocent, like an English humourist. He told a story about a dog that had been sent in a satchel from Valparaiso to San Francisco and was mangy to boot. Goodness knew what was the point of the anecdote—in his mouth it was indescribably comic. And while everybody about him writhed with laughter, unable to leave off, he himself sat there cross-legged, a strange, uneasy seriousness in his face with its great hooked nose, his thin, long neck, his sparse light-red hair and little round deep-set eyes. It almost seemed as if the laugh were at his expense, as if they were laughing at him. But that never occurred to him.
At home his favourite tales were about his office in Valparaiso. He told of the extreme heat there, and about a young Londoner, named Johnny Thunderstorm, a ne’er-dowell, an extraordinary chap, whom he had “never seen do a stroke of work, God damn me,” and who yet was a remarkable business man.
“Good God, the heat!” he said. “Well, the chief came into the office—there we all lay, eight of us, like flies, and smoked cigarettes to keep the mosquitoes away. Good God! Well, the chief said: ‘You are not working, gentlemen?’ ‘No, sir,’ says Johnny Thunderstorm, ‘as you see, sir!’ And we all blew our cigarette-smoke in his face. Good God!”
“Why do you keep saying ‘good God’?” asked Thomas irritably. But his irritation was at bottom because he felt that Christian told this story with particular relish just because it gave him a chance to sneer at honest work.
The Mother would discreetly change the subject. There were many hateful things in the world, thought the Frau Consul, born Kröger. Brothers could despise and dislike each other, dreadful as it sounded; but one didn’t mention such things. They had to be covered up and ignored.