Buddenbrooks/Volume 1/Part 6/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
At the end of April Frau Grünlich returned home. Another epoch was behind her, and the old existence began again—attending the daily devotions and the Jerusalem evenings and hearing Lea Gerhardt read aloud. Yet she was obviously in a gay and hopeful mood.
Her brother, the Consul, fetched her from the station—she had come from Buchen—and drove her through the Holsten Gate into the town. He could not resist paying her the old compliment—how, next to Clothilde, she was the prettiest one in the family; and she answered: “Oh, Tom, I hate you! To make fun of an old lady like that—”
But he was right, nevertheless: Madame Grünlich kept her good looks remarkably. You looked at the thick ash-blonde hair, rolled at the sides, drawn back above the little ears, and fastened on the top of the head with a broad tortoise-shell comb; at the soft expression of her grey-blue eyes, her pretty upper lip, the fine oval and delicate colour of her face—and you thought of three-and-twenty, perhaps; never of thirty. She wore elegant hanging gold earrings, which, in a somewhat different form, her grandmother had worn before her. A loose bodice of soft dark silk, with satin revers and flat lace epaulettes, gave her pretty bosom an enchanting look of softness and fulness.
She was in the best of tempers. On Thursday, when Consul Buddenbrook and the ladies from Broad Street, Consul Kröger, Clothilde, Sesemi Wiechbrodt and Erica came to tea, she talked vividly about Munich. The beer, the noodles, the artist who wanted to paint her, and the court coaches had made the greatest impressions. She mentioned Herr Permaneder in passing; and Pfiffi Buddenbrook let fall a word or two to the effect that such a journey might be very agreeable, but did not seem to have any practical results. Frau Grünlich passed this by with dignity, though she put back her head and tucked in her chin. She fell into the habit now, whenever the vestibule bell rang through the entry, of hurrying to the landing to see who had come. What might that mean? Probably only Ida Jungmann, Tony’s governess and year-long confidante, knew that. Ida would say, “Tony, my child, you will see: he’ll come.”
The family was grateful to the returned traveller for her cheering presence; for the atmosphere of the house sadly needed brightening. The relations between the head of the firm and his younger brother had not improved. Indeed, they had grown sadly worse. Their Mother, the Frau Consul, followed with anxious misgivings the course of events and had enough to do to mediate between the two. Her hints to visit the office more regularly were received in absent silence by Christian. He met his brother’s remonstrances with a mortified air, making no defence, and for a few days would apply himself with somewhat more zeal to the English correspondence. But there developed more and more in the elder an irritated contempt for the younger brother, not decreased by the fact that Christian received his occasional rebukes without seeming offence, only looking at him with the usual absent disquiet in his eyes.
Tom’s irritable activity and the condition of his nerves would not let him listen sympathetically or even patiently to Christian’s detailed accounts of his increasing symptoms. To his mother or sister, he referred to them with disgust as “the silly phenomena of an obstinate introspection.”
The ache, the indefinite ache in Christian’s left leg, had yielded by now to treatment; but the trouble in swallowing came on often at table, and there was lately a difficulty in breathing, an asthmatic trouble, which Christian thought for several weeks was consumption. He explained its nature and activity at length to his family, his nose wrinkled up the while. Dr. Grabow was called in. He said the heart and lungs were operating soundly, but the occasional difficulty in breathing was due to muscular sluggishness, and ordered first the use of a fan and secondly that of a green powder which one burned, inhaling the smoke. Christian used the fan in the office, and to a remonstrance on the part of the chief answered that in Valparaiso every man in the office was provided with a fan on account of the heat: “Johnny Thunderstorm—good God!” But one day, after he had been wriggling about on his chair for some time, nervous and restless, he took his powder out of his pocket and made such a strong and violent-smelling reek in the room that some of the men began to cough violently, and Herr Marcus grew quite pale. There was an open explosion, a scandal, a dreadful talking-to which would have led to a break at once, but that the Frau Consul once more covered everything all up, reasoned them out of it, and set things going again.
But this was not all. The life Christian led outside the house, mainly with his old schoolmate Lawyer Gieseke, was observed by the Consul with disgust. He was no prig, no spoil-sport. He knew very well that his native town, this port and trading city, where men walked the streets proud of their irreproachable reputation as business men, was by no means of spotless morality. They made up to themselves for the tedious hours spent in their offices, by dinners with heavy wines and heavy dishes—and by other things. But the broad mantle of civic respectability concealed this side of their life. Thomas Buddenbrook’s first law was to preserve “the dehors”; wherein he showed himself not so different from his fellow burghers. Lawyer Gieseke was a member of the professional class, whose habits of life were much like those of the merchants. That he was also a “good fellow,” anybody could see who looked at him. But, like the other easy men of pleasure in the community, he knew how to avoid trouble by wearing the proper expression and saying the proper thing. And in political and professional matters, he had a reputation of irreproachable respectability. His betrothal to Fräulein Huneus had just been announced; whereby he married a considerable dowry and a place in the best society. He was active in civic affairs, and he had his eye on a seat in the Council—even, ultimately, on the seat of old Burgomaster Överdieck.
But his friend Christian Buddenbrook—the same who could go calmly up to Mlle. Meyer-de-la-Grange, present her his bouquet, and say, “Oh, Fräulein, how beautifully you act!”—Christian had been developed by character and circumstances into a free-liver of the naïve and untrammeled type. In affairs of the heart, as in all others, he was disinclined to govern his feelings or to practise discretion for the sake of preserving his dignity. The whole town had laughed over his affair with an obscure actress at the summer theatre. Frau Stuht in Bell Founders’ Street—the same who moved in the best society—told everybody who would listen how Chris had been seen again walking by daylight in the open street with the person from the Tivoli.
Even that did not actually offend people. There was too much candied cynicism in the community to permit a display of serious moral disapproval. Christian Buddenbrook, like Consul Peter Döhlmann—whose declining business put him into somewhat the same artless class—was a popular entertainer and indispensable to gentlemen’s companions. But neither was taken seriously. In important matters they simply did not count. It was a significant fact that the whole town, the Bourse, the docks, the club, and the street called them by their first names—Peter and Chris. And enemies, like the Hagenströms, laughed not only at Chris’s stories and jokes, but at Chris himself, too.
He thought little or nothing of this. If he noticed it, it passed out of his mind again after a momentary disquiet. But his brother the Consul knew it. Thomas knew that Christian afforded a point of attack to the enemies of the family—and there were already too many such points. The connection with the Överdiecks was distant and would be quite worthless after the Burgomaster’s death. The Krögers played no rôle now; they lived retired, after the misfortunes with their son. The marriage of the deceased uncle Gotthold was always unpleasant. The Consul’s sister was a divorced wife, even if one did not quite give up hope of her re-marrying. And his brother was a laughing-stock in the town, a man with whose clownishness industrious men amused their leisure and then laughed good-naturedly or maliciously. He contracted debts, too, and at the end of the quarter, when he had no more money, would quite openly let Dr. Gieseke pay for him—which was a direct reflection on the firm. Thomas’s contemptuous ill will, which Christian bore with quiet indifference, expressed itself in all the trifling situations that come up between members of a family. If the conversation turned upon the Buddenbrook family history, Christian might be in the mood to speak with serious love and admiration of his native town and of his ancestors. It sat rather oddly on him, to be sure, and the Consul could not stand it: he would cut short the conversation with some cold remark. He despised his brother so much that he could not even permit him to love where he did. If Christian had uttered the same sentiments in the dialect of Marcellus Stengel, Tom could have borne it better. He had read a book, a historical work, which had made such a strong impression on him that he spoke about it and praised it in the family. Christian would by himself never have found out the book; but he was impressionable and accessible to every influence; so he also read it, found it wonderful, and described his reactions with all possible detail. That book was spoiled for Thomas for ever. He spoke of it with cold and critical detachment. He pretended hardly to have read it. He completely gave it over to his brother, to admire all by himself.