CHAPTER IV
“Our best respects to you, Buddenbrook—I repeat, our best respects!” Herr Köppen’s powerful voice drowned the general conversation as the maid-servant, in her heavy striped petticoat, her fat arms bare and a little white cap on the back of her head, passed the cabbage soup and toast, assisted by Mamsell Jungmann and the Frau Consul’s maid from upstairs. The guests began to use their soup-spoons.
“Such plenty, such elegance! I must say, you know how to do things!—I must say—” Herr Köppen had never visited the house in its former owner’s time. He did not come of a patrician family, and had only lately become a man of means. He could never quite get rid of certain vulgar tricks of speech—like the repetition of “I must say”; and he said “respecks” for “respects.”
“It didn’t cost anything, either,” remarked Herr Gratjens drily—he certainly ought to have known—and studied the wall-painting through the hollow of his hand.
As far as possible, ladies and gentlemen had been paired off, and members of the family placed between friends of the house. But the arrangement could not be carried out in every case; the two Överdiecks were sitting, as usual, nearly on each other’s laps, nodding affectionately at one another. The elder Kröger was bolt upright, enthroned between Madame Antoinette and Frau Senator Langhals, dividing his pet jokes and his flourishes between the two ladies.
“When was the house built?” asked Herr Hoffstede diagonally across the table of old Buddenbrook, who was talking in a gay chaffing tone with Madame Köppen.
“Anno . . . let me see . . . about 1680, if I am not mistaken. My son is better at dates than I am.”
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