Pastor Wunderlich filled his own and his neighbour’s wine-glass. “So you think my dear Consul,” he said with a discreet smile, “that even without Geelmaack, things would have turned out just as they did?”
“Oh, probably not,” the Consul said thoughtfully, not addressing anybody in particular. “But I do think that Dietrich Ratenkamp was driven by fate when he took Geelmaack into partnership. That was the way his destiny was to be fulfilled. . . . He acted under the pressure of inexorable necessity. I think he knew more or less what his partner was doing, and what the state of affairs was at the warehouse. But he was paralyzed.”
“Assez, Jean,” interposed old Buddenbrook, laying down his spoon. “That’s one of your idées. . . .”
The Consul rather absently lifted his glass to his father. Lebrecht Kröger broke in: “Let’s stick by the jolly present!”
He took up a bottle of white wine that had a little silver stag on the stopper; and with one of his fastidious, elegant motions he held if on its side and examined the label. “C. F. Köppen,” he read, and nodded to the wine-merchant. “Ah, yes, where should we be without you?”
Madame Antoinette kept a sharp eye on the servants while they changed the gilt-edged Meissen plates; Mamsell Jungmann called orders through the speaking-tube into the kitchen, and the fish was brought in. Pastor Wunderlich remarked, as he helped himself:
“This ‘jolly present’ isn’t such a matter of course as it seems, either. The young folk here can hardly realize, I suppose, that things could ever have been different from what they are now. But I think I may fairly claim to have had a personal share, more than once, in the fortunes of the Buddenbrook family. Whenever I see one of these, for instance—” he picked up one of the heavy silver spoons and turned to Madame Antoinette—“I can’t help wondering whether they belong to the set that our friend the philosopher Lenoir, Sergeant under his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon,
19
