He had come back once more to his mother’s house, and had a room on the corridor of the first storey. But he spent more of his time at the club than in Meng Street, for life there was not made any too pleasant for him. Riekchen Severin, Ida Jungmann’s successor, who now reigned over the Frau Consul’s household and managed the servants, had a peasant’s instinct for hard facts. She was a thickset country-bred creature, with coarse lips and fat red cheeks. She perceived directly that it was not worth while to put herself out for this idle storyteller, who was silly and ill by turns, whom his brother, the Senator—the real head of the family—ignored with lifted eyebrows. So she quite calmly neglected Christian’s wants. “Gracious, Herr Buddenbrook,” she would say, “you needn’t think as I’ve got time for the likes of you!” Christian would look at her with his nose all wrinkled up, as if to say “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” and go his stiff-kneed way.
“Do you think,” he said to Tony, “that I have a candle to go to bed by? Very seldom. I generally take a match.” The sum his mother could allow him was small. “Hard times,” he would say. “Yes, things were different once. Why, what do you suppose? Sometimes I’ve had to borrow money for tooth-powder!”
“Christian!” cried Frau Permaneder. “How undignified! And going to bed with a match!” She was shocked and outraged in her deepest sensibilities—but that did not mend matters.
The tooth-powder money Christian borrowed from his old friend Andreas Gieseke, Doctor of Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence. He was fortunate in this friendship, and it did him credit; for Dr. Gieseke, though as much of a rake as Christian, knew how to keep his dignity. He had been elected Senator the preceding winter, for Dr. Överdieck had sunk gently to his long rest, and Dr. Langhals sat in his place. His elevation did not affect Andreas Gieseke’s mode of life. Since his marriage with Fräulein Huneus, he had acquired a spacious house in the centre of the town; but as everybody knew, he also owned a certain comfortable little vine-clad villa in the suburb of St. Gertrude, which was charmingly furnished, and occupied quite alone by a still young and uncommonly pretty person of unknown origin. Above the house door, in ornamental gilt lettering, was the word “Quisisana,” by which name the retired little dwelling was known throughout the town, where they pronounced it with a very soft s and a very broad a. Christian Buddenbrook, as Senator Gieseke’s best friend, had obtained entry into Quisisana, and been successful there, as formerly with Aline Puvogel in Hamburg, and on other occasions in London, Valparaiso, and sundry other parts of the world. He “told a few stories,” and was “a little friendly”; and now he visited the little vine-clad house on the same footing as Senator Gieseke himself. Whether this happened with the latter’s knowledge and consent, is of course doubtful. What is certain is, that Christian found there, without money and without price, the same friendly relaxation as Dr. Gieseke, who, however, had to pay for the same with his wife’s money.
A short time after the betrothal of Hugo Weinschenk and Erica Grünlich, the Director proposed to his relative that he should enter the Insurance office; and Christian actually worked for two weeks in the service of the Company. But the misery in his side began to get worse, and his other, indefinable ills as well; and the Director proved to be a domineering superior, who did not hesitate, on the occasion of a little misunderstanding, to call his relative a booby. So Christian felt constrained to leave this post too.
Madame Permaneder, at this period of the family’s history, was in such a joyful mood that her happiness found vent in shrewd observations about life: how, when all was said and done, it had its good side. Truly, she bloomed anew in these weeks; and their invigorating activity, the manifold plans, the search for suitable quarters, and the feverish preoccupation with furnishings brought back with such force the memories of her first betrothal that she could not but feel young again—young and boundlessly hopeful. Much of the graceful high spirits of girlhood returned to her ways, and movements; indeed, she profaned the mood of one entire Jerusalem evening by such uncontrollable hilarity that even Lea Gerhardt let the book of her ancestor fall in her lap and stared about the room with the great, innocent, startled eyes of the deaf.
Erica was not to be parted from her mother. The Director agreed—nay, it was even his wish—that Frau Antonie should live with the Weinschenks, at least at first, and help the inexperienced Erica with her housekeeping. And it was precisely this which called up in her the most priceless feeling, as though no Bendix Grünlich or Alois Permaneder had ever existed, and all the trials, disappointments, and sufferings of her life were as nothing, and she might begin anew and with fresh hopes. She bade Erica be grateful to God, who bestowed upon her the one man of her desire, whereas the mother had been obliged to offer up her first and dearest choice on the altar of duty and reason. It was Erica’s name which, with a hand trembling with joy, she inscribed in the family book next the Director’s. But she, Tony Buddenbrook, was the real bride. It was she who might once more ransack furniture and upholstery shops and test hangings and carpets with a practised hand; she who once more found and rented a truly “elegant” apartment. It was she who was once more to leave the pious and roomy parental mansion and cease to be a divorced wife; she who might once more lift her head and begin a new life, calculated to arouse general remark and enhance the prestige of the family. Even—was it
