“Idiot!” murmured the Senator.
“What? Well, the bad thing about it is, that Erica is a little bit inclined to be melancholy. She must get it from me, Tom. Sometimes she is very serious and quiet and thoughtful; and then he scolds and grumbles and complains, and really, to tell the truth, is not at all sympathetic. You can’t help seeing that he is a man of no family, and never enjoyed what one would call a refined bringing-up. To be quite frank—a few days before I went to Pöppenrade, he threw the lid of the soup-tureen on the floor and broke it, because the soup was too salt.”
“How charming!”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t, not at all! But we must not judge. God knows, we are all weak creatures—and a good, capable, industrious man like that—Heaven forbid! No, Tom, a rough shell with a sound kernel inside is not the worst thing in this life. I’ve just come from something far sadder than that, I can tell you! Armgard wept bitterly, when she was alone with me—”
“You don’t say! Is Herr von Maiboom—?”
“Yes, Tom—that is what I wanted to tell you. We sit here visiting, but I really came tonight on a serious and important errand.”
“Well, what is the trouble with Herr von Maiboom?”
“He is a very charming man, Ralf von Maiboom, Thomas; but he is very wild—a hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. He gambles in Rostock, and he gambles in Warnemünde, and his debts are like the sands of the sea. Nobody could believe it, just living a couple of weeks at Pöppenrade. The house is lovely, everything looks flourishing, there is milk and sausage and ham and all that, in great abundance. So it is hard to measure the actual situation. But their affairs are in frightful disorder—Armgard confessed it to me, with heartbreaking sobs.”
“Very sad.”
“You may well say so. But, as I had already suspected, it turned out that I was not invited over there just for the sake of my beaux yeux.”
“How so?”
“I will tell you, Tom. Herr von Maiboom needs a large sum of money immediately. He knew the old friendship between his wife and me, and he knew that I am your sister. So, in his extremity, he put his wife up to it, and she put me up to it.—You understand?”
The Senator passed his fingertips across his hair and screwed up his face a little.
“I think so,” he said. “Your serious and important business evidently concerns an advance on the Pöppenrade harvest—if I am not mistaken. But you have come to the wrong man, I think, you and your friends. In the first place, I have never done any business with Herr von Maiboom, and this would be a rather strange way to begin. In the second place—though, in the past, Grandfather, Father, and I myself have made advances on occasion to the landed gentry, it was always when they offered a certain security, either personally or through their connections. But to judge from the way you have just characterized Herr von Maiboom and his prospects, I should say there can be no security in his case.”
“You are mistaken, Tom. I have let you have your say, but you are mistaken. It is not a question of an advance, at all. Maiboom has to have thirty-five thousand marks current—”
“Heavens and earth!”
“—five-and-thirty thousand marks current, to be paid within two weeks. The knife is at his throat—to be plain, he has to sell at once, immediately.”
“In the blade—oh, the poor chap!” The Senator shook his head as he stood, playing with his pince-nez on the tablecloth. “That is a rather unheard-of thing for our sort of business,” he went on. “I have heard of such things, mostly in Hesse, where a few of the landed gentry are in the hands of the Jews. Who knows what sort of cutthroat it is that has poor Herr von Maiboom in his clutches?”
“Jews? Cutthroats?” cried Frau Permaneder, astonished beyond measure. “But it’s you we are talking about, Tom!”
Thomas Buddenbrook suddenly threw down his pince-nez on the table so that it slid along on top of the newspaper, and turned toward his sister with a jerk.
“Me?” he said, but only with his lips, for he made no sound. Then he added aloud: “Go to bed, Tony. You are tired out.”
“Why, Tom, that is what Ida Jungmann used to say to us, when we were just beginning to have a good time. But I assure you I was never wider awake in my life than now, coming over here in the dead of night to make Armgard’s offer to you—or rather, indirectly, Ralf von Maiboom’s—”
“And I will forgive you for making a proposal which is the product of your naivete and the Maibooms’ helplessness.”
“Helplessness? Naivete, Thomas? I don’t understand you—I am very far from understanding you. You are offered an opportunity to do a good deed, and at the same time the best stroke of business you ever did in your life—”
“Oh, my darling child, you are talking the sheerest nonsense,” cried the Senator, throwing himself back impatiently in his chair. “I beg your pardon, but you make me angry with your ridiculous innocence. Can’t you understand that you are asking me to do something discreditable, to engage in underhand manoeuvres? Why should I go fishing in troubled waters? Why should I fleece this poor landowner? Why should I take advantage of his necessity to do him out of a year’s harvest at a usurious profit to myself?”
“Oh, is that the way you look at it!” said Frau Permaneder, quite taken aback and thoughtful. But she recovered in a moment and went on: “But it is not at all necessary to look at it like that, Tom. How are you forcing him, when it is he who comes to you? He needs the money,
