When Frau Permaneder opened the dining-room door in passing, to call a good night to her brother in the living-room, she saw that the whole storey was lighted up, and that Thomas was walking up and down with his hands behind his back.
IV
The Senator, when he was alone again, sat down at the table, took out his glasses, and tried to resume his reading. But in a few minutes his eyes had roved from the printed page, and he sat for a long time without changing his position, gazing straight ahead of him between the portières into the darkness of the salon.
His face, when he was alone, changed so that it was hardly recognizable. The muscles of his mouth and cheeks, otherwise obedient to his will, relaxed and became flabby. Like a mask the look of vigour, alertness, and amiability, which now for a long time had been preserved only by constant effort, fell from his face, and betrayed an anguished weariness instead. The tired, worried eyes gazed at objects without seeing them; they became red and watery. He made no effort to deceive even himself; and of all the dull, confused, and rambling thoughts that filled his mind he clung to only one: the single, despairing thought that Thomas Buddenbrook, at forty-three years, was an old, worn-out man.
He rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead, drawing a long, deep breath, mechanically lighted another cigarette, though he knew they were bad for him, and continued to gaze through the smoke-haze into the darkness. What a contrast between that relaxed and suffering face and the elegant, almost military style of his hair and beard! the stiffened and perfumed mustaches, the meticulously shaven cheeks and chin, and the careful hairdressing which sedulously hid a beginning thinness. The hair ran back in two longish bays from the delicate temples, with a narrow parting on top; over the ears it was not long and waving, but kept shortcut now, in order not to betray how grey it had grown. He himself felt the change and knew it could not have escaped the eyes of others: the contrast between his active, elastic movements and the dull pallor of his face.
Not that he was in reality less of an important and indispensable personage than he always had been. His friends said, and his enemies could not deny, that Senator Buddenbrook was the Burgomaster’s right hand: Burgomaster Langhals was even more emphatic on that point than his predecessor Överdieck had been. But the firm of Johann Buddenbrook was no longer what it had been—this seemed to be common property, so much so that Herr Stuht discussed it with his wife over their bacon broth—and Thomas Buddenbrook groaned over the fact.
At the same time, it was true that he himself was mainly responsible. He was still a rich man, and none of the losses he had suffered, even the severe one of the year , had seriously undermined the existence of the firm. But the notion that his luck and his consequence had fled, based though it was more upon inward feelings than upon outward facts, brought him to a state of lowness and suspicion. He entertained, of course, as before, and set before his guests the normal and expected number of courses. But, as never before, he began to cling to money and, in his private life, to save in small and petty ways. He had a hundred times regretted the building of his new house, which he felt had brought him nothing but bad luck. The summer holidays were given up, and the little city garden had to take the place of mountains or seashore. The family meals were, by his express and emphatic command, of such simplicity as to seem absurd by contrast with the lofty, splendid dining-room, with its extent of parquetry floors and its imposing oak furniture. For a long time now, there had been dessert only on Sundays. His own appearance was as elegant as ever; but the old servant, Anton, carried to the kitchen the news that the master only changed his shirt now every other day, as the washing was too hard on the fine linen. He knew more than that. He knew that he was to be dismissed. Gerda protested: three servants were few enough to do the work of so large a house as it should be done. But it was no use: old Anton, who had so long sat on the box when Thomas Buddenbrook drove down to the Senate, was sent away with a suitable present.
Such decrees as these were in harmony with the joyless state of affairs in the firm. That fresh enterprising spirit with which young Thomas Buddenbrook had taken up the reins—that was all gone, now; and his partner, Herr Friedrich Wilhelm Marcus—who, with his small capital, could not have had a prepondering influence in any case—was by nature lacking in initiative.
Herr Marcus’ pedantry had so increased in the course of years that it had become a distinct eccentricity. It took him a quarter of an hour of stroking his moustaches, casting side-glances, and giving little coughs, just to cut his cigar and put the tip in his pocketbook. Evenings, when the gaslight
