“I may be perhaps worse off than you are!”
“Worse than I am—come, that’s too much! Gerda, Tony! He says he is worse off than I am. Perhaps it was you that came near dying, in Hamburg, of rheumatism. Perhaps you have had to endure torments in your left side, perfectly indescribable torments, for every little trifling irregularity! Perhaps all your nerves are short on the left side! All the authorities say that is what is the matter with me. Perhaps it happens to you that you come into your room when it is getting dark and see a man sitting on the sofa, nodding at you, when there is no man there?”
“Christian!” Frau Permaneder burst out in horror. “What are you saying? And, my God! what are you quarrelling about? Is it an honour for one to be worse off than the other? If it were, Gerda and I might have something to say, too.—And with Mother lying in there! How can you?”
“Don’t you realize, you fool,” cried Thomas Buddenbrook, in a passion, “that all these horrors are the consequence and effect of your vices, your idleness, and your self-tormenting? Go to work! Stop petting your condition and talking about it! If you do go crazy—and I tell you plainly I don’t think it at all unlikely—I shan’t be able to shed a tear; for it will be entirely your own fault.”
“No, and when I die you won’t shed any tears either.”
“You won’t die,” said the Senator bitingly.
“I shan’t die? Very good, I shan’t die, then. We’ll see who dies first. Work! Suppose I can’t work? My God! I can’t do the same thing long at a time! It kills me. If you have been able to, and are able to, thank God for it, but don’t sit in judgment on others, for it isn’t a virtue. God gives strength to one, and not to another. But that is the way you are made, Thomas. You are self-righteous. Oh, wait, that is not what I am going to say, nor what I accuse you of. I don’t know where to begin, and however much I can say is only a millionth part of the feeling I have in my heart against you. You have made a position for yourself in life; and there you stand, and push everything away which might possibly disturb your equilibrium for a moment—for your equilibrium is the most precious thing in the world to you. But it isn’t the most precious thing in life, Thomas—no, before God, it is not. You are an egotist, that is what you are. I am still fond of you, even when you are angry, and tread on me, and thunder me down. But when you get silent: when somebody says something and you are suddenly dumb, and withdraw yourself, quite elegant and remote, and repulse people like a wall and leave the other fellow to his shame, without any chance of justifying himself—! Yes, you are without pity, without love, without humility.—Oh,” he cried, and stretched both arms in front of him, palms outward, as though pushing everything away from him, “Oh, how sick I am of all this tact and propriety, this poise and refinement—sick to death of it!”
The outburst was so genuine, so heartfelt, it sounded so full of loathing and satiety, that it was actually crushing. Thomas shrank a little and looked down in front of him, weary and without a word.
At last he said, and his voice had a ring of feeling, “I have become what I am because I did not want to become what you are. If I have inwardly shrunk from you, it has been because I needed to guard myself—your being, and your existence, are a danger to me—that is the truth.”
There was another pause, and then he went on, in a crisper tone: “Well, we have wandered far away from the subject. You have read me a lecture on my character—a somewhat muddled lecture, with a grain of truth in it. But we are not talking about me, but about you. You are thinking of marrying; and I should like to convince you that it is impossible for you to carry out your plan. In the first place, the interest I shall be able to pay you on your capital will not be a very encouraging sum—”
“Aline has put some away.”
The Senator swallowed, and controlled himself. “You mean you would mingle your mother’s inheritance with the—savings of this lady?”
“Yes. I want a home, and somebody who will be sympathetic when I am ill. And we suit each other very well. We are both rather damaged goods, so to speak—”
“And you intend, further, to adopt the existing children and legitimize them?”
“Yes.”
“So that after your death your inheritance would pass to them?” As the Senator said this, Frau Permaneder laid her hand on his arm and murmured adjuringly, “Thomas! Mother is lying in the next room!”
“Yes,” answered Christian. “That would be the way it would be.”
“Well, you shan’t do it, then,” shouted the Senator, and sprang up. Christian got behind his chair, which he clutched with one hand. His chin went down on his breast; he looked apprehensive as well as angry.
“You shan’t do it,” repeated Thomas, almost senseless with anger; pale, trembling, jerking convulsively. “As long as I am alive it won’t happen. I swear it—so take care! There’s enough money gone already, what with bad luck and foolishness and rascality, without your throwing a quarter of Mother’s inheritance into this creature’s lap—and her bastards’—and that after another quarter has been snapped up by Tiburtius! You’ve brought enough disgrace on the family already, without bringing us home a courtesan for a sister-in-law, and giving our name to her children. I forbid it, do you hear? I forbid it!” he shouted, in a voice that made the room ring, and Frau Permaneder squeeze
