The Frau Consul smiled forbearingly. She well knew her husband’s opinion of the luxurious Kröger tastes.
“That’s all,” he said, and put his cigar into the ash-receiver. “As far as I’m concerned, I live in the hope that God will preserve my powers unimpaired, and that by His gracious help I may succeed in reestablishing the firm on its old basis. … I hope you see the thing more clearly now, Betsy?”
“Quite, quite, my dear Jean,” the Frau Consul hastened to reply; for she had given up the manservant, for the evening. “Shall we go to bed? It is very late—”
A few days later, when the Consul came in to dinner in an unusually good mood, they decided at the table to engage the Möllendorpfs’ Anton.
VI
“We shall put Tony into Fräulein Weichbrodt’s boarding-school,” said the Consul. He said it with such decision that so it was.
Thomas was applying himself with talent to the business; Clara was a thriving, lively child; and the appetite of the good Clothilde must have pleased any heart alive. But Tony and Christian were hardly so satisfactory. It was not only that Christian had to stop nearly every afternoon for coffee with Herr Stengel—though even this became at length too much for the Frau Consul, and she sent a dainty missive to the master, summoning him to conference in Meng Street. Herr Stengel appeared in his Sunday wig and his tallest choker, bristling with lead-pencils like lance-heads, and they sat on the sofa in the landscape-room, while Christian hid in the dining-room and listened. The excellent man set out his views, with eloquence if some embarrassment: spoke of the difference between “line” and “dash,” told the tale of “The Forest Green” and the scuttle of coals, and made use in every other sentence of the phrase “in consequence.” It probably seemed to him a circumlocution suitable to the elegant surroundings in which he found himself. After a while the Consul came and drove Christian away. He expressed to Herr Stengel his lively regret that a son of his should give cause for dissatisfaction. “Oh, Herr Consul, God forbid! Buddenbrook minor has a wide-awake mind, he is a lively chap, and in consequence—Just a little too lively, if I might say so; and in consequence—” The Consul politely went with him through the hall to the entry, and Herr Stengel took his leave. … Ah, no, this was far from being the worst!
The worst, when it became known, was as follows: Young Christian Buddenbrook had leave one evening to go to the theatre in company with a friend. The performance was Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell; and the role of Tell’s son Walter was played by a young lady, a certain Mademoiselle Meyer-de-la-Grange. Christian’s worst, then, had to do with this young person. She wore when on the stage, whether it suited her part or not, a diamond brooch, which was notoriously genuine; for, as everybody knew, it was the gift of young Consul Döhlmann—Peter Döhlmann, son of the deceased wholesale dealer in Wall Street outside Holsten Gate. Consul Peter, like Justus Kröger, belonged to the group of young men whom the town called “fast.” His way of life, that is to say, was rather loose! He had married, and had one child, a little daughter; but he had long ago quarrelled with his wife, and he led the life of a bachelor. His father had left him a considerable inheritance, and he carried on the business, after a fashion; but people said he was already living on his capital. He lived mostly at the Club or the Rathskeller, was often to be met somewhere in the street at in the morning; and made frequent business trips to Hamburg. Above all, he was a zealous patron of the drama, and took a strong personal interest in the cast. Mademoiselle Meyer-de-la-Grange was the latest of a line of young ladies whom he had, in the past, distinguished by a gift of diamonds.
Well, to arrive at the point, this young lady looked so charming as Walter Tell, wore her brooch and spoke her lines with such effect, that Christian felt his heart swell with enthusiasm, and tears rose to his eyes. He was moved by his transports to a course that only the very violence of emotion could pursue. He ran during the entr’acte to a flower-shop opposite, where, for the sum of one mark eight and a half shillings, he got at a bargain a bunch of flowers; and then this fourteen-year-old sprat, with his big nose and his deep-lying eyes, took his way to the greenroom, since nobody stopped him, and came upon Fräulein Meyer-de-la-Grange, talking with Consul Peter Döhlmann at her dressing-room door. Peter Döhlmann nearly fell over with laughing when he saw Christian with the bouquet. But the new wooer, with a solemn face, bowed in his best manner before Walter Tell, handed her the bouquet, and, nodding his head, said in a voice of well-nigh tearful conviction: “Ah, Fräulein, how beautifully you act!”
“Well, hang me if it ain’t Krishan Buddenbrook!” Consul Döhlmann cried out, in his broadest accent. Fräulein Meyer-de-la-Grange lifted her pretty brows and asked: “The son of Consul Buddenbrook?” And she stroked the cheek of her young admirer with all the favour in the world.
Such was the story that
