“Speak lower, devil take you!”
“You are a fool. Shrewd and resourceful, are you? Yes, to the other chap’s advantage. You’re not scrupulous, I’ll say that for you, but much good it’s done you! You have played tricks, and wormed capital out of people by hook or crook, just to pay me my twelve or sixteen percent. You threw your honour overboard without getting any return. You have a conscience like a butcher’s dog, and yet you are nothing but a ninny, a scapegoat. There are always such people—they are too funny for words. Why is it you are so afraid to apply to the person we mean with the whole story? Isn’t it because there was crooked work four years ago? Perhaps it wasn’t all quite straight—what? Are you afraid that certain things—?”
“Very well, Kesselmeyer; I will write. But suppose he refuses? Suppose he lets me down?”
“Oh—ah, ha! Then we will just have a bankruptcy, a highly amusing little bankruptcy. That doesn’t bother me at all. So far as I am concerned, I have about covered my expenses with the interest you have scratched together, and I have the priority with the assets. Oh, you wait; I shan’t come short. I know everything pretty well, my good friend; I have an inventory already in my pocket. Ah, ha! We shall see that no dressing-gown and no silver breadbasket gets away.”
“Kesselmeyer, you have sat at my table—”
“Oh, be quiet with your table! In eight days I’ll be back for the answer. I shall walk in to town—the fresh air will do me good. Good morning, my friend, good morning!”
And Herr Kesselmeyer seemed to depart—yes, he went. She heard his odd, shuffling walk in the corridor, and imagined him rowing along with his arms. …
Herr Grünlich entered the “pensée-room” and saw Tony standing there with the little watering-can in her hand. She looked him in the face.
“What are you looking at? Why are you staring like that?” he said to her. He showed his teeth, and made vague movements in the air with his hands, and wiggled his body from side to side. His rosy face could not become actually pale; but it was spotted red and white like a scarlet-fever patient’s.
VII
Consul Johann Buddenbrook arrived at the villa at two o’clock in the afternoon. He entered the Grünlich salon in a grey travelling-cloak and embraced his daughter with painful intensity. He was pale and seemed older. His small eyes were deep in their sockets, his large pointed nose stuck out between the fallen cheeks, his lips seemed to have grown thinner, and the beard under his chin and jaws half-covered by his stiff choker and high neckband—he had lately ceased to wear the two locks running from the temples halfway down the cheeks—was as grey as the hair on his head.
The Consul had hard, nerve-racking days behind him. Thomas had had a haemorrhage; the Father had learned of the misfortune in a letter from Herr van der Kellen. He had left his business in the careful hands of his clerk and hurried off to Amsterdam. He found nothing immediately dangerous about his son’s illness, but an open-air cure was necessary, in the South, in Southern France; and as it fortunately happened that a journey of convalescence had been prescribed for the young son of the head of the firm, the two young men had left for Pau as soon as Thomas was able to travel.
The Consul had scarcely reached home again when he was attacked by a fresh misfortune, which had for the moment shaken his firm to its foundations and by which it had lost eighty thousand marks at one blow. How? Discounted cheques drawn on Westfall Brothers had come back to the firm, liquidation having begun. He had not failed to cover them. The firm had at once showed what it could do, without hesitation or embarrassment. But that could not prevent the Consul from experiencing all the sudden coldness, the reserve, the mistrust at the banks, with “friends,” and among firms abroad, which such an event, such a weakening of working capital, was sure to bring in its train.
Well, he had pulled himself together, and had reviewed the whole situation; had reassured, reinforced, made head. And then, in the midst of the struggle, among telegrams, letters, and calculations, this last blow broke upon him as well: B. Grünlich, his daughter’s husband, was insolvent. In a long, whining, confused letter he had implored, begged, and prayed for an assistance of a hundred to a hundred and twenty thousand marks. The Consul replied curtly and non-committally that he would come to Hamburg to meet Herr Grünlich and Kesselmeyer the banker, made a brief, soothing explanation to his wife, and started off.
Tony received him in the salon. She was fond of receiving visits in her brown silk salon, and she made no exception now; particularly as she had a very profound impression of the importance of the present occasion, without comprehending in the least what it was about. She looked blooming and yet becomingly serious, in her pale grey frock with its laces at breast and wrists, its bell-shaped sleeves and long train, and little diamond clasp at the throat. “How are you, Papa? At last you have come to see us again. How is Mamma? Is there good news from Tom? Take off your things, Father dear. Will you dress? The guestroom is ready for you. Grünlich is dressing.”
“Don’t call him, my child. I will wait for him here. You know I have come for a talk with your husband—a very, very serious talk, my dear Tony. Is Herr Kesselmeyer here?”
“Yes, he is in the pensée-room
