“Where is Erica?”
“Up in the nursery with Tinka. She is very well. She is bathing her doll—of course, not in real water; I mean—she is a wax-doll, she only—”
“Of course.” The Consul drew a deep breath and went on: “Evidently you have not been informed as to—to the state of affairs with your husband.”
He had sat down in an armchair near the large table, and Tony placed herself at his feet on a little seat made of three cushions on top of one another. The finger of her right hand toyed gently with the diamond at her throat.
“No, Papa,” answered Tony. “I must confess I know nothing. Heavens, I am a goose!—I have no understanding at all. I heard Kesselmeyer talking lately to Grünlich—at the end it seemed to me he was just joking again—he always talks so drolly. I heard your name once or twice—”
“You heard my name? In what connection?”
“Oh, I know nothing of the connection, Papa. Grünlich has been insufferably sulky ever since that day, I must say. Until yesterday—yesterday he was in a good mood, and asked me a dozen times if I loved him, and if I would put in a good word for him with you if he had something to ask you.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, he told me he had written you and that you were coming here. It is good you have. Everything is so queer. Grünlich had the card-table put in here. There are a lot of paper and pencils on it—for you to sit at, and hold a council together.”
“Listen, my dear child,” said the Consul, stroking her hair. “I want to ask you something very serious. Tell me: you love your husband with your whole heart, don’t you?”
“Of course, Papa,” said Tony with a face of childlike hypocrisy—precisely the face of the child Tony when she was asked: “You won’t tease the old doll-woman again, Tony?” The Consul was silent a minute.
“You love him so much,” he asked again, “that you could not live without him, under any circumstances, even if by God’s will your situation should alter so that he could no longer surround you with all these things?” And his hand described a quick movement over the furniture and portières, over the gilt clock on the étagère, and finally over her own frock.
“Certainly, Papa,” repeated Tony, in the soothing tone she nearly always used when anyone spoke seriously to her. She looked past her father out of the window, where a heavy veil of rain was silently descending. Her face had the expression children wear when someone tells them a fairy story and then tactlessly introduces a generalization about conduct and duty—a mixture of embarrassment and impatience, piety and boredom.
The Consul looked at her without speaking for a minute. Was he satisfied with her response? He had weighed everything thoroughly, at home and during the journey.
It is comprehensible that Johann Buddenbrook’s first impulse was to refuse his son-in-law any considerable payment. But when he remembered how pressing—to use a mild word—he had been about this marriage; when he looked back into the past, and recalled the words: “Are you satisfied with me?” with which his child had taken leave of him after the wedding, he gave way to a burdensome sense of guilt against her and said to himself that the thing must be decided according to her feelings. He knew perfectly that she had not made the marriage out of love, but he was obliged to reckon with the possibility that these four years of life together and the birth of the child had changed matters; that Tony now felt bound body and soul to her husband and would be driven by considerations both spiritual and worldly to shrink from a separation. In such a case, the Consul argued, he must accommodate himself to the surrender of whatever sum was necessary. Christian duty and wifely feeling did indeed demand that Tony should follow her husband into misfortune; and if she actually took this resolve, he did not feel justified in letting her be deprived of all the ease and comfort to which she had been accustomed since childhood. He would feel himself obliged to avert the catastrophe, and to support B. Grünlich at any price. Yet the final result of his considerations was the desire to take his daughter and her child home with him and let Grünlich go his own way. God forbid that the worst should happen!
In any case, the Consul invoked the pronouncement of the law that a continued inability to provide for wife and children justified a separation. But, before everything, he must find out his daughter’s real feelings.
“I see,” he said, “my dear child, that you are actuated by good and praiseworthy motives. But—I cannot believe that you are seeing the thing as, unhappily, it really is—namely, as actual fact. I have not asked what you would do in this or that case, but what you today, now, will do. I do not know how much of the situation you know or suspect. It is my painful duty to tell you that your husband is obliged to call his creditors together; that he cannot carry on his business any longer. I hope you understand me.”
“Grünlich is bankrupt?” Tony asked under her breath, half rising from the cushions and seizing the Consul’s hand quickly.
“Yes, my child,” he said seriously. “You did not know it?”
“My suspicions were not definite,” she stammered. “Then Kesselmeyer was not joking?” she went on, staring before her at the brown carpet. “Oh, my God!” she suddenly uttered, and sank back on her seat.
In that minute all that was involved in the word “bankrupt” rose clearly before her: all the vague and fearful hints which she had heard as a child. “Bankrupt”—that was more dreadful than death, that was catastrophe, ruin, shame, disgrace, misery, despair. “He is bankrupt,” she repeated. She was so cast down and shaken by the fatal word that the idea of escape, of assistance
