He watched her keenly, and her bearing filled him with satisfaction. It expressed disappointment.
“How much is it?” she asked.
“What is that to the point, my child? A very large sum.” And Consul Buddenbrook nodded several times, as though the weight of the very thought of such a sum swung his head back and forth. “I should not conceal from you,” he went on, “that the firm has suffered losses already quite apart from this affair, and that the surrender of a sum like this would be a blow from which it would recover with difficulty. I do not in any way say this to—”
He did not finish. Tony had sprung up, had even taken a few steps backward, and with the wet handkerchief still in her hand she cried: “Good! Enough! Never!” She looked almost heroic. The words “the firm” had struck home. It is highly probable that they had more effect than even her dislike of Herr Grünlich. “You shall not do that, Papa,” she went on, quite beside herself. “Do you want to be bankrupt too? Never, never!”
At this moment the hall door opened a little uncertainly and Herr Grünlich entered.
Johann Buddenbrook rose, with a movement that meant: “That’s settled.”
VIII
Herr Grünlich’s face was all mottled with red; but he had dressed carefully in a respectable-looking black coat and pea-green trousers like those in which he had made his first visits in Meng Street. He stood still, with his head down, looking very limp, and said in a weak exhausted sort of voice: “Father?”
The Consul bowed, not too cordially, and straightened his neckcloth with an energetic movement.
“Thank you for coming,” said Herr Grünlich.
“It was my duty, my friend,” replied the Consul. “But I am afraid it will be about all I can do for you.”
Herr Grünlich threw him a quick look and seemed to grow still more limp.
“I hear,” the Consul went on, “that your banker, Herr Kesselmeyer, is awaiting us—where shall the conference be held? I am at your service.”
“If you will be so good as to follow me,” Herr Grünlich murmured. Consul Buddenbrook kissed his daughter on the forehead and said, “Go up to your child, Antonie.”
Then he went, with Herr Grünlich fluttering in front of and behind him to open the portières, through the dining-room into the living-room.
Herr Kesselmeyer stood at the window, the black and white down softly rising and falling upon his cranium.
“Herr Kesselmeyer, Herr Consul Buddenbrook, my father-in-law,” said Herr Grünlich, meekly. The Consul’s face was impassive. Herr Kesselmeyer bowed with his arms hanging down, both yellow teeth against his upper lip, and said “Pleasure to meet you, Herr Consul.”
“Please excuse us for keeping you waiting, Kesselmeyer,” said Herr Grünlich. He was not more polite to one than to the other. “Pray sit down.”
As they went into the smoking-room, Herr Kesselmeyer said vivaciously: “Have you had a pleasant journey? Ah, rain? Yes, it is a bad time of year, a dirty time. If we had a little frost, or snow, now—but rain, filth—very, very unpleasant.”
“What a queer creature!” thought the Consul.
In the centre of the little room with its dark-flowered wallpaper stood a sizable square table covered with green baize. It rained harder and harder; it was so dark that the first thing Herr Grünlich did was to light the three candles on the table. Business letters on blue paper, stamped with the names of various firms, torn and soiled papers with dates and signatures, lay on the green cloth. There were a thick ledger and a metal inkstand and sand-holder, full of well-sharpened pencils and goose-quills.
Herr Grünlich did the honours with the subdued and tactful mien of a man greeting guests at a funeral. “Dear Father, do take the easy-chair,” he said. “Herr Kesselmeyer, will you be so kind as to sit here?”
At last they were settled. The banker sat opposite the host, the Consul presided on the long side of the table. The back of his chair was against the hall door.
Herr Kesselmeyer bent over, released his upper lip, disentangled a glass from his waistcoat and stuck it on his nose, which he wrinkled for the purpose, and opened his mouth wide. Then he scratched his stubbly beard with an ugly rasping noise, put his hands on his knees, and remarked in a sprightly tone, jerking his head toward the piles of papers: “Well, there we have the whole boiling.”
“May I look into matters a little more closely?” asked the Consul, taking up the ledger. But Herr Grünlich suddenly stretched out his hands over the table—long, trembling hands marked with high blue veins—and cried out in a voice that trembled too: “A moment, Father. Just a moment. Let me make just a few explanations. Yes, you will get an insight into everything—nothing will escape your glance; but, believe me, you will get an insight into the situation of an unfortunate, not a guilty man. You see in me a man who fought unwearied against fate, but was finally struck down. I am innocent of all—”
“We shall see, my friend, we shall see,” said the Consul, with obvious impatience; and Herr Grünlich took his hands away and resigned himself to his fate.
Then there were long dreadful minutes of silence. The three gentlemen sat close together in the flickering candlelight, shut in by the four dark walls. There was not a sound but the rustling of the Consul’s papers and the falling rain outside.
Herr Kesselmeyer stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and played piano on his shoulders with his fingers, looking with indescribable jocosity from one to the other. Herr Grünlich sat upright in his chair, hands on the table, staring gloomily before him, and now and then stealing an anxious glance at his
