But if in time the relations between the two brothers came to be not of the best, Christian was not the one who thought of showing or feeling any animosity against his brother. He silently took for granted the pre-eminence of his elder, his superior capacity, earnestness, and respectability. But precisely this casual, indiscriminate acknowledgment irritated Thomas, for it had the appearance of setting no value upon superior capacity, earnestness, or respectability.
Christian appeared not to notice the growing dislike of the head of the firm. Thomas’s feelings were indeed quite justifiable; for unfortunately Christian’s zeal for business visibly decreased, even after the first week, though more after the second. His little preparations for work, which, in the beginning, wore the air of a prolonged and refined anticipation: the reading of the paper, the after-breakfast cigarette, the cognac, began to take more and more time, and finally used up the whole morning. It gradually came about that Christian freed himself largely from the constraint of office hours. He appeared later and later with his breakfast cigarette to begin his preparations for work; he went at midday to eat at the Club, and came back late or not at all.
This Club, to which mostly unmarried business men belonged, occupied comfortable rooms in the first storey of a restaurant, where one could eat and meet in unrestrained and sometimes not altogether harmless conversation—for there was a roulette table. Even some of the more light-minded fathers of families, like Justus Kröger and, of course, Peter Döhlmann, were members, and police senator Crema was here “the first man at the hose.” That was the expression of Dr. Gieseke—Andreas Gieseke, the son of the Fire Commissioner and Christian’s old schoolmate. He had settled as a lawyer in the town, and Christian renewed the friendship with him, though he ranked as rather a wild fellow. Christian—or, as he was called everywhere, Chris—had known them all more or less in the old days, for nearly all of them had been pupils of Marcellus Stengel. They received him into the Club with open arms; for, while neither business men nor scholars found him a genius, they recognized his amusing social gifts. It was here that he gave his best performances and told his best stories. He did the virtuoso at the club piano and imitated English and transatlantic actors and opera singers. But the best things he did were stories of his affairs with women, related in the most harmless and entertaining way imaginable—adventures that had befallen him on shipboard, on trains, in St. Paul’s, in Whitechapel, in the virgin forest. There was no doubt that Christian’s weakness was for women. He narrated with a fluency and power that entranced his listeners, in an exhaustless stream, with his somewhat plaintive, drawling voice, burlesque and innocent, like an English humourist. He told a story about a dog that had been sent in a satchel from Valparaiso to San Francisco and was mangy to boot. Goodness knew what was the point of the anecdote—in his mouth it was indescribably comic. And while everybody about him writhed with laughter, unable to leave off, he himself sat there cross-legged, a strange, uneasy seriousness in his face with its great hooked nose, his thin, long neck, his sparse light-red hair and little round deep-set eyes. It almost seemed as if the laugh were at his expense, as if they were laughing at him. But that never occurred to him.
At home his favourite tales were about his office in Valparaiso. He told of the extreme heat there, and about a young Londoner, named Johnny Thunderstorm, a ne’er-do-well, an extraordinary chap, whom he had “never seen do a stroke of work, God damn me,” and who yet was a remarkable business man.
“Good God, the heat!” he said. “Well, the chief came into the office—there we all lay, eight of us, like flies, and smoked cigarettes to keep the mosquitoes away. Good God! Well, the chief said: ‘You are not working, gentlemen?’ ‘No, sir,’ says Johnny Thunderstorm, ‘as you see, sir!’ And we all blew our cigarette-smoke in his face. Good God!”
“Why do you keep saying ‘good God’?” asked Thomas irritably. But his irritation was at bottom because he felt that Christian told this story with particular relish just because it gave him a chance to sneer at honest work.
The Mother would discreetly change the subject. There were many hateful things in the world, thought the Frau Consul, born Kröger. Brothers could despise and dislike each other, dreadful as it sounded; but one didn’t mention such things. They had to be covered up and ignored.
CHAPTER IV
In May it happened that Uncle Gotthold—Consul Gotthold Buddenbrook, now sixty years old—was seized with a heart attack one night and died in the arms of his wife, born Stüwing.
The son of poor Madame Josephine had had the worst of it in life, compared with the younger and stronger brother and sister born of Madame Antoinette. But he had long since resigned himself to his fortunes; and in his later years, especially after his nephew turned over to him the Consulate of the Netherlands, he ate his lozenges out of his tin box and harboured the friendliest feelings. It was his ladies who kept up the feud now: not so much his good-natured wife as the three elderly damsels, who could not look at Frau Consul, or Antonie, or Thomas, without a spark in their eyes.