“Oh, no,” Morten said, hastily. “Thanks, but I don’t fit very well with those people, you see. I’ll just sit down over there on the rocks.”
It was a rather large company which Tony was approaching while Morten Schwarzkopf betook himself to the great heap of boulders on the right, near to the bathing-house and washed by the waves. The party was encamped before the Möllendorpfs’ pier, and was composed of the Möllendorpf, Hagenström, Kistenmaker, and Fritsche families. Except for Herr Fritsche, the owner, from Hamburg, and Peter Döhlmann, the idler, the group consisted of women, for it was a week-day, and most of the men were in their offices. Consul Fritsche, an elderly, smooth-shaven gentleman with a distinguished face, was up on the open pier, busy with a telescope, which he trained upon a sailboat visible in the distance. Peter Döhlmann, with a broad-brimmed straw hat and a beard with a nautical cut, stood chatting with the ladies perched on camp-stools or stretched out on rugs on the sand. There were Frau Senator Möllendorpf, born Langhals, with her long-handled lorgnon and untidy grey hair; Frau Hagenström, with Julchen, who had not grown much, but already wore diamonds in her ears, like her mother; Frau Consul Kistenmaker and her daughters; and Frau Consul Fritsche, a wrinkled little lady in a cap, who performed the duties of hospitality at the bath and went about perpetually hot and tired, thinking only about balls and routs and raffles, children’s parties and sailboat excursions. At a little distance sat her paid companion.
Kistenmaker and Son was the new firm of wine-merchants which had, in the last few years, managed to put C. F. Köppen rather in the shade. The two sons, Edouard and Stephan, worked in their father’s office. Consul Döhlmann possessed none of those graces of manner upon which Justus Kröger laid such stress. He was an idler pure and simple, whose special characteristic was a sort of rough good humour. He could and did take a good many liberties in society, being quite aware that his loud, brusque voice and bluff ways caused the ladies to set him down as an original. Once at a dinner at the Buddenbrooks, when a course failed to come in promptly and the guests grew dull and the hostess flustered, he came to the rescue and put them into a good humour by bellowing in his big voice the whole length of the table: “Please don’t wait for me, Frau Consul!” Just now, in this same reverberating voice, he was relating questionable anecdotes seasoned with low-German idioms. Frau Senator Möllendorpf, in paroxysms of laughter, was crying out over and over again: “Stop, Herr Döhlmann, stop! for heaven’s sake, don’t tell any more.”
They greeted Tony—the Hagenströms coldly, the others with great cordiality. Consul Fritsche even came down the steps of the pier, for he hoped that the Buddenbrooks would return next year to swell the population of the baths.
“Yours to command, Fräulein Buddenbrook,” said Consul Döhlmann, with his very best pronunciation; for he was aware that Mademoiselle did not especially care for his manners.
“Mademoiselle Buddenbrook!”
“You here?”
“How lovely!”
“When did you come?”
“What a sweet frock!”