“I’ll go with you, Thomas,” he said, quite simply. “You don’t mind, I suppose.” And the Senator, though he did mind very much, said “yes” and “amen” to this arrangement as well.
Christian was now more than ever master of his own time. His fluctuating health had constrained him to give up his last undertaking, the champagne and spirit agency. The man who used to come and sit on his sofa and nod at him in the twilight had happily not recurred of late. But the misery in the side had, if anything, grown worse, and added to this was a whole list of other infirmities of which Christian kept the closest watch, and which he described in all companies, with his nose wrinkled up. He often suffered from that long-standing dread of paralysis of the tongue, throat, and œsophagus, even of the extremities and of the brain—of which there were no actual symptoms, but the fear in itself was almost worse. He told in detail how, one day when he was making tea, he had held the lighted match not over the spirit-lamp, but over the open bottle of methylated spirit instead; so that not only himself, but the people in his own and the adjacent buildings, nearly went up in flames. And he dwelt in particular detail, straining every resource he had at his command to make himself perfectly clear, upon a certain ghastly anomaly which he had of late observed in himself. It was this: that on certain days, i.e., under certain weather conditions, and in certain states of mind, he could not see an open window without having a horrible and inexplicable impulse to jump out. It was a mad and almost uncontrollable desire, a sort of desperate foolhardiness. The family were dining on Sunday in Fishers’ Lane, and he described how he had to summon all his powers, and crawl on hands and knees to the window to shut it. At this point everybody shrieked; his audience rebelled, and would listen no more.
He told these and similar things with a certain horrible satisfaction. But the thing about himself which he did not know, which he never studied and described, but which none the less grew worse and worse, was his singular lack of tact. He told in the family circle anecdotes of such a nature that the club was the only possible place for them. And even his sense of personal modesty seemed to be breaking down. He was on friendly terms with his sister-in-law, Gerda. But when he displayed to her the beautiful weave and texture of his English socks, he did not stop at that, but rolled up his wide, checkered trouser-leg to far above the knee: “Look,” he said, wrinkling his nose in distress: “Look how thin I’m getting. Isn’t it striking and unusual?” And there he sat, sadly gazing at his crooked, bony leg and the gaunt knee visible through his white woollen drawers.
His mercantile activity then, was a thing of the past. But such hours as he did not spend at the club he liked to fill in with one sort of occupation or another; and he would proudly point out that he had never actually ceased to work. He extended his knowledge of languages and embarked upon a study of Chinese—though this was for the sake of acquiring knowledge, simply, with no practical purpose in view. He worked at it industriously for two weeks. He was also, just at this time, occupied with a project of enlarging an English-German dictionary which he had found inadequate. But he really needed a little change, and it would be better too for the Senator to have somebody with him; so he did not allow his business to keep him in town.
The two brothers drove out together to the sea along the turnpike, which was nothing but a puddle. The rain drummed on the carriage-top, and they hardly spoke. Christian’s eyes roved hither and yon; he was as if listening to uncanny noises. Thomas sat muffled in his cloak, shivering, gazing with bloodshot eyes, his moustaches stiffly sticking out beyond his white cheeks. They drove up to the Kurhouse in the afternoon, their wheels grating in the wet gravel. Old Broker Gosch sat in the glass verandah, drinking rum punch. He stood up, whistling through his teeth, and they all sat down together to have a little something warm while the trunks were being carried up.
Herr Gosch was a late guest at the cure, and there were a few other people as well: an English family, a Dutch maiden lady, and a Hamburg bachelor, all of them presumably taking their rest before table-d’hôte, for it was like the grave everywhere but for the sound of the rain. Let them sleep! As for Herr Gosch, he was not in the habit of sleeping in the daytime. He was glad enough to get a few hours’ sleep at night. He was far from well; he was taking a late cure for the benefit of this trembling which he suffered from in all his limbs. Hang it, he could hardly hold his glass of grog; and more often than not he could not write at all—so that the translation of Lope da Vega got on but slowly. He was in a very low mood indeed, and even his curses lacked relish. “Let it go hang!” was his constant phrase, which he repeated on every occasion and often on none at all.
And the Senator? How was he feeling? How long were the gentlemen thinking of stopping?
Oh, Dr. Langhals had sent him out on account of his nerves. He had obeyed orders, of course, despite the frightful weather—what doesn’t one do out of fear of one’s physician? He was really feeling more or less miserable, and they would probably remain till there was a little improvement.
“Yes, I’m pretty wretched too,” said Christian, irritated at Thomas’s speaking only of himself. He was about to fetch out his repertoire—the nodding man, the spirit-bottle, the open window—when the Senator interrupted him by going to engage the rooms.
The rain did not stop. It washed away the earth, it danced upon the sea, which was driven back by the south-west wind and left the beaches bare. Everything was shrouded in grey. The steamers went by like wraiths and vanished on the dim horizon.