“Oh, yes—he probably would not refuse it,” the Senator said bitterly; and Frau Permaneder answered, three times, one after the other: “You see, you see, you see!”
Thomas Buddenbrook suddenly began to shake his head and laugh angrily.
“We are silly. We sit here and work ourselves up—at least, you do—over something that is neither here nor there. So far as I know, I have not even asked what the thing is about—what Herr von Maiboom actually has to sell. I do not know Pöppenrade.”
“Oh, you would have had to go there,” she said eagerly. “It’s not far from here to Rostock—and from there it is no distance at all. And as for what he has to sell—Pöppenrade is a large estate, I know for a fact that it grows more than a thousand sacks of wheat. But I don’t know details. About rye, oats, or barley, there might be five hundred sacks of them, more or less. Everything is of the best, I can say that. But I can’t give you any figures, I am such a goose, Tom. You would have to go over.”
A pause ensued.
“No, it is not worth wasting words over,” the Senator said decidedly. He folded his pince-nez and put it into his pocket, buttoned up his coat, and began to walk up and down the room with firm and rapid strides, which studiously betrayed no sign that he was giving the subject any further consideration.
He paused by the table and turned toward his sister, drumming lightly on the surface with his bent forefinger as he said: “I’ll tell you a little story, my dear Tony, which will illustrate my attitude toward this affair. I know your weakness for the nobility, and the Mecklenburg nobility in particular—please don’t mind if one of these gentry gets rapped a bit. You know, there is now and then one among them who doesn’t treat the merchant classes with any great respect, though perfectly aware that he can’t do without them. Such a man is too much inclined to lay stress on the superiority—to a certain extent undeniable—of the producer over the middleman. In short, he sometimes acts as if the merchant were like a peddling Jew to whom one sells old clothes, quite conscious that one is being over-reached. I flatter myself that in my dealings with these gentry I have not usually made the impression of a morally inferior exploiter; to tell the truth, the boot has sometimes been on the other foot—I’ve run across men who were far less scrupulous than I am! But in one case, it only needed a single bold stroke to bring me into social relations. The man was the lord of Gross-Poggendorf, of whom you have surely heard. I had considerable dealings with him some while back: Count Strelitz, a very smart-appearing man, with a square eye-glass (I could never make out why he did not cut himself), patent-leather top-boots, and a riding-whip with a gold handle. He had a way of looking down at me from a great height, with his eyes half-shut and his mouth half open. My first visit to him was very telling. We had had some correspondence. I drove over, and was ushered by a servant into the study, where Count Strelitz was sitting at his writing-table. He returns my bow, half gets up, finishes the last lines of a letter; then he turns to me and begins to talk business, looking over the top of my head. I lean on the sofa-table, cross my arms and my legs, and enjoy myself. I stand five minutes talking. After another five minutes, I sit down on the table and swing my leg. We get on with our business, and at the end of fifteen minutes he says to me, very graciously, ‘won’t you sit down?’ ‘Beg pardon?’ I say. ‘Oh, don’t mention it—I’ve been sitting for some time!’”
“Did you say that? Really?” cried Frau Permaneder, enchanted. She had straightway forgotten all that had gone before, and lived for the moment entirely in the anecdote.
“‘I’ve been sitting for some time’—oh, that is too good!”
“Well, and I assure you that the Count altered his tune at once. He shook hands when I came, and asked me to sit down—in the course of time we became very friendly. But I have told you this in order to ask you if you think I should have the right, or the courage, or the inner self-confidence to behave in the same way to Herr von Maiboom if, when we met to discuss the bargain, he were to forget to offer me a chair?”