They went into the dark dining-room, where the Consul lighted a gas-jet on the wall, and looked at his brother. He expected nothing good. Except for the first greeting, he had had no opportunity to speak with Christian, but he had looked at him, during the service, and noted that he seemed unusually serious, and even more restless than common: in the course of Pastor Pringsheim’s discourse he had left the room for several minutes. Thomas had not written him since the day in Hamburg when he had paid over into his brother’s hands an advance of 10,000 marks current on his inheritance, to settle his indebtedness. “Just go on as you are going,” he had said, “and you’ll soon run through all your money. As far as I am concerned, I hope you will cross my path very little in future. You have put my friendship to too hard a test in these three years.” Why was he here now? Something must be driving him.
“Well?” asked the Consul.
“I’m done,” Christian said. He let himself down sidewise on one of the high-backed chairs around the dining-table, and held his hat and stick between his thin knees.
“May I ask what it is you are done with, and what brings you to me?” said the Consul. He remained standing.
“I’m done,” repeated Christian, shaking his head from side to side with frightful earnestness and letting his little round eyes stray restlessly back and forth. He was now thirty-three years old, but he looked much older. His reddish-blond hair was grown so thin that nearly all the cranium was bare. His cheeks were sunken, the cheek-bones protruded sharply, and between them, naked, fleshless, and gaunt, stood the huge hooked nose.
“If it were only this—!” he went on, and ran his hand down the whole of his left side, very close, but not touching it. “It isn’t a pain, you know—it is a misery, a continuous, indefinite ache. Dr. Drögemuller in Hamburg tells me that my nerves on this side are all too short. Imagine, on my whole left side, my nerves aren’t long enough! Sometimes I think I shall surely have a stroke here, on this side, a permanent paralysis. You have no idea. I never go to sleep properly. My heart doesn’t beat, and I start up suddenly, in a perfectly terrible fright. That happens not once but ten times before I get to sleep. I don’t know if you know what it is. I’ll tell you about it more precisely. It is—”
“Not now,” the Consul said coldly. “Am I to understand that you have come here to tell me this? I suppose not.”
“No, Thomas. If it were only that—but it is not that—alone. It is the business. I can’t go on with it.”
“Your affairs are in confusion again?” The Consul did not start, he did not raise his voice. He asked the question quite calmly, and looked sidewise at his brother, with a cold, weary glance.
“No, Thomas. For to tell you the truth—it is all the same now—I never really was in order, even with the ten thousand, as you know yourself. They only saved me from putting up the shutters at once. The thing is—I had more losses at once, in coffee—and with the failure in Antwerp— That’s the truth. So then I didn’t do any more business; I just sat still. But one has to live—so now there are notes and other debts—five thousand thaler. You don’t know the hole I’m in. And on top of everything else, this agony—”