“You shan’t do it,” repeated Thomas, almost senseless with anger; pale, trembling, jerking convulsively. “As long as I am alive it won’t happen. I swear it—so take care! There’s enough money gone already, what with bad luck and foolishness and rascality, without your throwing a quarter of Mother’s inheritance into this creature’s lap—and her bastards’—and that after another quarter has been snapped up by Tiburtius! You’ve brought enough disgrace on the family already, without bringing us home a courtesan for a sister-in-law, and giving our name to her children. I forbid it, do you hear? I forbid it!” he shouted, in a voice that made the room ring, and Frau Permaneder squeeze herself weeping into the corner of the sofa. “And I advise you not to attempt to defy me! Up to now I have only despised you and ignored you: but if you try any tricks, if you bring the worse to the worst, we’ll see who will come out ahead! You can look out for yourself! I shan’t have any mercy! I’ll have you declared incompetent, I’ll get you shut up, I’ll ruin you—I’ll ruin you, you understand?”
“And I tell you—” Thus it all began over again, and went on and on: a battle of words, destructive, futile, lamentable, without any purpose other than to insult, to wound, to cut one another to the quick. Christian came back to his brother’s character and cited examples of Thomas’s egotism—painful anecdotes out of the distant past, which he, Christian, had never forgotten, but carried about with him to feed his bitterness. And the Senator retorted with scorn, and with threats which he regretted a moment later. Gerda leaned her head on her hand and watched them, with an expression in her eyes impossible to read. Frau Permaneder repeated over and over again, in her despair: “And Mother lying there in the next room!”
Christian, who at the end had been walking up and down in the room, at last forsook the field.
“Very good, we shall see!” he shouted. With his eyes red, his moustaches ruffled, his handkerchief in his hand, his coat wide open, hot and beside himself, he went out of the door and slammed it behind him.
In the sudden stillness the Senator stood for a moment upright and gazed after his brother. Then he sat down without a word and took up the papers jerkily. He went curtly through the remaining business, then leaned back and twisted his moustaches through his fingers, lost in thought.
Frau Permaneder’s anxiety made her heart beat loudly. The question, the great question, could now not be put off any longer. It must come up, and he must answer; but was her brother now in a mood to be governed by gentleness and filial piety? Alas, she feared not.
“And—Tom—,” she began, looking down into her lap, and then up, as she made a timid effort to read his thoughts. “The furniture—you have taken everything into consideration of course—the things that belong to us, I mean to Erica and me and the little one, they remain here with us? In short, the house—what about it?” she finished, and furtively wrung her hands.
The Senator did not answer at once. He went on for a while twisting his moustaches and drearily meditating. Then he drew a deep breath and sat up.
“The house?” he said. “Of course it belongs to all of us, to you and me, and Christian—and, queerly enough, to Pastor Tiburtius too. I can’t decide anything about it by myself. I have to get your consent. But obviously the thing to do is to sell as soon as possible,” he concluded, shrugging his shoulders. Yet something crossed his face, after all, as though he were startled by his own words.
Frau Permaneder’s head sank deep on her breast; her hands stopped pressing themselves together; she relaxed all over.