care or disquiet had vanished from Madame Buddenbrook’s face. She sat down between Pastor Wunderlich and the elder Kröger, who presided on the window side.
“Bon appetit! ” she said, with her short, quick, hearty nod, flashing a glance down the whole length of the table till it reached the children at the bottom.
4
“OUR BEST RESPECTS to you, Buddenbrook – I repeat, our best respects!” Herr Köppen’s powerful voice drowned the general conversation as the maid-servant, in her heavy striped petticoat, her fat arms bare and a little white cap on the back of her head, passed the potage aux fines herbes and toast, assisted by Mamsell Jungmann and the Frau Consul’s maid from upstairs. The guests began to use their soup-spoons.
“Such plenty, such elegance! I must say, you know how to do things! – I must say –” Herr Köppen had never visited the house in its former owner’s time. He did not come of a patrician family, and had only lately become a man of means. He could never quite get rid of certain vulgar tricks of speech – like the repetition of “I must say”; and he said “respecks” for “respects.”
“It didn’t cost anything, either,” remarked Herr Gratjens drily – he certainly ought to have known – and studied the wall-painting through the hollow of his hand.
As far as possible, ladies and gentlemen had been paired off, and members of the family placed between friends of the house. But the arrangement could not be carried out in every case; the two Överdiecks were sitting, as usual, nearly on each other’s laps, nodding affectionately at one another. The elder Kröger was bolt upright, enthroned between Madame Antoinette and Frau Senator Langhals, dividing his pet jokes and his flourishes between the two ladies.
“When was the house built?” asked Herr Hoffstede diagonally across the table of old Buddenbrook, who was talking in a gay chaffing tone with Madame Köppen.
“Anno … let me see … about 1680, if I am not mistaken. My son is better at dates than I am.”
“Eighty-two,” said the Consul, leaning forward. He was sitting at the foot of the table, without a partner, next to Senator Langhals. “It was finished in the winter of 1682. Ratenkamp and Company were just getting to the top of their form. … Sad, how the firm broke down in the last twenty years!”
A general pause in the conversation ensued, lasting for half a minute, while the company looked down at their plates and pondered on the fortunes of the brilliant family who had built and lived in the house and then, broken and impoverished, had left it.
“Yes,” said Broker Gratjens, “it’s sad, when you think of the madness that led to their ruin. If Dietrich Ratenkamp had not taken that fellow Geelmaack for a partner! I flung up my hands, I know, when he came into the management. I have it on the best authority, gentlemen, that he speculated disgracefully behind Ratenkamp’s back, and gave notes and acceptances right and left in the firm’s name. … Finally the game was up. The banks got suspicious, the firm couldn’t give security. … You haven’t the least idea … who looked after the warehouse, even? Geelmaack, perhaps? It was a perfect rats’ nest there, year in, year out. But Ratenkamp never troubled himself about it.”
“He was like a man paralysed,” the Consul said. A gloomy, taciturn look came on his face. He leaned over and stirred his soup, now and then giving a quick glance, with his little round deep-set eyes, at the upper end of the table.
“He went about like a man with a load on his mind; I think one can understand his burden. What made him take Geelmaack into the business – a man who brought painfully little capital, and had not the best of reputations? He must have felt the need of sharing his heavy responsibility with some one, not much matter who, because he realized that the end was inevitable. The firm was ruined, the old family passée. Geelmaack only gave it the last push over the edge.”
Pastor Wunderlich filled his own and his neighbour’s wineglass. “So you think my dear Consul,” he said with a discreet smile, “that even without Geelmaack, things would have turned out just as they did?”
“Oh, probably not,” the Consul said thoughtfully, addressing nobody in particular. “But I do think that Dietrich Ratenkamp was driven by fate when he took Geelmaack into partnership. That was the way his destiny was to be fulfilled. … He acted under the pressure of inexorable necessity. I think he knew more or less what his partner was doing, and what the state of affairs was at the warehouse. But he was paralysed.”
“Assez, Jean,” interposed old Buddenbrook, laying down his spoon. “That’s one of your idées.…”
The Consul rather absently lifted his glass to his father. Lebrecht Kröger broke in: “Let’s stick by the jolly present!” He took up a bottle of white wine that had a little silver stag on the stopper; and with one of his fastidious, elegant motions he held it on its side and examined the label. “C. F. Köppen,” he read, and nodded to the wine-merchant. “Ah, yes, where should we be without you?”
Madame Antoinette kept a sharp eye on the servants while they changed the gilt-edged Meissen plates; Mamsell Jungmann called orders through the speaking-tube into the kitchen, and the fish was brought in. Pastor Wunderlich remarked, as he helped himself:
“This ‘jolly present’ isn’t such a matter of course as it seems, either. The young folk here can hardly realize, I suppose, that things could ever have been different from what they are now. But I think I may fairly claim to have had a personal share, more than once, in the fortunes of the Buddenbrook family. Whenever I see one of these, for instance –” he picked up one of the heavy silver spoons and turned to Madame Antoinette – “I can’t help wondering whether they belong to the set that our friend the philosopher Lenoir, Sergeant under his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, had in his hands in the year 1806 – and I think of our meeting in Alf Street, Madame.”
Madame Buddenbrook looked down at her plate with a smile half of memory, half of embarrassment. Tom and Tony, at the bottom of the table, cried out almost with one voice, “Oh, yes, tell about it, Grandmama!” They did not want the fish, and they had been listening attentively to the conversation of their elders. But the Pastor knew that she would not care to speak herself of an incident that had been rather painful to her. He came to her rescue and launched out once more upon the old story. It was new, perhaps, to one or two of the present company. As for the children, they could have listened to it a hundred times.
“Well, imagine a November afternoon, cold and rainy, a wretched day; and me coming back down Alf Street from some parochial duty. I was thinking of the hard times we were having. Prince Blücher had gone, and the French were in the town. There was little outward sign of the excitement that reigned everywhere: the streets were quiet, and people stopped close in their houses. Prahl the master-butcher had been shot through the head, just for standing at the door of his shop with his hands in his pockets and making a menacing remark about its being hard to bear. Well, thought I to myself, I’ll just have a look in at the Buddenbrooks’. Herr Buddenbrook is down with erysipelas, and Madame has a great deal to do, on account of the billeting.
“At that very moment, whom should I see coming towards me but our honoured Madame Buddenbrook herself? What a state she was in! Hurrying through the rain hatless, stumbling rather than walking, with a shawl flung over her shoulders, and her hair falling down – yes, Madame, it is quite true, it was falling down!
“‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ I said. She never saw me, and I made bold to lay my hand on her sleeve, for my mind misgave me about the state of things. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry, my dear?’
