Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann

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      Part Three

      Chapter One

      On a June afternoon, not long after five o’clock, the family were sitting before the “portal” in the garden, where they had drunk coffee. They had pulled the rustic furniture outside, for it was too close in the white-washed garden house, with its tall mirror decorated with painted birds and its varnished folding doors, which were really not folding doors at all and had only painted latches.

      The Consul, his wife, Tony, Tom, and Clothilde sat in a half-circle around the table, which was laid with its usual shining service. Christian, sitting a little to one side, conned the second oration of Cicero against Catiline. He looked unhappy. The Consul smoked his cigar and read the Advertiser. His wife had let her embroidery fall into her lap and sat smiling at little Clara; the child, with Ida Jungmann, was looking for violets in the grass-plot. Tony, her head propped on both hands, was deep in Hoffman’s “Serapion Brethren,” while Tom tickled her in the back of the neck with a grass-blade, an attention which she very wisely ignored. And Clothilde, looking thin and old-maidish in her flowered cotton frock, was reading a story called “Blind, Deaf, Dumb, and Still Happy.” As she read, she scraped up the biscuit-crumbs carefully with all five fingers from the cloth and ate them.

      A few white clouds stood motionless in the slowly paling sky. The small town garden, with its carefully laid-out paths and beds, looked gay and tidy in the afternoon sun. The scent of the mignonette borders floated up now and then.

      “Well, Tom,” said the Consul expansively, and took the cigar out of his mouth, “we are arranging that rye sale I told you about, with van Henkdom and Company.”

      “What is he giving?” Tom asked with interest, ceasing to tickle Tony.

      “Sixty thaler for a thousand kilo—not bad, eh?”

      “That’s very good.” Tom knew this was excellent business.

      “Tony, your position is not comme il faut,” remarked the Frau Consul. Whereat Tony, without raising her eyes from her book, took one elbow off the table.

      “Never mind,” Tom said. “She can sit how she likes, she will always be Tony Buddenbrook. Tilda and she are certainly the beauties of the family.”

      Clothilde was astonished almost to death. “Good gracious, Tom,” she said. It was inconceivable how she could drawl out the syllables. Tony bore the jeer in silence. It was never any use, Tom was more than a match for her. He could always get the last word and have the laugh on his side. Her nostrils dilated a little, and she shrugged her shoulders. But when the Consul’s wife began to talk of the coming dance at the house of Consul Huneus, and let fall something about new patent leather shoes, Tony took the other elbow off the table and displayed a lively interest.

      “You keep talking and talking,” complained Christian fretfully, “and I’m having such a hard time. I wish I were a business man.”

      “Yes, you’re always wanting something different,” said Tom. Anton came across the garden with a card on his tray. They all looked at him expectantly.

      “Grünlich, Agent,” read the Consul. “He is from Hamburg—an agreeable man, and well recommended, the son of a clergyman. I have business dealings with him. There is a piece of business now.—Is it all right, Betsy, if I ask him to come out here?”

      A middle-sized man, his head thrust a little forward of his body, carrying his hat and stick in one hand, came across the garden. He was some two-and-thirty years old; he wore a fuzzy greenish-yellow suit with a long-skirted coat, and grey worsted gloves. His face, beneath the sparse light hair, was rosy and smiling; but there was an undeniable wart on one side of his nose. His chin and upper lip were smooth-shaven; he wore long, drooping side-whiskers, in the English fashion, and these adornments were conspicuously golden-yellow in colour. Even at a distance, he began making obsequious gestures with his broad-brimmed grey hat, and as he drew near he took one last very long step, and arrived describing a half-circle with the upper part of his body, by this means bowing to them all at once.

      “I am afraid I am disturbing the family circle,” he said in a soft voice, with the utmost delicacy of manner. “You are conversing, you are indulging in literary pursuits—I must really beg your pardon for my intrusion.”

      “By no means, my dear Herr Grünlich,” said the Consul. He and his sons got up and shook hands with the stranger. “You are very welcome. I am delighted to see you outside the office and in my family circle. Herr Grünlich, Betsy—a friend of mine and a keen man of business. This is my daughter Antonie, and my niece Clothilde. Thomas you know already, and this is my second son, Christian, in High School.” Herr Grünlich responded to each name with an inclination of the body.

      “I must repeat,” he said, “that I have no desire to intrude. I came on business. If the Herr Consul would be so good as to take a walk with me round the gardens—” The Consul’s wife answered: “It will give us pleasure to have you sit down with us for a little before you begin to talk business with my husband. Do sit down.”

      “A thousand thanks,” said Herr Grünlich, apparently quite flattered. He sat down on the edge of the chair which Tom brought, laid his hat and stick on his knees, and settled himself, running his hand over his long beard with a little hemming and hawing, as if to say, “Well, now we’ve got past the introduction—what next?”

      The Frau Consul began the conversation. “You live in Hamburg?” she asked, inclining her head and letting her work fall into her lap.

      “Yes, Frau Consul,” responded Herr Grünlich with a fresh bow. “At least, my house is in Hamburg, but I am on the road a good deal. My business is very flourishing—ahem—if I may be permitted to say so.”

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