Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/283

RV 271 (BUDDENBROOKS) head of the firm. Thomas’s feelings were indeed quite justifiable; for unfortunately Christian’s zeal for business visibly decreased, even after the first week, though more after the second. His little preparations for work, which, in the beginning, wore the air of a prolonged and refined anticipation: the reading of the paper, the after-breakfast cigarette, the cognac, began to take more and more time, and finally used up the whole morning. It gradually came about that Christian freed himself largely from the constraint of office hours. He appeared later and later with his breakfast cigarette to begin his preparations for work; he went at midday to eat at the Club, and came back late or not at all.

This Club, to which mostly unmarried business men belonged, occupied comfortable rooms in the first story of a restaurant, where one could eat and meet in unrestrained and sometimes not altogether harmless conversation&mdash;for there was a roulette table. Even some of the more light-minded fathers of families, like Justus Kröger and, of course, Peter Döhlmann, were members, and police senator Crema was here “the first man at the hose.” That was the expression of Dr. Gieseke&mdash;Andreas Gieseke, the son of the Fire Commissioner and Christian’s old schoolmate. He had settled as a lawyer in the town, and Christian renewed the friendship with him, though he ranked as rather a wild fellow. Christian&mdash;or, as he was called everywhere, Chris&mdash;had known them all more or less in the old days, for nearly all of them had been pupils of Marcellus Stengel. They received him into the Club with open arms; for, while neither business men nor scholars found him a genius, they recognized his amusing social gifts. It was here that he gave his best performances and told his best stories. He did the virtuoso at the club piano and imitated English and transatlantic actors and opera singers. But the best things he did were stories of his affairs with women, related in the most harmless and entertaining way imaginable&mdash;adventures that had befallen him on shipboard, on trains, in St. Paul’s, in Whitechapel,

RV 271 (271)