Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/324

RV 312 (BUDDENBROOKS) activity at length to his family, his nose wrinkled up the while. Dr. Grabow was called in. He said the heart and lungs were operating soundly, but the occasional difficulty in breathing was due to muscular sluggishness, and ordered first the use of a fan and secondly that of a green powder which one burned, inhaling the smoke. Christian used the fan in the office, and to a remonstrance on the part of the chief answered that in Valparaiso every man in the office was provided with a fan on account of the heat: “Johnny Thunderstorm&mdash;good God!” But one day, after he had been wriggling about on his chair for some time, nervous and restless, he took his powder out of his pocket and made such a strong and violent-smelling reek in the room that some of the men began to cough violently, and Herr Marcus grew quite pale. There was an open explosion, a scandal, a dreadful talking-to which would have led to a break at once, but that the Frau Consul once more covered everything all up, reasoned them out of it, and set things going again.

But this was not all. The life Christian led outside the house, mainly with his old schoolmate Lawyer Gieseke, was observed by the Consul with disgust. He was no prig, no spoil-sport. He knew very well that his native town, this port and trading city, where men walked the streets proud of their irreproachable reputation as business men, was by no means of spotless morality. They made up to themselves for the tedious hours spent in their offices, by dinners with heavy wines and heavy dishes&mdash;and by other things. But the broad mantle of civic respectability concealed this side of their life. Thomas Buddenbrook’s first law was to preserve “the dehors”; wherein he showed himself not so different from his fellow burghers. Lawyer Gieseke was a member of the professional class, whose habits of life were much like those of the merchants. That he was also a “good fellow,” anybody could see who looked at him. But, like the other easy men of pleasure in the community, he knew how to avoid trouble by wearing the proper expression and saying the proper thing. And in

RV 312 (312)