Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/29

RV 19 (BUDDENBROOKS) she might be present when Hermann Hagenström’s character was being pulled to pieces! A moment later she leaned over and began to count the prune-pits on her brother’s dessert-plate: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor—finishing triumphantly with “senator” when she came to the last pit. But after dinner she could not hold in any longer. She took her brother’s arm and drew him into the bow-window.

“Oh, Tom! Tom! Suppose you are really elected—if our coat-of-arms is put up in the Senate-chamber at the Town Hall I shall just die of joy, I know I shall. I shall fall dead at the news—you'll see!”

“Now, Tony dear! Have a little self-control, a little dignity, I beg of you. You are not usually lacking in dignity. Am I going around like Henning Kurz? We amount to something even without the ‘Senator.’ And I hope you won't die, whichever way it turns out!”

And the agitations, the consultations, the struggles of opinion took their course. Consul Peter Döhlman, the rake with a business now entirely ruined, which existed only in name, and the twenty-seven-year-old daughter whose inheritance he was eating up, played his part by attending two dinners, one given by Thomas Buddenbrook and the other by Herman Hagenström, and both times addressing his host, in his loud, resounding voice, as “Senator.” But Siegismund Gosch, old Gosch the broker, went about like a raging lion, and engaged to throttle anybody, out of hand, who wasn’t minded to vote for Consul Buddenbrook.

“Consul Buddenbrook, gentlemen—ah, there’s a man for you! I stood at his father’s side in the ’48, when, with a word, he tamed the unleashed fury of the mob. His father, and his father’s father before him, would have been Senator were there any justice on this earth!”

But at bottom it was not so much Consul Buddenbrook himself whose personality fired Gosch’s soul to its innermost depths. It was rather the young Frau Consul, Gerda Arnoldsen. Not that the broker had ever exchanged a word

RV 19 (19)