Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/94

RV 84 (BUDDENBROOKS) gas-jets, and looked like a party the moment after the last guest is gone. The Senator measured the room throughout its length, and then stood at one of the windows and looked down into the garden.

The moon stood high and small between fleecy clouds, and the little fountain splashed in the stillness over the overhanging boughs of the walnut tree. Thomas looked down on the pavilion which enclosed his view, on the little glistening white terrace with the two obelisks, the regular gravel paths, and the freshly turned earth of the neat borders and beds. But this whole minute and punctilious symmetry, far from soothing him, only made him feel the more exasperated. He held the catch of the window, leaned his forehead on it, and gave rein to his tormenting thoughts again.

What was he coming to? He thought of a remark he had let fall to his sister—something he had felt vexed with himself the next minute for saying, it seemed so unnecessary. He was speaking of Count Strelitz and the landed aristocracy, and he had expressed the view that the producer had a social advantage over the middleman. What was the point of that? It might be true and it might not; but was he, Thomas Buddenbrook, called upon to express such ideas—was he called upon even to think them? Should he have been able to explain to the satisfaction of his father, his grandfather—or any of his fellow townsmen—how he came to be expressing, or indulging in, such thoughts? A man who stands firm and confident in his own calling, whatever it may be, recognizes only it, understands only it, values only it.

Then he suddenly felt the blood rushing to his face as he recalled another memory, from farther back in the past. He saw himself and his brother Christian, walking around the garden of the Meng Street house, involved in a quarrel—one of those painful, regrettable, heated discussions. Christian, with artless indiscretion, had made a highly undesirable, a compromising remark, which a number of people had heard; and Thomas, furiously angry, irritated to the last

RV 84 (84)