BUDDENBROOKS
“Eighty-two,” said the Consul, leaning forward. He was sitting at the foot of the table, without a partner, next to Senator Langhals. “It was finished in the winter of 1682. Ratenkamp and Company were just getting to the top of their form. . . . Sad, how the firm broke down in the last twenty years!”
A general pause in the conversation ensued, lasting for half a minute, while the company looked down at their plates and pondered on the fortunes of the brilliant family who had built and lived in the house and then, broken and impoverished, had left it.
“Yes,” said Broker Gratjens, “it’s sad, when you think of the madness that led to their ruin. If Dietrich Ratenkamp had not taken that fellow Geelmaack for a partner! I flung up my hands, I know, when he came into the management. I have it on the best authority, gentlemen, that he speculated disgracefully behind Ratenkamp’s back, and gave notes and acceptances right and left in the firm’s name. . . . Finally the game was up. The banks got suspicious, the firm couldn’t give security. . . . You haven’t the least idea…who looked after the warehouse, even? Geelmaack, perhaps? It was a perfect rats’ nest there, year in, year out. But Ratenkamp never troubled himself about it.”
“He was like a man paralysed,” the Consul said. A gloomy, taciturn look came on his face. He leaned over and stirred his soup, now and then giving a quick glance, with his little round deep-set eyes, at the upper end of the table.
“He went about like a man with a load on his mind; I think one can understand his burden. What made him take Geelmaack into the business—a man who brought painfully little capital, and had not the best of reputations? He must have felt the need of sharing his heavy responsibility with some one, not much matter who, because he realized that the end was inevitable. The firm was ruined, the old family passée. Geelmaack only gave it the last push over the edge.”
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