Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/135

RV 125 (BUDDENBROOKS) nothing, and gives nothing away.” When the sign had served its purpose, he removed it.

Motherless—for the Countess had died when her child was born, and the housework was done by an elderly female—little Kai grew up like a wild animal, among the dogs and chickens; and here Hanno Buddenbrook had looked at him shyly from a distance, as he leaped like a rabbit among the cabbages, romped with the dogs, and frightened the fowls by turning somersaults.

They met again in the schoolroom, where Hanno probably felt again his first alarm at the little Count’s unkempt exterior. But not for long. A sure instinct had led him to pay no heed to the outward negligence; had shown him instead the white brow, the delicate mouth, the finely shaped blue eyes, which looked with a sort of resentful hostility into his own; and Hanno felt sympathy for this one alone among all his fellows. But he would never, by himself, have taken the first steps; he was too timid for that. Without the ruthless impetuosity of little Kai they might have remained strangers, after all. The passionate rapidity of his approach even frightened Hanno, at first. The neglected little count sued for the favour of the quiet, elegantly dressed Hanno with a fiery, aggressive masculinity impossible to resist. Kai could not, it is true, help Hanno with his lessons. His untamed spirits were as hostile to the “tables” as was little Buddenbrook’s dreamy abstractedness, But he gave him everything he had: glass bullets, wooden tops, even a broken lead pistol which was his dearest treasure. During the recess he told him about his home and the puppies and chickens, and walked with him at midday as far as he dared, though Ida Jungmann, with a packet of sandwiches, was always waiting for her fledgling at the school gate. It was from Ida that Kai heard little Buddenbrook’s nickname; he took it up, and never called him henceforth by anything else.

One day he demanded that Hanno, instead of going to the

RV 125 (125)