Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/332

RV 322 (BUDDENBROOKS) ardice. He refrained out of an indefinite respect and awe for the softness of Hanno’s hair, the delicacy of his limbs, and his sad, shy, cold glance.

“I’m scared,” Hanno said to Kai. He leaned against the wall of the school, drawing his jacket closer about him, yawning and shivering, “I’m so scared, Kai, that it hurts me all over my body. Now just tell me this: is Herr Mantelsack the sort of person one ought to be afraid of? Tell me yourself! If this beastly Ovid lesson were only over! If I just had my had mark, in peace, and stopped where I am, and everything was in order! I’m not afraid of that. It is the row that goes beforehand that I hate!”

Kai was still deep in thought. “This Roderick Usher is the most remarkable character ever conceived,” he said suddenly and abruptly. “I have read the whole lesson-hour. If ever I could write a tale like that!”

Kai was absorbed in his writing. It was to this he had referred when he said that he had something better to do than his preparation, and Hanno had understood him. Attempts at composition had developed out of his old propensity for inventing tales; and he had lately completed a composition in the form of a fantastic fairy tale, a narrative of symbolic adventure, which went forward in the depths of the earth among glowing metals and mysterious fires, and at the same time in the souls of men: a tale in which the primeval forces of nature and of the soul were interchanged and mingled, transformed and refined—the whole conceived and written in a vein of extravagant and even sentimental symbolism, fervid with passion and longing.

Hanno knew the tale well, and loved it; but he was not now in a frame of mind to think of Kai’s work or of Edgar Allan Poe. He yawned again, and then sighed, humming to himself a motif he had lately composed on the piano. This was a habit with him. He would often give a long sigh, a deep indrawn breath, from the instinct to calm the fluctuating and irregular action of his heart; and he had accustomed himself

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