Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/340

RV 330 (BUDDENBROOKS) cut a disgraceful figure, let me tell you, sir. A cretin! Stupid and lazy both—it is really too much.”

Mumme was overwhelmed. He looked the child of calamity, and at this moment everybody in the room despised him. A sort of disgust, almost like nausea, mounted again in Hanno Buddenbrook’s throat; but at the same time he observed with horrid clarity all that was going forward. Dr. Mantelsack made a mark of sinister meaning after Mumme’s name, and then looked through his notebook with frowning brows. He went over, in his disgust, to the order of the day, and looked to see whose turn it really was. There was no doubt that this was the case: and just as Hanno was overpowered by this knowledge, he heard his name—as if in a bad dream.

“Buddenbrook!” Dr. Mantelsack had said “Buddenbrook.” The scale was in the air again. Hanno could not believe his senses. There was a buzzing in his ears. He sat still.

“Herr Buddenbrook!” said Dr. Mantelsack, and stared at him sharply through his glasses with his prominent sapphire-blue eyes. “Will you have the goodness?”

Very well, then. It was to be. It had to come. It had come differently from his expectations, but still, here it was, and he was none the less lost. But he was calm. Would it be a very big row? He rose in his place and was about to utter some forlorn and absurd excuse to the effect that he had “forgotten” to study the lines, when he became aware that the boy ahead of him was offering him his open book.

This boy, Hans Hermann Kilian, was a small brown lad with oily hair and broad shoulders. He had set his heart on becoming an officer, and was so possessed by an ideal of comradeship that he would not leave in the lurch even little Buddenbrook, whom he did not like. He pointed with his finger to the place.

Hanno gazed down upon it and began to read. With trembling voice, his face working, he read of the Golden Age, when truth and justice flourished of their own free will, with-

RV 330 (330)