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, without laws or compulsions. “Punishment and fear did not exist,” he said, in Latin. “No threats were graven upon the bronze tablets, nor did those who came to petition fear the countenance of the judges....” He read in fear and trembling, read with design badly and disjointedly, purposely omitted some of the elisions that were marked with pencil in Kilian’s book, made mistakes in the lines, progressed with apparent difficulty, and constantly expected the master to discover the fraud and pounce upon him. The guilty satisfaction of seeing the open book in front of him gave him a pricking sensation in his skin; but at the same time he had such a feeling of disgust that he intentionally deceived as badly as possible, simply to make the deceit seem less vulgar to himself. He came to the end, and a pause ensued, during which he did not dare look up. He felt convinced that Dr. Mantelsack had seen all, and his lips were perfectly white. But at length the master sighed and said:
“Oh, Buddenbrook! Si tacuisses! You will permit me the classical thou, for this once. Do you know what you have done? You have conducted yourself like a vandal, a barbarian. You are a humourist, Buddenbrook; I can see that by your face. If I ask myself whether you have been coughing or whether you have been reciting this noble verse, I should incline to the former. Timm showed small feeling for rhythm, but compared to you he is a genius, a rhapsodist! Sit down, unhappy wretch! You have studied the lines, I cannot deny it, and I am constrained to give you a good mark. You have probably done your best. But tell me—have I not been told that you are musical, that you play the piano? How is it possible? Well, very well, sit down. You have worked hard—that must suffice.”
He put a good mark down in his book, and Hanno Buddenbrook took his seat. He felt as Timm, the rhapsodist had felt before him—that he really deserved the praise which Dr. Mantelsack gave him. Yes, at the moment he was of the opinion that he was, if rather a dull, yet an industrious pupil, who had come off with honour, comparatively speaking. He was conscious that all his schoolmates, not excepting Hans Hermann Kilian, had the same view. Yet he felt at the same time somewhat nauseated. Pale, trembling, too exhausted to think about what had happened, he closed his eyes and sank back in lethargy.
Dr. Mantelsack, however, went on with the lesson. He came to the verses that were to have been prepared for to-day, and called up Petersen. Petersen rose, fresh, lively, sanguine, in a stout attitude, ready for the fray. Yet to-day, even to-day, was destined to see his fall. Yes, the lesson-hour was not to pass without a catastrophe far worse than that which had befallen the hapless, short-sighted Mumme.
Petersen translated, glancing now and then at the other page of his book, which should have had nothing on it. He did it quite cleverly: he acted as though something there distracted him—a speck of dust, perhaps, which he brushed with his hand or tried to blow away. And yet—there followed the catastrophe.