“Well, Timm,” said Dr. Mantelsack. “Can’t you get on?”
Timm clutched his brow, rolled up his eyes, sighed windily, and said with a dazed smile: “I get all mixed up, Herr Doctor, when you stand so close to me.”
Dr. Mantelsack smiled too. He smiled in a very flattered way and said “Well, pull yourself together and get on.” And he strolled back to his place.
And Timm pulled himself together. He drew out and opened his book again, all the time apparently wrestling to recover his self-control and staring about the room. Then he dropped his head and was himself again.
“Very good,” said the master, when he had finished. “It is clear that you have studied to some purpose. But you sacrifice the rhythm too much, Timm. You seem to understand the elisions; yet you have not been really reading hexameters at all. I have an impression as if you had learned the whole thing by heart, like prose. But, as I say, you have been diligent, you have done your best—and whoever does his best—; you may sit down.”
Timm sat down, proud and beaming, and Dr. Mantelsack gave him a good mark in his book. And the extraordinary thing was that at this moment not only the master, but also Timm himself and all his classmates, sincerely felt that Timm was a good industrious pupil who had fully deserved the mark he got. Hanno Buddenbrook, even, thought the same, though something within him revolted against the thought. He listened with strained attention to the next name.
“Mumme,” said Dr. Mantelsack. “Again: aurea prima—”
Mumme! Well! Thank Heaven! Hanno was now in probable safety. The lines would hardly be asked for a third time, and in the sight-reading the letter B had just been called up.
Mumme got up. He was tall and pale, with trembling hands and extraordinarily large round glasses. He had trouble with his eyes, and was so shortsighted that he could not possibly read standing up from a book on the desk before him. He had to learn, and he had learned. But today he had not expected to be called up; he was, besides, painfully ungifted; and he stuck after the first few words. Dr. Mantelsack helped him, he helped him again in a sharper tone, and for the third time with intense irritation. But when Mumme came to a final stop, the Ordinarius was mastered by indignation.
“This is entirely insufficient, Mumme. Sit down. You 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, 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
