BUDDENBROOKS
“Unfortunately, gone mad,” uttered Kai, Count Mölln, with great clarity and precision. And this also was confirmed by the chorus amid an ever-increasing tumult.
Then Herr Modersohn stood up and shouted in to the hubbub: “Buddenbrook, you will do me a hundred lines imposition. If you laugh again, I shall be obliged to mark you.”
Then he sat down again. It was true that Hanno had laughed. He had been seized by a quiet but violent spasm of laughter, and went on because he could not stop. He had found Kai’s joke so good—the “unfortunately” had especially appealed to him. But he became quiet when Herr Modersohn attacked him, and sat looking solemnly into the Candidate’s face. He observed at that moment every detail of the man’s appearance: saw every pathetic little hair in his scanty beard, which showed the skin through it; saw his brown, empty, disconsolate eyes; saw that he had on what appeared to be two pairs of cuffs, because the sleeves of his shirt came down so long; saw the whole pathetic, inadequate figure he made. He saw more: he saw into the man’s inner self. Hanno Buddenbrook was almost the only pupil whom Herr Modersohn knew by name, and he availed himself of the knowledge to call him constantly to order, give him impositions, and tyrannize over him. He had distinguished Buddenbrook from the others simply because of his quieter behaviour—and of this he took advantage to make him feel his authority, an authority he did not dare exert upon the real offenders. Hanno looked at him and reflected that Herr Modersohn’s lack of fine feeling made it almost impossible even to pity him! “I don’t bully you,” he addressed the Candidate, in his thoughts: “I don’t share in the general tormenting like the others—and how do you repay me? But so it is, and so will it be, always and everywhere,” he thought; and fear, and that sensation almost amounting to physical nausea, rose again in him. “And the most dreadful thing is that I can’t help seeing through you with such disgusting clearness!”
At last Herr Modersohn found some one who was neither
338
