“Very well, proceed, then,” said the Senator, and shut his eyes more tightly.
There was a pause. Herr Brecht prepared something at his chest of drawers and got out his instruments. Then he approached the chair again.
“I’ll paint it a little,” he said; and began at once to apply a strong-smelling liquid in generous quantities. Then he gently implored the patient to sit very still and open his mouth very wide—and then he began.
Thomas Buddenbrook clutched the plush arm-rests with both his hands. He scarcely felt the forceps close around his tooth; but from the grinding sensation in his mouth, and the increasingly painful, really agonizing pressure on his whole head, he was made amply aware that the thing was under way. Thank God, he thought, now it can’t last long. The pain grew and grew, to limitless, incredible heights; it grew to an insane, shrieking, inhuman torture, tearing his entire brain. It approached the catastrophe. ‘Here we are, he thought. Now I must just bear it.’
It lasted three or four seconds. Herr Brecht’s nervous exertions communicated themselves to Thomas Buddenbrook’s whole body, he was even lifted up a little on his chair, and he heard a soft, squeaking noise coming from the dentist’s throat. Suddenly there was a fearful blow, a violent shaking as if his neck were broken, accompanied by a quick cracking, crackling noise. The pressure was gone, but his head buzzed, the pain throbbed madly in the inflamed and ill-used jaw; and he had the clearest impression that the thing had not been successful: that the extraction of the tooth was not the solution of the difficulty, but merely a premature catastrophe which only made matters worse.
Herr Brecht had retreated. He was leaning against his instrument-cupboard, and he looked like death. He said: “The crown—I thought so.”
Thomas Buddenbrook spat a little blood into the blue basin at his side, for the gum was lacerated. He asked, half-
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