The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann

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Part 1 of 8

CHAPTER 7

By the Ocean of Time

CAN one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: "Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onward" and so forth—no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note or chord for a whole hour, and called it music. For narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It "fills it in" and "breaks it up," so that "there’s something to it," "something going on"—to quote, with due and mournful piety, those casual phrases of our departed Joachim, all echo of which so long ago died away. So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was. For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration—like music—even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.

So much is clear. But it is just as clear that we have also a difference to deal with. For the time element in music is single. Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills. But a narrative must have two kinds of time: first, its own, like music, actual time, conditioning its presentation and course; and second, the time of its content, which is relative, so extremely relative that the imaginary time of the narrative can either coincide nearly or completely with the actual, or musical, time, or can be a world away. A piece of music called a "Five-minute Waltz" lasts five minutes, and this is its sole relation to the time element. But a narrative which concerned itself with the events of five minutes, might, by extraordinary conscientiousness in the telling, take up a thousand times five minutes, and even then seem very short, though long in relation to its imaginary time. On the other hand, the contentual time of a story can shrink its actual time out of all measure. We put it in this way on purpose, in order to suggest another element, an illusory, even, to speak plainly, a morbid element, which is quite definitely a factor in the situation. I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period of ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man’s temporal capacity for experience: dreams whose contentual time was enormously greater than their actual or musical time, and in which there obtained an incredible foreshortening of events; the images pressing one upon another with such rapidity that it was as though "something had been taken away, like the spring from a broken watch "from the brain of the sleeper. Such is the description of a hashish eater.

Thus, or in some such way as in these sinister dreams, can the narrative go to work with time; in some such way can time be dealt with in a tale. And if this be so, then it is clear that time, while the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. Therefore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed. We freely admit that, in bringing up the question as to whether the time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view in the present work. And if we touched upon the further question, whether our readers were clear how much time had passed since the upright Joachim, deceased in the interval, had introduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time—remarks indicating a certain alchemistical heightening of his nature, which, in its goodness and simplicity, was, of its own unaided power, incapable of any such ideas—we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-going sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time—a fact that has conditioned his romantic adventures up here, to an extent which has made of them, in more than one sense, a "time-romance."

How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long—dismissing Joachim from our calculations—Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking himself. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known—a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Settembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.

All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely in-capable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by ourselves, without any outward fixed points as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering between hope and fear, to be some three days. It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would ap-pear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under- rather than over-estimate time.

No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could without any great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are repugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience—yet surely it is a want of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time!

We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back—under circumstances very different from those Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place—when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, interrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow—and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious, as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim’s disgusted utterances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like "still" and "again"; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewildering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining-room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.

Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional thinkers—Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, had one time been led to consider it—whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year-old-girl, who fell asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl, but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man—is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all—but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp’s hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber’s chair in the main street of the Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet, and the barber, chatting obsequiously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time, then the barber, performed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his dainty velvet case, he would suddenly be overpowered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and light-headed, incapable of distinguishing between "now" and "then," and prone to mingle these together in a timeless eternity.

As we have repeatedly said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly striving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic figures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second-hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left be-hind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the tiny intervening unmarked strokes showed that all the figures and divisions on its path were simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on.—Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashütte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.

How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adventurer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale. If to-day’s now—even with decent goodwill—was not easy to distinguish from yesterday’s, the day before’s or the day before that’s, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused with the now which had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words "still," "again," "next," there was always the temptation to extend the significance of such descriptive words as "to-morrow," "yesterday," by which "to-day" holds at bay "the past" and "the future." It would not be hard to imagine the existence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practising a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk tripping gait of our second-hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between "still," "in a little while," "yesterday," "to-morrow," are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legitimate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important rôle, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its train, who one day falls into the vicious habit—or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire—to say "yesterday" when he means a year ago, and "next year" when he means to-morrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.

There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic surroundings—if one may use that adjective to describe the surroundings we have in mind—within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean’s edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader’s recollections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk—never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be!—A singing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips.—We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander—wander—watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, re-bounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond, out on the bar. The dull, pervasive, sonorous roar closes our ears against all the sounds of the world. O deep content, O wilful bliss of sheer forgetfulness! Let us shut our eyes, safe in eternity! No—for there in the foaming grey-green waste that stretches with uncanny foreshortening to lose itself in the horizon, look, there is a sail. There? Where is there? How far, how near? You cannot tell. Dizzyingly it escapes your measurement. In order to know how far that ship is from the shore, you would need to know how much room it occupies, as a body in space. Is it large and far off, or is it small and near? Your eye grows dim with uncertainty, for in yourself you have no sense-organ to help you judge of time or space.—We walk, walk. How long, how far? Who knows? Nothing is changed by our pacing, there is the same as here, once on a time the same as now, or then; time is drowning in the measureless monotony of space, motion from point to point is no motion more, where uniformity rules; and where motion is no more motion, time is no longer time.

The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding present. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the well-conducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to question their validity, would be absurd, dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the "evil principle," to the young man in whose fate we are interested, and whom he had once subtly called "life’s delicate child." We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought of duty, the law of life. Yes, law-giving wisdom, in marking off the limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man’s soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp’s account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin’s zeal, called doggedness by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?

Mynheer Peeperkorn

MYNHEER PEEPERKORN, an elderly Dutchman, spent some time at House Berghof, that establishment which, in its prospectus, so correctly described itself as "international." Pieter Peeperkorn—such was his name, so he called himself, as for instance, ‘Pieter Peeperkorn will now take unto himself a Hollands gin"—was a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a coffee-planter. His slightly faded nationality is scarcely sufficient ground for introducing him at this late day into our story. God knows we have had racial mixtures a-plenty in the famous cure conducted with such many-tongued efficiency by Herr Hofrat Behrens! There was the Egyptian princess who had given the Hofrat the extraordinary coffee-machine and sphinx cigarettes, a sensational person with cropped hair and beringed fingers yellow with nicotine, who went about—except at the main meal of the day, for which she made full Parisian toilet—in a sack coat and well-pressed trousers; and who scorned the world of men, to lay hot and heavy, though fitful siege to an insignificant little Roumanian Jewess called plain Frau Landauer, while Lawyer Paravant for her royal highness’s beaux yeux neglected his mathematics and altogether played the fool for love. This princess, in addition to her own colourful personality, had among her little suite a Moorish eunuch, a weak and sickly man, who yet, despite his basic and constitutional lack—upon which Caroline Stönr loved to dwell—clung to life more desperately than most, and was quite inconsolable over the conclusions Hofrat Behrens drew from the transparency they made of his dusky inside.

Mynheer Peeperkorn, then, compared with such phenomena, might seem well-nigh colourless. And it is true that this part of our story might, like an earlier chapter, bear the caption "A Newcomer." But the reader need not fear that in him another occasion for pedagogic strife has arrived upon the scene. No, Mynheer Peeperkorn was not the man to be the bearer of logical confusion. He was quite a different man, as we shall see. Yet he brought sore dismay and perplexity upon the hero of our tale, as will shortly be very evident.

Mynheer Peeperkorn arrived at the Dorf station by the same evening train as Frau Chauchat. They drove up in the same sleigh to House Berghof, and supped together in the restaurant. The arrival, in short, was not only coincident but concurrent, and continued in that sense, Mynheer taking his place beside the returned wanderer at the "good" Russian table, opposite the doctor’s seat—the place Popoff had occupied, what time he performed his wild and equivocal antics. The companionship troubled our good Hans Castorp—that it should turn out like this had never entered his mind. The Hofrat, after his own fashion, had announced the day and hour of Clavdia’s return. "Well, Castorp, old top," he said, "there’s always a reward for faithful waiting. To-morrow the little puss will be slinking back—I’ve had a dispatch." But not a word that she might not come alone. Perhaps he did not know that she and Peeperkorn were travelling together; at least, he showed surprise when Hans Castorp, the day after, as much as took him to task.

"Don’t know myself where she picked him up," he declared. "I take it they met on the return from the Pyrenees. Alas, poor Strephon! Tut, my lad, you’ll have to put up with it, no use pulling a long face. They’re thick as thieves, it seems, have even their luggage in common. The man’s larded with money, from what I hear. Retired coffee-king, Malayan valet, plutocratic is no word for it. But he hasn’t come up here for fun. A catarrhal condition due to alcoholism—and from what I can see he is threatened with tropical fever, malignant, intermittent, you know; protracted, obstinate. You’ll have to be patient with him."

"Don’t mention it," replied Hans Castorp, loftily. "And what about you?" he said to himself. "I wonder what your feelings are; you didn’t come off scot-free either, or I miss my guess, you blue-in-the-face widower, with your oil-painting technique. Old dog in the manger! You needn’t tell me: so far as Peeperkorn is concerned, I’m certain we’re companions in misery."—"Quaint creature," he continued aloud, and shrugged. "An original, certainly. He’s so lean—yet he’s robust; that is the impression he makes, at least that’s the impression I got at breakfast. Lean, and robust, those are the adjectives, I think, though they aren’t commonly used together. He is certainly tall and broad, and likes to stand with his legs apart and his hands in his trouser pockets—which, I observe, are put in running up and down, not like yours and mine and most people’s of our class. And when he stands there and talks, in his guttural Dutch voice, there’s something unmistakably robust about him. But he has a sparse whisker, you could almost count the hairs; and his eyes are very small and pale, hardly any colour to them at all. He keeps trying to open them wide, and has made a lot of wrinkles, regular corrugations, that turn up on the temples and run straight across his forehead, and his forehead is high and red, with long wisps of white hair. He wears a clerical waist-coat, but his tail-coat is check. These are the impressions I got this morning."

Behrens answered: "I see you’ve taken his number—you’re right, too, for you will have to come to terms with his being here."

"Yes, I expect we shall," said Hans Castorp. We have left it to him to describe the unlooked-for guest, and he has not come badly off—we could scarcely add anything essential to the picture. He had a good view; as we know, he had in Clavdia’s absence moved closer to the "good" Russian table; the one where he now sat stood parallel with hers, only rather farther away from the verandah door. Both he and Peeperkorn were on the inner and narrow side of their respective tables, and thus, in a way, neighbours, Hans Castorp being slightly in the Dutchman’s rear, very advantageously placed to observe him, as also to look at the three-quarter view which Frau Chauchat’s profile presented. We might round out Hans Castorp’s description by a few notes: as, that the Dutchman’s nose was large and fleshy, his mouth large too, and bare of mous-taches, the lips of irregular shape, as though chapped. His hands were fairly broad, with long, pointed nails; he used them freely as he talked, and he talked almost continuously, though Hans Castorp failed to get his drift. Those adequate, compelling, cleanly attitudes of the hands—so varied, so full of subtle nuances—possessed a technique like that of an orchestral conductor. He would curve forefinger and thumb to a circle; extend the palm, that was so broad, with nails so pointed, to hush, to caution, to enjoin attention—and then, having by such means led up to some stupendous utterance, produce an anticlimax by saying something his audience could not quite grasp. Yet this, perhaps, was less a disappointment than it was a conversion of expectancy into ecstatic amaze; for the speaking gesture made good what he did not say, and was of itself alone vastly satisfying and diverting. Sometimes, indeed, after leading up to his climax, he left it out altogether. He would lay his hand tenderly on the arm of the young Bulgarian scholar next him, or on Frau Chauchat’s on the other side; then lift it obliquely for silence, create suspense for what he was about to say, wrinkling high his brows, so that the lines running upwards from the outer corners of his eyes were deepened like those on a mask; he would look down on the cloth before his neighbour’s place, and from his thick, distorted lips words of the highest import seemed about to issue then, after more pause, he would breathe an outward breath, give up the struggle, nod, as though to say "As you were," and return undelivered to his coffee, which was served to him of extra strength, in his own machine.

After the draught he would proceed thus, choking off with one hand the conversation, making a silence round him, as a conductor hushes the confused sounds of tuning instruments and collects his orchestra to begin a number; mastering at will any situation, for could anything resist that regal head, with its aureole of white hair and its pallid eyes, the great folds of the brows, the long whisker and shaven raw upper lip? They were silent, they looked at him and smiled, they waited, anticipatorily nodding. He spoke.

In rather a low voice he said: "Ladies and gentlemen. Very well. Very well indeed. Very. Settled. But will you keep in mind, and—not for one moment—not one moment—lose sight of the fact—but no more. On this point not another word. What is incumbent upon me to say is not so much—it is in the first place simply this: it is our duty—we lie under a solemn—an inviolable No! No, ladies and gentlemen! It was not thus—it was not thus that I—how mistaken to imagine that I—quite right, ladies and gentlemen! Set—tled. Let us drop the subject. I feel we understand each other, and now—to the point!"

He had said absolutely nothing. But look, manner, and gestures were so peremptory, perfervid, pregnant, that all, even Hans Castorp, were convinced they had heard something of high moment; or, if aware of the total lack of matter and sequence in the speech, certainly never missed it. We wonder how it might appear to a deaf person. Perhaps the impressiveness of what he saw would make him draw an altogether wrong conclusion as to what he might have heard but for his infirmity—and cause him to suffer accordingly. Such people incline to mistrust and bitterness. On the other hand, a young Chinaman at the other end of the table, who possessed too little of the language to understand what had been said, but had yet assiduously listened and looked, clapped his hands and called out: "Très bien, très bien."

And Mynheer Peeperkorn came "to the point." He drew himself up, swelled his broad chest, buttoned the check frock-coat over the clerical waistcoat; the pose of his white head was regal. He beckoned to a "dining-room girl"—it was the dwarf—and though busily engaged, she at once obeyed his weighty summons, and stood, milk jug and coffee-pot in hand, by his chair. She too felt drawn to look at him with an ingratiating smile on her large, old face; she too was rapt by the pallid gaze beneath the deep-wrinkled brow; by the lifted hand, whose thumb and forefinger were joined in an O, while the other three with their lanceolate nails stood stiffly up.

"My child," said he, "very well. Very well indeed—very. You are small—what is that to me? On the contrary. I find it a positive good, I thank God, that you are as you are; I thank God you are so small and full of character. What I want of you is also small and full of character. But in the first place, what is your name?"

She said, smiling and stammering, that her name was Emerentia.

"Splendid," cried Peeperkorn, throwing himself back in his chair and stretching out his arm toward her. He cried it in the tone of one who would say "Wonderful! Is not everything wonderful?"—"My child," he went on, with a perfectly serious face, almost sternly, "you surpass all my expectations. Emerentia! You utter it so modestly—yet, taken with your person, it holds out such boundless possibilities. Beautiful. Worth dwelling upon, communing with in the depths of one’s—in order to—understand me, my child: as a term of endearment—the pet name. It might be Rentia. Though Emchen would equally warm and fortify the heart—in short, for the moment, I will abide by Emchen. Emchen, then, ‘Emchen my child, attend. A little bread, my love. But hold! Let no misunderstanding come between us—for in your somewhat over life-size face I seem to read—bread, Renzchen, bread; yet not baker’s bread, of which in this place we have enough and to spare, in all conceivable forms. Not corn that is baked, my angel, but corn that is burnt—in other words, distilled. Bread of God, bread of sunshine, little pet name; bread for the laving of man’s weary spirit. But I still have misgivings—whether the sense of this word I would even consider substituting for it another, the beautiful word cordial—if here we did not encounter a new danger, that it might be understood in the ordinary thoughtless sense—No more, Rentia. Settled. Set—tled, and out of the question. Rather would I, in consideration of the debt of honour I acknowledge, right cordially to rejoice your characteristic smallness—a gin, love, and haste thee. A Schiedamer, Emerentia. Bring me one hither."

"A geneva, sir," repeated the dwarf, and spun three times round on herself, seeking a place for her jugs, which she finally deposited on Hans Castorp’s table, quite near him, obviously not wishing to burden Herr Peeperkorn with the same. She put wings to her feet, and he soon received his desire. The little glass was so full that the "bread" overflowed and bedewed the plate. He took the grain distillation between thumb and middle finger, and held it toward the light. "Pieter Peeperkorn," he declared, "will now take unto himself a glass of Hollands." He appeared to chew the liquid some-what, then swallowed it down; "And now," he said, "I look on you all with new eyes." He lifted Frau Chauchat’s hand from the cloth, carried it to his lips and laid it back, letting his own rest for some while upon it.

An odd man, and of great personal weight, though incoherent. The population of the Berghof were enthusiastic over him. It was reported that he had only lately retired from his colonial interests and transferred them to the continent. He was said to have a magnificent house at The Hague, and another at Scheveningen. Frau Stöhr called him a money magnet (the unhappy woman meant magnate) and indicated the string of pearls Frau Chauchat had worn in the evening since her return to the Berghof. These pearls, Frau Stöhr considered, were scarcely a token of affection from the trans-Caucasian husband; more likely they came out of the common travelling-trunk. She winked and jerked her head in the direction of Hans Castorp, whose discomfiture she parodied with her mouth drawn down—no, illness and affliction had had no power to refine Caroline Stöhr; her jeers over the young man’s disappointment positively went beyond bounds. He preserved his composure, and corrected her blunder, not unadroitly. It was magnate, not magnet she had meant to say, he told her. Money-magnate. But magnet was not so bad after all—certainly Herr Peeperkorn had a good deal that was attractive about him. The schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, with a wry smile, flushing dully, but not looking at him as she spoke, asked how he liked the new guest. He replied, quite calmly, that he found Mynheer Peeperkorn a "blurred personality"; a personality, that is, undoubtedly, though blurred. The precision of the characterization showed objectivity and poise; it dislodged the schoolmistress from her position. Ferdinand Wehsal, too, made oblique reference to the unexpected circumstances of Frau Chauchat’s return; and got from Hans Castorp proof that a look may be every whit as telling and unequivocal as the articulate word. "You paltry wretch," said the stare with which Hans Castorp measured the Mannheimer—said it without the shadow of a doubt of its meaning. Wehsal understood that look, and pocketed it up; even nodded and showed his bad teeth; but from that time forward he ceased to carry Hans Castorp’s overcoat, when they went their walks with Naphta, Settembrini, and Ferge. But dear me, Hans Castorp could carry his own coat, couldn’t he—and much preferred to; he had only let the poor creature take it now and then out of sheer good feeling. However, there was no doubt everybody in the circle knew that Hans Castorp was hard hit by the wholly unforeseen circumstance, which frustrated all the hopes he had cherished against the return of his carnival partner. It would be putting it even better to say that she had rendered nugatory all his hopes; that, precisely, was the mortifying fact.

His designs had been of the most discreet and delicate, he had meant nothing clumsy or abrupt. He would not even fetch her from the station—what a mercy, indeed, he had not thought of doing so! Uncertain whether a woman—upon whom illness had conferred such a degree of freedom—uncertain whether she would even admit the fantastic adventures of a dream dreamed on carnival night, in a foreign tongue to boot! Whether she would even wish in the first instance to be reminded of them. No, there would be no exigence, no clumsy pressing of claims. Admitted that his relations with the slant-eyed sufferer went beyond the limits prescribed by the traditions of the Occident; the uttermost formality of civilization, even for the moment apparent forgetfulness—was indicated as the suitable procedure. A respectful greeting from table to table—only that, for the time, no more. A courtly approach as occasion indicated, an easy inquiry after the health of the traveller. The actual meeting would follow in good time, as a reward for his chivalrous reserve.

All this fine feeling, now, had become null and void—Hans Castorp’s conduct being deprived of choice, and therewith of merit. The presence of Mynheer Peeperkorn effectively disposed of any tactics save utter aloofness. On the evening of the arrival, Hans Castorp had seen from his loge the sleigh come up the winding drive. On the box next the coachman sat the Malayan valet, a yellow little man with a fur collar to his overcoat, and a bowler hat. At the back, his hat over his brows, sat the stranger, beside Clavdia. That night Hans Castorp got little sleep. Next morning he heard for the asking the name of the mysterious new arrival; heard likewise that the two travellers occupied neighbouring suites on the first floor. He was early at breakfast, and sat in his place erect but pale, awaiting the slamming of the glass door. It did not come. Clavdia’s entrance was noiseless; for Mynheer Peeperkorn closed the door behind her—tall and broad, his white hair flaring above his lofty brow, he followed the familiar gliding tread of his companion, as with head stuck out before her she slipped to her chair. Yes, she was unchanged. Regardless of his programme, Hans Castorp devoured her, with his sleep-weary eyes. There was the red-blond hair, no more elaborately dressed than of yore, wound in the same simple braid about her head; there were the "prairie-wolf’s eyes," the rounding neck, the lips that seemed fuller than they actually were, thanks to the prominent cheek-bones, which gave the cheeks that exquisite flat or slightly concave look.—Clavdia! he thought, and thrilled. He fixed his eyes on the unexpected guest; not without a toss of the head for the splendid masklike impression the person made; not without summoning a sneer at pretensions which, however justified by present possession, were invalidated by the past—by certain very definite events in the past—for instance in the field of amateur portraiture. Hans Castorp knew, for had not those events visited himself with justifiable pangs?—Even her way of turning, before she sat down, to present herself, as it were, to the room, she had as of yore. Mynheer Peeperkorn assisted at the little ceremony, standing behind her while it took place, and then seating himself at Clavdia’s side.

As for that courtly salute from table to table—nothing came of it. Clavdia’s eyes, when she presented herself, had passed over Hans Castorp’s person and his whole vicinity, and rested upon the far corner of the room. At the next meal it was the same. And the more meals passed without any response to his gaze than this blank and indifferent passing-over, the more impracticable became the project of the courtly salute. After supper the two travelling-companions sat in the small salon, on the sofa together, surrounded by their table-mates; and Peeperkorn, his magnificent visage flaming against the flashing white of hair and beard, drank out the bottle of red wine he had ordered at table. At each of the main meals he drank one, or two, or two and a half bottles, in addition to the "bread" which he took even at early breakfast. Obviously the system of this kingly man stood in more than common need of moistening. He took in fluid likewise in the form of extra-strong coffee, many times a day, drinking it out of a large cup, even after dinner—or rather, he drank it during dinner, along with the wine. Wine and coffee, Hans Castorp heard him say, were both good for fever—quite aside from their cordial and refreshing properties—very good against the intermittent tropical fever which had kept him in bed for several hours the second day after he arrived. The Hofrat called it quartan fever: it took the Dutchman about every fourth day, first with a chill, then with a fever, then with a mighty sweat. He was said to have also an inflamed spleen, from the same cause.

Vingt Et Un

A LITTLE time passed, some three or four weeks—this on our own reckoning, since on Hans Castorp’s we cannot depend. They brought no great change. On our hero’s part they witnessed an abiding scorn of the unforeseen circumstances which kept him in undeserved exile, of, in particular, that circumstance which called itself Pieter Peeperkorn, when it took unto itself a glass of gin—the disturbing presence of that kingly, incoherent man, which upset Hans Castorp far more than had the presence of the "organ-grinder" in the old days. His brows took on two querulous vertical wrinkles, and five times daily he contracted them as he sat and looked at the returned traveller—glad despite himself to be able to look at her—and at the high-and-mighty presence sitting there all unaware what a poor light past events shed on his present pretensions.

One evening the social hour happened to be livelier than usual—which it might be at any time without especial cause. A Hungarian student played spirited gipsy waltzes on his fiddle; and Hofrat Behrens, who chanced to be present for a quarter-hour with Dr. Krokowski, got somebody to play the melody of the "Pilgrims’ Chorus" on the bass notes of the piano, while he himself operated in a skipping movement with a brush over the treble, and parodied the violin counterpoint. Everybody laughed; and the Hofrat, nodding benevolent approval of his own sprightly performance, withdrew amid applause. The gaiety prolonged itself, there was more music, people sat down with drinks beside them to dominoes and bridge, trifled with the optical instruments, or stood in groups talking. Even the Russian circle mingled with the others in hall and music-room. Mynheer Peeperkorn was to be seen among them—or rather, he could not but be seen, wherever he was, his kingly head towering high above any scene, and dwarfing it by the sheer weight and majesty of his person. Those who stood about him, drawn first by the reports of the man’s wealth, soon hung absorbed upon his personality. Forgetful of all else, they stood laughing and nodding, spellbound by the pallid eye, by the brow’s mighty folds, by the compulsion of the gestures his long-nailed hands performed. And never, for one moment, were they conscious of any lack in his incoherent, rhapsodic, literally futile remarks.

If we look about for our friend Hans Castorp, we shall find him in the reading- and writing-room, where once (but that "once" is vague, not the teller nor the reader of this story, nor yet its hero, being any longer clear upon the degree of its "once-ness")—where once he had received certain very important communications touching the history of human progress. It was quiet here—only two or three other persons shared his retreat. At one of the double tables, under the electric light, a man was writing; and a lady with two pairs of glasses on her nose sat by the bookshelves and turned over the leaves of an illustrated magazine. Hans Castorp sat near the open door to the music-room, with his back to the portières, on a chair that happened to be standing there, a plush-covered chair in Renaissance style, with a high straight back, and no arms. He held a newspaper as though to read it, but instead was listening with his head on one side to the snatches of music and talk from the next room. His brows were dark, his thoughts seemed not on harmonies bent, but rather on the thorny path of his present disillusionment. Bitter, bitter was the weird of our young man, who had borne out the long waiting only to be gulled at the end. Indeed he seemed not far from a sudden determination to fling his paper upon the chair he sat in, to escape by the hall door and exchange the empty gaieties of the salon for the frosty solitude of his balcony, and the society of his Maria.

"And your cousin, Monsieur?" a voice suddenly asked above and behind his shoulder. It was a voice enchanting to his ear; it seemed his senses had been expressly contrived to perceive its sweet-and-bitter huskiness as the very height and summit of earthly harmonies; it was the voice that once had said to him: "Certainly. But be careful not to break it"—a compelling, fateful voice. And if he heard aright, it had asked him about Joachim.

Slowly he let his newspaper fall, and turned his face up a little, so that the crown of his head came against the straight back of his chair. He even closed his eyes, but quickly opened them, and gazed somewhere into space—the expression on the poor wight’s face was well-nigh that of a sleep-walker, or clairvoyant. He wished she might ask again, but she did not, he was not even sure she still stood behind him, when, after all that pause, so tardily and with scarce audible voice he answered: "He is dead. He went down below to the service, and he died."

He realized that this "dead" was the first word to fall between them; likewise, simultaneously, that she was not sure of expressing herself in his tongue, and chose short and easy phrases to condole in. Still standing behind and above him, she said: "Oh, woe, alas! That is too bad! Quite dead and buried? Since when?"

"Some time ago. His mother came and took him back with her. He had grown a beard, a soldier’s beard. They fired three salvoes over his grave."

"He deserved them. He was a very good young man. Far better than most other people—than some others one knows."

"Yes, he was good and brave. Rhadamanthus always talked about his doggedness. But his body would have it otherwise. Rebellio carnis, the Jesuits call it. He always set store by his body—in the highest sense. However, his body thought otherwise, and snapped its fingers at doggedness. But it is more moral to lose your life than to save it."

"Monsieur is still the philosophizing fainéant, I see. But Rhadamanthus? Who is that?"

"Behrens. That is Settembrini’s name for him."

"Ah, Settembrini. Him I know. That Italian who—whom I did not like. He was not hu—man. He had—arrogance." The voice dwelt on the word human—dreamily, fanatically; and accented arrogance on the final syllable. "He is no longer here? And I am so stupid, I do not know what is Rhadamanthus."

"A humanistic allusion. Settembrini has moved away. We’ve philosophized a lot of late, he and I and Naphta."

"Who is Naphta?"

"His adversary."

"If he is that, then I would gladly make his acquaintance.—Did I not tell you your cousin would die if he went down to be a soldier?"

And Hans Castorp answered as he had vowed and dreamed: "Tu l’as su," he said.

"What are you thinking of?" she asked him.

There was a long pause. He did not retract, he waited, with the crown of his head pressed against the chair-back, and his gaze half tranced, to hear her voice again; and again he was not sure she was still there, again he was afraid the broken music might have drowned her departing footsteps. At last it came again: "And Monsieur did not go down to his cousin’s funeral?"

He replied: "No, I bade him adieu up here, before they shut him away, when he had begun to smile in his beard. His brow was cold—tu sais comme les fronts des morts sont froids?"

"Again! What a way is that to address a lady whom one hardly knows!"

"Must I speak not humanly, but humanistically?"

"Quelle blague! You were here all the time?"

"Yes. I waited."

"Waited—for what?"

"For thee!"

A laugh came from above him, a word that sounded like "Madman!"—"For me? How absurd it is—ils ne t’auraient pas laissé partir."

"Oh, yes, Behrens would have, once—he was furious. But it would have been folly. I have not only the old scars that come from my school-days, but the fresh places that give me my fever."

"Still fever?"

"Yes, still, a little—or nearly always. It is intermittent. But not an intermittent fever."

"Des allusions?"

He was silent. He still gazed somnambulantly, but his brows were gathered. After a while he asked: "Et toi—où as-tu été?"

A hand struck the back of the chair. "Toujours ce tutoyer! Mais c’est un sauvage!—Where have I been? All over. In Moscow"—the voice pronounced it Muoscow—" in Baku—in some German baths, in Spain."

"Oh, in Spain. Did you like it?"

"So-so. The travelling is bad. The people are half Moorish. Castile is bare and stark. The Kremlin is finer than that castle or monastery, or whatever it is, at the foot of the mountains—"

"Yes, the Escurial."

"Yes, Philip’s castle. An inhuman place. I preferred the folk-dancing in Catalonia, the sardana to the bagpipes. Moi, j’ai dansé aussi moi! they take each other’s hands and dance in a ring—the whole square is full of dancing people. C’est charmant. That is hu—man. I bought a little blue cap, such as all the men and boys of the people wear down there, almost like a fez—the boina. I shall wear it in the rest-cure, and other places, perhaps. Monsieur shall judge if it becomes me."

"What monsieur?"

"Sitting here in this chair."

"Not Mynheer Peeperkorn?"

"He has already pronounced judgment—he says I look charming in it."

"He said that—all of it? Did he really finish the sentence, so it could be understood?"

"Ah! It seems Monsieur is out of temper? Monsieur would be spiteful, cutting? He would laugh at people who are much greater and better, and—more hu—man than himself and his—his ami bavard de la Méditerranée, son maître et grand parleur—put together. But I cannot listen—"

"Have you my x-ray portrait?" he interrupted, crest-fallen.

She laughed. "I must look it out."

"I carry yours here. And on my bedside table I have a little easel—"

He did not finish. Before him stood Peeperkorn. He had searched for his travelling-companion, entered through the portières and stood in front of Hans Castorp’s chair, behind which he saw her talking; stood like a tower, so close to Hans Castorp as to rouse the latter from his trance, and make him realize that it was in place to get up and be mannerly. But they were so close he had to slide sidewise from his seat, and then the three stood in a triangle, the centre of which was the chair.

Frau Chauchat complied with the requirements of the civilized West, by presenting the gentlemen to each other, Hans Castorp to Peeperkorn as "an acquaintance of a former stay." Superfluous to account for Herr Peeperkorn. She gave his name, and the Dutchman bent a look upon the young man, out of his colourless eyes, beneath the astonishing arabesque of wrinkles that made his face so like an old idol’s; gave him a look, and put out his hand, which was freckled on the back, and would have looked like a sea-captain’s, Hans Castorp thought, but for the lanceolate finger-nails. For the first time, he stood under the immediate influence of Peeperkorn’s impressive personality (personality was the word that always occurred to one in reference to this man, one knew straightway that this was a personality; and the more one saw of him the more one was convinced that a personality must look not otherwise than as he did) and his unstable youth felt the weight of this broad-shouldered, red-faced man in the sixties, with his aureole of white hair, his cracked lips and the chin-whisker that strayed long and scanty over the clerical waistcoat. Peeperkorn’s manner was courtesy itself.

"My dear sir," he said, "with the greatest of pleasure. Don’t mention it. I am entirely your man. In making your acquaintance, I distinctly feel—as a young man, you inspire me with confidence. I like you. I—don’t mention it. Settled, sir, settled. You suit me."

What could Hans Castorp do? Peeperkorn’s gestures were conclusive, peremptory. He liked Hans Castorp. It was "settled." And his satisfaction gave Peeperkorn an idea, which he indicated by means of speaking gesture. His fair companion, coming to the rescue, elaborated and made it vocal.

"My child," he said. "Very well. Very well indeed. Very. But how would it be—? Pray understand me. Our life here is but brief. Our power to do it justice is but—These are facts, my child. Laws. In—ex—orable. In short, my child, in short and in brief—" He paused, in an impressive attitude, which suggested that he would defer to another’s judgment but disclaim responsibility if, despite his warning, an error were committed.

Frau Chauchat was obviously skilled in interpreting his half-uttered wishes. She said: "Why not? We might remain down a little longer, make a party, perhaps, and drink a bottle of wine together." She turned to Hans Castorp. "Make haste! Why are you waiting? We must have company, we three are not enough. Who is still in the salon? Ask anyone who is there, fetch some of your friends down from their balconies. We will ask Dr. Ting-fu from our table."

Peeperkorn rubbed his hands.

"Very good," he said. "Absolutely. Capital. Do as you are bid, young man, make haste! Let us make a little company, play, and eat and drink. Let us feel that—settled, young man. Absolutely."

Hans Castorp took the lift to the second storey. He knocked at Ferge’s door, who in his turn fetched Wehsal and Herr Albin from their chairs in the main rest-hall below. Lawyer Paravant and the Magnus couple were still in the hall, Frau Stöhr and the Kleefeld in the salon. A large table was set up under the centre chandelier, chairs and serving-tables put about. Mynheer courteously greeted each guest as he appeared, with a glance of the pallid eyes and a lifting of the masklike brows. They sat down, twelve together, Hans Castorp between his kingly host and Clavdia Chauchat. Cards and counters were produced, they decided on some rounds of vingt et un. Peeperkorn summoned the dwarf and in his most impressive manner ordered wine—white Chablis of ‘06, three bottles for a start—and dessert, whatever pâtisseries and dried fruits were to be had. He rubbed his hands in high glee as the good things came in, and communicated his sentiments in broken phrases which were none the less entirely successful, at least in the direction of establishing his "personality." He laid both hands on his neighbour’s arm, then raised his long forefinger with the pointed nail, and claimed and received the admiration of the table for the splendid golden colour of the wine in the rummers, for the sugar that sweated from the Malaga grapes, for a certain sort of little salt and poppy-seed pretzel. These, he declared, were divine, and with an imperious gesture nipped in the bud any possible protest against the strength of his adjective. He had taken charge of the bank at first, but soon turned it over to Herr Albin and was understood to say that the charge of it hindered his unfettered enjoyment.

The gambling was to him quite evidently a minor consideration. The stakes were very low, a mere trifle in his view, though the bidding, at his suggestion, began at fifty rappen, a considerable sum to most of those present. Lawyer Paravant and Frau Stöhr went white and red by turns; the latter suffered pangs of indecision when called on to decide whether it was too high for her to buy at eighteen. She squealed aloud when Herr Albin with chill routine dealt her a card so high as to confound her hopes over and over. Peeperkorn laughed heartily.

"Squeal away, madame, squeal away," said he. "It sounds shrill and full of life, it wells up from depths—drink, madame, drink and refresh yourself for new efforts." He filled her glass, also his neighbour’s and his own, ordered three more bottles, and clicked glasses with Wehsal and Frau Magnus the inly wasted one; they two seeming to stand in most need of enlivenment. Faces flushed more and more, from the effects of the truly marvellous wine—only Dr. Ting-fu’s remained unchangingly yellow, with jet-black slits of eyes. He staked very high, with his little suppressed giggle, and was shamelessly lucky. Lawyer Paravant, his gaze a-swim, challenged fate by putting ten francs on an only moderately hopeful opening card, bought until he was pale in the face, and then won twice his money back; for Herr Albin had rashly doubled on the strength of an ace he received. Not only the persons involved felt the shock of these events; the whole circle shared the shattering effect. Even Herr Albin, whose sang-froid outdid the croupiers of Monte Carlo, where, according to him, he was an old habitué, now scarcely mastered his excitement. Hans Castorp played high, so did Frau Stöhr and the Kleefeld, Frau Chauchat as well. They went the rounds: played Chemin de fer, "My aunt, your aunt," and the perilous Différence. There were outbursts of jubilation and despair, explosions of rage, attacks of hysterical laughter—all due to the reaction of this unlawful pleasure upon their nerves; and all perfectly serious and genuine. The chances and changes of life itself would have called up in them no other reaction.

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Part 2 of 8

But it was not solely—or even chiefly—the play and the wine that made the little circle so tense, that flushed their cheeks and opened their eyes so wide, or evoked such breathless excitement, such almost painful concentration on the moment’s business. It was rather the effect of a commanding nature in their midst, a "personality"; it was Mynheer Peeperkorn who held the gathering in the hollow of his mobile gesturing hand, and enforced it, by the spectacle of his countenance, by his pallid gaze beneath the monumental creases of his brow, by his words, and his compelling pantomime, to take the mood of the hour. No matter what he said; it was highly incomprehensible, and the more so the more wine he drank. Yet they hung on his lips, they could not take their eyes from the little round made by his finger and thumb, with the pointed nails stiffly erect beside it; or from the majestic, speaking face; they utterly succumbed to feelings which for self-forgetfulness and intensity far exceeded the accustomed gamut of these people. The tribute they paid was too much for some of them—Frau Magnus, at least, felt very poorly; threatened to faint, but stoutly refused to retire, and contented herself with the chaise-longue, where she lay awhile with a wet-napkin over her forehead, and then rejoined the group at the table. Peeperkorn put down her plight to lack of nourishment. He expressed himself in this sense, with impressive disjointedness, forefinger aloft. People must nourish themselves properly, he gave them to understand, in order to do justice to life's manifold claims. And he ordered sustenance for the company: platters of cold meat, joint and roast; tongue, goose, ham, sausage, whole dishes of delectables, all garnished with little radishes, butter-balls, and parsley, gay as flower-beds. They found a welcome, despite the lately consumed supper, which, it were superfluous to tell the reader, had lacked nothing in heartiness. But Mynheer Peeperkorn, after a few bites, dismissed the whole as "kickshaws" -- dismissed them with a scorn which gave dismaying evidence of the uncertain temper of this lordly man. Yes, he waxed choleric, turned upon one of the company who tried to defend the collation. He swelled with rage, struck the table with his fist, and cursed the food for garbage, fit for the dust-bin. This reduced the offender to silence, for certainly Peeperkorn, as host and dispenser of the good cheer, might find fault with its quality if he chose.

But his rage, however disproportionate, became him magnificently, Hans Castorp saw that. It did not misrepresent or render him petty: it wrought his incoherence, which no one in the group could have had the heart to connect with the mixture of wine he had drunk, to so royal a pitch that they all with one accord agreed, and took not another bite of the offending viands. Frau Chauchat set to work to mollify her companion's mood. She stroked his great sea-captain's hand, as it rested on the cloth after the blow he had struck, and said cajolingly that they might order something else, a hot dish, perhaps, if the chef chef could be won over. "Very good, my child," Peeperkorn said, assuaged. And passed, without abating his dignity, from a full torrent of wrath to a state of appeasement, as he took Clavdia's hand and kissed it. He ordered omelets for himself and the company, for each person a fine large om could be won over. "Very good, my child," Peeperkorn said, assuaged. And passed, without abating his dignity, from a full torrent of wrath to a state of appeasement, as he took Clavdia's hand and kissed it. He ordered omelets for himself and the company, for each person a fine large omelette aux fines herbes, to help them do justice to the demands life made on them. And accompanied the order with a hundred-franc note as a sweetener for the staff.

His placidity was fully restored by the appearance of the steaming dishes, with their burden of canary-yellow besprent with green, which dispersed a mild warm fragrance of eggs and butter upon the air. They fell to with Peeperkorn, who ate and presided over the enjoyment, with broken words and compelling gesture enjoining upon everybody a perfervid appreciation of these gifts of God. He ordered a Hollands all round to go with the omelets; the transparent liquor gave out a healthy grain odour, mingled with just the faintest whiff of juniper—and Peeperkorn laid upon them all to drink it reverently.

Hans Castorp smoked, Frau Chauchat as well; the latter Russian cigarettes with a mouthpiece, from a lacquered box with a troika going full speed on the lid, which lay to hand on the table before her. Peeperkorn made no objection to his neighbours’ enjoyment, but did not smoke himself—he never had done so. If they understood him aright, he considered the use of tobacco one of those over-refined enjoyments the cultivation of which robbed of their majesty the simpler pleasures of life—those gifts and claims to which our power of feeling was even at best scarcely equal. "Young man," said he to Hans Castorp, holding him by the power of his pale eye and his developed gesture: "Young man—the simple—the holy. Good—you understand me.

A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirit—let us absorb such things as these, exhaust them, satisfy their claims, before we—Positively, sir. Not a word. I have known men and women, cocaine eaters, hashish smokers, morphine takers—My dear friend, very good. Very good indeed. Very. Let them. We cannot judge, or condemn. But the simple, the great, the primeval gifts of God—to them they were unequal in the first place. Settled, my friend. Condemned, rejected. They could not respond.—Your name, young man? Good. I knew it, but I had forgotten. Not in cocaine, not in opium, not in vice as such does the viciousness lie. The un-pardonable—the—unpardonable—sin—"

He paused. Tall and broad, he bent toward his neighbour; paused and maintained a marvellously expressive silence. His forefinger was raised, his mouth a broken line beneath the bare, red upper lip, which was somewhat raw from the razor, the horizontal folds of his bald forehead rose to meet the white aureole of his hair; the small pale eyes stared wide, and Hans Castorp seemed to read in them some flicker of horror at the crime, the great transgression, the unforgivable sin, which seeking to expound he stood there now, charming the silence with all the force of a commanding though incoherent personality. Hans Castorp thought it a disinterested horror, yet with something too of a personal kind, something that touched the kingly creature near: fear, perhaps, but not of any mean or narrow sort; that was very like panic flickering up momentarily in the eyes. Hans Castorp—despite the grounds he had for hostile misinterpretation of Frau Chauchat’s majestic friend—was by nature too respectful not to feel shocked at the revelation.

He cast down his eyes, and nodded, to give his neighbour the satisfaction of being understood.

"You are quite right," he said. "It may easily be a sin—and a sign of impotence—to indulge in the refinements of life, at the same time being inadequate to its great, simple, sacred gifts. If I understood you aright, Herr Peeperkorn, that was your meaning. And though I hadn’t thought of it in that light, I may say that I agree with you, now that you mention it. It probably happens seldom enough that these sound and simple gifts of life have real justice done them. The majority of human beings are too heedless, too flabby, too corrupt, too worn out inwardly to give them their due, I feel sure of that."

The mighty one was immensely pleased. "Young man," he said, "positively. Will you permit me—not a word. I beg you to drink with me—no heel-taps—arm-in-arm. I do not, at this moment, propose to you the brotherly thou; I was about to do so, but it would no doubt be precipitate. Somewhat. In the near future, however. Depend upon it. Or, if you insist upon the present—"

Hans Castorp demurred.

"Excellent, young man. ‘Impotence’—very good. Very. Gives one the shivers. ‘Corrupt’—very good too. ‘Gifts’—not so good—‘claims’ better. The holy, the feminine claims life makes upon manly honour and strength—"

Hans Castorp was suddenly driven to realize that Peeperkorn was very drunk. Still, his drunkenness was not debasing, there was no loss of dignity; rather it combined with the nobility of his nature to produce an immense and awe-inspiring effect. Bacchus himself, thought Hans Castorp, without detriment to his godhead, leaned for support on the shoulders of his troop. Everything depended upon who was drunk—a drunken personality was far from being the same as a drunken tinker. He took care not to abate, even inwardly, his respect for this overwhelming person, whose gestures had grown lax, and his tongue stammering.

"Brother," said Peeperkorn. His great torso lolled back in free and regal intoxication against his chair. His arm lay stretched along the cloth and he tapped the table with fist lightly clenched. "Brother-in-blood—prospective. In the near future—after a proper interval for reflection.—Very good. Set—tled.—Life, young man, is a female. A sprawling female, with swelling breasts close to each other, great soft belly between her haunches, slender arms, bulging thighs, half-closed eyes. She mocks us. She challenges us to expend our manhood to its uttermost span, to stand or fall before her. To stand or fall. To fall, young man—do you know what that means? The defeat of the feelings, their overthrow when confronted by life—that is impotence. For it there is no mercy, it is pitilessly, mockingly condemned.—Not a word, young man! Spewed out of the mouth. Shame and ignominy are soft words for the ruin and bankruptcy, the horrible disgrace. It is the end of everything, the hellish despair, the Judgment Day. ..."

The Dutchman had flung back his mighty torso more and more, his kingly head sank lower on his breast, he seemed to be dozing as he talked. But with the last word he lifted the fist that had been lying relaxed on the table, and brought it down with a crash, making our slim young Hans Castorp, overwrought as he was with wine and play, and the singularity of the whole scene, jump, and in startled awe look at the mighty one. "The Judgment Day!" How the phrase suited the man! Hans Castorp did not remember ever hearing it uttered, except perhaps at catechism. And no wonder, he said to himself. Who else would have thought of using it like that—or, more correctly, who would have been big enough to take the thunderbolt in his mouth? Naphta, perhaps, when he talked his vindictive rubbish—but it would have been cheek. Whereas Peeperkorn’s utterance seemed to hold the sound of the last trump, majestic, biblical. "Good Lord, what a personality!" he felt for the hundredth time. "At last I’ve come in contact with a real character—and it turns out to be Clavdia’s—." Not too clear-headed himself, he turned his wineglass about on the table, one hand in his trouser pocket, one eye clipped shut against the smoke of the cigarette he held in the corner of his mouth. Certainly he would have done better to keep quiet. What was his feeble pipe, after the rolling thunder of Jove? But his two democratic mentors had trained him to discussion—for they were both democratic, though one of them struggled against it—and habit betrayed him into one of his naïve commentaries.

"Your remarks, Mynheer Peeperkorn," (what an expression! Does one make "remarks" about the Day of Judgment?) "lead back my mind to what you said previously about vice: that it consists in an affront to the simple, what you call the holy, or, as I might say, the classic, gifts which life offers us; the larger gifts, by contrast with the later and ‘cultivated’ ones, the refinements, which you ‘indulge in,’ as one of us put it, whereas one ‘consecrates oneself’ to the great gifts and pays them homage. But just here, it seems to me, lies the excuse for vice (you must pardon me, but I incline by nature to excuses, though there is nothing ‘large’ about them—I am quite clear on that point) in so far as it is a result of impotence. About the horrors of impotence you have said things of such magnitude that I am quite confounded, as you see me sit here. But in my view, a vicious man appears not at all insensible of your horrors; on the contrary he does them full justice, since it is the abdication of his feelings before the classical gifts of life that drives him to vice. Thus we need not see in vice any affront to life, it may just as well be regarded as homage to it; on the other hand, so far as the refinements represent stimulantia, as they say—means of excitation or intoxication—so far as they sustain or increase the power to feel, then life is their purpose and meaning, the desire for feeling, the impotent striving after feeling—I mean—"

What was he talking about? Was it not democratic and unblushing enough that he had said "as one of us put it"—thus coupling himself and a personality like Peeperkorn? Had certain events in the past—which shed a dubious light on present pretensions—given him courage to utter the impertinence? Were the gods wishful to destroy him, when they moved him to embark on this foolhardy analysis of "vice"? Now let him look to it to extricate himself; for surely he has invoked the whirlwind.

Mynheer Peeperkorn, during Hans Castorp’s harangue, had sat flung back in his chair, his head still sunk on his breast. It was uncertain even whether he had been listening. But now, slowly, as the young man’s utterance grew more involved, he began to erect himself to his full sitting height, the majestic head inflamed; the pattern of furrows on his brow expanded upwards, his little eyes opened in pallid menace. Obviously a storm was brewing beside which the other had been a passing cloud. Mynheer’s under lip pressed wrathfully against the upper, the corners of his mouth drew down, the chin protruded. Slowly he raised his right arm above his head; the fist clenched and remained poised aloft, ready for summary execution upon the democratic prattler, who for his part was panic-stricken—yet not without a thrill of precarious joy at this spectacle of regal rage.

He repressed an inclination to flight, and hastened to say, disarmingly: "Of course, I have failed to express my meaning. The whole thing is simply a question of scale. If a thing has size, one cannot call it vice. Vice is petty. Of their nature, so are the raffine-ments. They are never on the grand scale. But since the most primitive times man has had to his hand a resource, a means of mounting to the heights of feeling, which belongs among the classic gifts of life: a resource, simple, sacred, in the grand style, if I may so express myself. I mean the grape, wine, the gift of the gods to man, as we are told of old time. A God invented it, and with its invention civilization began. For we are told that, thanks to the art of planting and treading the vine, man emerged from his barbaric state, and achieved culture; even to-day where the grape grows, those people are accounted, or account themselves, possessed of a higher culture than the Cimmerians, a fact which is worthy our attention. For it indicates that civilization is not a thing of the reason, of being sober and articulate; it has far more to do with inspiration and frenzy, the joys of the winecup—if I may make so bold as to ask, have I not expressed your attitude in the matter?"

A sly dog, this Hans Castorp. Or, as Herr Settembrini with literary feeling had put it, a "wag." To rush into controversy with personalities, to be even forward of speech—but then to know how to extricate himself when need was, and his coat-tails, as it were, all but on fire! In the first place, he had given them an impromptu but quite respectable apologia for drinking; into which, en passant, he had slipped a reference to "civilization"—of which there was just then small trace in Mynheer Peeperkorn’s primitive and menacing attitude; and lastly, he had got round him, put him in the wrong, by asking him, quite simply, a question which one can scarcely answer and maintain the threatening pose or the raised fist. And accordingly the Dutchman relaxed from his neolithic rage, slowly his arm sank again till it rested on the table, his face lost its swollen look, the storm passed over with no trace but the last mutter of thunder, he even seemed to entertain the thought of clicking glasses again; and now Frau Chauchat came to the rescue, by calling her companion’s attention to the gradual disintegration of the party.

Peeperkorn turned his attention to the circle. It was true: they were demoralized. "My friend," she said to him, in French, "you are neglecting your other guests. You devote yourself too exclusively to this gentleman—important though your conversation with him doubtless is—and the others have stopped playing, I fear they grow tired—shall we say good-night?"

Lethargy and boredom sat on every brow; the guests were out of hand, like a neglected class. Several were on the point of falling asleep. Peeperkorn took a firm grip on the reins he had let fall. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he summoned them, with raised forefinger—and that pointed finger was like a waving standard or the flash of an unsheathed sword, as his words were like the rallying-cry of the leader, which brings to a stand the threatened rout. It had its effect in a trice. They picked themselves up, they pulled themselves together, they looked again with smiles into their host’s pale eyes beneath his masklike brows. He held them all, he pressed them afresh into service of his personality, sinking the tip of his forefinger till it met the tip of his thumb, and erecting the three others straight and stiff with their long nails. He stretched out his sea-captain’s hand, checking them, warning them, and words issued from his cracked lips—words utterly irrelevant and indistinct, yet exerting on their spirits a resistless power, thanks to the reserves of personality behind them.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Very good, very good indeed. Very. The flesh, ladies and gentlemen, is—not another word. No, permit me to say—weak, so the Scripture has it. Weak. Inclined to be unequal to claims—but I appeal to your—in short, ladies and gentlemen, in short and in brief, I ap—peal! You will say to me: ‘Sleep.’ Very good, ladies and gentlemen, very good, very. I love and honour sleep. I venerate the deep, sweet, refreshing bliss of it. Sleep is one of the—what did you call them, young man?—one of the classic gifts of life—the first, the very first, the highest, ladies and gentlemen. But you will recall, you will remember—Gethsemane. ‘And took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee. . . Then saith he unto them:. . . Tarry ye here and watch with me.’ You remember? ‘And he cometh unto the disciples and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter: What, could ye not watch with me one hour?’ Immense, my friends. Heart-piercing moving to the last—very. ‘And came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy. And saith unto them: Sleep on now, and take your rest, behold the hour is at hand.’ Ladies and gentlemen, that pierces the heart, it sears—"

In truth, they were all cut to the quick, they were crushed. He had folded his hands across his chest, upon His scanty beard, and laid his head on one side. His eyes had grown dim with feeling as the words expressive of the lonely anguish of death fell from his chapped lips. Frau Stöhr sobbed. Frau Magnus heaved a heavy sigh. Lawyer Paravant saw it was incumbent upon him to represent the sense of the meeting. In a voice solemnly sunk, he assured their honoured host that the circle was his to command. Herr Peeperkorn mistook them. Here they were, blithe as the dawn, jolly as sand-boys, ready for anything. This, he said, was a priceless evening, so festive, so out of the ordinary. Such was their feeling, and no one of them had any present idea of availing himself of life’s good gift of sleep. Mynheer Peeperkorn could count on them, one and all.

"Splendid, excellent," Peeperkorn cried, and stood erect again. He unclasped his hands and spread them wide and high before him, palms outward—it looked like a heathen prayer. His majestic physiognomy, but now imprinted with Gothic anguish, blossomed once more in pagan jollity. Even a sybaritic dimple appeared in his cheek. "The hour is at hand," said he, and sent for the wine-card. He put on a horn-rimmed pince-nez, the nose-piece of which rode high up on his forehead, and ordered champagne, three bottles of Mumm & Co., Cordon rouge, extra dry, with petits fours, toothsome cone-shaped little dainties in lace frills, covered with coloured frosting and filled with chocolate and pistache cream. Frau Stöhr licked her fingers after them. Herr Albin nonchalantly removed the wire from the first bottle, and let the mushroom-shaped cork pop to the ceiling; elegantly he conformed to the ritual, holding the neck of the bottle wrapped in a serviette as he poured. The noble foam bedewed the cloth. Every glass rang as the guests saluted, then drank the first one empty at a draught, electrifying their digestive organs with the ice-cold, prickling, perfumed liquid. Every eye sparkled. The game had come to an end, no one troubled to take cards or gains from the table. They gave themselves over to a blissful far niente, enlivened by scraps of conversation in which, out of sheer high spirits, no one hung back. They uttered thoughts that in the thinking had seemed primevally fresh and beautiful, but in the saying somehow turned lame, stammering, indiscreet, a perfect gallimaufry, calculated to arouse the scorn of any sober onlooker. The audience, however, took no offence, all being in much the same irresponsible condition. Even Frau Magnus’s ears were red, and she admitted that she felt "as though life were running through her"—which Herr Magnus seemed not over-pleased to hear. Hermine Kleefeld leaned against Herr Albin’s shoulder as she held her glass to be filled. Peeperkorn conducted the Bacchanalian rout with his long-fingered gestures, and summoned additional supplies: coffee followed the champagne, "Mocha double," with fresh rounds of "bread," and pungent liqueurs: apricot brandy, chartreuse, crême de vanille, and maraschino for the ladies. Later there appeared marinated filets of fish, and beer; lastly tea, both Chinese and camomile, for those who had done with champagne and liqueurs and did not care to return to a sound wine, as Mynheer himself did; he, Frau Chauchat, and Hans Castorp working back after midnight to a Swiss red wine. Mynheer Peeperkorn, genuinely thirsty, drank down glass after glass of the simple, effervescent drink.

The party held together for another hour, partly because they were all too leaden-footed and befuddled to rise, partly because this method of spending the hours of the night appealed to them by its novelty; partly by the weight of Peeperkorn’s personality, and the blasting example of Peter and his brethren, to which they all shamed to yield. Generally speaking, the female section seemed less compromised than the male. For the men, flushed or sallow, sat with their legs sprawled before them, puffing out their cheeks. Now and then they would make a half-mechanical effort to lift the glass, but their hearts were no longer in it. The women were more enterprising. Hermine Kleefeld, bare elbows on the table, propped up her head, her cheeks in her hands, and showed the giggling Ting-fu all the enamel of her front teeth. Frau Stöhr, with her chin and shoulder coquettishly meeting, sought to reawaken Lawyer Paravant to desire. Frau Magnus’s state was such that she had seated herself on Herr Albin’s lap and was pulling both his ears by their lobes—a sight in which Herr Magnus appeared to find relief. The company had urged Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to regale them with the story of the pleura-shock; but his tongue was too thick, he could not manage it, and honourably avowed his incapacity, which was greeted by the company as occasion for another drink. Wehsal all at once began to weep bitterly, from some unplumbed depth of wretchedness. They brought him round with coffee and cognac; but the episode roused Peeperkorn’s lively interest, who looked at his quivering chin, from which tears dripped, and with raised forefinger and lifted mask-like brows called the attention of the company to the phenomenon.

"That is—" he said. "Ah—with your permission, that is—holy. Dry his chin, my child, take my serviette—or, still better, let it drip. He himself has done so. Holy, holy, my friends. In every sense. Christian and pagan. A primitive phenomenon, of the first—the very first—No. No, that is to say—"

This oft-repeated phrase set the key for all the running comment with which he accompanied his production of gesture—gesture that by now, in all conscience, had grown more than a little burlesque. He had a way of lifting that little circlet formed by thumb and forefinger to a poise above his ear, and coyly twisting his head away from it—one watched him as one might an elderly priest of some oriental cult, with the skirts of his robe snatched up, doing a dance before the sacrificial altar. Again, flung back in Olympian repose, with one arm stretched out on the back of his neighbour’s chair, he beguiled them all to their confusion, by painting a vivid and irresistible scene of a dark, frosty winter morning, when the yellow gleam of the night-lamp reveals the network of bare boughs outside the pane, rigid in the harsh and penetrating mist of early dawn. So telling was the picture, so universal its appeal—actually, they all shivered; particularly when he went on to speak of rising in such a dawn, and squeezing a great sponge filled with ice-cold water over neck and shoulders. The effective sensation he characterized as "holy." But all this was a digression, an aside thrown out to illustrate receptivity for life; a fantastic impromptu, let fall merely to renew and reassert the whole irresistible compulsion of his presence and his sensations upon the scene of abandoned night-revelry. He made love to every female creature within reach, without discrimination or respect of person; tendering such offers to the dwarf that the crippled creature’s large old face was wreathed in smiles. He paid Frau Stöhr compliments that made the vulgar creature bridle more extravagantly than ever, and become almost senseless with affectation. He supplicated—and received—a kiss from Fräulein Kleefeld, upon his thick, chapped lips. He even coquetted with the forlorn Frau Magnus—and all this without detriment to the delicate homage he paid his companion, whose hand he would every now and then carry gallantly to his lips. "Wine—" he said, "women; they are—that is—pardon me—Gethsemane—Day of Judgment. . ."

Toward two o’clock word flew about that "the old man"—in other words, Hofrat Behrens—was approaching by forced marches. Panic reigned among the nerveless company. Chairs and ice-pails were upset. They fled through the library. Peeperkorn raged at the precipitate breaking-up of the festivities, in kingly choler struck the table with his fist and called after the retreating "cowardly slaves"—but allowed Frau Chauchat and Hans Castorp to calm him with the consideration that the banquet had already lasted some six hours, and must in any case some time come to an end. He lent an ear when they murmured something about the "holy" boon of sleep, and yielded to their efforts to lead him away to bed.

"Let me lean upon you, my child! And you, young man, on my other side," he said. They helped him lift his unwieldy body from table, gave him the support of their arms, and he walked with wide steps between them bedwards, his mighty head sunk on his lifted shoulder. First one and then the other of his aides was carried to one side by his staggering pace. It is probable that he was merely indulging himself in the regal luxury of being thus supported and piloted; presumably he could have gone by himself. But he scorned the effort. If made it would have been solely for the unworthy purpose of disguising his state, and of this he was royally unashamed, revelling in the fun of making his companions stagger with him from side to side. He even said, on the way: "Children—nonsense. Of course I’m not—at this moment. You ought to see—ridiculous—"

"Ridiculous, of course," Hans Castorp agreed. "It certainly is. We are giving the classical gifts of life their due, staggering in their honour. Seriously, on the other hand: I’ve had my share too; but any so-called drunkenness to the contrary, I fully recognize the honour of helping such a tremendous personality to bed; I am not so drunk I don’t know that in the matter of size I don’t hold a candle—"

"Come, come, chatterbox," Peeperkorn said, and they moved rhythmically on toward the stairs, drawing Frau Chauchat with them.

The report of the Hofrat’s approach had been a bogy. Perhaps the weary little waitress was responsible, thinking thereby to break up the party. Peeperkorn scented the false alarm, and would have turned back for another drink. But they both set to work to talk him out of the idea, and he let himself be moved on.

The Malayan valet, in white cravat and black silk slippers, awaited his master in the corridor before their apartments. He bowed low, laying his hand upon his breast. "Kiss each other," commanded Peeperkorn. "Young man, kiss this lovely woman good-night, upon her brow," said he to Hans Castorp. "She will have no objection to receiving and responding to—do it to my health, with my blessing." But Hans Castorp declined.

"No, Your Majesty," he said. l beg your pardon. It would not do."

Peeperkorn, in the arms of his valet, drew up his arabesques and demanded to know why.

"Because your companion and I can exchange no kisses on the brow," Hans Castorp responded. "I hope you sleep well. No, no, that is the sheerest nonsense, however you look at it."

Frau Chauchat, for her part, was moving toward her door; Peeperkorn gave way, and let the unwilling suitor go, though looking at him awhile over his and the Malay’s shoulders, his wrinkled brows drawn high in astonishment at an insubordination his kingly temper was seldom called upon to brook.

Mynheer Peeperkorn (Continued)

MYNHEER PEEPERKORN remained in House Berghof the whole winter—what there was left of it—and on into the spring; and there took place, among others, a memorable excursion (in which Settembrini and Naphta joined) into the Fluela valley, to see the waterfall. This occurred at the end of his stay. At the end? Did he remain no longer, then? No. He went away? Yes—and no. How yes and no? Pray let us have no prying into secrets—in the fullness of time we shall know. We are aware that Lieutenant Ziemssen died, not to speak of other less admirable performers of the dance of death. Then Peeperkorn’s malignant tropical fever carried him off? No, not so—but why so impatient? Let us not forget the condition of life as of narration: that we can never see the whole picture at once—unless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge. Let us at least pay time so much honour as the nature of our story permits—little enough, in all conscience; for it has begun to rush pell-mell and helter-skelter; or, if the words suggest too much noise and confusion, shall we say it is going like the wind? The little hand on time’s clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it. Yet how much logical clarity, how much pure light of reason have we opposed to the stealing vague? Not by chance, may we say, have we kept company with intellectual lights like Naphta and Settembrini, instead of surrounding ourselves with incoherent Peeperkorns! And this leads us to a comparison, which in many respects, notably that of scale, must result in favour of this latest arrival on the scene. It did so in Hans Castorp’s own mind. He lay, considering matters, in his loge, and admitted to himself that his two over-vocal mentors, the self-elected guardians of his soul, were dwarfed beside Pieter Peeperkorn. Almost he inclined to call them what Peeperkorn in his royal cups had called him, Hans Castorp—chatterboxes. He was well pleased that hermetic pedagogy should have given him this too: contact with an out-and-out personality.

True, this personality was the companion of Clavdia Chauchat’s travels, and as such a greatly disturbing element. But that was another matter, and one which Hans Castorp did not allow to prejudice his judgment. He persisted in his sincere and respectful if also rather forward sympathy for this man on the grand scale, regardless of his partnership in the travelling-trunks of the woman of whom once, on a carnival night, Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil. That was his way; though we know some people, male and female, will not understand such a lack of sensibility, preferring that our hero should hate Peeperkorn, avoid him, call him an old dotard, a drivelling old sot. Instead of which we see him by Peeperkorn’s bedside in his attacks of fever—prattling to him (the word applies to his own share in the conversation, not the majestic Peeperkorn’s) and with the receptivity of inquiring youth on his travels, letting himself be played on by the power of the personality. All this Hans Castorp did, and all this we report of him, indifferent to the danger that someone may thereby be reminded of Ferdinand Wehsal, who once was wont to carry Hans Castorp’s overcoat. The comparison is not pertinent—for our hero was no Wehsal. Depths of self-abasement were not his line. But he was no "hero" either: which is to say, he would never let his relation to the masculine be conditioned by the feminine. True to our principle of making him out neither better nor worse than he was, we assert that he simply declined—not expressly and consciously, but quite naïvely, declined to let his judgment of his own sex be perverted by romantic considerations. Nor his sense of what was formative in experience. The female sex may find this offensive; we believe Frau Chauchat did feel some involuntary chagrin over the fact—a biting remark or so escaped her, to which we shall refer later on. But surely it was this very characteristic of his which rendered him so irresistible an object for pedagogic rivalry.

Pieter Peeperkorn lay grievously ill, the day after that evening of cards and champagne we have described—and no wonder. Nearly all the participants in those long-drawn-out, exhausting revels were the same. Hans Castorp was no exception, his head ached to splitting; which did not prevent him from paying a visit to the bedside of his last night’s host. He craved permission through the Malay, whom he met in the corridor; and it was readily granted.

He entered the Dutchman’s double bedroom through the salon which separated it from Frau Chauchat’s. It was larger and more luxuriously furnished than most of the Berghof rooms, with satin-upholstered arm-chairs and curly-legged tables. A thick, soft carpet covered the floor, and the beds—they were not the usual hygienic dying-bed of the establishment, but very stately indeed, of polished cherry-wood with brass mounting, and above them hung a little canopy without curtains, like one umbrella sheltering both.

Pieter Peeperkorn lay in one of the two; its red satin coverlet was strewn with papers, books, and letters, and he was reading the Telegraaf through his horn-rimmed pince-nez with the high nose-piece. The coffee-machine stood on a chair at the bedside, and a half-empty bottle of the same simple effervescent red wine was on the night-table, among vials of medicine. Hans Castorp was rather put off to see the Dutchman wearing not a white night-shirt, but a long-sleeved woollen vest, buttoned at the wrists and collar-less, cut round in the neck, and clinging to the old man’s powerful torso, his broad shoulders and breast. This undress threw into even greater relief the splendid humanity of his head on the pillow; in it he looked more remote than ever from the conventional and middle-class, suggesting on the one hand the homme du peuple, on the other a portrait-bust.

"By all means, young man," he said, taking off the horn spectacles by the nose-piece. "Come in. Don’t mention it—on the contrary." Hans Castorp sat down by the bed, and concealed his surprise—for it was that rather than admiration which he felt, however sympathetically—under a burst of cordial and lively chatter, which Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent disjecta membra and much play of gesture. He looked very "poorly," yellow and in evident distress; a good deal affected by the attack of fever he had had toward morning, and the subsequent exhaustion—in part undoubtedly the result of his last night’s bout. "We were pretty—last night, you know—carried it pretty far," he said. "But you are—Good. With you there were no further—but my age, and the condition I am in—my child," he turned with mild yet quite perceptible severity to Frau Chauchat, who just then entered the room from the salon, "very well, very well indeed. Very. But I repeat—ought to have been prevented." Something like an approach to his regal fit of rage rose in face and voice. The injustice, the unreason of the reproof were obvious to anybody who tried to imagine the storm that would have burst on the head of one seriously thinking to disturb him in his drink. But such are the moods of the great. Frau Chauchat moved to and fro in the room, after greeting Hans Castorp, who rose as she entered, without a handshake, but with a smile and nod, and a "Pray don’t disturb yourself"—in his tête-à-tête, that was, with Mynheer. She busied herself about the room, summoned the Malay to take the coffee-machine, then withdrew awhile, and on her return, soft-footed, took part standing in the others’ talk. Hans Castorp got an impression that she was there on guard. It was all very well for her to come back to the Berghof in company with a personality. But when the long-suffering lover took leave to evince regard for the personality, as man for man, then she betrayed uneasiness in pointed phrases like "Pray don’t disturb yourself" and the like. They cost Hans Castorp a smile, which he bent his head to hide, though inwardly aglow. Peeperkorn poured him out a glass of wine from the bottle on the night-table. Under the circumstances the best thing, in the Dutchman’s opinion, was to begin where one had left off; and that innocent effervescent wine had the same effect as soda-water. They touched glasses. Hans Castorp, as he drank, looked at the freckled, sea-captain’s hand, with its pointed nails, the woollen band buttoned round the wrist. It took up the glass, carried it to the thick, cracked lips; the throat, so like a statue’s and yet rather like a day labourer’s, worked up and down as it swallowed the wine. Peeperkorn indicated the medicine bottle on the table, a brown liquid, of which he took a spoonful from Frau Chauchat’s hand. It was an antipyretic, chiefly quinine, he baid. He made his guest try its characteristic bitter and pungent taste; and had much to say in praise of the wonder-working, germ-destroying properties of the drug, its tonic quality, its wholesome effect in regulating the temperature. It slowed down protein catabolism, promoted assimilation, in short it was a boon to mankind, a wonderful cordial, tonic and stimulant—an intoxicant as well, for one could get quite tipsy on it, he said, making the last night’s suggestive gesture of fingers and head like a pagan priest at his ritual dance.

Yes, a wonderful substance, cinchona. It had not been three hundred years since European pharmacology made its acquaintance; not a century since the alkaloid had been isolated which was its active principle; isolated and, to a certain extent, analysed, for it would be too much to say that chemistry knew all there was to know about it, or was in a position to reproduce it synthetically. Our pharmacology need not be too arrogant over its science; for the state of its knowledge on the subject of quinine was a fair example of the rest. It had various facts about the operation of this or that drug; but was very often embarrassed to know the causes of the effect produced. If the young man were to survey the field of our toxicological knowledge, he would find that no one could tell him anything of the elementary properties conditioning the effects of the so-called poisons. For example, take the venom of snakes: all that was known of these animal substances was that they belonged to the albuminoid group, and consisted of various proteids, none of which produced a violent effect, except in this certain—and most uncertain—combination. Introduced into the blood-circulation, the effect was astonishing indeed, considering how far we were from being accustomed to think of albumen as a poison. The truth was, Peeperkorn said, and lifted his head from the pillow, elevated the arabesques on his brow, and gave point to his remarks by the little circle and the upright finger-tips—the truth was, in the world of matter, that all substances were the vehicle of both life and death, all of them were medicinal and all poisonous, in fact therapeutics and toxicology were one and the same, man could be cured by poison, and substances known to be the bearer of life could kill at a thrust, in a single second of time.

He spoke very impressively, and with unwonted coherence, of drugs and poisons, and Hans Castorp listened and nodded; less concerned with the content of his speech—he seemed to have the subject much at heart—than with silently exploring this extraordinary personality, which in the end remained as inexplicable as the operation of the snake-poison he was discussing. In the world of matter, Peeperkorn said, everything depended on dynamics, all else being entirely hypothetical. Quinine was one of the medicinal poisons; one of the strongest of these. Four grammes could make one deaf and giddy and short-winded; it acted like atropine on the visual organs, it was as intoxicating as alcohol; workers in quinine factories had inflamed eyes and swollen lips and suffered from affections of the skin. Peeperkorn described the cinchona, the quinine-tree, in the primeval forests of the Cordilleras, three thousand metres above sea-level. Its bark, called Peruvian or Jesuits’ bark, came late to Spain, long after the natives of South America knew its use. He spoke of the enormous quinine plantations owned by the Dutch government in Java, whence yearly many million pounds of the coils of reddish bark, like cinnamon, were shipped to Amsterdam and London. In fact, said Peeperkorn, bark, the wood-fibre itself, from the epidermis to the cambium, contained, almost always, extraordinary dynamic virtue, for good or evil. The knowledge of drugs possessed by the coloured races was far superior to our own. In certain islands east of Dutch New Guinea, youths and maidens prepared a love charm from the bark of a tree—it was probably poisonous, like the manzanilla tree, or the antiaris toxicaria, the deadly upas-tree of Java, which could poison the air round with its steam and fatally stupefy man and beast. This bark they powdered and mixed with coconut shavings, rolled the mixture into a sheet and toasted it, then sprinkled a brew in the face of the reluctant one, who was straightway inflamed with love for the sprinkler. Sometimes it was the bark of the root that contained the principle, as was the case with a certain creeper growing in the Malay Archipelago, called strychnos tieuté, from which the natives prepared the upas-radsha, by adding snake-venom. This drug caused immediate death when introduced into the circulation—as for instance by means of an arrow—but nobody could explain how it operated. All that seemed clear was that the upas had a dynamic relation with strychnine. . . Peeperkorn, by this time, was sitting erect in his bed; now and then, with a hand that slightly trembled, conveying the wineglass to his cracked lips, to take great, thirsty draughts. He went on to speak of the "crows’-eye" tree of the Coromandel Coast, from the orange-yellow berries of which—the crows’ eyes—was extracted the most powerful alkaloid of all, strychnine. His voice sank to a whisper, and the great folds of his brow rose high, as he described to Hans Castorp the ash-grey boughs, the strikingly glossy foliage and yellow-green blossoms; the picture of this tree conjured up in the mind’s eye of the young man was luridly, almost hysterically garish—it made him shudder. But here Frau Chauchat intervened, saying it was not good for Mynheer Peeperkorn to talk any longer, it tired him too much. She disliked to interfere, but Hans Castorp would forgive her if she suggested that they had had enough for the time. The young man accordingly took his leave. But often, in the months that followed, did Hans Castorp sit by the bed of that kingly man, when he kept it after an attack of fever; Frau Chauchat being within hearing, as she moved about the rooms, and sometimes taking part with a few words. They spent much time together when Peeperkorn was free of fever; for the Dutchman, on his good days, seldom failed to gather round him a select company, to play and drink and otherwise divert themselves and rejoice the inner man. These reunions took place either in the salon, as on the first occasion, or in the restaurant; and Hans Castorp had a habitual place between the great man and his languid companion. They even went abroad together, took walks with Herr Ferge and Wehsal, Naphta and Settembrini, those opposed spirits, whom they could hardly fail to meet. Hans Castorp counted himself fortunate in presenting them to Peeperkorn, and even, in the end, to Clavdia Chauchat. He troubled not at all whether the acquaintance was to these pedagogues’ liking or not. Secure in the knowledge that they needed a tree whereon to sharpen their pedagogical tusks, he reckoned on their putting up even with unwelcome society, in order to continue in enjoyment of his own.

And he was not wrong in thinking that the members of this motley group would at least get used to not getting used to each other. Strangeness, tension, even suppressed hostility there was of course enough between them; it is surely rather remarkable that a comparatively insignificant personality could have held them together. That he did so must be laid to a certain shrewd geniality native to him, which found everything fish that came to his net, and not only bound to him people of the most diverse tastes and characters, but exerted enough power to bind them to each other.

Again, how involved were the relations between the various members of our group! Let us con them a little, as Hans Castorp himself did, with shrewd, yet friendly eye, as they went their ways together. There was the unhappy Wehsal, consumed by his louring passion for Frau Chauchat; who grovelled before Peeperkorn and Hans Castorp, the one on grounds of the past, the other for the sake of the compelling present. And there was Clavdia Chauchat herself, charming, soft-stepping invalid, the property of Peeperkorn—surely by choice and conviction, yet uneasy and sharp-tongued to see her carnival cavalier on such good terms with her sovereign lord. The irritation was probably the same in kind as that which coloured her feeling toward Herr Settembrini, the humanist and haranguer, whom she could not abide, calling him arrogant, not "hu—man." Dearly would she have liked to ask this mentor of Hans Castorp’s the meaning of certain words in his own Mediterranean tongue, of which, though less contemptuously, she was as ignorant as he of hers: the words he had flung after the altogether nice young German, quite correct and of good family, on that carnival night when at length he had summoned courage to approach her.—Hans Castorp was in love up to his ears, so much was true; not in the accepted blissful sense, but as one loves when the case is out of all reason, and cannot be celebrated in any pretty little flat-land ditties we know of. He was badly smitten, quite subjugated, endured all the orthodox pangs; yet was the man to retain, even in his slavery, a certain sense of proportion, which told him that his devotion was worth something to the fair one with the Tartar eyes; not too blind in his abasement to measure its worth by Settembrini’s own attitude toward her. The Italian was as distant as the dictates of humanistic courtesy would permit; while she was only too obviously piqued by his bearing. The position with regard to Leo Naphta was scarcely more—or, from Hans Castorp’s point of view, scarcely less—favourable. True, there was here no fundamental antagonism such as set Herr Ludovico’s being against hers and all its works. Also, the language difficulty was less, and they sometimes strolled and talked apart, Clavdia and the knife-edged little man; discussed books, and questions of political philosophy, upon which both held radical views. Hans Castorp, in his simplicity, would sometimes take part. Yet Frau Chauchat could not but be aware of a certain haughty aloofness in Naphta’s bearing. Its source was the caution of the parvenu, a feeling of insecurity in this unfamiliar society. But in truth his Spanish terrorism had little in common with her roving, door-slamming, all-too-human humanity. And there was moreover the subtle, scarcely perceptible animosity felt by both pedagogues on the score of this disturbing female element that came between them and their fledgling, and united them in an unspoken, primitive hostility, at least as potent as their long-standing conflict with each other. If Hans Castorp was aware of these sentiments they could hardly escape his charmer’s feminine intuition.

Was there something of the same aversion in the attitude of the two dialecticians toward Pieter Peeperkorn? At least, Hans Castorp thought he discerned it, though perhaps he went out to meet it, and took malicious pleasure in watching tongue-tied majesty in contact with his two "auditors," as, with reference to his stocktaking activities, he jestingly called them—though distinctly feeling that the word was but a definition by contraries! Mynheer, in the open, was not so impressive as in the house. He wore a soft felt hat drawn down on his brows, covering the blaze of white hair and the forehead’s extraordinary folds, reducing, as it were, the scale of his features, even the commanding large red nose. He looked better standing than walking; for he took small steps, and with each one of them shifted the full weight of his body on to the leg he had advanced—it was the comfortable gait of an old man, but it was not kingly. He stooped slightly too, or rather, shrank together; though even so he overlooked Herr Ludovico, and was a whole head taller than little Naphta. But it was not his height alone that made his presence oppressive—oh, quite as oppressive as Hans Castorp had anticipated!—to the two politicians.

Yes, they suffered by comparison—so much was perceptible not only to the connoisseur’s watchful eye, but very probably to the feelings of those concerned, the tongue-tied giant as well as the two insignificant and over-articulate others. Peeperkorn treated both with distinguished attention, a respect which Hans Castorp would have called ironic had he not known that irony is not on the grand scale. Kings are never ironical—not even in the sense of a direct and classic device of oratory, to say nothing of any other kind. The Dutchman’s manner toward Hans Castorp’s friends was rather mocking than ironic. He made beautiful fun of them, either openly or veiled in exaggerated respect. "Oh, yes, yes," he would say, with his finger threatening their direction, the head and smiling lips turned away, "this is—these are—ladies and gentlemen, I call your attention—cerebrum, cerebral, you understand! No, no—positively. Extraordinary—displays great—" In revenge, they looked at each other, pantomimed despair, angled for Hans Castorp’s glance; but he refused to be drawn.

Settembrini however attacked Hans Castorp directly, and confessed to pedagogic concern.

"Lord, what a stupid old man you have there, Engineer," said he. "What is it you see in him? What good can he do you? I am at a loss. I should understand—though scarcely approve—your putting up with his society in order to enjoy that of his mistress. But it is obvious that you are even more interested in him than in her. Come to the aid of my understanding, I implore you."

Hans Castorp laughed. "By all means," said he. "Absolutely. That is to say—very good. Very good indeed." He tried to imitate Peeperkorn’s gestures. "Yes, yes," he went on, laughing, "you find it stupid, Herr Settembrini, and I admit it is unclear, which in your eyes is even worse. Stupid—well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. There, I have made an epigram—a bon mot! What do you think of it?"

"Very good. I look forward eagerly to your collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time to beg you not to forget some comment we once made on the anti-social nature of paradox."

"I won’t indeed, Herr Settembrini. I certainly will not. No, my mot was not in the nature of paradox, I assure you. I only meant to indicate the difficulty I really find in distinguishing between stupidity and cleverness. It is so hard to draw a line—one goes over into the other.—I know you hate all that mystical guazzabuglio; you are all for values, judgment, and judgment of values; and I’m sure you are right. But this about stupidity and—on my honour, it’s a complete mystery; and after all, it is allowable to think about mysteries, isn’t it, so long as one is honestly bent on getting to the bottom of them? But I ask you. Can you deny that he puts us all in his pocket? That’s expressing it crudely, perhaps—but, so far as I can see, you can’t deny it. He puts us all in his pocket; somehow or other, he has the right to laugh at us all—but where does he get it? Where does it come from? How does he do it? Certainly it’s not that he’s so clever. I admit that you can’t talk about his cleverness. He’s inarticulate—it’s more feeling with him, feeling is just his mark, if you’ll excuse my language. No, as I say, it’s not out of cleverness, not on intellectual grounds at all, that he can do as he likes with us. You would be right to deny it. It isn’t the point. But not on physical either. It’s not the massive shoulders, or the strength of his biceps; not because he could knock us down if he liked. He isn’t conscious of his power; if he does take a notion, he can easily be put off it with a couple of civilized words.—So it is not physical. And yet the physical has something to do with it; not in a muscular sense—it’s something quite different, mystical; because so soon as the physical has anything to do with it, it becomes mystical, the physical goes over into the spiritual, and the other way on, and you can’t tell them apart, nor can you cleverness and stupidity. But the result is what we see, the dynamic effect—he puts us in his pocket. We’ve only one word for that—personality. We use it in another, more regular sense too, in which we are all personalities—morally, legally, and otherwise. But that is not the sense in which I am using it now. I am speaking of the mystery of personality, something above either cleverness or stupidity, and something we all have to take into account: partly to try to understand it; but partly, where that is not possible, to be edified by it. You are all for values; but isn’t personality a value too? It seems so to me, more so than either cleverness or stupidity, it seems positive and absolute, like life—in short, something quite worth while, and calculated to make us trouble about it. That’s what I wanted to say in answer to what you said about stupidity."

Nowadays, when Hans Castorp relieved his mind, he did not hem and haw, become involved and stick in the middle. He said his say to the end like a man, rounded off his period, let his voice drop and went his way; though he still got red, and at heart was still afraid of the silence he knew would follow when he had done, to give him time to feel mortified at what he had expressed.

Herr Settembrini let it have full sway before he said: "You deny that you are hunting paradoxes; but at the same time you well know that I love them as much as I do mysteries. In making a mystery of the personality, you run a risk of idol-worship.

You do reverence to a hollow mask. You see mystery in mystification, in one of those counterfeits with which a malicious demon of physical form loves sometimes to mock us. Have you ever frequented theatrical circles? You know those physiognomies in which the features of Julius Cæsar, Beethoven, and Goethe unite—the happy possessor of which has only to open his mouth to prove himself the most pitiable fool on God’s earth?"

"Very good, a freak of nature," said Hans Castorp. "But not alone a freak of nature, not simply a hoax. For since these people are actors, they must have a gift, and the gift itself is beyond cleverness and stupidity, it is after all a value. Mynheer Peeperkom has a gift, say what you like; and thus it is he can stick us all in his pocket. Put Herr Naphta in one corner of the room, and let him deliver a discourse on Gregory the Great and the City of God—it would be highly worth listening to—and put Mynheer Peeperkorn in the other, with his extraordinary mouth and the wrinkles on his forehead, and let him not say a word except ‘By all means—capital—settled, ladies and gentlemen!’ You will see everybody gather round Peeperkorn, and Herr Naphta will be sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, though he may be uttering such penetrating wisdom that it pierces through marrow and cucumber, as Behrens says—"

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Part 3 of 8

"Take shame to yourself for bowing down to success," Herr Settembrini adjured him. "Mundus vult decipi. I do not claim that people ought to flock about Herr Naphta. He is too full of guile for my taste. But I am inclined to range myself on his side, in the imaginary scene you have conjured up with such relish. Will you despise logic, precision, discrimination? Will you contemn them, in favour of some suggestion—hocus-pocus and emotional charlatanry? If you will, then the devil has you in his—"

"But he can often talk as coherently as you please," said Hans Castorp, "when he gets interested. The other day he was telling me about dynamic drugs and Asiatic poison-trees; it was so interesting it was almost uncanny—interesting things are always a bit uncanny—but the interest was not so much in what he was saying as it was taken in connexion with his personality, which made it interesting and uncanny at once."

"Ah, yes, your weakness for Asia is well known to me. True, I cannot oblige with marvels such as those," the Italian said, so bitterly that Hans Castorp hastened to assure him how much he valued his conversation and instruction from quite another angle, and that it had not occurred to him to make comparisons which would be unjust to both sides. Herr Settembrini paid no heed, he spurned the politeness, and went on: "In any case, Engineer, you must permit me to admire your serene objectivity. It approaches the fantastic, you will admit. The way things stand: this zany has taken away your Beatrice from you, yet you—it is unheard of."

"These are temperamental differences, Herr Settembrini. We have different views as to what is knightly and warm-blooded. You, a southerner, would prescribe poison and dagger, at least you would conceive the affair in its social and passionate aspect, and want me to act like a game-cock. That would of course be masculine and gallant, in a social sense. But with me it is different. I am not at all masculine in the sense that I see in another man only a rival male and nothing more. Perhaps I am not masculine at all—certainly I am not in the sense which I tend to call ‘social,’ I don’t exactly know why. What I do is to question my sad heart whether I have any ground of complaint against the man. Has he really insulted me? But an insult must be of intent, otherwise it can be none. And as for his having ‘done anything’ to me, there I should have to apply to her—and I have no right to, certainly not with regard to Peeperkorn.

For he is a quite extraordinary personality, which by itself is something for women, and then he is hardly a civilian, like me, he is a sort of military, a bit like my poor cousin, in that he has a point d’honneur, a sore spot, as it were, which is feeling, life.—I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes. That must be a military trait in my character, after all, if I may say so—"

"You may say so," Settembrini acquiesced. "A trait at least worthy of praise. The courage to recognize and express—that is the quality that makes literature—that is humanism."

Thus they parted on good terms, Herr Settembrini having given the conversation this placable turn. It was the wiser course; his position had not been so strong he could afford to push the argument to extremes. A conversation dealing with jealousy was rather slippery ground for him; at one point he would have been obliged to admit that his own position—as a pedagogue—was scarcely masculine in the social and cock-fighting sense, else why should the prepotent Peeperkorn disturb his tranquillity, in the same way Naphta and Frau Chauchat did? Lastly, the Italian could not hope to argue his pupil out of interest in a personality to whose native superiority he himself and his partner in cerebral gymnastic were willy-nilly constrained to bow.

They were on safer ground when they could sustain the conversation in the realms of the intellectual, and hold the attention of their audience by one of their elegant and impassioned debates, academic, yet conducted as though the matter discussed were the most burning question of the time, or of all time. They were of course almost the sole support of such discussions; while these lasted; they did, to some extent, neutralize the effect of "bigness" purveyed by a certain member of their group, who could only accompany them by a running play of wrinkles, gestures, and snatches of mockery. But even that was enough to cast a shadow, rob their brilliant performance of some of its gloss, emasculate it, as it were, set up a cross-current perceptible to them all, though Peeperkorn himself remained unconscious, or conscious to a degree impossible for them to guess. Neither side could get any advantage, both were embarrassed, and the stamp of futility set upon their debate. We might put it like this: that their life-and-death duel of wits came to be carried on always with vague subterranean reference to "bigness" walking beside them, and to be deflected from its orbit by the magnetism "bigness" exerted. One cannot characterize otherwise this puzzling, for the two disputants maddening, posture of affairs. One can only add that had there been no Pieter Peeperkorn, party feeling would have run higher on both sides; as when Leo Naphta defended the arch-revolutionary nature of the Church, against Settembrini’s dogmatic assertion that that great historic power was to be looked upon merely as the protectress of the sinister forces of reaction; whereas all the forces that made for life and future, and looked undismayed on change and resolution, he claimed for the principles of enlightenment; science and progress, which had their rise in an epoch of quite opposed tendencies, the famous century that witnessed the rebirth of classical culture. He drove home his convictions with a graceful play of word and gesture. Whereupon Naphta, with chilling acuity, undertook to show—and showed too, with devastating clarity—that the Church, as the embodiment of the religious and ascetic ideal, was remote indeed from posing as the champion and support of the existing order, in other words of secular culture and civil law—rather had she from the beginning inscribed upon her radical banner the programme of their extirpation root and branch; that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.

After that, Settembrini took the floor—and well he knew how to avail himself of it. It was lamentable, he said—this confusion of luridly revolutionary doctrine with a general insurrection of all the powers of evil. The Church’s love of innovation had for centuries manifested itself in putting to the question the living idea, wherever she found it; throttling it, quenching it in smoke at the stake; to-day she announces through her emissaries that she rejoices in revolution, that her goal is the uprooting of freedom, culture, and democracy, which she intends to replace by barbarism and the dictatorship of the mob. Yea, verily, a fearsome mixture of contradictory consistency and consistent contradiction. . .

His opponent, Naphta retorted, displayed no lack of the same qualities. By his own account, he was a democrat; yet his words sounded neither democratic nor egalitarian; but rather displayed a reprehensible and arrogant aristocratism, as when he alluded to the delegated dictatorship of the proletariat as mob rule! However, where the Church was in question, assuredly he showed himself a democrat; for the Church was admittedly the most aristocratic force in the history of mankind; an aristocracy in the last and highest sense, that of the spirit. For the ascetic spirit—if the pleonasm might be pardoned him—the spirit that would deny and destroy the world, was aristocracy itself, a pure culture of the aristocratic principle. It could never be popular; and the Church, accordingly, had at all times been unpopular. A little research into the cultural history of the Middle Ages would convince Herr Settembrini of the stout resistance which the people—in the widest sense—opposed to the things of the Church. There were for instance monkish figures, the invention of popular fantasy, who, quite in the spirit of Luther, had set up wine, women, and song in opposition to the ascetic idea. All the instincts of secular heroism, all warlike spirit, all court poetry, set themselves in more or less open conflict with the religious idea and the hierarchy. For all that was "the world," all that was "the common people," compared with the aristocracy of the spirit represented by Church.

Herr Settembrini thanked him for jogging his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan in the Rosengarten he did indeed find refreshing by comparison with this much-lauded aristocracy of the grave. He, the speaker, was no friend to the German Reformation; but they would find him ever ready to defend whatever of democratic individualism there was in its teaching, against any and every clerical and feudal craving for dominion over the individual.

"Aha!" cried Naphta. So Herr Settembrini would condemn the Church for lack of democracy, for being wanting in a sense of the value of human personality? But what of the humane freedom from prejudice evinced by canonical law? For whereas Roman law made the possession of legal rights dependent upon citizenship, and Germanic law upon individual freedom and membership in the tribe, ecclesiastical law, orthodoxy, was alone in divorcing legal rights from either national or social considerations, and asserting that slaves, serfs, and prisoners of war were all capable of making wills and inheriting property.

Settembrini bitingly remarked that he might mention, as not entirely irrelevant in this connexion, the so-called "canonical portion," which subtracted a substantial sum from every testamentary bequest. And he spoke of priestly demagoguery, which began to vent its thirst for power in exaggerated solicitude for the under dog, when the top dog would none of it. The Church, he asserted, cared more about the quantity of souls she got hold of than their quality—which certainly reflected upon her pretensions to spiritual refinement.

So the Church lacked refinement? Herr Settembrini’s attention was invited to the inexorable aristocratism which underlay the idea that shame could be inherited: the passing on of guilt to the—democratically considered—innocent descendants; for example, the illegitimacy and lifelong pollution of natural children. But the Italian bade him be silent: in the first place, because his human feelings rose up in arms against Naphta’s words, and in the second, because he had had enough of such quibbles, and saw in the shifts of his opponent’s apologetics only the same old infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which wanted to be called Spirit, and found so legitimate, so sacrosanct the admittedly existent hatred of the ascetic principle.

But here Naphta begged to be forgiven for laughing outright. The nihilism of the Church! The nihilism of the most realistic system of government in the history of the world! Herr Settembrini, then, had never been touched by a breath of that ironic humanity which made constant concession to the world and the flesh, cleverly veiling the letter and letting the spirit rule, not to put too sore a constraint on nature? He had never heard of the ecclesiastical conception of indulgence, under which was to be classified one of the sacraments of the Church—namely, marriage, not in itself an absolute good, like the other sacraments, but only a protection against sin, countenanced in order to set bounds to sensual desire; that the ascetic principle, the ideal of complete chastity, might be upheld, without at the same time opposing an unpolitic harshness to the flesh?

Herr Settembrini, of course, could not refrain from protesting against this hideous conception of "policy"; against the gesture of a shrewd and sinister complaisance, made by the "Spirit"—or what called itself so—against the imaginary guilt of its opposite, which it pretended to deal with in a "politic" sense, but which in reality stood in no need of the pernicious indulgence it proffered; against the accursed dualism of a conception which bedevilled the universe—that is to say, life—as well as life’s dark opposite, the Spirit—for if life was evil, the Spirit, as pure negation, must be so too. And he broke a lance in defence of the blamelessness of sensual gratification—hearing which, Hans Castorp could not but think of the humanistic cuddy under the roof, with its standing desk, rush-bottomed chairs, and water-bottle. Naphta asserted that sensual gratification was never blameless—nature, he said, always had a bad conscience in respect of the spiritual. The ecclesiastical policy of indulgence practised by the Spirit he designated as "Love"—this to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle. Hans Castorp felt how very odd indeed the word sounded in the mouth of sharp, skinny little Naphta.

So it went on—we know already how it went, and so did Hans Castorp. We have listened, as he did, for a little while, in order to learn how such a peripatetic passage-at-arms fares, in what way it is blown upon, by the presence of a personality. It seemed as though a secret impulse to animadvert upon the presence of Peeperkorn quenched the leaping spark of wit, and called up that sense of weary devitalization that comes over us when an electric connexion fails to connect. Yes, that was it. No spark leaped nimbly from pole to pole, no flash of lightning, no current. The intellect which should in its own opinion have neutralized the presence was neutralized by it—as Hans Castorp, amazed and curious, perceived.

Revolution, conservation—he looked at Peeperkorn, saw him stalking along, not particularly majestic on foot, with his slumping gait, his hat drawn over his brows; saw his thick lips with their broken line, heard him say, jerking his head mockingly in the direction of the debaters: "Yes, yes—cerebrum, highly cerebral, you understand.

Very; that is—it shows"—and behold, in a trice, the current cut off! Dead. As a door-nail. They tried another tack, invoked more powerful spells, came on the "aristocratic problem," on popularity and exclusiveness. Not a spark. Despite itself, what they said sounded personal. Hans Castorp saw Clavdia’s traveling-companion as he lay under the red satin coverlet, in his collarless woollen shirt, half ancient ouvrier, half royal bust. And the nerve of the debate quivered and died. They tried to galvanize it into life. Negation, cult of nihilism on the one hand, on the other the positive assertion of life, and the inclining of the heart unto love. But where was the spark, where the current, directly one looked at Mynheer, as one did, irresistibly, as though magnetized? They simply were not there—which remained, to use Hans Castorp’s expression, neither more nor less than a mystery. He took note, for his collection of aphorisms, that either one expresses a mystery in the simplest words, or leaves it unexpressed. But to get this one expressed, one could only say straight out that Pieter Peeperkorn, with his kingly mask, and bitter, irregular mouth, was both, now this, now that; both seemed to fit him and to neutralize each other when one looked at him—both this and that, the one and the other. Yes, this stupid old man, this commanding cipher! He did not paralyse the opposition by cross-purposes and confusion, like Naphta, he was not like him equivocal, or was so in an entirely different way, in a positive way, this staggering mystery, which so naïvely set at naught not only cleverness and stupidity, but so much else in the way of opposed views invoked by Settembrini and Naphta, in order to stimulate interest, to their own pedagogical ends. The personality, it appeared, was not pedagogically inclined—yet what a find, what a prize, for inquiring youth on its travels! Fascinating it was to watch riddling royalty when the conversation turned on marriage and sin, indulgences, the guilt or innocence of pleasures of the sense! His head would sink upon his shoulder or chest, the calamitous lips part as the mouth relaxed into pathetic curves, the nostrils dilate as with pain, the folds on the forehead rose until the eyes were fixed in a wide, suffering gaze.—It was a picture of bitterness and woe. And behold, as one looked, this martyr’s visage blossomed into wantonness. The head was roguishly on a side, the still open lips wreathed in wickedly suggestive smiles, the sybaritic little dimple appeared in one cheek—he was again the dancing priest, and jerked his head as before, mockingly, in the direction of so much cerebration, as they heard him say: "Ah, yes, yes, absolutely! But isn’t there a—are there not—sacraments of pleasure—you understand—"

Still, as we said, Hans Castorp’s diminished friends and teachers were always well served when they could wrangle. They were in their element, whereas the personality was not. Though one might have two views of the rôle he played when wrangling was the order of the day. But on the other hand, when the scene changed from the sphere of the intellectual to the strictly earthly and practical, and dealt with questions, and in fields, where commanding natures prove their worth—then there were no two views possible. For then the others were undone, then they were cast in the shade, then they drew in their horns, and Peeperkorn came out, grasped the sceptre, arranged, decided, "settled." Was there any wonder, then, that he behaved so as to bring that state of things about, that he sought to override logomachy? He suffered, while it held sway, or if it held sway for long. But not in his vanity. Of that Hans Castorp felt assured. For vanity is not on the grand scale, nor is greatness vain. No, Peeperkorn’s need of reality had other grounds. It sprang, to put it baldly, from fear: from a characteristic infirmity of minds on the grand scale, from the sensitively and passionately cherished point d’honneur which Hans Castorp had struggled to explain to Herr Settembrini, describing it as in a sense a military trait.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Dutchman said, and lifted his sea-captain’s hand, with its nails like lance-heads, in entreaty and monition. "Ladies and gentlemen. Very good. Very. Asceticism. Indulgences. Lust of the flesh. By all means. Most important. Most debatable. But may I—I should like to—I fear we may commit a serious error. Are we not irresponsibly neglecting—one of our highest—" He drew in a deep breath. "Ladies and gentlemen. This air—this characteristic thawing air, with its somewhat enervating breath, full of memories and promises of spring—we should not breathe it in to breathe it out in—Really.—I must implore you. We must not. It is an insult. We should give it out only in the form of praise—of complete and utter—enough, ladies and gentlemen. I interrupt myself—in honour of—" He did, indeed, stand still, bent backward, shading his brows with his hat. They followed his gaze. "May I," said he, "may I draw your attention upwards—high in the sky, to that black, circling point against the blue, intensely blue, shading into black—that is a bird of prey. It is, if I am not mistaken—look, ladies and gentlemen, look, my child. It is an eagle. Most emphatically I call your attention—look, it is no buzzard, no vulture, it is an eagle. If you were as far-sighted as my advancing age—yes, my child, advancing—my hair is white. You would see, as plainly as I do, the blunt pinions—it is a golden eagle. He circles directly overhead, he hovers, not a single beat of his wing—at a tremendous height in the blue, and with his keen, far-sighted eyes under the prominent bony structure of his brows he is peering earthwards. The eagle, ladies and gentlemen, the bird of Jove, king of his kind, the lion of the upper air. He has feathered gaiters, and a beak of iron, with a sudden hook at the end; claws of enormous strength, their talons curving inwards, the front ones overlapped by the long hinder one in an iron clutch. Look!" And he tried to put his long fingers in the posture of an eagle’s claw. "Gaffer, why are you circling and spying up there?" He turned his head upwards again. "Strike! Strike downward, with your iron beak into head and eyes, tear out the belly of the creature God gives you—splendid! Splendid! Absolutely! Bury your talons in its entrails, make your beak drip with its blood—"

He had wrought himself to a pitch. All interest in Settembrini’s and Naphta’s antinomies was fled away. But the vision of the eagle remained—even though they ceased talking about it, and devoted themselves to the programme they were carrying out under Mynheer’s lead. They stopped at an inn to eat and drink—quite out of hours, but with an appetite whetted by silent memories of the eagle. There was a feasting and a tippling, such as always went on where Mynheer was, in Dorf or Platz, or the inns at Claris and Klosters, whither they had gone in the little train. Under his tutelage, they tasted the "classic" gifts of life: coffee and cream with fresh bread, moist cheese and fragrant Alpine butter, heavenly-tasting with hot roasted chestnuts. They drank red Veltliner, to their hearts’ content. Peeperkorn accompanied the impromptu meal with a fire of ejaculations; or incited Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to talk, that good-natured sufferer, who abhorred all high thoughts, but could hold forth so acceptably on the subject of the manufacture of rubber shoes in Russia. He described how the rubber mass was treated with sulphur and other substances, and the finished, glossy product subjected to a heat of over two hundred degrees to "vulcanize" it. He talked about the polar circle, for his business trips had more than once taken him thither; about the midnight sun, and eternal winter at the North Cape—all this out of his scraggy throat, from beneath his bushy moustaches. Up there, he said, the steamers looked tiny, next the gigantic cliffs, on the steel-grey surface of the sea. And a yellow radiation was diffused over great tracts of the heavens—the northern lights. The whole thing had seemed spooky to him, Anton Karlowitsch: the scene and himself to boot.

Thus Herr Ferge, the complete outsider, the only member of the group who stood detached from its complicated relationships. But now that we speak of these, it will be well to relate two conversations, two priceless conversations à deux, which our unheroic hero had, the first with Clavdia Chauchat, the second with the present companion of her travels; one in the hall, on an evening when the disturbing element lay above with a fever; the other on an afternoon by Mynheer’s bedside.

It was half dark in the hall. The social activities had been brief and languid, the guests withdrew early to the evening cure or else took their wilful way into town, to dance and game. A single light burned in the hall ceiling—and in the adjoining salons dimness reigned. But Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had taken dinner without her protector, was not gone upstairs after it, but still lingered in the writing-room, so he did the same. He sat by the tiled hearth, in the back part of the hall, which was raised by one step from the rest, and separated by arches supported on two columns; in a rocking-chair such as that one Marusja had leaned back in, on the evening Joachim had spoken with her for the first and last time. He was, permissibly at this hour, smoking a cigarette.

She came, he heard her approaching step and the sound of her frock; fanning the air with a letter she held by one corner, and saying, in her Pribislav voice: "The porter has gone. Do give me a timbre poste."

She was wearing a thin dark silk this evening, cut round in the neck, with filmy sleeves finished by a buttoned cuff at the wrists. It was the cut he loved. She wore the pearls, they gleamed palely in the half light. He looked up into her Khirgiz face.

"Timbre?" he repeated, "I have none."

"No? Tant pis pour vous. Not prepared to do a lady a favour?" She pouted and shrugged her shoulders. "I am disappointed. You ought to be more precise and dependable. I imagined you having a compartment in your pocket-book, nice neat little sheets of all denominations."

"Why should I? I never write a letter. To whom should I write? I seldom do, even a card, and that is already stamped. I have no one to write to. I have no contact with the flat-land, it has fallen away. We have a folk-song that says: ‘I am lost to the world’—so it is with me."

"Well, then, lost soul, at least give me a papiros," said she, and sat down opposite him on a bench with a linen cushion, one leg over the other. She stretched out her hand. "With those, at least, you are provided." She took a cigarette, negligently, from the silver case he held out to her, and availed herself of his little pocket-device, the flame of which lighted up her face. The indolent "Give me a cigarette," the taking it without thanks, bespoke the spoiled, luxurious female; yet even more it betokened a human companionship and mutual "belonging," an unspoken give and take which came both thrilling and tender to his love-lorn sense.

He said: "Yes, I always have them. I am always provided, one must be. How should I get on without them? I have, as they say, a passion for them. To tell the truth, however, I am hardly a very passionate man, though I have my passions, phlegmatic ones."

"I am extraordinarily relieved," she said, breathing out, as she spoke, the smoke she had inhaled, "to hear that you are not a passionate man. But how should you be? You would have degenerated. Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C’est ça. You don’t realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you an enemy of the human race?"

"Well, well, well! Enemy of the human race! How can you make such a general statement, Clavdia? Have you something definite and personal in your mind, when you say we don’t live for the sake of life, but for the sake of enriching ourselves? Women don’t usually moralize like that, so abstractly. Oh, morality, and that! A subject for Naphta and Settembrini to quarrel over. It belongs to the realm of the Great Confusion. Whether one lives for oneself, or for the sake of life—one doesn’t know oneself, no one can know that precisely and certainly. I mean, the limits are fluid. There is egoistic devotion, and there is devoted egoism. I think, on the whole, that it is as it is in love. Of course, it is probably immoral of me that I cannot very well attend to what you say to me about morality for being so happy that we are sitting here as we once did, and then never again, even since you came back. And that I may tell you there was never anything so lovely as the way those cuffs suit your hand, and the soft flowing silk your arm—your arm, that I know so well—"

"I am going."

"Oh, please, please not! I promise to have proper regard for the circumstances, and the—personalities."

"As one would expect, from a man without passion!"

"Yes, you see—you mock at me when I—and then, when I—you say you will leave me—"

"Pray speak a little more connectedly, if you expect me to understand you."

"So I am not to have any benefit from all your practice in guessing the meaning of disconnected sentences? Is that fair, I ask—or I would if I did not know that it is not a matter of justice at all—"

"No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy—when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous."

"There—ridiculous. Then grant me my phlegm. I repeat, how could I do without it? For instance, how else could I have endured to wait so long?"

"I beg pardon?"

"Aussi longtemps pour toi."

"Voyons, mon ami. I say no more about the form of address you persist in, in your folly. You will tire of it—and then, I am not prudish, not an outraged middle-class housewife—"

"No, for you are ill. Your illness gives you freedom. It makes you—wait, I must hunt for the word—it makes you—spirituelle!"

"We shall speak of that another time. It was something else I meant. Something I demand to hear. You shall not pretend I had anything to do with your waiting—if you did wait—that I encouraged you to it, or even permitted it. You must admit explicitly that the opposite was the case—"

"Certainly, Clavdia, with pleasure. You never asked me to wait, I did it on my own. I can quite understand your laying stress on the point—"

"Even when you make admissions, there is always some impertinence about them. You are impertinent by nature—not only with me, but in general—God knows why. Your admiration, your very humility, is an impertinence. Don’t think I can’t see it. I ought not to speak with you at all, and certainly not when you dare to talk about waiting for me. It is inexcusable that you are still here. You should have been long ago at your work, sur le chantier, or wherever it was."

"Now that, Clavdia, is not spirituel—it even sounds conventional. You are just talking. You can’t mean it in Settembrini’s sense—and however else, then? I cannot take it seriously. I will not go off without permission, like my poor cousin, who, as you said he would, died because he tried to do service down below, and who knew himself, I suppose, that he would die, but preferred death to doing service up here any longer. Well, it was for that he was a soldier. But I am not. I am a civilian, for me it would be deserting the colours to do what he did, and go and serve the cause of progress down in the flat-land, despite what Behrens says. It would be the greatest disloyalty and ingratitude, to the illness, and its spirituel quality, and to my love for you, of which I bear scars both old and new—and to your arms I know so well, even admitting that it was in a dream, a highly spirituel dream, that I learned to know them, and that you had no responsibility for my dream, and were not bound by it, nor your freedom infringed on—"

She laughed, cigarette in mouth, so that the Tartar eyes became narrow slits; leaning back against the wainscoting, her hands resting on the bench on either side of her, one leg crossed over the other, and swinging,her foot in its patent-leather shoe.

"Quelle générosité! Pauvre petit! Oh la la, vraiment—Precisely thus I have always imagined un homme de génie!"

"Don’t, Clavdia. I am no homme de génie—as little as I am a personality. Lord, no. But chance—call it chance—brought me up here to these heights of the spirit—you, of course, do not know that there is such a thing as alchemistic-hermetic pedagogy, transubstantiation, from lower to higher, ascending degrees, if you understand what I mean. But of course matter that is capable of taking those ascending stages by dint of outward pressure must have a little something in itself to start with. And what I had in me, as I quite clearly know, was that from long ago, even as a lad, I was familiar with illness and death, and had in the face of all common sense borrowed a lead pencil from you, as I did again on carnival night. But unreasoning love is spirituel; for death is the spirituel principle, the res bina, the lapis philosophorum, and the pedagogic principle too, for love of it leads to love of life and love of humanity. Thus, as I have lain in my loge, it has been revealed to me, and I am enchanted to be able to tell you all about it. There are two paths to life: one is the regular one, direct, honest. The other is bad, it leads through death—that is the spirituel way."

"You are a quaint philosopher," she said. "I will not assert that I have understood all your involved German ideas; but it sounds human and good, and you are good, a good young man. You have truly behaved en philosophe, one must say that for you—"

"Too much en philosophe for your taste, eh, Clavdia?"

"No more impertinences. They become tiresome. That you waited for me was silly—uncalled for. But you are not angry, because you waited in vain?"

"It was hard, Clavdia, even for a man phlegmatic in his passions. Hard for me and hard of you to come back with him like that—for of course you knew through Behrens that I was here and waiting for you. But I have told you I regard it as a dream, what we had together, and I admit that you are free. And I waited after all not quite in vain, for here you are, we sit together as once we did, I can hear the piercing sweetness of your voice, known to my ear from so long ago; and beneath this flowing silk are your arms, your arms that I know—even though upstairs there lies your protector, in a fever, the mighty Peeperkorn, whose pearls you wear—"

"And with whom, for your own profit and enrichment, you have struck up such a friendship."

"Do not grudge me it, Clavdia, Settembrini reproached me with it too. But that is conventional prejudice. The man is a boon—for God’s sake, is he not a personality? He is already old—yes; but even so, I could well understand how you as a woman could love him madly. You do love him madly?"

"All honour to thy philosophy, my little German Hänschen," she said, and lightly stroked his hair. "But I could not find it in my heart to speak to you of my love for him. It would not be hu—man."

"Ah, why not, Clavdia? It is my belief that love of humanity begins where poor-spirited people believe it leaves off. We can speak quite quietly of him. You love him passionately?"

She bent to toss her cigarette-end in the grate, and then sat with folded arms.

"He loves me," she said, "and his love makes me proud and grateful, and devoted to him. Tu peux comprendre çela. Or else you are not worthy the friendship he feels for you. His feeling forced me to follow and serve him. What else could I do? You may judge. Is it possible for any human being to disregard his love?"

"Not possible," Hans Castorp confirmed. "No, of course, it was out of the question. How could a woman bring herself to disregard his feeling, and his anguish over that feeling—to forsake him, as it were, in his Gethsemane—"

"Tu n’es pas du tout stupide," said she, her slanting eyes fixed in a reverie. "You understand things. ‘Anguish over the feeling—’ "

"Not much understanding is needed to know that you had to follow him—though, or rather because, there must be much that is troubling in his love."

"C’est exact. Troubling. There is much care with him, you know, many difficulties." She had taken his hand, and played absently with the fingers—but suddenly she knitted her brows, she looked up and said: "Mais—dis-moi: ce if est pas un peu—ordinaire, que nous parlons de lui, comme ça?"

"No, Clavdia. Surely not. Far from it. Surely it is no more than human. You love the word, and I love to hear you say it, in your quaint pronunciation. My cousin Joachim did not like it—on military grounds. He thought it meant general licence and flabbiness; and in that sense, as an unlimited guazzabuglio of self-indulgence, I have my own suspicions of it, I confess. But in the sense of freedom, goodness, esprit, then it is great, we can freely apply it to our talk about Peeperkorn and the care and pain he causes you. Of course, they are the result of his sore spot—his dread of denying the feelings, that makes him love so much what he calls the classic gifts of life, the gift of Bacchus, liquid refreshment—we may speak of that in all reverence, for even in that weakness his scale is kingly and we shall lower neither him nor ourselves by speaking of it."

"It is not a question of us," she said. She had folded her arms again. "One would not be a woman if one were not willing to bear humiliation for the sake of a man like that, on the grand scale, as you say, when one is the object of his feeling and of his suffering from it."

"Absolutely, Clavdia. Well said. For then even the humiliation is on the grand scale, and from the height of it the woman can look down on poor creatures built on smaller lines, and speak to them with such contempt as was in your voice when you said, about the postage stamps: ‘You ought to be more precise and dependable!’ "

"You are hurt? You must not be. Let us put those feelings away, send them to Jericho. Do you agree? I have been wounded too sometimes—I will confess it, since we are sitting together like this. I have been angry with your phlegm, and your being such friends with him, on account of your egoistic craving for experience. Yet I was glad too, and grateful for the respect you paid him. You were loyal; if you were a bit impertinent too, after all I could make allowance for that."

"Very kind of you."

She looked at him. "You are incorrigible, it seems. And certainly I can’t quite tell how much esprit you have—but deep you are, a deep young man. Well, very good, one can do with it, and be friends. Shall we be friends, shall we make a league—not against but for him? Will you give me your hand on it? I am often frightened.—

Sometimes I am afraid of the solitude with him—the inward solitude, tu sais—he is—frightening; sometimes I am afraid something may happen to him—it makes me shudder.—I should be glad to feel I had someone beside me. En fin—if you care to know—that was why I came back here with him—chez toi."

They sat knee to knee, he with his rocking-chair tipped toward her, she on her bench. Her last words were breathed close to his face, and she pressed his hand as she spoke. He said: "To me? Oh, Clavdia! That is beautiful beyond words! You came back to me with him? And yet will you say my waiting was silly and wrong and fruitless? It would be very inept of me to refuse, not to know how to value your friendship, friendship with me for his sake—"

She kissed him on the mouth. It was a Russian kiss, the kind that is exchanged in that spreading, soulful land, at high religious feasts, as a seal of love. But when a notoriously "deep" young man and a lady still young, and of such insinuating charm, exchange it, we are involuntarily reminded of Dr. Krokowski’s ingenious if not wholly unobjectionable method of treating the subject of love, in that slightly fluctuating sense, so that no one was ever quite sure whether it was earthly or heavenly, spiritual or fleshly love he had in mind. Are we so treating it, or were Clavdia Chauchat and Hans Castorp, when they exchanged their Russian kiss? But what will the reader say if we simply refuse to go into the question? To try to make a clean-cut distinction between the passionate and the soulful—that would, no doubt, be analytical. But we feel that it would also be inept—to borrow Hans Castorp’s useful word—and certainly not in the least "genial." For what would "clean-cut" be? The subject is so equivocal, the limits so fluctuating. We make bold to laugh at the idea. Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly? All ambiguity is therein resolved: love cannot but be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself, as the height of shrewd "geniality" as in the depth of passion; it is organic sympathy, the touching sense-embrace of that which is doomed to decay. In the most raging as in the most reverent passion, there must be caritas. The meaning of the word varies? In God’s name, then, let it vary; That it does so makes it living, makes it human; it would be a regrettable lack of "depth" to trouble over the fact.

So while these youthful lips meet in their Russian kiss, let us darken our little stage and change the scene. For now, instead of the dimness of the hall we have the rather pensive light of a declining spring day in the season of melting snows; and our hero is seated in his wonted place at the bedside of Mynheer Peeperkorn, in friendly and respectful converse with that great man. Frau Chauchat, after the tea hour, at which she had appeared alone, as at the previous three meals, had gone shopping in the Platz, and Hans Castorp announced himself for his usual visit to the Dutchman. First of all to show him attention and help him pass the time; but also to be edified by the motions of the great man’s personality. In short, out of "varying" motives, varying as life varies. Peeperkorn laid aside the Telegraaf and tossed the horn-rimmed eye-glasses upon it. He reached his visitor a broad, sea-captain’s hand, and his thick chapped lips, on which sat a distressed expression, moved vaguely. Red wine and coffee were as usual to hand; the coffee things stood on a chair, stained brown from recent use—Mynheer had taken his regular afternoon drink, hot and strong, with sugar and cream, and was in a perspiration. His face with its fringe of white hair was flushed, and little beads stood on brow and upper lip.

"I am sweating somewhat," he said. "Come in, young man, come in. On the contrary. Sit down. It is a sign of weakness when one takes a hot drink and sweats thereafter. Will you—quite right—a handkerchief—thank you." The flush soon faded and gave place to the yellowish pallor which was Mynheer’s facial teint after a bad attack. The fever had been severe this morning, and in all three stages, the cold, the hot, the moist; Peeperkorn’s little eyes looked tired beneath the lined, masklike brow. He said: "It is—by all means, young man. I would like to express my—the word is—Positively. Appreciative—very kind of you to visit an ailing old man—"

"Not at all, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I am the one to be grateful, for permission to sit here a little; I get a great deal more out of it than you—I assure you my motives are not altruistic. But what sort of description is that of yourself—an ailing old man? It would never occur to anyone to call you that. It gives an entirely false picture."

"Very good," responded Mynheer. He closed his eyes for a second or so, leaning his majestic head against the pillows, the chin raised, the fingers with their long nails folded on his kingly chest, the muscles of which showed beneath the tricot shirt. "You are right, young man, or, rather, you mean it well. I am sure. It was pleasant yesterday—yes, yesterday afternoon, at that hospitable spot—the name of which I have now forgotten where we ate the excellent salami and scrambled eggs—and that sound native wine—"

"It was gorgeous," Hans Castorp confirmed. "We certainly are filled up—the Berghof chef would not have been pleased to see us putting it in—one and all; he’d have felt insulted. That was genuine salami, the real thing; Herr Settembrini ate it with tears in his eyes. He is a patriot, you must know, a democratic patriot. He has consecrated his burgher’s pike on the altar of humanity, so that salami may be taxed at the Brenner frontier."

"That is no matter," Peeperkorn declared. "He is most chivalrous and courteous and very affable in conversation—a gallant gentleman, though obviously unable to change his clothing with any frequency."

"None at all," said Hans Castorp, "none at all! I know him well, have been friendly with him for a long time; he was kind enough to take me up, because he found I was a ‘delicate child of life.’ That is an expression we use between us, the sense of which is not obvious without the context. He has taken much pains to influence me for my good. But never, summer or winter, have I seen him wear anything but those check trousers and that threadbare double-breasted coat. He wears the old things with great dignity, there is something gallant about him, I agree with you there. The way he does it is a triumph over poverty—I like better to see it than little Naphta’s elegance, that always seems suspicious—a work of darkness, as it were, and he gets the money for it in some hole-and-corner way, I understand."

"A chivalrous and affable gentleman," repeated Peeperkorn, passing over Hans Castorp’s remarks about little Naphta. "But also—forgive me the reservation—not free from prejudice. Madame, my companion, has no great opinion of him—you may have seen. She feels little sympathy—no doubt because she perceives the same prejudice to exist toward herself. Not a word, young man. I am far from—comment on Herr Settembrini and your friendly feelings for him—No more! I should not think of saying that in any point—he has failed in any respect in knightly courtesy. My dear friend—irreproachable, very. But there is—a line drawn, a certain—a withdrawal—which makes comprehensible Madame Chauchat’s—"

"Feeling against him. Perfectly natural. Perfectly justified. Pardon me, Mynheer Peeperkorn, for taking the words out of your mouth. I venture to do so in the consciousness that you will not misunderstand me. When one thinks how women are made (you smile, to hear a person of my youth and inexperience making general observations on this subject)—how dependent a woman’s feeling for a man is upon his feeling for her—it is not surprising. Women, if you will permit me so to express myself, are creatures not of action but of reaction; they do not initiate, they are inactive in the sense that they are passive. May I, even at the risk of being tiresome, try to follow that a little further? Woman, so far as I have been able to observe, regards herself, in a love-affair, as the object. She lets it come; she does not make a free choice, she only chooses on the basis of the man’s having chosen, and even then, even then, I must repeat, her choice is suspect, it is prejudiced by the very fact that she has been chosen—provided, of course, the man is not too poor a specimen, and even so—Good Lord, what unalloyed drivel I’m talking! But when one is young, everything seems new and astonishing. You ask a woman: ‘Do you love him?’ And she tells you: ‘He loves me so much!’ and rolls her eyes up, or else rolls them down. Imagine an answer like that from one of us—if you will pardon me putting us in the same category. Perhaps there are men who would answer like that, but they are poor-spirited creatures—their women wear the breeches, if you will forgive the expression. I should like to know what kind of self-appraisement is at the bottom of the feminine answer. Is it that the woman thinks she owes a man boundless devotion merely because he has conferred the favour of his choice upon so lowly a creature? Or does she see in the man’s love an infallible sign of her personal excellence? I’ve often asked myself these questions, when I have been thinking quietly alone."

"Primitive—traditional mysteries you touch on there, young man, applying your glib little phrases to the sacred conditions of our existence," responded Peeperkorn. "Man is intoxicated by his desire, woman demands and expects to be intoxicated by it. Hence our holy duty of feeling, hence the shame in unfeelingness, in powerlessness to awaken the woman to desire. Will you take a glass of red wine with me? I will drink, for I am thirsty. I have given out a considerable amount of water to-day."

"Thanks, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I do not usually take anything at this hour; but I am always ready to drink a swallow or so to your health."

"Then take the wineglass. There is only one, I will use the water-glass. It won’t insult this simple wine to drink it out of an ordinary tumbler—" He poured out the wine, with Hans Castorp’s help, as his hand trembled slightly, and drank thirstily, as though it had been water.

"That is refreshing," he said. "Won’t you have some more? No? Permit me to fill my glass"—the second time, he spilled some wine; the turned-over sheet was stained with dark-red spots. "I repeat," he said, with one lancelike finger reared up, "I repeat, that therein lies our duty, our sacred duty to feel. Feeling, you understand, is the masculine force that rouses life. Life slumbers. It needs to be roused, to be awakened to a drunken marriage with divine feeling. For feeling, young man, is godlike. Man is godlike, in that he feels. He is the feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing but the organ through which God consummates his marriage with roused and intoxicated life. If man fails in feeling, it is blasphemy; it is the surrender of His masculinity, a cosmic catastrophe, an irreconcilable horror—" He drank.

"Permit me to relieve you of your glass," Hans Castorp said. "I find your train of thought highly edifying, Mynheer Peeperkorn. You are developing a theology there, in which you ascribe to man a highly honourable, if perhaps rather a one-sided re-ligious function. There is, if I may say so, a certain austerity in your conception, it has its alarming side. Pardon me. All religious austerity is naturally somewhat alarming to people who are built on modest lines. I have no thought of criticizing the conception, I should like simply to return to your remark about certain prejudices, which, according to your observations, Herr Settembrini has on the subject of Madame. I have known Herr Settembrini for some time, more than a year, for years, in fact. And I can assure you that his prejudices, in so far as they exist, are in no case of a petty or bourgeois character. It would be absurd to think so. It can only be a question of prejudice in a general sense, impersonal, relating to certain pedagogic principles, which, in my character as a delicate child of life, Herr Settembrini has been at pains to—but that would lead us too far. It is a very complex subject, into which I could not—"

"And you love Madame?" Mynheer suddenly asked. He turned toward his visitor that kingly countenance, with the sore, writhen mouth and the pale little eyes under the arabesque of lines on the brow.

Hans Castorp started. He stammered: "I—that is—I feel great respect for Frau Chauchat, certainly, in her character as—"

"Pray!" said Peeperkorn, stretching out his hand with that gesture which held back the flow of words. Having thus made a free space for what he was about to say, "Let me," he went on, "let me repeat, that I am far from reproaching this Italian gentleman with any actual offence against the rules of chivalry. I levelled this reproach against no one—no one. But it occurs to me—Understand me, young man, I am gratified, very. Your presence rejoices my heart. At the same time, I say to myself: your acquaintance with Madame is older than ours. You were a companion of her earlier sojourn up here. And she is a woman of the rarest charms, and I am only an ailing old man. How does it happen—to-day, as I was unable to accompany her, she goes down unattended to the village to make purchases—there is no harm in that, none at all. But doubtless—am I then to ascribe it to the—what was it you said?—the pedagogic principles of Signor Settembrini that you—I beg you not to misunderstand me—"

"Not at all, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Absolutely not. Not in the least. I act independently. On the contrary, Herr Settembrini has even taken occasion to—I regret to see that you have spilled wine on your sheets, Mynheer Peeperkorn. May I not—we usually put salt on while the spots are fresh—"

"It does not matter," said Peeperkorn, fixing his guest with his glance.

Hans Castorp changed colour. He said, with a hollow smile: "Everything up here is out of the ordinary. The spirit of the place, if I may put it so, is not conventional. The sufferer, whether man or woman, is privileged. The laws of chivalry are thus forced rather into the background. You are for the moment indisposed, Mynheer Peeperkorn, an acute indisposition. Your companion is relatively well. I think I do as Madame would wish in representing her here beside you, in her absence—in so far as there can be any talk of representing her, ha ha!—instead of representing you with her and offering to attend her into the village. How indeed should I come to be playing the cavalier to Madame? I have no title to the position, no mandate, and I have, I must admit, a strong sense of mine and thine. In short, I find my position is correct, in face of the general situation, and also the very genuine feelings I entertain for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn. You asked me, I believe, a question, and I think what I have said should be a satisfactory answer to it."

"A very amiable answer," Peeperkorn responded. "I listen with involuntary pleasure, young man, to your fluent little phrases. Your tongue runs on, it springs over stock and stone, and rounds off all the sharp corners. But satisfactory—no. Your answer does not quite satisfy me—you must forgive me for disappointing you. Austere, my dear friend—you used the word with reference to some of my remarks just now. But in yours too I seem to note a certain austerity, they seem a little stiff and forced, and not in harmony with your nature, though I am acquainted with the phenomenon through your bearing in one respect and therefore recognize it now. I mean the formal manner you assume toward Madame—and toward no one else in our little circle, on our walks and excursions. And of which you owe me an explanation. It is a duty, an obligation. I am not mistaken. I have confirmed my observation too many times, and it is unlikely it has not been remarked by others as well—with the difference that these others may perhaps—or even probably—possess a key which I do not."

Mynheer spoke with uncommon precision and clarity this afternoon, despite the exhaustion consequent upon his fever. There was scarcely a trace of his usual rhapsodic style. He half sat in his bed, his powerful shoulders and splendid head turned toward his guest; one arm was stretched out over the coverlet, with the freckled, sea-captain’s hand erect at the end of the woollen sleeve, forming the ring of precision. The lance-tipped fingers were aloft. And his lips formed the words, as precisely, as "plastically," as Herr Settembrini himself could have wished, and rolled the r in his throat in words like probably and austerity.

"You smile," he went on. "You seem to be busy searching the tablets of your memory and finding them blank. But there can be no doubt that you know what I mean. I do not say that you do not sometimes address Madame, or that you do not answer her, as occasion arises. But I repeat, you do so with a definite constraint, an evasiveness, and, in fact, an avoidance of one certain form. One gets the impression that there has been a one-sided wager; it is as though you had eaten a philippina with Madame, and made up that you will not address her with the usual form of address. In short, you never use the third person plural. You never say She to Madame."

"But Mynheer Peeperkorn—how absurd—what sort of philippina would that be?"

"May I mention the circumstance—you are surely aware of it yourself—that you have just grown pale to the lips?"

Hans Castorp did not look up. He bent over and busied himself with the red stains on the sheet. "It had to come to that, I suppose," he thought. "It had to come out.—And I suppose I even helped it on myself. I can see that now. Did I really go pale? It may be. For now we’ve certainly come to grips. What will happen? Shall I keep on lying? It might still go—but I won’t. I’ll just sit tight a few minutes and look at these blood-stains—I mean wine-stains—on the sheet." They were both silent. The stillness lasted some two or three minutes—and gave evidence how much under such circumstances these very small units of time can expand.

It was Pieter Peeperkorn who first spoke. "On the evening when I first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance," he said, beginning in a singsong tone, and letting his voice fall at the end, as though embarked on a long recitative, "we had a little celebration, sat very late eating and drinking and making merry, and then, in an elevated mood, of spirit free and unrestrained, arm in arm we sought our beds. As we parted, here at my door, the idea came to me to ask you to salute Madame on the brow, as a good friend from her former visit up here. You bluntly refused, rejected the idea on the ground that it would be preposterous. You will not deny that the expression itself demanded an explanation—an explanation for which you have remained until now in my debt. Are you willing to absolve yourself of it?"

"Ah, so he noticed that too," Hans Castorp thought, and bent closer over the wine-stains, one of which he scratched with his middle finger. "The fact is I suppose I wanted him to notice it, or I should not have said it. But what to say now? My heart is pounding. Will there be an exhibition of royal rage? Perhaps I’d best keep an eye on his fist, he may be holding it over me already. Certainly I am in a fine position—between the devil and the deep blue sea, as it were."

And suddenly he felt his right wrist grasped by the hand of Peeperkorn.

"Hullo!" he thought. "Why should I be sitting here with my tail between my legs?

Have I done him any injury? Not in the least. Let him talk to the man in Daghestan before he does to me. And after that somebody else, and so on. And then me. And what has he to complain of about me? Nothing, so far. Then why should my heart be pounding like this? It is high time I sit up and look him in the eye—with all due respect to his personality, of course."

He did so. The great man’s face was yellow, the eyes pale beneath the forehead’s heavy folds, a bitter expression sat on the wounded lips. They looked each other in the eye, the splendid old man and the insignificant young one, and Peeperkorn continued to hold Hans Castorp by the wrist. At last he said, gently: "You were Clavdia’s lover when she was here before."

[admin]

Part 4 of 8

Hans Castorp bowed his head once more but lifted it again straightway, took a deep breath, and began: "Mynheer Peeperkorn! It is in the highest degree repugnant to me to tell you a lie. I am searching for a means of avoiding it, but this is not easy. I should be boasting if I say yes, lying if I say no. Let me explain in what sense this is to be taken. I lived a long time, oh, a very long time in this house with Clavdia—I beg pardon, with the present companion of your travels—before making her acquaintance. Our relations—or, rather, my relation to her was never the social one; I can only say of it that its beginnings are shrouded in darkness. In my thoughts I have never named Clavdia but with the thou—and never in reality either. For on the evening when, casting off certain pedagogic restraints of which we were speaking, I made bold to approach her, upon a pretext furnished me by the long-ago past, it was carnival. It was an evening of masks and freedom, an irresponsible hour, when the thou was in force, and by the power of magic and dreams, somehow had—full sway. And—it was also the eve of Clavdia’s departure."

"Full sway," repeated Peeperkorn. "You have put that very—very—well." He released Hans Castorp’s hand, and began with his own huge ones to massage both sides of his own face, eyes, cheeks, and chin. Then he folded his hands upon the wine-bespotted sheet, and laid his head on the left shoulder, the one toward his guest, with the effect that his face was lightly turned away.

"I have given you the best answer I could, Mynheer Peeperkorn," Hans Castorp said. "I have tried to say neither too much nor too little. I was concerned to let you see that it is in a way open to us to count that evening—when the thou had full sway, and it was the eve of Clavdia’s departure—or not to count it. It was an extraordinary occasion, almost outside the calendar, intercalated, so to speak, a twenty-ninth of February. It would have been only half a lie if I had simply denied the truth of what you said."

Peeperkorn made no answer.

"I preferred," Hans Castorp began again, after a pause, "to tell you the truth, rather than run the risk of losing your favour, which, I openly admit, would be a sensible loss to me, I may say a blow, a real blow, comparable to the one I received when Frau Chauchat returned hither as the companion of your travels. I have risked letting this happen, because I have long wished and hoped that there might be understanding between myself and the man for whom I entertained feelings of the most extraordinary respect and reverence. It seemed finer, more ‘human’ to me—you know that is Clavdia’s favourite word, and how she pronounces it, in that enchanting, husky drawl of hers—than silence and dissimulation; and in that sense a weight was lifted from my heart when you put your question."

No answer.

"One thing more, Mynheer Peeperkorn," Hans Castorp went on. "There was another thing that made me wish to make a clean breast of it to you: and that was the personal experience I had with the irritating effect of uncertainty, being let in for suspicions that could be neither confirmed nor dismissed. You know now who it was—before this present relationship was established which it would be absurd of me not to respect—with whom Clavdia spent—or experienced, or committed—that twenty-ninth of February. It is clear to you now. But for my part I have never been able to know—though of course I realized that anyone in my situation has to reckon with the past—by which I really mean predecessors—and though I also realized that Hofrat Behrens is an amateur portrait-painter, and had, in the course of many sittings, made a capital portrait of her, with a treatment of the skin so very lively and realistic that—between ourselves—it gave me very seriously to think. I have tormented myself no end with that riddle, and still do."

"You still love her?" Peeperkorn asked, without changing his position, his face still turned away. The large room fell more and more into twilight.

"You will pardon me, Mynheer Peeperkorn," answered Hans Castorp, "but my feeling for you, which is one of the highest respect and admiration, will not permit me to speak of my feeling for the present companion of your travels,"

"And does she—" Peeperkorn asked, with lowered voice, "does she still return your feeling?"

"I do not say," answered Hans Castorp, "I do not say that she ever returned it. That is scarcely credible. We were touching upon this subject earlier in the afternoon, when we spoke of the responsive nature of women. There is nothing much about me to fall in love with. I am not built on a grand scale, as you can see. The possibility of—of a twenty-ninth of February could only be ascribed to feminine receptivity on the basis of the man’s choice already made. I must say that when Í refer to myself as a man, it seems to me a sort of self-advertising and bad taste—but at all events, Clavdia is a woman."

"She was responsive to your feeling," murmured Peeperkorn, with wry lips.

"How much more so to yours," said Hans Castorp. "And in all probability to many another. One has to face that, when—"

"Stop!" Peeperkorn said, still turned away, but with a gesture of the palm toward his interlocutor. "Is it not rather—common—of us to talk about her?"

"I don’t feel it so, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I think I can set your mind at rest on that point. These are human topics we are treating of; human in the sense that they have to do with freedom and the spirituel—you must pardon me if I use a rather ambiguous terminology, but I needed the expression lately, and made it my own."

"Very good, go on," Peeperkorn said in a low voice.

Hans Castorp spoke in a low voice, too, and sat on the edge of his chair by the bed, bent toward the kingly old man, his hands between his knees.

"For she is certainly a most spirituel being," he said, "and the husband beyond the Caucasus—you know, of course, that she has a husband beyond the Caucasus—gives her her freedom, whether out of stupidity or intelligence I don’t know, I don’t know the chap. But it is a good thing he does, for it is her illness grants it to her—and whoever falls into our situation will do well to follow his example, and not complain, either of the past or of the future."

"You don’t complain?" asked Peeperkorn, and turned his face. It seemed ashen in the twilight, the pale, weary eyes stared out beneath the great folds of brow, the large chapped lips stood half open, like the mouth of a tragic mask.

"I hardly thought it was a question of myself," Hans Castorp answered modestly. "What I meant was that you should not complain, nor deprive me of your friendship because of events in the past. That is what concerns me at this hour."

"But aside from that," Peeperkorn said, "I must involuntarily have been the cause of much suffering on your part."

"If you put the question," responded Hans Castorp, "and if I answer yes, my answer must not be taken to mean that I did not know how to value the enormous privilege of knowing you; for that privilege was indissolubly bound up with the suffering."

"I thank you, young man, I thank you. I value the courtesy of your little phrases. But, aside from our acquaintance—"

"It is difficult," Hans Castorp said, "to divorce the two; and the idea does not commend itself to me that I should divorce them in order to be free to reply in the affirmative to your question. The very fact that it was a personality like you in whose company Clavdia returned could only make more distressing and involved her coming back in the company of anybody whatever. It gave me a quarter of an hour, I assure you, and still does, that I do not deny; I have purposely kept as much as I could to the positive element, that is my sincere feeling of honour and reverence for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn—in which there mingled a spice of malice against your mistress; for women are never at ease when their lovers come to terms."

"True enough," Peeperkorn said, and ran his hand over mouth and chin to conceal a smile, as though he were afraid Madame Chauchat might see it. Hans Castorp too smiled discreetly—and then they both nodded, in mutual understanding.

"This little revenge," went on Hans Castorp, "was granted me at the end, because, so far as I personally am concerned, I have a quarrel after all, not with Clavdia, not with you, Mynheer Peeperkorn, but with my lot in general, my destiny. I will try to tell you about it, in so far as I can, now that I am secure in the honour of your confidence, and in this altogether exceptional and extraordinary twilight hour."

"Pray do so," said Peeperkorn, courteously, and Hans Castorp went on.

"I have been up here a long time, Mynheer Peeperkorn, years. How long I hardly know myself, but it has been years of my life. My cousin, to visit whom I came up, in the first instance, was a soldier, an upright and honourable soul, but that was no help to him—he died, and left me, and I remained here alone. I was no soldier, but a civilian, I had a profession, as you may have heard, a good, two-fisted job, which is even supposed to do its share in drawing together the nations of the earth—but some-how it did not draw me. I admit this freely; but the reasons for it I cannot describe otherwise than to say that they are veiled in obscurity, the same obscurity that envelops the origin of my feeling for Madame your mistress—I call her that expressly to show that I am not thinking of undermining the situation as it exists—my feeling for Clavdia Chauchat, and my intimate sense of her being, which I have had since the first moment her eyes met mine and bewitched me, enchanted me, you understand, beyond all reason. For love of her, in defiance of Herr Settembrini, I declared myself for the principle of unreason, the spirituel principle of disease, under whose ægis I had already, in reality, stood for a long time back; and I remained up here, I no longer know precisely how long. I have forgotten, broken with, everything, my relatives, my calling, all my ideas of life. When Clavdia went away, I waited here for her return, so that now I am wholly lost to life down below, and dead in the eyes of my friends. That is what I meant when I spoke of my destiny, and said there might be some justice in a complaint over my present state. I have read a story—no, I saw it in the theatre: a good-natured youth, a soldier like my cousin, who comes to know a charming gipsy—charming she was, with a flower behind her ear, a wild and fatal creature, who so bewitches him that he goes off altogether, sacrifices everything to her, deserts the colours, joins the smugglers, dishonours himself in every way. Well, when he has got so far, she for her part has had enough of him, and takes up with a matador, a forceful personality with a magnificent baritone voice. The end of it all is that the little soldier, white as a sheet, shirt open at the throat, stabs his mistress with his knife in front of the circus—which, after all, she brought upon herself. It is rather a pointless story after all: how did I come to think of it?"

Mynheer Peeperkorn, at mention of the knife, had shifted his position in the bed, with a quick motion to one side, turning his face toward his guest, and looking him piercingly in the eye. Now he pulled himself to a more comfortable posture, supporting himself on one elbow, and said: "Well, young man, I have listened to you, and I have the whole picture. On my side, let me make you an honourable declaration. Were my hair not white, my limbs not racked with fever, you would see me ready to give you satisfaction, man to man, weapon to weapon, for the injury I unwittingly did you, and that which my companion added to it, for which likewise it is mine to atone. Positively, my friend—you would see me at your service. But as matters lie, you must let me make a different proposal. It is this: I recall an exalted moment, when our acquaintance was very young, when I felt myself pleasantly impressed by your native parts, and stood ready to offer you the brotherly thou; but then perceived that the moment was premature. Very good. I stand again to-day at that moment, I return to it, I declare that the period of probation has come to an end. Young man, we are brothers. Your phrase was that the thou had full sway—very good, let ours likewise have full sway, let us give free rein to brotherly feeling. The satisfaction which age and incapacity prevent me from giving you, I offer in another form, in the form of a brotherly alliance, such as one forms against a third party, against the world, against all and sundry; let us swear it to each other in the name of our feeling for somebody. Take your wineglass, young man, I will use the water-glass again, it does the crude new wine no shame—" With his trembling hand he filled the glasses, Hans Castorp hastening to assist him.

"Take it," repeated Peeperkorn, "take my arm, let us drink so, let us drink it out—positively, young man. Very. Here is my hand. Art thou satisfied?"

"That is no word for it, of course, Mynheer Peeperkorn," said Hans Castorp. He had not found it easy to drink out the full glass at a draught; he spilled a little and dried his knee with his handkerchief. "I might better say that I am immensely happy, and can hardly grasp how this has all come about, it is like a dream. What an immense honour for me! How I have deserved it I scarcely know, certainly in no active sense. It is not surprising that at first it seems entirely too bold, and I doubt if I shall be able to fetch it out—especially in Clavdia’s presence, who is not quite so likely to be pleased with the new arrangement, all at once."

"Leave that to me," responded Peeperkorn; "the rest is a matter of practice and habit. Go, now, young man. Leave me, my son. The night has fallen, our loved one may return any moment, and a meeting between you just now would perhaps not be quite well-advised."

"Farewell, Mynheer Peeperkorn," Hans Castorp said, and rose. "Yes, it has grown dark. I can imagine Herr Settembrini coming in suddenly and turning on the light, to let reason and convention reign—it is a weakness of his. Good-bye until to-morrow. I leave you, so proud, so joyful, as I could never have dreamed it was possible for me to be. And now you will have at least three good days, and free of fever, and that rejoices me as much as though it were myself. Brother, good-night!"

Mynheer Peeperkorn (Conclusion)

A WATERFALL is always an attractive goal for an excursion. We scarcely know how to explain why Hans Castorp, with all his native love of falling water, had never visited the picturesque cascade in the valley of the Fluela. His cousin’s strong sense of duty to the service had probably prevented him, during Joachim’s time; the latter’s purposeful attitude had tended to confine their activities to the close vicinity of the Berghof. But even since that time—if we except the winter excursions on skis—Hans Castorp’s relations with the mountain scenery had been extremely conservative, not to say monotonous. The young man found a curious pleasure in the contrast between the limitations of his physical sphere and the broad scope of his mental operations. However, when it was proposed that his little group of seven people should make a driving excursion to the waterfall, he readily assented.

It was the blissful month of May, oft celebrated in the pleasant little ditties of the flat-land. Up here the air was fresh, the temperature scarcely ingratiating; but at least the snow was gone. It might, indeed, snow again; during the last few days there had been flurries of gigantic flakes, but it did not lie, it only made wet. The winter drifts had wasted away, they were gone, save for vestiges here and there; and the green slopes, the open paths, tempted the spirit to rove.

The group had been less socially occupied of late weeks owing to the illness of its ruling spirit, the prepotent Pieter Peeperkorn. His fever refused to yield to the beneficent working of the climate or the skilled ministrations of so excellent a doctor as Hofrat Behrens. He was obliged to spend much time in bed, not only on the days when the quartan fever held sway, but on others too. There was trouble with his liver and spleen, Behrens told those who tended him; the digestion was not what it should be—in short, the Hofrat did not neglect to point out that the condition seemed to indicate a danger of chronic debility, not to be ignored.

Mynheer Peeperkorn had presided at only one evening festivity in all these weeks; and the group had taken but one short walk. Hans Castorp was rather relieved than otherwise at this state of affairs; for the pledge he had drunk with Clavdia Chauchat’s protector made him difficulties, in general conversation, of the same kind he had to deal with in the case of Frau Chauchat herself, namely the avoidance of the formal mode of address—as though, as Peeperkorn said, they had eaten a philippina together. He was fertile in expedients to get round it or simply leave it out; nevertheless, the favour accorded him by Peeperkorn had doubled his present dilemma.

But now the excursion to the waterfall was the order of the day; Peeperkorn himself had arranged it, and felt equal to the effort. It was the third day after the usual attack, and he announced that he wished to take advantage of it. He did not, indeed, appear at the early meals of the day, but took them, in company with Madame Chauchat, in their salon, as they often did of late. But Hans Castorp received word, through the lame concierge, to be ready for a drive an hour after the midday meal, and further, to communicate with Ferge and Wehsal, Settembrini and Naphta, and to engage two landaus for three o’clock.

Accordingly, at this hour they assembled before the portal of the Berghof—Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal. and awaited the pair from the appartements de luxe; whiling the time by holding out lumps of sugar on the palms of their hands, for the horses to nip them up with thick, moist black lips. Their companions appeared with no great delay on the threshold; Peeperkorn’s kingly head seemed narrower; he lifted his hat as he stood in a long, rather shabby ulster, by Madame Chauchat’s side, and his lips shaped a vague form of greeting to the company in general. Then he descended and shook hands with the three gentlemen, who met him at the foot of the steps. He laid his left hand on Hans Castorp’s shoulder, saying: "Well, young man, and how goes it, my son?"

"Topping, thanks, I hope it’s mutual," responded the young man.

The sun shone, the day was beautiful and bright. But they had done well to don overcoats, driving would be cool. Madame Chauchat too wore a warm belted mantle of some woolly stuff with a pattern of large checks, and a small fur about her shoulders. The rim of her felt hat was turned down at one side by the olive-green veil she wore bound under her chin; an effect so charming that it was actual pain to most of the beholders—Ferge being the only man there not in love with her. To his disinterested state was probably due the temporary advantage he presently enjoyed, of being selected to sit opposite Mynheer and Madame in the first landau, while Hans Castorp mounted with Wehsal into the second, catching as he did so a mocking smile that for a moment visited Frau Chauchat’s face. The others would be called for at their lodgings. The Malayan servant joined the party with a capacious basket, from the top of which protruded the necks of two winebottles. He bestowed it under the back seat of the first landau, took his place by the coachman on the box and folded his arms; the horses started up, and the carriages, with the brakes against their wheels, drove down the drive.

Wehsal had seen Frau Chauchat’s smile, and expressed himself on the subject to his companion, showing his bad teeth as he talked.

"Did you see," he asked, "how she was laughing at you for having to drive alone with me? Yes, yes, a man like me is always fair game. Do you find it so disgusting to have to sit next to me?"

"Pull yourself together, Wehsal, and stop talking in that poor-spirited way," Hans Castorp admonished him. "Women are for ever smiling, at anything, just for the sake of smiling; there is no sense in attending to it. Why do you always cry yourself down? You have your advantages and your disadvantages, like the rest of us. For instance, you can play out of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s not everybody who can. Will you play for us again soon’ "

"Yes, you think you can talk to me condescendingly, like that," retorted the wretched soul, "and you don’t know what cheek there is in your consolation and how it just lowers me the more. You have the right to, though. You are laughing out of the wrong corner of your mouth now; but once you were in the seventh heaven, and felt her arms about your neck—oh, God, it burns me in the pit of my stomach when I think of it—and you are conscious of all you have had, when you look down on me and my torments and think what a beggarly wretch I am."

"You haven’t a pretty way of expressing yourself, Wehsal. I don’t need to conceal my opinion of it, since you reproach me with being cheeky: it is really very repulsive and probably intentional on your part; you lay yourself out to be disgusting and humiliate yourself, the whole time. Are you really so desperately in love with her?"

"Fearfully," answered Wehsal, with a head-shake. "Words cannot express what I have had to endure from my craving for her. I wish I could say it will be the death of me—but the trouble is, one can neither die nor live. It was a bit better while she was away, I was gradually beginning to forget her. But since she came back, and I have her daily before my eyes, I get attacks—I bite my hand and strike about me, and am beside myself. Such things ought not to be; yet one cannot wish not to have them. Whoever is in that state cannot wish not to be, it would be like wishing not to live, because it has bound itself up with life. What good would it do to die? Afterwards—afterwards, yes, gladly. In her arms it would be bliss. But before—no; it would be preposterous, because life is longing, and longing is life—it cannot go against itself, that is the cursed catch in the game. Even when I say cursed, it is only a way of talking, as though I were somebody else, for in myself I cannot feel it so. There are many kinds of torture, Castorp, and whichever one you are under, your one desire and longing is to be free of it. But the torture of fleshly lust is the only one you can never wish to be free of, except through satisfaction. Never, never in any other way, never at any price. So it is; the man who is not suffering from it doesn’t dwell on it; but the man who is learns to know our Lord Jesus Christ, and his tears run down. Good Lord in heaven, what a thing it is, that the flesh can crave the flesh like that, simply because it is not its own flesh, but belongs to another soul—how strange, and yet, when you come to look at it, how unassuming, how friendly, how almost apologetic! One might say, almost, if that is all he wants, in God’s name let him have it! What is it I want, Castorp? Do I want to kill her? Do I want to shed her blood? I only want to fondle her. Dear, good Castorp, don’t despise me for whining like this—but after all, couldn’t she let me have my way? There would be something higher about it, Castorp; I am not a beast of the field, in my way I am a man too. Pure fleshly desire casts about, here, there, and everywhere; it is not bound, not fixed, and so we call it animal. But when it is fixed upon a human being, with a human face, then we begin talking about love. It is not that I just crave her carnal part, to enjoy as if she were a flesh-and-blood doll; if there were one least little thing different about her face, it might be that I should not crave her at all—which shows that I love her soul, and love her with my soul. For love of the face is love of the soul—"

"Why, Wehsal, what’s the matter with you? You are off your head, you don’t know how you are going on—"

"But that is just it," pursued the unhappy wretch, "that she has a soul, that she is a creature made up of soul and body. And her soul will have absolutely nothing to do with mine, nor her body either, and thence come, oh, God, the torments I suffer, and therefore is my desire condemned to shame, and my body must mortify itself for ever. Why will she know nothing of me, Castorp, either body or soul, and why is my desire a horror to her? Am I not a man? Even if I am repulsive? I swear to you that I am, that I would give her more than all the others who have lain there, once she opened to me the bliss of her embrace, of her arms, which are beautiful because her soul is so. There is not a glory of the flesh I would not offer her, Castorp, if it were only a matter of the body, not of the countenance, if it were not her accursed soul that will have none of me, without which I should have no longing for her body—that is the devil’s treadmill in which I eternally go round and round."

"Hush, Wehsal, hush, the coachman can understand you. He does not turn his head, on purpose, but I can see by the expression of his back that he is listening."

"Yes, you’re right, he is listening, and he understands. There you have again the thing I am talking about, and can see what it is like. If I were speaking of—of palingenesis, or hydrostatics, he would not understand, and would not listen, he would not have the faintest idea about it, nor care to have. There is no popular understanding for those things. But this business of body and soul, the last and highest and most ghastly private matter in the world, is also the most universal—everybody can understand it and laugh at anyone suffering from it, whose days are a torture of desire and his nights a torment of hell. Castorp, dear Castorp, let me make my little moan to you—you don’t know the sort of nights I have. Every night I dream of her, ah, what do I not dream of her, it makes me burn inside even to think of it! And all the dreams end the same way: she gives me a box on the ear, slaps me in the face, sometimes spits at me, with her face all distorted with disgust, and then I awake, covered with sweat and drowned in shame and desire—"

"That will do, Wehsal. We will sit quiet now, and make up our minds to hold our tongues until we reach the grocer’s and someone gets in with us. That is my wish. I don’t want to wound you, and I admit that your mental state is a quite choice and particular mess. But you know the story about the maiden who by way of being punished for something had snakes and toads hop out of her mouth, a snake or a toad for every word she spoke. The book does not say what she did about it, but I should think she finally had to keep her mouth shut."

"But every human being needs to express what he feels," said Wehsal complainingly, "to relieve himself, my dear Castorp, when he is in the state I am in!"

"And every human being has the right to do it, too, if you like. But my dear Wehsal, it seems to me there are certain rights a man simply does not assert."

After which, according to Hans Castorp’s desire, they were silent. Moreover, they were now arrived at the grocer’s vine-clad cottage, where they needed not to linger at all, for Naphta and Settembrini stood waiting in the street; the one in his shabby fur, the other in a yellowish-white spring overcoat, copiously stitched, and looking almost foppish. They all bowed and exchanged greetings, and Naphta took his place beside Ferge in the first landau, which now contained four persons, while Herr Settembrini added himself to the other two in the second carriage. Wehsal gave up his place on the back seat, and the Italian lolled there elegantly, as though on his native Corso; in his very best mood, and bubbling over with esprit.

He talked about the pleasure of driving, the charm of sitting still and being moved along at the same time amid a changing scene; showed a fatherly interest in Hans Castorp, even patted the forlorn Wehsal’s cheek and bade him forget his own unsympathetic ego in admiration of the blithe exterior world, to which the Italian pointed with a spacious gesture of his hand in its worn leather glove.

It was a delightful drive. The horses, all four of them sturdy, glossy, well-fed beasts, with a blaze on each forehead, covered the excellent road at a steady pace. There was no dust. The route was bordered here and there by crumbling rock tufted with grass and flowers. Telegraph-poles flew past. Their way wound along the mountain forests in pleasant curves that invited the interest and led it on; in the sunny distance glimmered mountain heights still partly covered with snow. They left behind their own accustomed valley, and the change of scene refreshed their spirits. At the edge of the forest they drew up, having decided to cover on foot the remainder of the distance to the goal they had in mind—a goal of which they had been for some time aware, by reason of the sound that came to their ears, at first scarcely perceptible, but steadily increasing in volume. They all heard, directly they dismounted, that far-away, sibilant, vibrating roar, that distant murmuring of water, as yet so faint that they would suddenly lose the sound and pause to listen again.

"It is mild enough now," Settembrini said. He had often been here before. "But when you come close, it is brutal, at this time of the year. You won’t be able to hear yourselves think—mark my words."

Thus they entered the woods, along a path strewn with damp pine-needles: Pieter Peeperkorn first, leaning on Madame Chauchat’s arm, his soft black hat drawn down on his brows, walking with his slumping gait; behind them Hans Castorp, hatless, like the other gentlemen, hands in pockets, head on one side, whistling softly as he looked about; then Naphta and Settembrini, then Ferge and Wehsal, last the Malay with the tea-basket on his arm. They all talked about the wood.

For the wood was not quite usual, it had a peculiarity which made it picturesque, exotic, even uncanny. It abounded in a hanging moss that draped and wreathed and wrapped the trees: the matted web of this parasitic plant hung and dangled in long, pallid beards from the branches, so that scarcely any pine-needles were visible for the shrouding veil. A complete, a bizarre transformation, a bewitched and morbid scene. For the trees were sick of this rank growth, it threatened to choke them to death—so all the visitors felt, as the little train wound along the path toward the sound, and the hissing and splashing swelled slowly to a mighty tumult that justified Settembrini’s prediction. A turn in the path revealed the bridge and the rocky ravine down which the torrent poured. At the moment their eyes perceived it, their ears seemed saluted with the maximum of sound—for which infernal was the only right word. The volume of water fell perpendicularly in a single cascade, perhaps nine or ten feet high, and of considerable breath, and foaming white shot away over the rocks. The frantic noise of its falling seemed to mingle all possible intensities and variations of sound—hissing, thundering, roaring, bawling, whispering, crashing, crackling, droning, chiming—truly it was enough to drive one senseless. The visitors went very close, on the slippery rocks at the bottom of the chasm, and stood looking, bespattered with its spray, enveloped in its mist, their ears stopped by its insensate clamour. They exchanged glances and head-shakes and rather intimidated smiles as they stood regarding this spectacle, this long catastrophe of foam and fury, whose preposterous roaring deafened them, frightened them, bewildered their senses of sight and hearing, so that they even imagined they heard above, below, and on all sides, cries of warning, trumpet-calls, hoarse human voices.

Gathered in a little group behind Mynheer Peeperkorn, Frau Chauchat surrounded by the five gentlemen, they stood and looked into the surging waters. The others could not see the Dutchman’s face, but they saw him take off his hat, and breathe in the freshness with expanding chest. They communicated by looks and signs, for words would have been useless, even shrieked immediately into the ear, against that raging thunder. Their lips formed soundless phrases of wonder and admiration. Hans Castorp, Settembrini, and Ferge proposed, by nods and signs, to climb up the side of the ravine in which they stood, and look down upon the water from above. It was not difficult: a series of narrow steps cut in the rock led up to an upper storey, so to speak, of the forest. They climbed it, one behind the other, reached the bridge which spanned the water just where it arched to pour downward, and leaning on the rail, waved to the party below. Then they crossed over and climbed laboriously down on the other side of the stream, whence they rejoined their friends by a second bridge over the whirling torrent.

Tea-drinking was now indicated; and more than one of them said it might be well to withdraw a little from the din in order to enjoy that refreshment in comfort, not totally dumb, not utterly deafened and dazed. But they learned that Peeperkorn thought otherwise. He shook his head, and pointed several times with violence toward the ground. His distorted lips curled back with the emphasis of the "Here!" they shaped. What could the others do? In such matters he was accustomed to command, and the weight of his personality would always have been decisive, even if he had not been, as he was, master and mover of the expedition. Size itself is tyrannical, autocratic; thus it has always been, thus it will remain. Mynheer desired to eat in sight, in thunderous hearing of the waterfall, it was his mighty will. Who did not wish to go hungry must acquiesce. Most of them felt dissatisfied. Herr Settembrini saw that all chance of conversation, of a human interchange of ideas, would be out of the question, and flung up his hand with a gesture of resigned despair. The Malay hastened to carry out his master’s will. Two camp-stools were set up against the rocks for Monsieur and Madame, and at their feet upon a cloth he spread out the contents of the basket: coffee-apparatus and glasses, thermos bottles, cake and wine. The others found places on boulders, or against the railing of the foot-bridge, holding their cups of hot coffee in their hands, their plates on their knees; they ate silently, amid the clamour.

Peeperkorn sat with his coat-collar turned up and his hat on the ground beside him, drinking port out of a monogrammed silver cup, which he emptied many times. And suddenly he began to speak. Extraordinary man! It was impossible for him to hear his own voice, still more for the others to catch a syllable of what he let transpire without its in the least transpiring. But with the winecup in his right hand, he raised his forefinger, stretching his left arm palm outwards toward the water. They saw his kingly features move in speech, the mouth form words, which were as soundless as though spoken into empty, etherless space. No one dreamed he would continue; with embarrassed smiles they watched this futile activity, thinking every moment it would cease. But he went on, with tense, compelling gesture, to harangue the clamour that swallowed his words; directing upon this or that one of the company by turns the gaze of his pale little weary eyes, spanned wide beneath the lifted folds of his brow; and whoever felt himself addressed was constrained to nod back again, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, hand to ear, as though any sort of effort to hear could better the utterly hopeless situation. He even stood up! There, in his crumpled ulster, that reached nearly to his heels, the collar turned up; bare-headed, cup in hand, the high brow creased with folds like some heathen idol’s in a shrine, and crowned by the aureole of white hair like flickering flames; there he stood by the rocks and spoke, holding the circle of thumb and forefinger, with the lancelike others above it, before his face, and sealing his mute and incomprehensible toast with that compelling sign of precision. Such words as they were accustomed to hearing from him, they could read on his lips or divine from his gestures: "Settled" and "Absolutely!"—but that was all. They saw his head sink sideways, the broken bitterness of the lips, they saw the man of sorrows in his guise. But then quite suddenly flashed the dimple, the sybaritic roguishness, the garment snatched up dancewise, the ritual impropriety of the heathen priest. He lifted his beaker, waved it half-circle before the assembled guests, and drank it out in three gulps, so that it stood bottom upwards. Then he handed it with outstretched arm to the Malay, who received it with an obeisance, and gave the sign to break up the feast.

They all bowed and thanked him as they hastened to do his bidding. Those crouching on the ground sprang up, the others jumped down from the railing. The little Javanese in his stiff hat and turned-up collar gathered the remnants of the meal. They went back along the path in the same order as they had come, through the draped, uncanny grove, to the high road and the waiting carriages.

This time Hans Castorp mounted with Alynheer and Madame, and sat opposite the pair with the humble Ferge, to whom all high thoughts were vain. Scarcely a word was spoken on the homeward drive. Mynheer sat with his jaw dropped and his hands palm upward on the carriage rug spread across his and Madame’s knees. Settembrini and Naphta dismounted and took their leave before the carriages crossed the track and the watercourse, and Wehsal drove alone as far as the portal of the Berghof, where the party separated.

Was Hans Castorp’s sleep this night rendered light and fitful by portents of which his soul knew naught—so that the slightest variation in the usual nightly peace of the Berghof, the faintest commotion, the barely perceptible sound of running, was enough to fetch him broad awake, to make him sit up in bed? He had been, in fact, awake for some time before a knock came on his door, as it did shortly after two o’clock. He answered at once, composed, alert and energetic, and heard the voice of one of the nurses in the house, saying in high, uncertain tones that Frau Chauchat would be glad if he would come at once to the first storey. Briskly he responded, sprang up and flung on some clothing, ran his fingers through his hair, and went down; not slow, not fast, and more in uncertainty as to the how than the what, in the meaning of these summons. The door to Peeperkorn’s salon stood open, also that to his bedroom, where all the lights were burning. The two physicians, the Directress, Madame Chauchat, and the Malay were within, the last-named dressed not as usual, but in a sort of national costume, with a striped garment like a shirt, very long wide sleeves, a gaily coloured skirt, and a curious, cone-shaped hat made of yellow cloth on his head. He wore an ornament of amulets on his breast, and stood with folded arms at the head of the bed, wherein Pieter Peeperkorn lay on his back, his arms stretched out before him. Hans Castorp, paling, took in the scene. Frau Chauchat sat with her back toward him in a low chair at the foot of the bed. Her elbows rested on the coverlet, her chin was in her hands, whose fingers were buried in her upper lip, and she gazed into the face of her protector.

"Evening, m’ boy," said Behrens, who stood talking in low tones with Krokowski and the Oberin, and nodded ruefully to Hans Castorp, with his upper lip drawn back. He was in his surgeon’s coat, from the pocket of which a stethoscope stuck out, wore embroidered slippers and no collar. "It’s all up with him," he added in a whisper. "Gone for good, o’er the border and awa’. Come have a look—run your experienced eye over him—you’ll agree there’s nothing for us to do."

Hans Castorp approached the bed on tiptoe. The Malay without turning his head followed the movement, until his eyeballs showed white. The young man assured himself by a side glance that Frau Chauchat was paying no heed; then stood by the bed in his accustomed posture, his weight on one leg, his head on one side, his hands folded across his stomach, reverently, reflectively gazing. Pieter Peeperkorn lay under the red satin coverlet, in his tricot shirt, as Hans Castorp had so often seen him. His hands were veined a bluish black, likewise parts of his face; a considerable disfigure-ment, though the kingly features remained unaltered. Beneath the white aureole of hair the masklike folds carved by the habitual gesture of a lifetime ran in a row of four or five, straight across the brow and then in a right angle down the temples; they were more striking than ever, by contrast with the drooping lids and the repose of the features. The cracked lips were slightly parted. The . cyanosis indicated abrupt stoppage, a violent apoplectic arrest of the vital functions.

Hans Castorp stood awhile, reverently, observing all this; hesitating to move, expectant of being addressed by the "widow." As he was not, and could not bring himself to disturb her, he turned toward the little group of other persons present. Behrens jerked his head in the direction of the salon, and Hans Castorp followed him thither.

"Suicide?" he asked, subdued but terse.

"Rather," said the Hofrat, with a shrug, and added: "up to the hilt. To the nth power. Have you ever seen a toy like this before?" he went on, and drew out of the pocket of his smock an irregularly shaped case, from which he took a small object and presented it to the young man’s notice. "Nor I either. But it is well worth seeing. We live and learn. It’s a fantastic little gadget, and ingenious. I took it out of his hand. Take care, if it drips on your skin it will blister."

Hans Castorp turned the puzzling little object in his hands. It was made of steel, gold, ivory, and rubber, wonderful to see. There were two curving prongs of bright steel, extremely sharp-pointed; a slightly spiral centre portion of gold-inlaid ivory, in which the prongs were somewhat movable and could sink up to a point; and a bulb of semi-hard black rubber. The whole thing was only about two inches long.

"What is it?" Hans Castorp asked.

"That," answered Behrens, "is an organized hypodermic syringe. Or, if you like, it is a copy of the mechanism of the cobra’s bite. Understand? You don’t seem to," he went on, as Hans Castorp continued to stare at the bizarre little instrument. "These are the teeth. They are not solid all the way, there is a canal inside, the thickness of a hair; you can see the issue of it quite plainly, here just above the point. They are also open at the base, of course, and communicate with the excretory duct of the bulb, which runs into the ivory middle part. When the teeth bite, they sink in a little, and the pressure on the reservoir shoots the contents into the canals, so that the poison gets into circulation the moment the fangs sink in the flesh. Perfectly simple, when you see it like that; you just have to get the idea. He probably had it made after his own design."

"Surely," Hans Castorp said.

"The amount must have been very small," continued the Hofrat. "What it lacked in quantity it made up for in—"

"Dynamic," Hans Castorp finished for him.

"Well, yes. What it was we shall soon find out. It will be worth knowing too, it has something curious to teach us. Shall we wager that the native on duty over there, who dressed himself up like that for the night’s work, could tell us all we want to know? I suspect it is a combination of animal and vegetable poisons, the most powerful known, for it must have worked like lightning. Everything points to its having taken away his breath, paralysed his respiration, you know, quick suffocation, probably easy and painless."

"God grant it," said Hans Castorp piously, handed the uncanny toy back to the Hofrat and returned to the bedchamber.

Madame Chauchat and the Malay were there alone. And this time Clavdia lifted her face toward the young man as he neared the bed.

"You had a right to be called," she said.

"It was kind of you," he answered, "and you are right." He availed himself of the third person plural as used by the peoples of the cultured West. "We were brothers. I feel shamed in the depth of my soul that I tried to hide it, and used circumlocutions before other people. Were you with him at the last?"

"The servant called me when all was over," she answered.

"He was built on such a grand scale," Hans Castorp began again, "that he considered it a blasphemy, a cosmic catastrophe, to be found wanting in feeling. For you must know, he regarded himself as the instrument of God’s marriage. That was a piece of majestic tomfoolery—when one is moved one can say things that sound crass and irreverent, but are after all more solemn than the conventional religious formulas."

"C’est une abdication," she said. "He knew of our folly?"

"I was not able to prevent it, Clavdia. He guessed, when I refused to kiss you on the forehead, in his presence. At this moment, his presence is rather symbolic than actual—but will you let me do it now?"

She moved her head toward him, in a little nod, the eyes closed. He pressed his lips on her brow. The brown, doglike eyes of the Malay servant watched the scene, rolling sidewise, until the whites showed.

The Great God Dumps

ONCE more we hear Herr Hofrat Behren’s voice—let us give it our ear. For we hear it perhaps for the last time. Some day even the story itself will come to an end. Long has it lasted; or, rather, the pace of its contentual time has so increased that there is no more holding it, even its musical time is running out. Perhaps we shall have no further opportunity to hear the lively cadences of the Rhadamanthine tongue. The Hofrat said

to Hans Castorp: "Castorp, old cock, you’re bored. Chap-fallen, I see it every day, dis-gust and ennui are written on your brow. You’re collapsed like a punctured tire—if some first-class excitement doesn’t come along every day, you pull a face as though you were saying: ‘H’m, small potatoes and few in the hill!’ Am I right, or am I not?"

Hans Castorp said never a word—a sure sign that his inward man was indeed pervaded with gloom.

"Right, then, of course, as I always am," Behrens answered himself. "Well, I can’t have you spreading the toxin of your disaffection all over my community, you disgruntled citizen, you. I must convince you that you are not forgotten of God and man, that the powers above have an eye, an unchanging eye upon you, and ceaselessly ponder your welfare. Old Behrens hasn’t forsaken you yet, my lad. Well, joking aside, I’ve been thinking about your case, and in the watches of the night something has come to me. I might almost speak of a revelation—in short, I promise great things from my new idea, nothing more nor less than your complete cure and triumphal progress down to the flat-land, before you can say Jack Robinson."

"Yes," he went on, after a pause for effect, "you may well open your eyes"—Hans Castorp had done nothing of the sort, merely blinked at him rather sleepy and distraught—"of course you haven’t an idea how old Behrens can say such a thing. Well, it’s like this: it cannot have escaped your acute apperceptions that there is something about your case that doesn’t hold water. The symptoms of infection have not for a long time corresponded to the local condition, which is undoubtedly very much improved. It’s not only since yesterday that I’ve been thinking about it. Here is your latest photo, take it and hold it up to the light. See there! The sheerest pessimist and cavillar—as the Kaiser says—could not see very much in it to find fault with. Some of the foci are absorbed, the area is smaller and more clearly defined, which you are experienced enough to know is a sign of healing. Nothing here to explain the unreliability of your domestic heater, my man. The doctor finds himself under the necessity of casting about for another cause." Hans Castorp’s bow conveyes at most a civil interest.

"You would think old Behrens must admit to having made a mistake in the treatment? Well, if you did, you’ve come a cropper again; sized the thing up wrong, and old Behrens too. The treatment was not wrong, but it was just possibly one-sided. The possibility has occurred to me that your symptoms were not necessarily to be referred to tuberculosis alone—because it is out of the question to refer them to it any longer. There must be some other source of trouble. In my view, you’ve got cocci."

"Yes," he repeated with increase of emphasis, and in acknowledgment of the bow with which Hans Castorp accepted his statement, "it is my profound conviction that you have streps—which, of course, is not necessarily alarming."

Of alarm there could be no talk: Hans Castorp’s face expressed at most a sort of ironic recognition, either of his companion’s acuteness, or of the new dignity with which the Hofrat had hypothetically invested him.

"No call for panic," he varied his theme. "Everybody has cocci. Any ass can have streps. You needn’t be puffed up. It is not very long since we have known that one can have streptococci in the blood without showing any symptoms of infection. And many of my colleagues are as yet unacquainted with the situation which confronts us, namely, that a man can even have tubercular bacilli in his blood without being any the worse for it. We aren’t more than three steps from the conception that tuberculosis is a disease of the blood."

Hans Castorp politely found that truly remarkable.

"When I say streps," Behrens began again, "you must not picture a well-known or severe type of illness. If this little one has really settled down and made itself at home in you, the bacteriological blood-test will show it. But whether it is really the cause of the fever—supposing it is present—that we can only tell from the effect of the strepto-vaccine treatment. This, my dear friend, is the technique, and I promise myself unheard-of results. Tuberculosis is the most long-winded thing in the world; but affections of this sort can be cured very quickly to-day; if you react to the inoculations, you will be as sound as a bell inside six weeks. Well, what do you say to that? That little ole Behrens has his head on his shoulders, what?"

"It is only a hypothesis for the moment, isn’t it?" Hans Castorp said languidly.

"But a demonstrable hypothesis! A highly fruitful hypothesis!" the Hofrat responded. "You’ll see how fruitful it is, when the cocci begin to grow in our culture. To-morrow afternoon we’ll rap you; we’ll let your blood according to the sacred rites of the village barber. It’s diverting in itself, and may have miraculous results."

Hans Castorp declared himself ready for the diversion, and thanked the Hofrat in due form for his efforts in his behalf. He put his head on one side and watched Behrens paddle off. It was true: the intervention had come at the critical moment, Rhadamanthus had not been far out in the description he gave of Hans Castorp’s face and air. The new undertaking was put forth—quite explicitly, there had been no attempt to wrap it up—in order to tide him over the crisis he was in, which betrayed itself by a bearing very like the departed Joachim’s, when he was mentally working himself up to a certain desperate resolve.

And further. It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he himself had arrived at this point, but that all the world, "the whole show," as he said, had arrived there with him; he found it hard to differentiate his particular case from the general. He had experi-enced the extravagant ending of his connexion with a certain personality. A commotion had ensued in the house. There had been a farewell between Clavdia Chauchat and himself, the surviving member of a severed brotherhood; a farewell, uttered in the shadow of a tragic renunciation, and followed by her second departure from the Berghof. Now all these events had put the young man in a frame of mind to find life itself not precisely canny. Everything appeared to have gone permanently and increasingly awry, as though a demonic power—which had indeed for a long time given hints of its malign influence—had suddenly taken control, in a way to induce secret consternation and almost thoughts of flight. The name of the demon was Dumps.

The reader will accuse the writer of laying it on pretty thick when he associates two such ideas as these, and ascribes to mere staleness a mystical and supernatural character. But we are not indulging in flights of fancy. We are adhering strictly to the personal experience of our simple-minded hero, which in some way defying exact definition it has been given us to know, and which indicates that when all the uses of this world unitedly become flat, stale, and unprofitable, they are actually possessed by a demonic quality capable of giving rise to the feelings we have described. Hans Castorp looked about him. He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation; life as dead.

Yet it was occupied too, it had activities of various kinds, pursued simultaneously; now and again one of these would assume the proportions of a craze, and subordinate everything to itself. Old residents experienced the periodic revival of more than one of these fads. So for instance amateur photography, always playing an important rôle at the Berghof, had twice become a perfect mania, lasting weeks and months on end. Everywhere one saw people absorbedly bent over cameras supported in the pit or their stomachs, focusing and snapping the shutter; and floods of snapshots were handed round at table. It became a point of honour to do the developing oneself. The supply of dark-rooms in the establishment was not sufficient, the bedroom windows and doors were draped with black cloth, and people busied themselves by dim red lights over chemical baths, until something caught fire, the Bulgarian student at the "good" Russian table was nearly reduced to ashes, and a prohibitory decree went forth from the management. Next they tired of ordinary photography, the fashion veered to flash-lights and colour photography after Lumière. They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diapositive, showing him with a copper-coloured visage, a brassy buttercup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poisonously green meadow, with Frau Stöhr on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fräulein Levi on the other in a blood-red sweater.

Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Everybody pasted, haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carried on correspondence with special vendors, foreign and do-mestic, with societies and private owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specimens, even by people whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof.

Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody’s mouth was stained brown, and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to Milka-nut, Chocolat à la crême d’amandes, Marquis-napolitains, and gold-besprinkled cats’ tongues.

Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and even the last thoughts and energies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn free-hand without lifting the pen—or, as a further refinement, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.

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Part 5 of 8

We know on the authority of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics; we know too the disciplinary grounds of his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more generally applied themselves to the same study, the necessity for certain recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these dealt with the passage across the balconies, at the end of the white glass partitions that did not quite reach to the balustrade. These were now extended by means of little doors, which the bathing-master had it in charge to lock every night—and did so, to a general accompaniment of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the verandah roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been introduced on Lawyer Paravant’s account. He had long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to challenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his brains, all the sporting pertinacity which once—before the beginning of this prolonged and enforced holiday, that even threatened at times to end in total quiescence—had gone to the convicting of criminals. It was—the squaring of the circle.

In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself that the arguments on which science based the impossibility of the proposition were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living, and brought him here, having selected him to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental into the realms of the earthly and exact. By day and night he measured and calculated; covered enormous quantities of paper with figures, letters, computations, algebraic symbols; his face, which was the face of an apparently sound and vigorous man, wore the morose and visionary stare of a monomaniac; while his conversation, with consistent and fearful monotony, dealt with the proportional number pi, that abandoned fraction which the debased genius of a mathematician named Zachariah Dase one day figured out to the two-hundredth decimal place—purely for the joy of it and as a work of supererogation, for if he had figured it out to the two-thousandth, the result, as compared with unattainable mathematical exactitude, would have been practically unchanged. Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant like the plague; for whomever he succeeded in buttonholing, that unhappy wretch had to listen to a torrent of red-hot oratory, as the lawyer strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in the defilement of the mind of man by the hopeless irrationality of this mystic relation. The fruitlessness of for ever multiplying the diameter of the circle by pi to find its circumference, of multiplying the square of the radius by pi to find its area, caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated, since Archimedes’ day; whether the solution were not, in actual fact, a child’s affair for simpleness. Why could not one rectify the circumference, why could one not also convert every straight line into a circle? Lawyer Paravant felt himself, at times, near a revelation. He was often seen, late in the evening, sitting at his table in the forsaken and dimly lighted dining-room, with a piece of string laid out before him, which he carefully arranged in circulai shape, and then suddenly, with an abrupt gesture, stretched out straight; only to fall thereafter, leaning on his elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat sometimes lent him a helping hand at the sorry sport, and generally encouraged him in his freak. And the sufferer turned to Hans Castorp too, again and yet again, with his cherished grievance, finding in the young man much friendly understanding and a sympathetic interest in the mystery of the circle. He illustrated his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact drawing, executed with vast pains, showing a circle between two polygons, one inscribed, the other circumscribed, each polygon being of an infinite number of tiny sides, up to the last human possibility of approximation to the circle. The remainder, the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bounding lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp, for all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi than his interlocutor. He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant not to over-heat himself with his cat’s-cradle; spoke of the series of dimensionless points of which the circle consisted, from its beginning—which did not exist—to its end—which did not exist either; and of the overpowering melancholy that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence of direction at any given moment—spoke with such tranquil resignation as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect.

It was a consequence of our good Hans Castorp’s nature that more than one of his fellow-patients made a confidant of him; several of them possessing some idée fixe or other and suffering because they could get no hearing from the callous majority. There was an elderly man from somewhere in the back blocks of Austria, a one-time sculptor, with white moustaches, a hooked nose and blue eyes; who had conceived a project, financial and political in its scope, and drawn it up most meticulously in a calligraphic hand, colouring the important points in sepia. The main feature of the scheme was that every newspaper subscriber should bind himself to contribute a daily quantum of forty grammes of old newspaper, collected on the first of every month; which in one year would amount to a lump quantity of 1400 grammes, and in twenty years to not less than 288 kilogrammes. Reckoning at twenty pfennig the kilo, this would come to fifty-seven marks and sixty pfennig. Five million subscribers, it was calculated, would in the course of twenty years deliver a quantity of old newspaper valued at the enormous sum of 288 million marks; of which two-thirds might be reckoned off to the new subscriptions, which would thus pay for themselves, the other third, amounting to about a million marks, remaining to be devoted to humanitarian projects, such as financing free establishments for tuberculous patients, encouraging struggling talent, and so on. The plan was elaborated even to the design for a centimetre price-column, from which the organization for collecting the old paper could read off each month the value of the paper collected, and the stamped form to be used as a receipt in exchange for payment. It was an excellent plan from every point of view. The wanton waste and destruction of news-print, thrown away or burnt up by the unenlightened, was a betrayal of our forests and of our political economy. To save and conserve paper meant to save cellulose, meant the conservation of our forests, the protection of human material that was used up in the manufacture of cellulose and paper—human material and capital. Furthermore, since newspaper might easily come to have four times the value of wrapping-paper and pasteboard, it would become an economic factor of considerable importance, and the basis of fruitful governmental and communal assessments, and thus lighten for newspaper readers the burden of taxation. In short, the plan was good, it was every way incontrovertible. The uncanny air of futility, or even a sort of sinister crack-brainedness, which hung about it was due to the addled fanaticism with which the former artist pursued and supported an economic idea, about which he was obviously so little serious that he made not the smallest effort to put it into execution. Hans Castorp, nodding, with his head on one side, listened to the man, as with fevered eloquence he made propaganda for his idea; observing at the same time in himself the contempt and repulsion which diminished his partisanship for the inventor against the indifference of the thoughtless world.

Some of the patients studied Esperanto, and knew enough to converse a little in that artificial jargon at their meals. Hans Castorp listened gloomily, but admitted to himself that there were other things even worse. A group of English who had been here for a short time, introduced a parlour game which consisted in the question, asked by the first player of his neighbour: "Have you ever seen the Devil with a night-cap on?" To which the person asked must reply: "No, I’ve never seen the Devil with a nightcap on," and then repeat the question in his turn, and so on. It was insufferable. Yet Hans Castorp found the patience-players even worse. They were to be seen all over the house, at every hour of the day, laying out their cards; a passion for that diversion having assumed such proportions at the Berghof as to turn the place into a den of vice. Hans Castorp had the more ground for horror, in that he himself fell a temporary victim to the plague—was, indeed, one of the severest cases. It was the patience called "elevens" that proved his undoing, the game in which the cards are laid out in three rows of three deep, and any two cards that together make eleven covered anew as they come uppermost, as well as the three face-cards, until by good luck the pack is dealt out. It seems inconceivable that such a simple procedure could prove fascinating to the point of bewitchment—yet so it was. Hans Castorp, like so many others, experienced it—always with drawn and frowning brows, for this particular form of debauch is never a merry one. He was given over to the whims of the card-goblins, ensnared by the fitful and fickle favour of fortune, which sometimes let the face-cards and elevens pile up so that the game was over before the third tier was laid, when the fleeting triumph would stimulate the nerves to new efforts. But next time perhaps, the ninth and last card would fall without any possibility of covering anything, or else the game, having aroused flattering hopes, would obstinately stick at the last moment. Everywhere, at all hours of the day, he played patience—and at night under the stars, and in the morning in his pyjamas; played at table, played almost in his sleep. He shuddered, but he played. Thus one day Herr Settembrini found him—and disturbed him, as even from the beginning it had been his mission to do.

"Accidente!" said he. "What, Engineer, you are playing cards?"

"Not precisely playing cards," Hans Castorp told him. "I am just laying them out, to have a tussle with abstract chance. The tricks it plays intrigue me, it is as inconsistent as the wind. It fawns on you, and then suddenly puts up its back and won’t budge. This morning, directly I got up, it came three times running, once in two rows, which is a record. But will you believe it, this is the thirty-third time I have played it without once going even halfway through?"

Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often he had looked in the course of the years, with melancholy black eyes.

"At all events, you are preoccupied," he said. "It does not look as though I could find here the consolation I seek, nor balsam for my inward wound."

"Wound?" echoed Hans Castorp, laying afresh.

"The world situation puzzles me," the Freemason sighed. "The Balkan Federation will go through, Engineer, all the information I receive points that way. Russia is working feverishly for it. And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which must fall before any of the Russian programme can be realized. You understand my scruples. Austria, as of course you are aware, I hate with all my strength. But shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent? Yet on the other hand, diplomatic collaboration, to however small an extent, between my own country and Austria, I should regard as dishonourable. These are conscientious scruples which—"

"Seven and four," said Hans Castorp. "Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out. You have brought me luck, Herr Settembrini."

The Italian was silent. Hans Castorp felt the black eyes, the eyes of reason and morality, bent in sorrow upon him. He played on for a while; then, resting his cheek in his hand, looked up at his mentor with the innocent, impenitent air of a naughty child.

"Your eyes," the master said, "vainly seek to hide the fact that you are conscious of your state."

"Placet experiri," Hans Castorp was so pert as to reply to him. Herr Settembrini left; and the abandoned one sat long, at his table in the middle of his white room, his chin supported on his hand, and brooded; shuddering in the very core of him at the cross-purposes everything in the world had got into, at the grinning and grimacing of the demons and ape-headed gods into whose hands it had fallen, at their unbridled domination, the name of which was "The Great God Dumps." An apocalyptic, evil name, calculated to give rise to mysterious fears. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and his heart with the flat of his hand. He was frightened. It seemed to him "all this" could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall; snatch life beyond the "dead point" and put an end to the "small potatoes" in one terrible Last Day. He longed to flee—as we have seen already. It was fortunate, then, that the heads had their unchanging eyes upon him, that they knew how to read his face, and were ready to tide him over the hard place with new and fruitful diversions.

They had declared, the heads, in the accents of a corps-student, that they were on track of the actual causes of the instability of Hans Castorp’s heating economy. And those causes, according to their scientific pronouncement, were so easy to come at that a veritable cure and legitimate dismissal to the flat-land had leaped into the foreground. The young man’s heart throbbed stormily with manifold emotions, when he stretched out his arm for the blood-letting. Going slightly pale, and blinking, he expressed his admiration for the splendid ruby colour of his life-blood, as it mounted in the glass container. The Hofrat himself, assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, performed the slight but portentous operation. Then passed several days, occupied in Hans Castorp’s mind with the question how this blood of his, this part of himself, would behave out of his control and under the eye of science.

At first, the Hofrat said one could not expect it to grow straight off. Later, he said it was unfortunate nothing had grown, as yet. But there came a day when he approached Hans Castorp at breakfast, where he sat at the upper end of the "good" Russian table, in the place once occupied by his great brother-in-blood, and whimsically congratulated him on the fact that the coccus was definitely established in one of the cultures they had prepared. It was now a question of probabilities: whether the symptoms of infection were to be referred to the insignificant amount of tubercle bacillus, or to the streptococci, which, also, were only present in small quantity. He, Behrens, must think it over. They were not finished with the cultures yet. He showed them to Hans Castorp in the "lab": a red, coagulate blood, in which tiny grey points were discernible. Those were the cocci. But any ass might have cocci, and tubercular bacilli too. If not for the symptoms of infection, they were not worth noticing.

Outside his body, under the eyes of science, Hans Castorp’s blood went on bearing witness. The morning came when the Hofrat in his sprightly phraseology announced that not only on the first culture, but on all the others as well, cocci had subsequently grown, in large quantities. It was not yet certain that they were all streptococci, but it was more than probable that they were the cause of the existing infection—or such part of it as had not been due to the previously existing and perhaps not quite conquered tubercular infection. And the conclusion the Hofrat drew was—a strepto-vaccine! The prognosis was extraordinarily favourable, there was not the slightest risk about the procedure, so in any case it could do no harm to try it. As the serum was prepared from Hans Castorp’s own blood, the inoculation with it could introduce into his system no deterrent not already present there. At worst, the experiment would have a negative result—which could hardly be called unfavourable, since even without it the patient must stop on in any case!

Hans Castorp could not go quite that far. He submitted to the treatment, though he found it absurd, contemptible. This inoculation of himself with part of himself seemed a singularly cheerless procedure, an incestuous abomination, a self-to-self which could have nothing but a fruitless, hopeless result. Such was his ignorant and hypochondriac judgment, right only as to the unfruitfulness of the result, but there wholly. The diversion lasted for weeks. Sometimes it seemed to do harm—which was of course not the case—sometimes good, which, it followed, must equally not be the case. The result was negative—without being explicitly so called and announced. The whole undertaking died a natural death, and Hans Castorp went on playing patience—and gazing into the eye of the demon, whose unbridled sway he foresaw would come to an end of horror.

Fullness of Harmony

WHAT new acquisition of House Berghof was it which at length released our long-standing friend from his patience-playing mania, and flung him into the arms of another passion, nobler, though at bottom no less strange? We are about to relate, being ourselves much taken by the mysterious object, and eager to communicate our enthusiasm.

The excellent management, in its sleepless concern for the happiness of its guests, had considered matters, there in the bowels of the earth, had resolved, and acted. It acquired, at a cost which we need not go into, but which must surely have been considerable, a new device for the entertainment of the patients, and added it to those already installed in the largest of the reception-rooms of House Berghof. Was it some clever artifice, of the same nature as the stereopticon, the kaleidoscope, or the cinematographic cylinder? Yes—and yet, again, no, far from it. It was not an optical toy which the guests discovered one evening in the salon, and greeted with applause, some of them flinging their hands above their heads, others stooping over and clapping in their laps. It was an acoustical instrument. Moreover, the simple devices above-mentioned were not to be compared with it—they were outclassed, outvalued, outshone. This was no childish peep-show, like those of which all the guests were sick and tired, at which no one ever looked after the first few weeks. It was an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment, ranging from grave to gay. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.

We are seriously concerned lest the term be understood in an unworthy, outworn sense, and ideas attach to it which are applicable only to the primitive form of the instrument we have in mind, never to the elegant product evolved by a tireless application of technical means to the Muses’ own ends. My dear friends, we implore you to realize that the instrument we describe was not that paltry box with a handle to it, a disk and shaft atop and a shapeless brass funnel attached, which used to be set up on the table outside country inns, to gratify the ears of the rude with its nasal braying. This was a case finished in dull ebony, a little deeper than broad, attached by a cord to an electric switch in the wall, and standing chastely on its special table. With the antediluvian mechanism described above, it had nothing in common. You lifted the prettily bevelled lid, which was automatically supported by a brass rod attached on the inside, and there above a slightly depressed surface was the disk, covered with green cloth, with a nickelled rim, and nickelled peg upon which one fitted the hole in the centre of the hard-rubber record. At the right, in front, was a time-regulating device, with a dial and figures like a watch; at the left, the lever, which set the mechanism going or stopped it; and behind, also on the left, the hollow, curving, club-shaped, nickel-plated arm, with its flexible joints, carrying the flat round sound-box at the end, with a fitment into which the needle was screwed. If you opened the double doors at the front of the box, you saw a set of slanting shelves, rather like a blind, stained black like the case—and that was all.

"Newest model," the Hofrat said. "Latest triumph of art, my children; A-I, copper-bottomed, superfinísimo, nothing better on the market in this line of goods"—he managed to give the words the twang of an eager and ignorant salesman. "This is not just a machine," he went on, taking a needle out of one of the gay little metal boxes ranged on the table, and fitting it into the holder, "it’s a Stradivarius, a Guarneri; with a resonance, a vibration—dernier raffinemang, Polyhymnia patent, look here in the inside of the lid. German make, you know, we do them far and away better than anybody else. The truly musical, in modern, mechanical form, the German soul up to date. And here’s the libretto," he said, and gestured with his head toward a little case on the wall, filled with broad-backed albums. "I turn it all over to you, it is yours. But take care of it; I commend it to the solicitude of the public. Shall we shoot it off once, just for fun?"

The patients implored him to do so. Behrens drew out a fat magic tome, turned over the heavy leaves, and chose a paper envelope, which showed a coloured title through a round hole on the front. He placed the record on the disk, set it in motion, waited until it was at full speed, and then carefully set the fine steel point upon the edge of the plate. There was a low, whetting sound. He let the lid sink, and at the same moment, from the open doors in front, from between the slats of the blind, or, rather, from the box as a whole, came a burst of music, with a hubbub of instruments, a lively, bustling, insistent melody: the first contagious bars of an Offenbach overture.

They listened, their lips parted in smiles. They could scarcely believe their ears at the purity and faithful reproduction of the colour of the wood-wind. A solo violin preluded whimsically; the bowing, the pizzicato, the sweet gliding from one position to another, were all clearly audible. It struck into the melody of the waltz, "Ach, ich habe sie verloren"; the orchestral harmony lightly bore the flattering strain—enchanting it was to hear it taken up by the ensemble and repeated as a sounding tutti. Of course, it was scarcely like a real orchestra playing in the room. The volume of sound, though not to any extent distorted, had suffered a diminution of perspective. If we may draw a simile from the visual field, it was as though one were to look at a painting through the wrong end of an opera-glass, seeing it remote and diminutive, though with all its luminous precision of drawing and colour. The vivid, consummate piece of music was reproduced in all the richness of its light-hearted invention. The finish was abandon itself, a galop with a drolly hesitating beginning, a shameless cancan that called up a vision of top-hats waved in the air, flying skirts and tossing knees, and seemed never to come to the end of its triumphal jollification. But at length the mechanism stopped automatically. It was over. There was cordial applause.

They called for more, and it was forthcoming. A human voice welled out from the casket, a masculine voice at once soft and powerful, with orchestral accompaniment. It was a famous Italian baritone; the marvellous organ swelled out to the full extent of its natural register, there could be no talk here of any diminution or veiling of the sound. If one sat in an adjoining room and did not see the instrument, it seemed not otherwise than as though the artist stood in the salon in his own person, notes in hand, and sang. He sang an aria di bravura in his own tongue—Eh, U barbiere! "Di qualità, di qualità! Figaro qua, Figaro là, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!" The listeners almost died of laughter at his falsetto parlando, at the contrast between the deep voice and the tongue-splitting facility with which it rendered the words. The musical followed and admired the art of his phrasing, his breathing-technique. He was a master in the irresistible, a virtuoso of the Italian da capo school; he must have come forward to the footlights and flung up his arm, as he held the last tone before the closing tonic, so that the audience involuntarily burst out in shouts of applause before he ceased. It was beyond words.

Followed a French horn, playing, with delicate scrupulosity, variations on a folk-song. A soprano voice, with the loveliest freshness and precision, the most exquisite staccato, trilled and warbled an air from La Traviata. The spirit of a world-famed violinist played as though behind veils a romance by Rubinstein, to a piano accompaniment that sounded thin and cold, like a spinet. The wonder-box seemed to seethe: it poured out the chimes of bells, harp glissandos, the crashing of trumpets, the long rolling of drums. Lastly, dance records were put in. There were specimens of the new imported dance, the tango, in the taste of a water-side dive, calculated to make a Viennese waltz sound sedate and grand-fatherly by contrast. Two couples displayed the fashionable steps, Behrens having by now withdrawn with the admonition that a needle should be used no more than once, and the whole instrument handled "as though it were made of eggs." Hans Castorp took his place as operator.

But why precisely Hans Castorp? In this wise. With suppressed eagerness he had opposed those who had thought to take over, on the Hofrat’s departure, the changing of plate and needle, the switching on and off of the current. "Let me do it," he said to them, gently putting them aside; and they gave way, first because he wore an air of having known all about it for years, and second because they cared little to take their pleasures actively, instead of sitting to be served to as much and such enjoyment as they could comfortably and unbored receive.

Not so Hans Castorp. While the Hofrat was introducing his new toy to the guests, the young man had remained in the background, not laughing or applauding, but following the performance with tense interest, rubbing an eyebrow round with two fingers, as he had on occasion a way of doing. Several times he restlessly shifted his position, even went into the reading-room to listen from there; then took up his stand close to Behrens, with his hands behind his back, and an enigmatic expression on his face, fixing the casket with his eye, and observing the simple operation of it. But within him something was saying: "Hold on! This is an epoch. This thing was sent to me!" He was filled with the surest foreknowledge of a new passion, a new enchantment, a new burden of love. The youth in the flat-land, who at first sight of a maiden marvels to find himself pierced to the heart with love’s barbed arrow, feels not greatly different. Jealousy followed hard upon. Public property, was it? Had that feeble curiosity the right, or the strength, to possess anything? "Let me do it," he had said between his teeth, and they were content it should be so. They danced a little more, to the rollicking pieces he ran off; asked for another vocal number, an operatic duet, the barcarole from the Contes d’Hoffmann, which sounded lovely enough. When he closed the lid they all flocked off, chattering in their ephemeral pleasure over the new toy, these to the evening rest-cure, those to bed. He had been waiting for them to go. They left behind all as it was, the boxes of needles open, the plates and albums strewn about. It was like them. He made as though to follow, but then left them on the stairs, turned back to the salon, closed all the doors, and stopped there half the night, busy as a bee.

He made himself acquainted with the new possession, and worked in undisturbed enjoyment through the contents of the heavy albums. There were twelve, in two sizes, with twelve records each; many of the flat, round, black disks were inscribed on both sides, not only with the continuation of a piece of music, but also because many of the plates held two distinct records. Here was a world to conquer, large enough that even to survey it was a difficult task at first, and bewildering; yet a world full of beautiful possibilities. He played some twenty or thirty records; using a kind of needle that moved softly over the plate and lessened the sound, in order that his activity might not offend the silence of the night. But twenty or thirty were scarcely the eighth part of the riches that lay asking to be enjoyed. He must be content tonight with looking over the titles, only choosing one now and again to set upon the disk and give it voice. To the eye one was like another, except for the coloured label in the centre of each hard-rubber plate; each and all were covered to the centre or nearly so with concentric circles; but it was these fine lines that held all imaginable music, the happiest inspirations from every region of the art, in choicest reproduction.

There were many overtures, and single symphonic movements, played by famous orchestras, the names of whose conductors were given on the record. There was a long list of lieder, sung to piano accompaniment by famous prima donnas; some of these were the lofty and conscious creation of individual artists, others simple folk-songs, still others fell between the two categories, in that they were products of an intellectual art, and at the same time sprang from all that was profoundest and most reverent in the feeling and genius of a people—artificial folk-songs, one might call them, if the word artificial need not be taken to cast a slur on the genuineness of their inspiration. One of these Hans Castorp had known from childhood; but from now on began to attach to it a quite special love and clothe it with many associations, as shall be seen hereafter. What else was there—or, simply—what was there not? Operas a-plenty. An "international troupe of famous artists, male and female, displayed their highly trained, God-given talent in arias, duos, ensembles illustrating various periods and localities in the history of the opera—to discreet orchestral accompaniment. The opera of the south, a high-hearted, light-hearted ravishment; the German, racy of the people, whimsical, hobgoblinish; and both grand and comic opera in the French style. But was that all? Oh, no. A succession of chamber music followed, quartets and trios, instrumental solo numbers for violin, ‘cello, flute; concert numbers with violin or flute obbligato, piano solos—and then there were the light diversions, the "couplets," the topical and popular numbers, played in the first instance by some small orchestra or other, and needing a coarse needle to render them suitably.

Hans Castorp, bustling and solitary, sifted and classified it all, and tried a fraction of it upon the instrument. At a late hour, as late as on the occasion of the first carouse with Pieter Peeperkorn of majestic memory, he went flushed of cheek to bed, where from two to seven he dreamed of the wonder-box. He saw in his sleep the disk circling about the peg, with a swiftness that made it almost invisible and quite soundless. Its motion was not only circular, but also a peculiar, sidling undulation, which communicated itself to the arm that bore the needle, and gave this too an elastic oscillation, almost like breathing, which must have contributed greatly to the vibrato and portamento of the stringed instruments and the voices. Yet it remained unclear, sleeping as waking, how the mere following out of a hair-line above an acoustic cavity, with the sole assistance of the vibrating membrane of the sound-box, could possibly reproduce such a wealth and volume of sound as filled Hans Castorp’s dreaming ear.

Next morning he was early in the salon, even before breakfast; and comfortably sitting with folded hands, listened to a glorious baritone voice, singing to a harp accompaniment: "Blick’ ich umher in diesem edlen Kreise." The harp sounded perfectly natural, there was no distortion or diminution of the sound that poured out of the casket accompanying the swelling, breathing, articulating human voice—it was simply amazing! And there could be on earth nothing more tender than the next number he chose: a duet from a modern Italian opera, a simple, heartfelt mingling of emotion between two beings, one part taken by the world-famous tenor who was so well represented in the albums, the other by a crystal-clear and sweet little soprano voice; nothing more lovely than his "Da mi il braccio, mia piccina" and the simple, sweet, succinct little melodic phrase in which she replies.

Hans Castorp started as the door opened in his rear. It was the Hofrat, looking in on him; in his clinical coat, the stethoscope showing in his breast pocket, he stood there a moment, with his hand on the door-knob, and nodded at the distiller of sweet sounds. Hans Castorp, over his shoulder, replied to the nod, and the chief’s blue-cheeked visage, with its one-sided moustache, disappeared as he drew the door to behind him. Hans Castorp returned to his invisible, melodious pair of lovers.

Later in the day, after the noon and evening meals, he had a changing audience for his performance—unless one must reckon him in with the audience, instead of as the dispenser of the entertainment. Personally he inclined to the latter view. And the Berghof population agreed with him, to the extent that from the very first night they silently acquiesced in his self-appointed guardianship of the instrument. They did not care, these people. Aside from their ephemeral idolatry of the tenor, luxuriating in the melting brilliance of his own voice, letting this boon to the human race stream from him in cantilenas and high feats of virtuosity, notwithstanding their loudly proclaimed enthusiasm, they were without real love for the instrument, and content that anyone should operate it who was willing to take the trouble. It was Hans Castorp who kept the records in order, wrote the contents of each album on the inside of the cover, so that each piece might be found at once when it was wanted, and "ran" the instrument. Soon he did it with ease and dexterity. The others would have spoiled the plates by using worn-out needles, would have left them lying about on chairs, would have tried all sorts of imbecile tricks, playing some noble and stately piece of music at break-neck speed and pitch, or setting the indicator at zero, so that nothing but a hysterical trilling or a long expiring groan came from the instrument. They had tried all that already. Of course, they were ill; but they were also pretty crude. After a while, Hans Castorp simply took the key of the little cabinet that held the needles and albums, and kept it in his pocket, so that his permission must needs be asked if anyone desired to play.

Evening, after the social quarter-hour, when the guests were gone, was his best time. He remained in the salon, or returned stealthily thither, and played until deep in the night. He found there was less danger than he had feared of disturbing the nightly rest of the house; for the carrying power of this ghostly music proved relatively small. The vibrations, so surprisingly powerful in the near neighbourhood of the box, soon exhausted themselves, grew weak and eerie with distance, like all magic. Hans Castorp was alone among four walls with his wonder-box; with the florid performance of this truncated little coffin of violin-wood, this small dull-black temple, before the open double doors of which he sat with his hands folded in his lap, his head on one side, his mouth open, and let the harmonies flow over him.

These singers male and female whom he heard, he could not see; their corporeal part abode in America, in Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg. But let them dwell where they might, he had their better part, their voices, and might rejoice in the refining and abstracting process which did away with the disadvantages of closer personal contact, yet left them enough appeal to the sense, to permit of some command over their individualities, especially in the case of German artists. He could distinguish the dialect, the pronunciation, the local origin of these; the character of the voice betrayed something of the soul-stature of individuals, and the level of their intelligence could be guessed by the extent to which they had neglected or taken advantage of their opportunities. Hans Castorp writhed when they failed. He bit his lips in chagrin when the reproduction was technically faulty; he was on pins and needles when the first note of an often-used record gave a shrill or scratching sound—which happened more particularly with the difficult female voice. Still, when these things happened, he bore with them, for love makes us forbearing. Sometimes he bent over the whirring, pulsating mechanism as over a spray of lilac, rapt in a cloud of sweet sound; or stood before the open case, tasting the triumphant joy of the conductor who with raised hand brings the trumpets into place precisely at the right moment. And he had favourites in his treasure-house, certain vocal and instrumental numbers which he never tired of hearing.

One group of records contained the closing scenes of a certain brilliant opera, overflowing with melodic genius, by a great countryman of Herr Settembrini, the doyen of dramatic music in the south, who had written it to the order of an oriental prince, in the second half of the last century, to celebrate the completion of a great technical achievement which should bind the peoples of the earth together. Hans Castorp had learned something of the plot, knew the main lines of the tragic fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida; and when he heard it from his casket could understand well enough what they said. The incomparable tenor, the royal alto with the wonderful sob in her register, and the silver soprano he understood perhaps not every word they said, but enough, with his knowledge of the situation, and his sympathy in general for such situations, to feel a familiar fellow-feeling that increased every time he listened to this set of records, until it amounted to infatuation.

First came the scene of the explanation between Radames and Amneris: the king’s daughter has the captive brought before her, whom she loves, whom she would gladly save for her own, but that he has just thrown all away for the sake of a barbarian slave—fatherland and honour and all. Though he insists that in the depth of his soul honour remains untarnished. But this inner unimpairment avails him little, under the weight of all that indisputable guilt and crime, for he has become forfeit to the spiritual arm, which is inexorable toward human weakness, and will certainly make short work of him if he does not, at the last moment, abjure the slave, and throw himself into the royal arms of the alto with the sob in her register—who, so far as her voice went, richly deserved him. Amneris wrestles fervidly with the mellifluous but tragically blind and infatuated tenor, who sings nothing at all but "In vain" and "I cannot," when she addresses him with despairing pleas to renounce the slave, for that his own life is in the balance. "I cannot". . . "Once more, renounce her". . . "In vain thou pleadest"—and deathly obstinacy and anguished love blend together in a duet of extraordinary power and beauty, but absolutely no hope whatever. Then comes the terrifying repetition of the priestly formulas of condemnation, to the accompaniment of Amneris’s despair; they sound hollowly from below, and them the unhappy Radames does not reply to at all.

"Radames, Radames," sings the high-priest peremptorily, and points out the treason he has committed.

"Justify thyself," all the priests, in chorus, demand.

The high-priest calls attention to his silence, and they all hollowly declare him guilty.

"Radames, Radames," sings the high-priest again. "The camp thou hast left before the battle."

And again: "Justify thyself." "Lo, he is silent," the highly prejudiced presiding officer announces once more; and all the priests acain unanimously declare him guilty.

"Radames, Radames," for the third time comes the inexorable voice. "To Fatherland, to honour and thy King, thy oath thou hast broken"—"Justify thyself," resounded again. And finally, for the third time, "Fellonia," the priestly chorus proclaims, after noting that Radames has again remained absolutely silent. So then there is nothing for it: the chorus announces the evil-doer for judgment, proclaims that his doom is sealed, that he must die the death of a deserter and be buried alive beneath the temple of the offended deity.

The outraged feelings of Amneris at this priestly severity had to be imagined, for here the record broke off. Hans Castorp changed the plate, with as few movements as possible, his eyes cast down. When he seated himself again, it was to listen to the last scene of the melodrama, the closing duet of Radames and Aida, sung in the underground vaults, while above their heads in the temple the cruel and bigoted priests perform the service of their cult, spreading forth their arms, giving out a dull, murmurous sound. "Tu—in qitesta tomba?" comes the inexpressibly moving, sweet and at the same time heroic voice of Radames, in mingled horror and rapture. Yes, she has found her way to him, the beloved one for whose sake he has forfeited life and honour, she has awaited him here, to die with him; and the exchange of song between the two, broken at times by the muffled sound of the ceremonies above them, or blending and harmonizing with it, pierced the soul of our solitary night-watcher to its very depth, as much by reason of the circumstances as by the melodic expression of them. They sang of heaven, these two; but truly the songs were heavenly themselves, and heavenly sweet the singing of them. That melodic line resistlessly travelled by the voices, solo and unisono, of Radames and Aida; that simple, rapturous ascent, playing from tonic to dominant, as it mounts from the fundamental to the sustained note a half-tone before the octave, then turning back again to the fifth—it seemed to the listener the most rarefied, the most ecstatic he had ever heard. But he would have been less ravished by the sounds, had not the situation which gave them birth prepared his spirit to yield to the sweetness of the music. It was so beautiful, that Aida should have found her way to the condemned Radames, to share his fate for ever! The condemned one protested, quite properly, against the sacrifice of the precious life; but in his tender, despairing "No, no, troppo sei bella" was the intoxication of final union with her whom he had thought never to see again. It needed no effort of imagination to enable Hans Castorp to feel with Radames all this intoxication, all this gratitude. And what, finally, he felt, understood, and enjoyed, sitting there with folded hands, looking into the black slats of the jalousies whence it all issued, was the triumphant idealism of the music, of art, of the human spirit; the high and irrefragable power they had of shrouding with a veil of beauty the vulgar horror of actual fact. What was it, considered with the eye of reason, that was happening here? Two human beings, buried alive, their lungs full of pit gas, would here together—or, more horrible still, one after the other—succumb to the pangs of hunger, and thereafter the process of putrefaction would do its unspeakable work, until two skeletons remained, each totally indifferent and insensible to the other’s presence or absence. This was the real, objective fact—but a side, and a state of affairs quite distinct, of which idealism and emotion would have none, which was triumphantly put in the shade by the music and the beauty of the theme. The situation as it stood did not exist for either operatic Radames or operatic Aida. Their voices rose unisono to the blissful sustained note leading into the octave, as they assured each other that now heaven was opening, and the light of its eternity streaming forth before their yearning eyes. The consoling power of this aesthetic palliation did the listener good, and went far to account for the special love he bore this number of his programme.

He was wont to rest from these terrors and ecstasies in another number, brief, yet with a concentrated power of enchantment; peaceful, compared with the other, an idyll, yet raffiné, shaped and turned with all the subtlety and economy of the most modern art. It was an orchestral piece, of French origin, purely instrumental, a symphonic prelude, achieved with an instrumentation relatively small for our time, yet with all the apparatus of modern technique and shrewdly calculated to set the spirit a-dreaming.

Here is the dream Hans Castorp dreamed: he lay on his back in a sunny, flower-starred meadow, with his head on a little knoll, one leg drawn up, the other flung over—and those were goat’s legs crossed there before him. His fingers touched the stops of a little wooden pipe, which he played for the pure joy of it, his solitude on the meadow being complete. He held it to his lips, a reed pipe or little clarinet, and coaxed from it soothing head-tones, one after the other, just as they came, and yet in a pleasing sequence. The care-free piping rose toward the deep-blue sky, and beneath the sky stretched the branching, wind-tossed boughs of single ash-trees and birches whose leaves twinkled in the sun. But his feckless, day-dreaming, half-melodious pipe was far from being the only voice in the solitude. The hum of insects in the sun-warmed air above the long grass, the sunshine itself, the soft wind, the swaying tree-tops, the twinkling leaves—all these gentle vibrations of the midsummery peace set themselves to his simple piping, to give it a changeful, ever surprisingly choice harmonic meaning. Sometimes the symphonic accompaniment would fade far off and be forgot. Then goat-legged Hans would blow stoutly away, and by the naïve monotony of his piping lure back Nature’s subtly colourful, harmonious enchantment; until at length, after repeated intermission, she sweetly acceded. More and higher in-struments came in rapidly, one after another, until all the previously lacking richness and volume were reached and sustained in a single fugitive moment that yet held all eternity in its consummate bliss. The young faun was joyous on his summer meadow. No "Justify thyself," was here; no challenge, no priestly court-martial upon one who strayed away and was forgotten of honour. Forgetfulness held sway, a blessed hush, the innocence of those places where time is not; "slackness" with the best conscience in the world, the very apotheosis of rebuff to the Western world and that world’s insensate ardour for the "deed." The soothing effect of all which upon our night-walking music-maker gave this record a special value in his eyes.

There was a third. Or rather there were many, a consecutive group of three or four, a single tenor aria taking up almost half the space of a whole black rubber plate. Again it was French music—an opera Hans Castorp knew well, having seen and heard it repeatedly. Once, at a certain critical juncture now far in the past, he had made its action serve him for an allegory. The record took up the play at the second act, in the Spanish tavern, in crude Moorish architecture, a shawl-draped, roomy cellar like the floor of a barn. One heard Carmen’s voice, a little brusque, yet warm, and very infectious in its folk-quality, saying she would dance before the sergeant; one heard the rattle of castanets. But in the same moment, from a distance, the blare of trumpets swelled out, bugles giving a military signal, at which sound the little sergeant starts up. "One moment, stop!" he cries, and pricks up his ears like a horse. Why? What was it then, Carmen asked; and he: "Dost thou not hear?" astonished that the signal did not enter into her soul as into his. "Carmen, ‘tis the retreat!" It is the trumpets from the garrison, giving the summons. "The hour draws nigh for our return," says he, in operatic language. But the gipsy girl cannot understand, nor does she wish to. So much the better, she says, half stupidly, half pertly; she needs no castanets, for here is music dropped from the sky. Music to dance by, tra-la, tra-la! He is beside himself. His own disappointment retreats before his need to make clear to her how matters stand, and how no love-affair in the world can prevent obedience to this summons.

How is it she cannot understand anything so fixed, so fundamental? "I must away, the signal summons me, to quarters!" he cries, in despair over a lack of understanding that doubly burdens his heavy heart. And now, hear Carmen! She is furious. Outraged to the depths of her soul, her voice is sheer betrayed and injured love—or she makes it sound so. "To quarters? The signal?" And her heart? Her faithful, loving heart, just then, in its weakness, yes, she admitted, in its weakness, about to while away an hour with him in dance and song? "Tan-ta-ra!" And in a fury of scorn she sets her curled hand to her lips and imitates the horns: "Taran-tara!" And that was enough to make the fool leap up, on fire to be off! Good, then, let him be off, away with him! Here are helmet, sabre, and hanger—away, away, away with him, let him be off, let him be off, off to the barracks! He pleads for mercy. But she goes on, scorching him with her scorn, mocking him, taking his place and showing in pantomime how at the sound of the horn he lost what little sense he had. Tan-tara! The signal! O heaven! he will come too late! Let him go, let him be off, for the summons sounds, and he, like a fool, makes to go, at the very moment when she would dance for him. From this time, so she will account his love!

He is in torments. She cannot understand. The woman, the gipsy girl, cannot, will not understand. Will not—for in her rage and scorn speaks something more and larger than the moment and the personal: a hatred, a primeval hostility against that principle, which in the accents of these Spanish bugles—or French horns—called to the love-lorn little soldier. Over that it was her deepest, her inborn, her more than personal ambition to triumph. And she possesses a very simple means: she says that if he goes he does not love her—precisely that which José cannot bear to hear. He beseeches her to let him speak. She will not. Then he compels her—it is a deucedly serious moment, dull notes of fatality rise from the orchestra, a gloomy, ominous motif, which, as Hans Castorp knew, recurred throughout the opera, up to its fatal climax, and formed also the first phrase of the soldier’s aria, on the next plate, which had now to be inserted. "See here thy flow’ret treasured well"—how exquisitely José sang that! Hans Castorp played this single record over and over, and listened with the deepest participation. As far as its contents went, it did not fetch the action much further; but its imploring emotion was moving in the highest degree. The young soldier sang of the flower Carmen had tossed him at the beginning of their acquaintance, which had been everything to him, in the arrest he had suffered for love of her. He confesses: "Sometimes I cursed the hour I met thee, and tried all vainly to forget thee"—only next moment to rue his blasphemy, and pray on his knees to see her once more. And as he prayed—striking the same high note as just before on the "To see thee, Carmen," but now the orchestration lends all the resources of its enchantment to paint the anguish, the longing, the desperate tenderness, sweet despair, in the little soldier’s heart—ah, there she stood before his eyes, in all her fatal charm; and clearly, unmistakably, he felt that he was undone, for ever lost—on the word undone came a sobbing whole-tone grace-note to the first syllable—lost and for ever undone. "Then would an ecstasy steal o’er me," he despairingly asseverated in a recurrent melody repeated wailingly by the orchestra, rising two tones from the tonic and thence returning ardently to the fifth: "Carmen, my own," he repeats, with infinite tenderness but rather tasteless redundancy, going all the way up the scale to the sixth, in order to add: "My life, my soul belongs to thee"—after which he let his voice fall ten whole tones and in deepest emotion gave out the "Carmen, I love thee!" shuddering forth the words in anguish from a note sustained above changing harmonies, until the "thee" with the syllable before it was resolved in the full accord. "Yes, ah, yes," said Hans Castorp, with mournful satisfaction, and put on the finale: where they are all congratulating young José because the meeting with the officer has cut off his retreat, and now it only remains open to him to desert, as Carmen, to his horror, had before now demanded he should.

"Away to the mountains, away, away,

Share in our life, careless and gay,"
they sang in chorus—one could understand the words quite well:
"Freely to roam, the world our home,
Gaily to pass o’er land and sea
And enjoy, all else excelling,
Sweet liberty!"

"Yes, yes," he said, as before; and passed on to a fourth record, something very dear and good.

It is not our fault that it was French again, nor are we responsible for its once more striking the military note. It was an intermezzo, a solo number, the Prayer from Gounod’s Faust. The singer, a character warmly sympathetic to our young man’s heart, was called in the opera Valentine; but Hans Castorp named him by another and dearly familiar, sadness-evoking name; whose onetime bearer he had come largely to identify with the operatic character whom the wonder-box was making vocal—though the latter to be sure had a much more beautiful voice, a warm and powerful baritone. His song was in three parts: the first consisting of two closely related "corner"—strophes, religious in character, almost in the style of the Protestant chorale, and a middle-strophe, bold and chevaleresque, war-like, light-hearted, yet God-fearing too, and essentially French and military. The invisible character sang:

"Now the parting hour has come
I must leave my lovéd home

"

and turned under these circumstances to God, imploring Him to take under His special care and protection his beloved sister. He was going to the wars: the rhythm changed, grew brisk and lively, dull care and sorrow might go hang! He, the invisible singer, longed to be in the field, to stand in the thickest of the fray, where danger was hottest, and fling himself upon the foe—gallant, God-fearing, altogether French. But if, he sang, God should call him to Himself, then would He look down protectingly on "thee"—meaning the singer’s sister, as Hans Castorp was perfectly aware, yet the word thrilled him to the depths, and his emotion prolonged itself as the hero sang, to a mighty choral accompaniment:

"O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer!
Guard Marguerite within Thy shelt’ring care!"

There the record ceased. We have dwelt upon it because of Hans Castorp’s especial penchant; but also because it played a certain rôle on a later and most strange occasion. And now we come back to the fifth and last piece in his group of high fa-vourites: this time not French, but something especially and exemplarily German; not opera either, but a lied, one of those which are folk-song and masterpiece together, and from the combination receive their peculiar stamp as spiritual epitomes. Why should we beat about the bush? It was Schubert’s "Linden-tree," it was none other than the old, old favourite, "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore."

It was sung to piano accompaniment by a tenor voice; and the singer was a lad of parts and discernment, who knew how to render with great skill, fine musical feeling and finesse in recitative his simple yet consummate theme. We all know that the noble lied sounds rather differently when given as a concert-number from its rendition in the childish or the popular mouth. In its simplified form the melody is sung straight through; whereas in the original art-song, the key changes to minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, changes back again with beautiful effect to major in the fifth line; is dramatically resolved in the following "bitter blasts" and "facing the tempest"; and returns again only with the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated to finish out the melody. The truly compelling turn in the melody occurs three times, in its modulated second half, the third time in the repetition of the last half-strophe "Ay, onward, ever onward." The enchanting turn, which we would not touch too nearly in bold words, comes on the phrases "Upon its branches fair," "A message in my ear," "Yet ever in my breast"; and each time the tenor rendered them, in his clear, warm voice, with his excellent breathing-technique, with the suggestion of a sob, arid so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fashion; with an effect the singer knew how to heighten by head-tones of extraordinary ardour on the lines "I found my solace there," and "For rest and peace are here." In the repetition of the last line, "Here shouldst thou find thy rest," he sang the "shouldst thou" the first time yearningly, at full strength, but the second in the tenderest flute-tones.

[admin]

Part 6 of 8

So much for the song, and the rendering of it. For the earlier selections, we may flatter ourselves, perhaps, that we have been able to communicate to the reader some understanding, more or less precise, of Hans Castorp’s intimate emotional participation in the chosen numbers of his nightly programme. But to make clear what this last one, the old "Linden-tree," meant to him, is truly a ticklish endeavour; requiring great delicacy of emphasis if more harm than good is not to come of the undertaking.

Let us put it thus: a conception which is of the spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expression and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which, whether more or less completely, is mirrored in the first, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself "significant": betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth—which, consciously or unconsciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.

May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of the "meaningfulness" of his love and the object of it? We assert, we record, that he has. To him the song meant a whole world, a world which he must have loved, else he could not have so desperately loved that which it represented and symbolized to him. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps rather darkly—that he might have had a different fate if his temperament had been less accessible to the charms of the sphere of feeling, the general attitude of mind, which the lied so profoundly, so mystically epitomized. The truth was that his very destiny had been marked by stages, adventures, insights, and these flung up in his mind suitable themes for his "stock-taking" activities, and these, in their turn, ripened him into an intuitional critic of this sphere, of this its absolutely exquisite image, and his love of it. To the point even that he was quite capable of bringing up all three as objects of his conscientious scruples!

Only one totally ignorant of the tender passion will suppose that such scruples can detract from the object of love. On the contrary, they but give it spice. It is they which lend love the spur of passion, so that one might almost define passion as misgiving love. But wherein lay Hans Castorp’s conscientious and stocktaking misgiving, as to the ultimate propriety of his love for the enchanting lied and the world whose image it was? What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love?

It was death.

What utter and explicit madness! That glorious song! An indisputable masterpiece, sprung from the profoundest and holiest depths of racial feeling; a precious possession, the archetype of the genuine; embodied loveliness. What vile detraction!

Yes. Ah, yes! All very fine. Thus must every upright man speak. But for all that, behind this so lovely and pleasant artistic production stood—death. It had with death certain relations, which one might love, yet not without consciously, and in a "stock-taking" sense, acknowledging a certain illicit element in one’s love. Perhaps in its original form it was not sympathy with death; perhaps it was something very much of the people and racy of life; but spiritual sympathy with it was none the less sympathy with death. At first blush proper and pious enough, indisputably. But the issues of it were sinister.

What was all this he was thinking? He would not have listened to it from one of you. Sinister issues. Fantastical, dark-corner, misanthropic, torture-chamber thoughts, Spanish black and the ruff, lust not love—and these the issues of pure-eyed loveliness!

Unquestioning confidence, Hans Castorp knew, he had never placed in Herr Settembrini. But he remembered now an admonition the enlightened mentor had given him in past time, at the beginning of his hermetic career, on the subject of "spiritual backsliding" to darker ages. Perhaps it would be well to make cautious application of that wisdom to the present case. It was the backsliding which Herr Settembrini had characterized as "disease"; the epitome itself, the spiritual phase to which one backslid—that too would appeal to his pedagogic mind as "diseased"? And even so? Hans Castorp’s loved nostalgic lay, and the sphere of feeling to which it belonged—morbid? Nothing of the sort. They were the sanest, the homeliest in the world. And yet—This was a fruit, sound and splendid enough for the instant or so, yet extraordinarily prone to decay; the purest refreshment of the spirit, if enjoyed at the right moment, but the next, capable of spreading decay and corruption among men. It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was a miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of conscienceless beauty; but on cogent grounds regarded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully "taking stock" in its love of the organic; it was a subject for self-conquest at the definite behest of conscience.

Yes, self-conquest—that might well be the essence of triumph over this love, this soul-enchantment that bore such sinister fruit! Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or rather his prophetic half-thoughts soared high, as he sat there in night and silence before his truncated sarcophagus of music. They soared higher than his understanding, they were alchemistically enhanced. Ah, what power had this soul-enchantment! We were all its sons, and could achieve mighty things on earth, in so far as we served it. One need have no more genius, only much more talent, than the author of the "Lindenbaum," to be such an artist of soul-enchantment as should give to the song a giant volume by which it should subjugate the world. Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly kingdoms, solid, "progressive," not at all nostalgic—in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity. But its faithful son might still be he who consumed his life in self-conquest, and died, on his lips the new word of love which as yet he knew not how to speak. Ah, it was worth dying for, the enchanted lied! But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart.

These, then, were Hans Castorp’s favourite records.

Highly Questionable

EDHIN KROKOWSKI’S lectures had in the swift passage of the years taken an unexpected turn. His researches, which dealt with psycho-analysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character; but now, by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had passed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room—the prime attraction of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling, foreign voice, in frock-coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience—these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion. They had gone on to the extraordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telepathy, "dreaming true," and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener’s eyes would glitter darkly puzzles like that of the relation of matter to the psychical, yes, even the puzzle of life itself, which, it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health.

We say this because we consider it our duty to confound those flippant spirits who declared that Dr. Krokowski had resorted to mystification for the sake of redeeming his lectures from hopeless monotony; in other words, with purely emotional ends in view. Thus spoke the slanderous tongues which are everywhere to be found. True, the gentlemen at the Monday lectures flicked their ears harder than ever to make them hear; Fräulein Levi looked, if possible, even more like a wax figure wound up by machinery. But these effects were as legitimate as the train of thought pursued by the mind of the learned gentleman, and for that he might claim that it was not only consistent but even inevitable. The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connexions and associations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subsconscious, "occult" in the proper sense of the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed thus to characterize. But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recognizes the creative force of the psychical within the material—a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say pathological idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour, can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, proceeding from the principle of creative hysteria, is inclined, and very readily resolved, to answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg—a strife which assumes its extraordinary complexity from the fact that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.

Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon them organically, logically, legitimately—that fact cannot be over-emphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.

Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody, at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years, a flaxen-haired Dane, not from Copenhagen but from Odense-on-Fünen, where her father had a butter business. She herself had been in commercial life for a couple of years or so; with a sleeve-protector on her writing-arm she had sat over heavy books, perched on a revolving stool in a provincial branch of a city bank—and developed temperature. It was a trifling case, probably more suspected than real, though Elly was indeed fragile, fragile and obviously chlorotic—distinctly sympathetic too, giving one a yearning to lay one’s hand upon the flaxen head—as the Hofrat regularly did, when he spoke to her in the dining-room. A northern freshness emanated from her, a chaste and glassy, maidenly chaste atmosphere surrounded her, she was entirely lovable, with a pure, open look from childlike blue eyes, and a pointed, fine, High-German speech, slightly broken, with small typical mispronunciations. About her features there was nothing unusual. Her chin was too short. She sat at table with the Kleefeld, who mothered her.

Now this little Fräulein Brand, this little Elly, this friendly-natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop-shouldered young counter-jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed, at first sight of her transparent small personality, but which began to discover themselves after a few weeks; and these it became Dr. Krokowski’s affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.

The learned man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a designated book from the shelves and presenting it to this or that person—and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark that such games had not been the practice among the Berghof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide; certainly it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival.

The participants were nearly all old friends of ours, among them Hans Castorp. They showed themselves apt in greater or less degree—some of them were entirely incapable. But Elly Brand’s talent was soon seen to be surpassing, striking, unseemly. Her power of finding hidden articles was passed over with applause and admiring laughter. But when it came to a concerted series of actions, they were struck dumb. She did whatever they had covenanted she should do, did it directly she entered the room; with a gentle smile, without hesitation, without the help of music. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining-room, sprinkled it over Lawyer Paravant’s head, took him by the hand, led him to the piano and played the beginning of a nursery ditty with his forefinger; then brought him back to his seat, curtseyed, fetched a footstool and finally seated herself at his feet, all of that being precisely what they had cudgelled their brains to set her for a task.

She had been listening.

She reddened. With a sense of relief at her embarrassment they began in chorus to chide her; but she assured them she had not blushed in that sense. She had not listened, not outside, not at the door, truly, truly she had not!

Not outside, not at the door?

"Oh, no"—she begged their pardon. She had listened after she came back, in the room, she could not help it.

How not help it?

Something whispered to her, she said. It whispered and told her what to do, softly, but quite clearly and distinctly.

Obviously that was an admission. In a certain sense she was aware, she had confessed, that she had cheated. She should have said beforehand that she was no good to play such a game, if she had the advantage of being whispered to. A competition loses all sense if one of the competitors has unnatural advantages over the others. In a sporting sense, she was straightway disqualified—but disqualified in a way that made chills run up and down their backs. With one voice they called on Dr. Krokowski, they ran to fetch him, and he came. He was immediately at home in the situation, and stood there, sturdy, heartily smiling, in his very essence inviting confidence. Breathless they told him they had something quite abnormal for him, an omniscient, a girl with voices. Yes, yes? Only let them be calm, they should see. This was his native heath, quagmirish and uncertain footing enough for the rest of them, yet he moved upon it with assured tread. He asked questions, and they told him. Ah, there she was—come, my child, is it true, what they are telling me? And he laid his hand on her head, as scarcely anyone could resist doing. Here was much ground for interest, none at all for consternation. He plunged the gaze of his brown, exotic eyes deep into Ellen Brand’s blue ones, and ran his hand down over her shoulder and arm, stroking her gently. She returned his gaze with increasing submission, her head inclined slowly toward her shoulder and breast. Her eyes were actually beginning to glaze, when the master made a careless outward motion with his hand before her face. Immediately thereafter he expressed his opinion that everything was in perfect order, and sent the overwrought company off to the evening cure, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he said he wished to have a little chat.

A little chat. Quite so. But nobody felt easy at the word, it was just the sort of word Krokowski the merry comrade used by preference, and it gave them cold shivers. Hans Castorp, as he sought his tardy reclining-chair, remembered the feeling with which he had seen Elly’s illicit achievements and heard her shamefaced explanation; as though the ground were shifting under his feet, and giving him a slightly qualmish feeling, a mild seasickness. He had never been in an earthquake; but he said to himself that one must "experience a like sensation of unequivocal alarm. But he had also felt great curiosity at these fateful gifts of Ellen Brand; combined, it is true, with the knowledge that their field was with difficulty accessible to the spirit, and the doubt as to whether it was not barren, or even sinful, so far as he was concerned—all which did not prevent his feeling from being what in fact it actually was, curiosity. Like everybody else, Hans Castorp had, at his time of life, heard this and that about the mysteries of nature, or the supernatural. We have mentioned the clairvoyante great-aunt, of whom a melancholy tradition had come down. But the world of the supernatural, though theoretically and objectively he had recognized its existence, had never come close to him, he had never had any practical experience of it. And his aversion from it, a matter of taste, an aesthetic revulsion, a reaction of human pride—if we may use such large words in connexion with our modest hero—was almost as great as his curiosity. He felt beforehand, quite clearly, that such experiences whatever the course of them, could never be anything but in bad taste, unintelligible and humanly valueless. And yet he was on fire to go through them. He was aware that his alternative of "barren" or else "sinful," bad enough in itself, was in reality not an alternative at all, since the two ideas fell together, and calling a thing spiritually unavailable warbidden character. But the >placet experiri" planted in Hans Castorp’s mind by one who would surely and re-soundingly have reprobated any experimentation at all in this field, was planted firmly enough. By little and little his morality and his curiosity approached and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, which had already brought him pretty close to the forbidden field, what time he tasted the mystery of personalityfoo was almost military in character, in that it did not weakly avoid the forbidden, when it presented itself. Hans Castorp came to the final resolve not to avoid, but to stand his ground if it came to more developments in the case of Ellen Brand.

Dr. Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any further experimentation on the part of the laity upon Fräulein Brand’s mysterious gifts. He had pre-empted the child for his scientific use, held sittings with her in his analytical oubliette, hypnotized her, it was reported, in an effort to arouse and discipline her slumbering potentialities, to make researches into her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered and patronized the child, tried to do the same; and under the seal of secrecy a certain number of facts were ascertained, which under the same seal she spread throughout the house, even unto the porter’s lodge. She learned, for example, that he who—or that which—whispered the answers into the little one’s ear at games was called Holger. This Holger was the departed and etherealized spirit of a young man, the familiar, something like the guardian angel, of little Elly. So it was he who had told all that about the pinch of salt and the tune played with Lawyer Paravant’s forefinger? Yes, those spirit lips, so close to her ear that they were like a caress, and tickled a little, making her smile, had whispered her what to do. It must have been very nice when she was in school and had not prepared her lesson to have him tell her the answers. Upon this point Elly was silent. Later she said she thought he would not have been allowed. It would be forbidden to him to mix in such serious matters—and moreover, he would probably not have known the answers himself. It was learned, further, that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visions, visible and invisible. What sort of thing were they, now—invisible visions? Well, for example: when she was a girl of sixteen, she had been sitting one day alone in the living-room of her parents’ house, sewing at a round table, with her father’s dog Freia lying near her on the carpet. The table was covered with a Turkish shawl, of the kind old women wear three-cornered across their shoulders. It covered the table diagonally, with the corners somewhat hanging over. Suddenly Ellen had seen the corner nearest her roll slowly up. Soundlessly, carefully, and evenly it turned itself up, a good distance toward the centre of the table, so that the resultant roll was rather long; and while this was happening, the dog Freia started up wildly, bracing her forefeet, the hair rising on her body. She had stood on her hind legs, then run howling into the next room and taken refuge under a sofa. For a whole year thereafter she could not be persuaded to set foot in the living-room.

Was it Holger, Fräulein Kleefeld asked, who had rolled up the cloth? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about the affair? But since it was absolutely impossible to think anything about it, little Elly had thought nothing at all. Had she told her parents? No. That was odd. Though so sure she had thought nothing about it, Elly had had a distinct impression, in this and similar cases, that she must keep it to herself, make a profound and shamefaced secret of it. Had she taken it much to heart? No, not particularly. What was there about the rolling up of a cloth to take to heart? But other things she had—for example, the following:

A year before, in her parent’s house at Odense, she had risen, as was her custom, in the cool of the early morning and left her room on the ground-floor, to go up to the breakfast-room, in order to brew the morning coffee before her parents rose. She had almost reached the landing, where the stairs turned, when she saw standing there close by the steps her elder sister Sophie, who had married and gone to America to live. There she was, her physical presence, in a white gown, with, curiously enough, a garland of moist water-lilies on her head, her hands folded against one shoulder, and nodded to her sister. Ellen, rooted to the spot, half joyful, half terrified, cried out: "Oh, Sophie, is that you?" Sophie had nodded once again, and dissolved. She became gradually transparent, soon she was only visible as an ascending current of warm air, then not visible at all, so that Ellen’s path was clear. Later, it transpired that Sister Sophie had died of heart trouble in New Jersey, at that very hour.

Hans Castorp, when Fräulein Kleefeld related this to him, expressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the apparition here, the death there—after all, they did hang together. And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting, a table-tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr. Krokowski’s back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.

A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fräulein Kleefeld’s room. Besides the hostess, Fräulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there were only Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel, and Dr. Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium-sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wineglass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink. Fräulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gratefully received, as Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Levi, despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table-lamp, as Fräulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gathering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique. They waited for the glass to move.

That should happen with ease. The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the glass well ground, the pressure of the tremulous fingers, however lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its position in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked counters; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the resultant phenomenon would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act, whether or not they were aware of what they did; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the suppressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew beforehand—Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort, after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies’ palpitation and cold extremities, the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illusory or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form’s sake, and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the spirits of the departed to speak to them through the movement of the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as manifested themselves—he had already had a little experience at seances.

Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was almost dropping off. Ellen Brand rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the table-lamp.

Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked, and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again, and remained quiet.

They were all startled; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stöhr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no, the glass need not run to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.

"Is there an Intelligence present?" Herr Albin asked, severely directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. After some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.

"What is your name?" Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.

The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point to another, executing a zigzag by returning each time a little distance toward the centre of the table. It visited H, O, and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters as the pinch of salt and that, but knew better than to mix into lessons at school. He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them, they took counsel behind their hands, what they were to ask him. Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were a cross-examining counsel.

The glass was silent awhile. Then it staggered over to the P, zigzagged and returned to O. Great suspense. Dr. Ting-Fu giggled and said Holger must be a poet. Frau Stöhr began to laugh hysterically; which the glass appeared to resent, for after indicating the E it stuck and went no further. However, it seemed fairly clear that Dr. Ting-Fu was right.

What the deuce, so Holger was a poet? The glass revived, and superfluously, in apparent pridefulness, rapped yes. A lyric poet, Fräulein Kleefeld asked? She said ly—ric, as Hans Castorp involuntarily noted. Holger was disinclined to specify. He gave no new answer, merely spelled out again, this time quickly and unhesitatingly, the word poet, adding the T he had left off before.

Good, then, a poet. The constraint increased. It was a constraint that in reality had to do with manifestations on the part of uncharted regions of their own inner, their subjective selves, but which, because of the illusory, half-actual conditions of these manifestations, referred itself to the objective and external. Did Holger feel at home, and content, in his present state? Dreamily, the glass spelled out the word tranquil. Ah, tranquil. It was not a word one would have hit upon oneself, but after the glass spelled it out, they found it well chosen and probable. And how long had Holger been in this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would never have thought of, and dreamily answered; it was "A hastening while." Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A "hastening while" was the time-element Holger lived in: and of course he had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgotten how to use earthly terminology and standards of exact measurement. Fräulein Levi confessed her curi-osity to know how he looked, or had looked, more or less. Had he been a handsome youth? Herr Albin said she might ask him herself, he found the request beneath his dignity. So she asked if the spirit had fair hair.

"Beautiful, brown, brown curls," the glass responded, deliberately spelling out the word brown twice. There was much merriment over this. The ladies said they were in love with him. They kissed their hands at the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu, giggling, said Mister Holger must be rather vain.

Ah, what a fury the glass fell into! It ran like mad about the table, quite at random, rocked with rage, fell over and rolled into Frau Stöhr’s lap, who stretched out her arms and looked down at it pallid with fear. They apologetically conveyed it back to its station, and rebuked the Chinaman. How had he dared to say such a thing—did he see what his indiscretion had led to? Suppose Holger was up and off in his wrath, and refused to say another word! They addressed themselves to the glass with the extreme of courtesy. Would Holger not make up some poetry for them? He had said he was a poet, before he went to hover in the hastening while. Ah, how they all yearned to hear him versify! They would love it so!

And lo, the good glass yielded and said yes! Truly there was something placable and good-humoured about the way it tapped. And then Holger the spirit began to poetize, and kept it up, copiously, circumstantially, without pausing for thought, for dear knows how long. It seemed impossible to stop him. And what a surprising poem it was, this ventriloquistic effort, delivered to the admiration of the circle—stuff of magic, and shoreless as the sea of which it largely dealt. Sea-wrack in heaps and bands along the narrow strand of the broad-flung bay; an islanded coast, girt by steep, cliffy dunes. Ah, see the dim green distance faint and die into eternity, while beneath broad veils of mist in dull carmine and milky radiance the summer sun delays to sink! No word can utter how and when the watery mirror turned from silver into untold changeful colour-play, to bright or pale, to spreading, opaline and moonstone gleams—or how, mysteriously as it came, the voiceless magic died away. The sea slumbered. Yet the last traces of the sunset linger above and beyond. Until deep in the night it has not grown dark: a ghostly twilight reigns in the pine forests on the downs, bleaching the sand until it looks like snow. A simulated winter forest all in silence, save where an owl wings rustling flight. Let us stray here at this hour—so soft the sand beneath our tread, so sublime, so mild the night! Far beneath us the sea respires slowly, and murmurs a long whispering in its dream. Does it crave thee to see it again? Step forth to the sallow, glacierlike cliffs of the dunes, and climb quite up into the softness, that runs coolly into thy shoes. The land falls harsh and bushy steeply down to the pebbly shore, and still the last parting remnants of the day haunt the edge of the vanishing sky. Lie down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty little mound beside thee. Dost thou recognize it, this tiny flowing? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour-glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit’s hut. An open book, a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here, as time, its troubling, solemn, mysterious essence. . .

Thus Holger the spirit and his lyric improvisation, ranging with weird flights of thought from the familiar sea-shore to the cell of a hermit and the tools of his mystic contemplation. And there war more; more, human and divine, involved in daring and dreamlike terminology—over which the members of the little circle puzzled endlessly as they spelled it out; scarcely finding time for hurried though rapturous applause, so swiftly did the glass zigzag back and forth, so swiftly the words roll on and on. There was no distant prospect of a period, even at the end of an hour. The glass improvised inexhaustibly of the pangs of birth and the first kiss of lovers; the crown of sorrows, the fatherly goodness of God; plunged into the mysteries of creation, lost itself in other times and lands, in interstellar space; even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac; and would most certainly have gone on all night, if the conspirators had not finally taken their fingers from the glass, and expressing their gratitude to Holger, told him that must suffice them for the time, it had been wonderful beyond their wildest dreams, it was an everlasting pity there had been no one at hand to take it down, for now it must inevitably be forgotten, yes, alas, they had already forgotten most of it, thanks to its quality, which made it hard to retain, as dreams are. Next time they must appoint an amanuensis to take it down, and see how it would look in black and white, and read connectedly. For the moment, however, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hastening while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?

The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplexity—what should they ask? It was as in the fairy-story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world, much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was so difficult to choose. At length, as no one else seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.

Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp’s room. The whole seemed to be a direction to go slanting through Hans Castorp’s room, that was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door.

They all jumped. Was it a surprise? Was Dr. Krokowski standing without, come to break up the forbidden session? They looked up guiltily, expecting the betrayed one to enter. But then came a crashing knock on the middle of the table, as if to testify that the first knock too had come from the inside and not the outside of the room.

They accused Herr Albin of perpetrating this rather contemptible jest, but he denied it on his honour; and even without his word they all felt fairly certain no one of their circle was guilty. Was it Holger, then? They looked at Elly, suddenly struck by her silence. She was leaning back in her chair, with drooping wrists and finger-tips poised on the table-edge, her head bent on one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, her little mouth drawn down so that it looked even smaller, with a tiny smile that had something both silly and sly about it, and gazing into space with vacant, childlike blue eyes. They called to her, but she gave no sign of consciousness. And suddenly the night-table light went out.

Went out? Frau Stöhr, beside herself, made great outcry, for she had heard the switch turned. The light, then, had not gone out, but been put out, by a hand—a hand which one characterized afar off in calling it a "strange" hand. Was it Holger’s? Up to then he had been so mild, so tractable, so poetic—but now he seemed to degenerate into clownish practical jokes. Who knew that a hand which could so roundly thump doors and tables, and knavishly turn off lights, might not next catch hold of someone’s throat? They called for matches, for pocket torches. Fräulein Levi shrieked out that someone had pulled her front hair. Frau Stöhr made no bones of calling aloud on God in her distress: "O Lord, forgive me this once!" she moaned, and whimpered for mercy instead of justice, well knowing she had tempted hell. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who hit on the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light; the room was brilliantly illuminated straightway. They now established that the lamp on the night-table had not gone out by chance, but been turned off, and only needed to have the switch turned back in order to burn again. But while this was happening, Hans Castorp made on his own account a most singular discovery, which might be regarded as a personal attention on the part of the dark powers here manifesting themselves with such childish perversity. A light object lay in his lap; he discovered it to be the "souvenir" which had once so surprised his uncle when he lifted it from his nephew’s table: the glass diapositive of Clavdia Chauchat’s x-ray portrait. Quite uncontestably he, Hans Castorp, had not carried it into the room.

He put it into his pocket, unobservably. The others were busied about Ellen Brand, who remained sitting in her place in the same state, staring vacantly, with that curious simpering expression. Herr Albin blew in her face and imitated the upward sweeping motion of Dr. Krokowski, upon which she roused, and incontinently wept a little. They caressed and comforted her, kissed her on the forehead and sent her to bed. Fräulein Levi said she was willing to sleep with Frau Stöhr, for that abject creature confessed she was too frightened to go to bed alone. Hans Castorp, with his retrieved property in his breast pocket, had no objection to finishing off the evening with a cognac in Herr Albin’s room. He had discovered, in fact, that this sort of thing affected neither the heart nor the spirits so much as the nerves of the stomach—a retroactive effect, like seasickness, which sometimes troubles the traveller with qualms hours after he has set foot on shore.

His curiosity was for the time quenched. Holger’s poem had not been so bad; but the anticipated futility and vulgarity of the scene as a whole had been so unmistakable that he felt quite willing to let it go at these few vagrant sparks of hell-fire. Herr Settembrini, to whom he related his experiences, strengthened this conviction with all his force. "That," he cried out, "was all that was lacking. Oh, misery, misery!" And cursorily dismissed little Elly as a thorough-paced impostor.

His pupil said neither yea nor nay to that. He shrugged his shoulders, and expressed the view that we did not seem to be altogether sure what constituted actuality, nor yet, in consequence, what imposture. Perhaps the boundary line was not constant. Perhaps there were transitional stages between the two, grades of actuality within nature; nature being as she was, mute, not susceptible of valuation, and thus defying distinctions which in any case, it seemed to him, had a strongly moralizing flavour. What did Herr Settembrini think about "delusions"; which were a mixture of actuality and dream, perhaps less strange in nature than to our crude, everyday processes of thought? The mystery of life was literally bottomless. What wonder, then, if sometimes illusions arose—and so on and so forth, in our hero’s genial, confiding, loose and flowing style.

Herr Settembrini duly gave him a dressing-down, and did produce a temporary reaction of the conscience, even something like a promise to steer clear in the future of such abominations. "Have respect," he adjured him, "for your humanity, Engineer! Confide jn your God-given power of clear thought, and hold in abhorrence these luxations of the brain, these miasmas of the spirit! Delusions? The mystery of life? Caro mío! When the moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degenerates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgment, of the creative deed: the process of decay sets in, moral scepsis, and does its deadly work." Man, he went on to say, was the measure of things. His right to recognize and to distinguish between good and evil, reality and counterfeit, was indefeasible; woe to them who dared to lead him astray in his belief in this creative right. Better for them that a millstone be hanged about their necks and that they be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Hans Castorp nodded assent—and in fact did for a while keep aloof from all such undertakings. He heard that Dr. Krokowski had begun holding seances with Ellen Brand in his subterranean cabinet, to which certain chosen ones of the guests were invited. But he nonchalantly put aside the invitation to join them—naturally not without hearing from them and from Krokowski himself something about the success they were having. It appeared that there had been wild and arbitrary exhibitions of power, like those in Fräulein Kleefeld’s room: knockings on walls and table, the turning off of the lamp, and these as well as further manifestations were being systematically produced and investigated, with every possible safeguarding of their genuineness, after Comrade Krokowski had practised the approved technique and put little Elly into her hypnotic sleep. They had discovered that the process was facilitated by music; and on these evenings the gramophone was pre-empted by the circle and carried down into the basement. But the Czech Wenzel who operated it there was a not unmusical man, and would surely not injure or misuse the instrument; Hans Castorp might hand it over without misgiving. He even chose a suitable album of records, containing light music, dances, small overtures and suchlike tunable trifles. Little Elly made no demands on a higher art, and they served the purpose admirably.

To their accompaniment, Hans Castorp learned, a handkerchief had been lifted from the floor, of its own motion, or, rather, that of the "hidden hand" in its folds. The doctor’s waste-paper-basket had risen to the ceiling; the pendulum of a clock been alternately stopped and set going again "without anyone touching it," a table-bell "taken" and rung—these and a good many other turbid and meaningless phenomena. The learned master of ceremonies was in the happy position of being able to characterize them by a Greek word, very scientific and impressive. They were, so he explained in his lectures and in private conversations, "telekinetic" phenomena, cases of movement from a distance; he associated them with a class of manifestations which were scientifically known as materializations, and toward which his plans and at-tempts with Elly Brand were directed.

He talked to them about biopsychical projections of subconscious complexes into the objective; about transactions of which the medial constitution, the somnambulic state, was to be regarded as the source; and which one might speak of as objectivated dream-concepts, in so far as they confirmed an ideoplastic property of nature, a power, which under certain conditions appertained to thought, of drawing substance to itself, and clothing itself in temporary reality. This substance streamed out from the body of the medium, and developed extraneously into biological, living end-organs, these being the agencies which had performed the extraordinary though meaningless feats they witnessed in Dr. Krokowski’s laboratory. Under some conditions these agencies might be seen or touched, the limbs left their impression in wax or plaster. But sometimes the matter did not rest with such corporealization. Under certain conditions, human heads, faces, full-length phantoms manifested themselves before the eyes of the experimenters, even within certain limits entered into contact with them. And here Dr. Krokowski’s doctrine began, as it were, to squint; to look two ways at once. It took on a shifting and fluctuating character, like the method of treatment he had adopted in his exposition of the nature of love. It was no longer plain-sailing, scientific treatment of the objectively mirrored subjective content of the medium and her passive auxiliaries. It was a mixing in the game, at least sometimes, at least half and half, of entities from without and beyond. It dealt—at least possibly, if not quite admittedly—with the non-vital, with existences that took advantage of a ticklish, mysteriously and momentarily favouring chance to return to substantiality and show themselves to thair summoners—in brief, with the spiritualistic invocation of the departed.

Such manifestations it was that Comrade Krokowski, with the assistance of his followers, was latterly striving to produce; sturdily, with his ingratiating smile, challenging their cordial confidence, thoroughly at home, for his own person, in this questionable morass of the subhuman, and a born leader for the timid and compunctious in the regions where they now moved. He had laid himself out to develop and discipline the extraordinary powers of Ellen Brand and, from what Hans Castorp could hear, fortune smiled upon his efforts. Some of the party had felt the touch of materialized hands. Lawyer Paravant had received out of transcendency a sounding slap on the cheek, and had countered with scientific alacrity, yes, had even eagerly turned the other cheek, heedless of his quality as gentleman, jurist, and one-time member of a duelling corps, all of which would have constrained him to quite a different line of conduct had the blow been of terrestrial origin. A. K. Ferge, that good-natured martyr, to whom all "highbrow" thought was foreign, had one evening held such a spirit hand in his own, and established by sense of touch that it was whole and well shaped. His clasp had been heart-felt to the limits of respect; but it had in some indescribable fashion escaped him. A considerable period elapsed, some two months and a half of biweekly sittings, before a hand of other-worldly origin, a young man’s hand, it seemed, came fingering over the table, in the red glow of the paper-shaded lamp, and, plain to the eyes of all the circle, left its imprint in an earthenware basin full of flour. And eight days later a troop of Krokowski’s workers, Herr Albin, Frau Stöhr, the Magnuses, burst in upon Hans Castorp where he sat dozing toward midnight in the biting cold of his balcony, and witn every mark of distracted and feverish delight, their words tumbling over one another, announced that they had seen Elly’s Holger—he had showed his head over the shoulder of the little medium, and had in truth "beautiful brown, brown curls." He had smiled with such unforgettable, gentle melancholy as he vanished!

Hans Castorp found this lofty melancholy scarcely consonant with Holger’s other pranks, his impish and simple-minded tricks, the anything but gently melancholy slap he had given Lawyer Paravant and the latter had pocketed up. It was apparent that one must not demand consistency of conduct. Perhaps they were dealing with a temperament like that of the little hunch-backed man in the nursery song, with his pathetic wickedness and his craving for intercession. Holger’s admirers had no thought for all this. What they were determined to do was to persuade Hans Castorp to rescind his decree; positively, now that everything was so brilliantly in train, he must be present at the next seance. Elly, it seemed, in her trance had promised to materialize the spirit of any departed person the circle chose.

Any departed person they chose? Hans Castorp still showed reluctance. But that it might be any person they chose occupied his mind to such an extent that in the next three days he came to a different conclusion. Strictly speaking it was not three days, but as many minutes, which brought about the change. One evening, in a solitary hour in the music-room, he played again the record that bore the imprint of Valentine’s personality, to him so profoundly moving. He sat there listening to the soldierly prayer of the hero departing for the field of honour:

"If God should summon me away,
Thee I would watch and guard alway,
O Marguerite!"

and, as ever, Hans Castorp was filled by emotion at the sound, an emotion which this time circumstances magnified and as it were condensed into a longing; he thought: "Barren and sinful or no, it would be a marvellous thing, a darling adventure! And he, as I know him, if he had anything to do with it, would not mind." He recalled that composed and liberal "Certainly, of course," he had heard in the darkness of the x-ray laboratory, when he asked Joachim if he might commit certain optical indiscretions.

The next morning he announced his willingness to take part m the evening seance; and half an hour after dinner joined the group of familiars of the uncanny, who, unconcernedly chatting, took their way down to the basement. They were all old inhabitants, the oldest of the old, or at least of long standing in the group, like the Czech Wenzel and Dr. Ting-Fu; Ferge and Wehsal, Lawyer Paravant, the ladies Kleefeld and Levi, and, in addition, those persons who had come to his balcony to announce to him the apparition of Holger’s head, and of course the medium, Elly Brand.

That child of the north was already in the doctor’s charge when Hans Castorp passed through the door with the visiting-card: the doctor, in his black tunic, his arm laid fatherly across her shoulder, stood at the foot of the stair leading from the basement floor and welcomed the guests, and she with him. Everybody greeted everybody else, with surprising hilarity and expansiveness—it seemed to be the common aim to keep the meeting pitched in a key free from all solemnity or constraint. They talked in loud, cheery voices, poked each other in the ribs, showed everyway how perfectly at ease they felt. Dr. Krokowski’s yellow teeth kept gleaming in his beard with every hearty, confidence-inviting smile; he repeated his "Wel—come" to each arrival, with special fervour in Hans Castorp’s case—who, for his part, said nothing at all, and whose manner was hesitating. "Courage, comrade," Krokowski’s energetic and hospitable nod seemed to be saying, as he gave the young man’s hand an almost violent squeeze. No need here to hang the head, here is no cant nor sanctimoniousness, nothing but the blithe and manly spirit of disinterested research. But Hans Castorp felt none the better for all this pantomime. He summed up the resolve formed by the memories of the x-ray cabinet; but the train of thought

hardly fitted with his present frame; rather he was reminded of the peculiar and unforgettable mixture of feelings—nervousness, pridefulness, curiosity, disgust, and awe—with which, years ago, he had gone with some fellow students, a little tipsy, to a brothel in Sankt-Pauli.

As everyone was now present, Dr. Krokowski selected two controls—they were, for the evening, Frau Magnus and the ivory Levi—to preside over the physical examination of the medium, and they withdrew to the next room. Hans Castorp and the remaining nine persons awaited in the consulting-room the issue of the austerely scientific procedure—which was invariably without any result whatever. The room was familiar to him from the hours he had spent here, behind Joachim’s back, in conversation with the psycho-analyst. It had a writing-desk, an arm-chair and an easy-chair for patients on the left, the window side; a library of reference-books on shelves to right and left of the side door, and in the further right-hand corner a chaise-longue, covered with oilcloth, separated by a folding screen from the desk and chairs. The doctor’s glass instrument-case also stood in that corner, in another was a bust of Hippocrates, while an engraving of Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson" hung above the gas fire-place on the right side wall. It was an ordinary consulting-room, like thousands more; but with certain temporary special arrangements. The round ma-hogany table whose place was in the centre of the room, beneath the electric chandelier, upon the red carpet that covered most of the floor, had been pushed forward against the left-hand wall, beneath the plaster bust; while a smaller table, covered with a cloth and bearing a red-shaped lamp, had been set obliquely near the gas fire, which was lighted and giving out a dry heat. Another electric bulb, covered with red and further with a black gauze veil, hung above the table. On this table stood certain notorious objects: two table-bells, of different patterns, one to shake and one to press, the plate with flour, and the paper-basket. Some dozen chairs of different shapes and sizes surrounded the table in a half-circle, one end of which was formed by the foot of the chaise-longue, the other ending near the centre of the room, beneath the ceiling light. Here, in the neighbourhood of the last chair, and about half-way to the door, stood the gramophone; the album of light trifles lay on a chair next it. Such were the arrangements. The red lamps were not yet lighted, the ceiling light was shedding an effulgence as of common day, for the window, above the narrow end of the writing-desk, was shrouded in a dark covering, with its open-work cream-coloured blind hanging down in front of it.

After ten minutes the doctor returned with the three ladies. Elly’s outer appearance had changed: she was not wearing her ordinary clothes, but a night-gownlike garment of white crêpe, girdled about the waist by a cord, leaving her slender arms bare. Her maidenly breasts showed themselves soft and unconfined beneath this garment, it appeared she wore little else.

They all hailed her gaily. "Hullo, Elly! How lovely she looks again! A perfect fairy! Very pretty, my angel!" She smiled at their compliments to her attire, probably well knowing it became her. "Preliminary control negative," Krokowski announced. "Let’s get to work, then, comrades," he said. Hans Castorp, conscious of being disagreeably affected by the doctor’s manner of address, was about to follow the example of the others, who, shouting, chattering, slapping each other on the shoulders, were settling themselves in the circle of chairs, when the doctor addressed him personally.

"My friend," said he, "you are a guest, perhaps a novice, in our midst, and therefore I should like, this evening, to pay you special honour. I confide to you the control of the medium. Our practice is as follows." He ushered the young man toward the end of the circle next the chaise-longue and the screen, where Elly was seated on an ordinary cane chair, with her face turned rather toward the entrance door than to the centre of the room. He himself sat down close in front of her in another such chair, and clasped her hands, at the same time holding both her knees firmly between his own. "Like that," he said, and gave his place to Hans Castorp, who assumed the same position. "You’ll grant that the arrest is complete. But we shall give you assistance too. Fräulein Kleefeld, may I implore you to lend us your aid?" And the lady thus courteously and exotically entreated came and sat down, clasping Elly’s fragile wrists, one in each hand.

[admin]

Part 7 of 8

Unavoidable that Hans Castorp should look into the face of the young prodigy, fixed as it was so immediately before his own. Their eyes met—but Elly’s slipped aside and gazed with natural self-consciousness in her lap. She was smiling a little affectedly, with her lips slightly pursed, and her head on one side, as she had at the wineglass seance. And Hans Castorp was reminded, as he saw her, of something else: the look on Karen Karstedt’s face, a smile just like that, when she stood with Joachim and himself and regarded the unmade grave in the Dorf graveyard.

The circle had sat down. They were thirteen persons; not counting the Czech Wenzel, whose function it was to serve Polyhymnia, and who accordingly, after putting his instrument in readiness, squatted with his guitar at the back of the circle. Dr. Krokowski sat beneath the chandelier, at the other end of the row, after he had turned on both red lamps with a single switch, and turned off the centre light. A darkness, gently aglow, lay over the room, the corners and distances were obscured. Only the surface of the little table and its immediate vicinity were illumined by a pale rosy light. During the next few minutes one scarcely saw one’s neighbours; then their eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the darkness and made the best use of the light they had—which was slightly reinforced by the small dancing flames from the chimney-piece.

The doctor devoted a few words to this matter of the lighting, and excused its lacks from the scientific point of view. They must take care not to interpret it in the sense of deliberate mystification and scene-setting. With the best will in the world they could not, unfortunately, have more light for the present. The nature of the powers they were to study would not permit of their being developed with white light, it was not possible thus to produce the desired conditions. This was a fixed postulate, with which they must for the present reckon. Hans Castorp, for his part, was quite satisfied. He liked the darkness, it mitigated the queerness of the situation. And in its justification he recalled the darkness of the x-ray room, and how they had collected themselves, and "washed their eyes" in it, before they "saw."

The medium, Dr. Krokowski went on, obviously addressing his words to Hans Castorp in particular, no longer needed to be put in the trance by the physician. She fell into it herself, as the control would see, and once she had done so, it would be her guardian spirit Holger, who spoke with her voice, to whom, and not to her, they should address themselves. Further, it was an error, which might result in failure, to suppose that one must bend mind or will upon the expected phenomena. On the contrary, a slightly diffused attention, with conversation, was recommended. And Hans Castorp was cautioned, whatever else he did, not to lose control of the medium’s extremities.

"We will now form the chain," finished Dr. Krokowski; and they did so, laughing when they could not find each other’s hands in the dark. Dr. Ting-Fu, sitting next Hermine Kleefeld, laid his right hand on her shoulder and reached his left to Herr Wehsal, who came next. Beyond him were Herr and Frau Magnus, then A. K. Ferge; who, if Hans Castorp mistook not, held the hand of the ivory Levi on his right—and so on. "Music!" the doctor commanded, and behind him his neighbour the Czech set the instrument in motion and placed the needle on the disk. "Talk!" Krokowski bade them, and as the first bars of an overture by Millöcker were heard, they obediently bestirred themselves to make conversation, about nothing at all: the winter snow-fall, the last course at dinner, a newly arrived patient, a departure, "wild" or otherwise—artificially sustained, half drowned by the music, and lapsing now and again. So some minutes passed.

The record had not run out before Elly shuddered violently. A trembling ran through her, she sighed, the upper part of her body sank forward so that her forehead rested against Hans Castorp’s, and her arms, together with those of her guardians, began to make extraordinary pumping motions to and fro.

"Trance," announced the Kleefeld. The music stopped, so also the conversation. In the abrupt silence they heard the baritone drawl of the doctor. "Is Holger present?"

Elly shivered again. She swayed in her chair. Then Hans Castorp felt her press his two hands with a quick, firm pressure.

"She pressed my hands," he informed them.

"He," the doctor corrected him. "He pressed your hands. He is present. Wel—come, Holger," he went on with unction. "Wel—come, friend and fellow comrade, heartily, heartily wel—come. And remember, when you were last with us," he went on, and Hans Castorp remarked that he did not use the form of address common to the civilized West—"you promised to make visible to our mortal eyes some dear departed, whether brother soul or sister soul, whose name should be given to you by our circle. Are you willing? Do you feel yourself able to perform what you promised?"

Again Elly shivered. She sighed and shivered as the answer came. Slowly she carried her hands and those of her guardians to her forehead, where she let them rest. Then close to Hans Castorp’s ear she whispered: "Yes."

The warm breath immediately at his ear caused in our friend that phenomenon of the epidermis popularly called goose-flesh, the nature of which the Hofrat had once explained to him. We mention this in order to make a distinction between the psychical and the purely physical. There could scarcely be talk of fear, for our hero was in fact thinking: "Well, she is certainly biting off more than she can chew!" But then he was straightway seized with a mingling of sympathy and consternation springing from the confusing and illusory circumstance that a blood-young creature, whose hands he held in his, had just breathed a yes into his ear.

"He said yes," he reported, and felt embarrassed.

"Very well, then, Holger," spoke Dr. Krokowski. "We shall take you at your word. We are confident you will do your part. The name of the dear departed shall shortly be communicated to you. Comrades," he turned to the gathering, "out with it, now! Who has a wish? Whom shall our friend Holger show us?"

A silence followed. Each waited for the other to speak. Individually they had probably all questioned themselves, in these last few days; they knew whither their thoughts tended. But the calling back of the dead, or the desirability of calling them back, was a ticklish matter, after all. At bottom, and boldly confessed, the desire does not exist; it is a misapprehension precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as we should soon see if nature once let it happen. What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

This was what they were all obscurely feeling; and since it was here simply a question not of an actual return, but merely a theatrical staging of one, in which they should only see the departed, no more, the thing seemed humanly unthinkable; they were afraid to look into the face of him or her of whom they thought, and each one would willingly have resigned his right of choice to the next. Hans Castorp too, though there was echoing in his ears that large-hearted "Of course, of course" out of the past, held back, and at the last moment was rather inclined to pass the choice on. But the pause was too long; he turned his head toward their leader, and said, in a husky voice: "I should like to see my departed cousin, Joachim Ziemssen."

That was a relief to them all. Of those present, all excepting Dr. Ting-Fu, Wenzel, and the medium had known the person asked for. The others, Ferge, Wehsal, Herr Albin, Paravant, Herr and Frau Magnus, Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Levi, and the Kleefeld, loudly announced their satisfaction with the choice. Krokowski himself nodded well pleased, though his relations with Joachim had always been rather cool, owing to the latter’s reluctance in the matter of psycho-analysis.

"Very good indeed," said the doctor. "Holger, did you hear? The person named was a stranger to you in life. Do you know him in the Beyond, and are you prepared to lead him hither?"

Immense suspense. The sleeper swayed, sighed, and shuddered. She seemed to be seeking, to be struggling; falling this way and that, whispering now to Hans Castorp, now to the Kleefeld, something they could not catch. At last he received from her hands the pressure that meant yes. He announced himself to have done so, and—

"Very well, then," cried Dr. Krokowski. "To work, Holger! Music," he cried. "Conversation!" and he repeated the injunction that no fixing of the attention, no strained anticipation was in place, but only an unforced and hovering expectancy.

And now followed the most extraordinary hours of our hero’s young life. Yes, though his later fate is unclear, though at a certain moment in his destiny he will vanish from our eyes, we may assume them to have been the most extraordinary he ever spent.

They were hours—more than two of them, to be explicit, counting in a brief intermission in the efforts on Holger’s part which now began, or rather, on the girl Elly’s—of work so hard and so prolonged that they were all toward the end inclined to be fainthearted and despair of any result; out of pure pity, too, tempted to resign an attempt which seemed pitilessly hard, and beyond the delicate strength of her upon whom it was laid. We men, if we do not shirk our humanity, are familiar with an hour of life when we know this almost intolerable pity, which, absurdly enough no one else can feel, this rebellious "Enough, no more!" which is wrung from us, though it is not enough, and cannot or will not be enough, until it comes somehow or other to its appointed end. The reader knows we speak of our husband- and fatherhood, of the act of birth, which Elly’s wrestling did so unmistakably resemble that even he must recognize it who had never passed through this experience, even our young Hans Castorp; who, not having shirked life, now came to know, in such a guise, this act, so full of organic mysticism. In what a guise! To what an end! Under what circum-stances! One could not regard as anything less than scandalous the sights and sounds in this red-lighted lying-in chamber, the maidenly form of the pregnant one, bare-armed, in flowing night-robe; and then by contrast the ceaseless and senseless gramophone music, the forced conversation which the circle kept up at command, the cries of encouragement they ever and anon directed at the struggling one: "Hullo, Holger! Courage, man! It’s coming, just keep it up, let it come, that’s the way!" Nor do we except the person and situation of the "husband"—if we may regard in that light our young friend, who had indeed formed such a wish—sitting there, with the knees of the little "mother" between his own, holding in his her hands, which were as wet as once little Leila’s, so that he had constantly to be renewing his hold, not to let them slip.

For the gas fire in the rear of the circle radiated great heat.

Mystical, consecrate? Ah, no, it was all rather noisy and vulgar, there in the red glow, to which they had now so accustomed their eyes that they could see the whole room fairly well. The music and shouting were so like the revivalistic methods of the Salvation Army, they even made Hans Castorp think of the comparison, albeit he had never attended at a celebration by these cheerful zealots. It was in no eerie or ghostly sense that the scene affected the sympathetic one as mystic or mysterious, as conducing to solemnity; it was rather natural, organic—by virtue of the intimate association we have already referred to. Elly’s exertions came in waves, after periods of rest, during which she hung sidewise from her chair in a totally relaxed and inaccessible condition, described by Dr. Krokowski as "deep trance." From this she would start up with a moan, throw herself about, strain and wrestle with her captors, whisper feverish, disconnected words, seem to be trying, with sidewise, jerking movements, to expel something; she would gnash her teeth, once even fastened them in Hans Castorp’s sleeve.

This had gone on for more than an hour when the leader found it to the interest of all concerned to grant a brief intermission. The Czech Wenzel, who had introduced an enlivening variation by closing the gramophone and striking up very expertly on his guitar, laid that instrument aside. They all drew a long breath and broke the circle. Dr. Krokowski strode over to the wall and switched on the ceiling lamp; the light flashed up glaringly, making them all blink. Elly, bent forward, her face almost in her lap, slumbered. She was busy too, absorbed in the oddest activity, with which the others appeared familiar, but which Hans Castorp watched with attentive wonder. For some minutes together she moved the hollow of her hand to and fro in the region of her hips: carried the hand away from her body and then with scooping, raking motion drew it towards her, as though gathering something and pulling it in. Then, with a series of starts, she came to herself, blinked in her turn at the light with sleep-stiffened eyes and smiled.

She smiled affectedly, rather remotely. In truth, their solicitude seemed wasted; she did not appear exhausted by her efforts. Perhaps she retained no memory of them. She sat down in the chair reserved for patients, by the writing-desk near the window, be-tween the desk and the screen about the chaise-longue; gave the chair a turn so that she could support her elbow on the desk and look into the room; and remained thus, receiving their sympathetic glances and encouraging nods, silent during the whole intermission, which lasted fifteen minutes.

It was a beneficent pause, relaxed, and filled with peaceful satisfaction in respect of work already accomplished. The lids of cigarette-cases snapped, the men smoked comfortably, and standing in groups discussed the prospects of the seance. They were far from despairing or anticipating a negative result to their efforts. Signs enough were present to prove such doubting uncalled for. Those sitting near the doctor, at the far end of the row, agreed that they had several times felt, quite unmistakably, that current of cool air which regularly whenever manifestations were under way streamed in a definite direction from the person of the medium. Others had seen light-phenomena, white spots, moving conglobations of forces showing themselves at intervals against the screen. In short, no faint-heartedness! No looking backward now they had put their hands to the plough. Holger had given his word, they had no call to doubt that he would keep it.

Dr. Krokowski signed for the resumption of the sitting. He led Elly back to her martyrdom and seated her, stroking her hair. The others closed the circle. All went as before. Hans Castorp suggested that he be released from his post of first control, but Dr. Krokowski refused. He said he laid great stress on excluding, by immediate contact, every possibility of misleading manipulation on the part of the medium. So Hans Castorp took up again his strange position vis-à-vis to Elly; the white light gave place to rosy twilight, the music began again, the pumping motions; this time it was Hans Castorp who announced "trance." The scandalous lying-in proceeded.

With what distressful difficulty! It seemed unwilling to take its course—how could it? Madness! What maternity was this, what delivery, of what should she be delivered? "Help, help," the child moaned, and her spasms seemed about to pass over into that dangerous and unavailing stage obstetricians call eclampsia. She called at intervals on the doctor, that he should put his hands on her. He did so, speaking to her encouragingly. The magnetic effect, if such it was, strengthened her to further efforts.

Thus passed the second hour, while the guitar was strummed or the gramophone gave out the contents of the album of light music into the twilight to which they had again accustomed their vision. Then came an episode, introduced by Hans Castorp. He supplied a stimulus by expressing an idea, a wish; a wish he had cherished from the beginning, and might perhaps have profitably expressed before now. Elly was lying with her face on their joined hands, in "deep trance." Herr Wenzel was just changing or reversing the record when our friend summoned his resolution and said he had a suggestion to make, of no great importance, yet perhaps—possibly—of some avail. He had—that is, the house possessed among its volumes of records—a certain song, from Gounod’s Faust, Valentine’s Prayer, baritone with orchestral ac-companiment, very appealing. He, the speaker, thought they might try the record.

"Why that particular one?" the doctor asked out of the darkness.

"A question of mood. Matter of feeling," the young man responded. The mood of the piece in question was peculiar to itself, quite special—he suggested they should try it. Just possible, not out of the question, that its mood and atmosphere might shorten their labours.

"Is the record here?" the doctor inquired.

No, but Hans Castorp could fetch it at once.

"What are you thinking of?" Krokowski promptly repelled the idea. What? Hans Castorp thought he might go and come again and take up his business where he had left it off? There spoke the voice of utter inexperience. Oh, no, it was impossible. It would upset everything, they would have to begin all over. Scientific exactitude forbade them to think of any such arbitrary going in and out. The door was locked. He, the doctor, had the key in his pocket. In short, if the record was not now in the room—

He was still talking when the Czech threw in, from the gramophone: "The record is here."

"Here?" Hans Castorp asked.

"Yes, here it is, Faust, Valentine’s Prayer." It had been stuck by mistake in the album of light music, not in the green album of arias, where it belonged; quite by chance—or mismanagement or carelessness, in any case luckily—it had partaken of the general topsyturvyness, and here it was, needing only to be put on.

What had Hans Castorp to say to that? Nothing. It was the doctor who remarked: "So much the better," and some of the others chimed in. The needle scraped, the lid was put down. The male voice began to choral accompaniment: "Now the parting hour has come."

No one spoke. They listened. Elly, as the music resumed, renewed her efforts. She started up convulsively, pumped, carried the slippery hands to her brow. The record went on, came to the middle part, with skipping rhythm, the part about war and dan-ger, gallant, god-fearing, French. After that the finale, in full volume, the orchestrally supported refrain of the beginning.

"O Lord of heaven, hear me pray. . ."

Hans Castorp had work with Elly. She raised herself, drew in a straggling breath, sighed a long, long, outward sigh, sank down and was still. He bent over her in concern, and as he did so, he heard Frau Stöhr say, in a high, whining pipe: "Ziems—sen!"

He did not look up. A bitter taste came in his mouth. He heard another voice, a deep, cold voice, saying: "I’ve seen him a long time."

The record had run off, with a last accord of horns. But no one stopped the machine. The needle went on scratching in the silence, as the disk whirred round. Then Hans Castorp raised his head, and his eyes went, without searching, the right way.

There was one more person in the room than before. There in the background, where the red rays lost themselves in gloom, so that the eye scarcely reached thither, between writing-desk and screen, in the doctor’s consulting-chair, where in the intermission Elly had been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last days, with hollow, shadowy cheeks, warrior’s beard and full, curling lips. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other. On his wasted face, shaded though it was by his head-covering, was plainly seen the stamp of suffering, the expression of gravity and austerity which had beautified it. Two folds stood on his brow, between the eyes, that lay deep in their bony cavities; but there was no change in the mildness of the great dark orbs, whose quiet, friendly gaze sought out Hans Castorp, and him alone. That ancient grievance of the outstanding ears was still to be seen under the head-covering, his extraordinary head-covering, which they could not make out. Cousin Joachim was not in mufti. His sabre seemed to be leaning against his leg, he held the handle, one thought to distinguish something like a pistol-case in his belt. But that was no proper uniform he wore. No colour, no decorations; it had a collar like a litewka jacket, and side pockets. Somewhere low down on the breast was a cross. His feet looked large, his legs very thin, they seemed to be bound or wound as for the business of sport more than war. And what was it, this headgear? It seemed as though Joachim had turned an army cook-pot upside-down on his head, and fastened it under his chin with a band. Yet it looked quite properly warlike, like an old-fashioned foot-soldier, perhaps.

Hans Castorp felt Ellen Brand’s breath on his hands. And near him the Kleefeld’s rapid breathing. Other sound there was none, save the continued scraping of the needle on the run-down, rotating record, which nobody stopped. He looked at none of his company, would hear or see nothing of them; but across the hands and head on his knee leaned far forward and stared through the red darkness at the guest in the chair. It seemed one moment as though his stomach would turn over within him. His throat contracted and a four- or fivefold sob went through and through him. "Forgive me!" he whispered; then his eyes overflowed, he saw no more.

He heard breathless voices: "Speak to him!" he heard Dr. Krokowski’s baritone voice summon him, formally, cheerily, and repeat the request. Instead of complying, he drew his hands away from beneath Elly’s face, and stood up.

Again Dr. Krokowski called upon his name, this time in monitory tones. But in two strides Hans Castorp was at the step by the entrance door and with one quick movement turned on the white light.

Fräulein Brand had collapsed. She was twitching convulsively in the Kleefeld’s arms. The chair over there was empty.

Hans Castorp went up to the protesting Krokowski, close up to him. He tried to speak, but no words came. He put out his hand, with a brusque, imperative gesture. Receiving the key, he nodded several times, threateningly, close into the other’s face; turned, and went out of the room.

Hysterica Passio

WITH the swift-changing years, a spirit began to walk in House Berghof: a spirit of immediate descent, or so Hans Castorp surmised, from that other demon whose baleful name we have spoken. With the facile curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, he had studied this new demon, yes, had even discovered in himself an alarming aptitude, in common with the rest of the world up here, to pay him extensive homage. This new evil genius had, like the other, always been present, as it were, in the germ, but now it began to spread itself; Hans Castorp had by nature no great predi-lection for becoming its slave; yet with something like horror he observed that even he, when he let himself go ever so little, fell victim to a contagion so general that scarce anyone in the circle escaped it.

What was this, then, that was in the air? A rising temper. Acute irritability. A nameless rancour. A universal tendency to envenomed exchange of words, to outbursts of rage—yes, even to fisticuffs. Embittered disputes, bouts of uncontrolled shrieking, by pairs and by groups, were of daily occurrence; and the significant thing was that the bystanders, instead of being disgusted with the participants, or seeking to come between them, actually sympathized with one side or the other to the extent of being themselves involved in the quarrel. They would pale and tremble, their eyes would glitter provocatively, their mouths set with passion. They envied those actively engaged the chance, the justification for screaming; a gnawing desire to do likewise possessed mind and body, and he who could not summon strength to flee apart, was soon willy-nilly in the midst of the mêlée. The fruitless dissensions, the mutual recriminations, in the face of authorities bent on accommodation but themselves falling with alarming ease a prey to the general temptation to brawl—these become frequent occurrences in House Berghof. A patient might issue forth of the house in tolerable tranquillity and not know at all in what frame he would return. A member of the "good" Russian table, an elegant dame from the provinces, from Minsk, still young, and a light case, with only three months prescribed, betook herself one day to the village to make purchases at the French lingerie shop; fell there into a quarrel with the modiste, of such dimensions that she came back in a state of violent excitement, suffered a hemorrhage, and was thenceforth incurable. The husband was summoned, and informed that her stay up here would terminate only with her life.

Her case aptly illustrates the general mood. Albeit with some distaste, we cite others. Our readers may remember the greedy schoolboy in the round spectacles, who sat at Frau Salomon’s table and had a habit of cutting up all the food on his plate into a sort of mess, and gulping it down, now and again wiping his eyes with his serviette behind his heavy spectacle-lenses. He had sat here, still a schoolboy, or rather still a former schoolboy, all this time, gobbled and wiped, without drawing upon his person more than the most cursory attention. But now, one morning at early breakfast, out of a blue sky, he was overtaken by such a transport of disorder that half the dining-room started up at the noise coming from his quarter. He sat there all pale and shrieking, and it was at the dwarf waitress standing near him that he shrieked. "You lie," he yelled, his voice breaking. "It’s ice-cold, this tea you have brought me is ice-cold, I tell you. Try it yourself before you lie to me again about it—it is just lukewarm wash-water, try if it isn’t, not fit for a decent person to drink! How do you dare think of bringing me ice-cold tea and setting it in front of me and actually persuading yourself that I would drink such hog-wash? I won’t drink it! I won’t!" he screamed, and began pounding with his fists on the table, till the dishes rang. "I will have hot tea—boiling hot—that is my right before God and man—boiling hot; I’d rather die on the spot than take a drop of this—you damned dwarf, you!" he fairly bellowed, and with the words appeared to fling off the last vestige of restraint and go stark mad, shaking his fist at Emerentia, literally showing her his foaming teeth. He went on, stamping, pounding, yelling "I will" and "I won’t"; while the dining-room displayed the now usual scene. There was tense and alarming participation in the schoolboy raving. Some of the guests even sprang up and glared, fists doubled, teeth clenched; others sat white and trembling, their eyes cast down. And they still glared or trembled, long after the schoolboy had spent himself, and sat in a collapse before his fresh tea, not drinking.

What was all this?

Among the Berghof community was a former business man, some thirty years old. His case was long-standing, he had wandered for years from one establishment to another. This man was a confirmed anti-Semite, out of conviction and the sporting in-stinct. He devoted a joyous consistency to the game, and the preaching of this negative gospel was the pride and content of his life. Business man he had been, he was so no more, he was nothing more in the world, but he was still an anti-Semite. His illness was serious, he had a burdensome cough, and made a sound as though he sneezed with his lung, a short, high-pitched, uncanny sound. But he was no Jew, and that was his one positive characteristic. His name was Wiedemann, a Christian name, not a filthy Jewish. He took in a paper called the Arian Sun; and would talk in this wise: "I arrive at the A—sanatorium, in B—. When I go to sit down in my chair in the rest-hall, whom do I find on my right hand? Herr Hirsch! And whom do I find on my left? Herr Wolf! Of course, I leave," And so on.

Wiedemann had a quick, threatening glance. It was literally as though he had a punching-ball hanging close in front of his nose, and squinted at it, seeing nothing whatever beyond. The prejudice that haunted him was grown to an itch, a ceaseless persecution-mania, which led him to smell out the vileness hidden or disguised in his neighbourhood and hold it up to scorn. Wherever he went, he suspected, he gibed, he vented his spleen; in short, his days were filled with hunting out and hounding down all his fellow-creatures who did not possess that inestimable advantage which was the only one he had.

The prevailing temper in House Berghof, which we have been indicating, aggravated Wiedemann’s complaint to an abnormal pitch. Naturally, he could not fail here to come into contact with persons suffering from the disability of which he was free; and so it came to a scene, at which Hans Castorp was present, and which will serve us as further illustration of our theme.

For there was another man. No possibility of concealing what he was, the case was clear. The man’s name was Sonnenschein, than which he could bear no filthier; and thus he became for Wiedemann the punching-ball in front of his nose, at which he squinted with his threatening glare, at which he struck, not so much to drive it away as to set it in motion that it might rasp his nerves the more.

Sonnenschein, like the other, was a business man born and bred. He too was critically ill, and illness made him sensitive. A friendly man, not at all a dull one, by nature rather playful, he hated Wiedemann for his gibes and stabs as Wiedemann hated him; and one afternoon things came to a head down in the hall, they fell on each other like beasts.

It was a horrid sight. They scuffled like small boys, but with the grimness of grown men when things have got to such a pitch. They clawed at each other’s faces, clutched throats or noses, grappled, hewed loose from each other and rolled together on the floor, spat, kicked, worried, and foamed at the mouth. The "management" came running and by main strength dragged them asunder, scratched and bitten. Herr Wiedemann, bleeding and frothing, his face brutish with rage, displayed a phenomenon Hans Castorp had never before seen and had always supposed a figure of speech: his hair stood on end. He staggered away. Herr Sonnenschein, with one black eye, a bleeding lacuna in the curling black locks about his brow, was led into the bureau, where he sat down, buried his face in his hands and wept bitterly.

Thus Wiedemann and Sonnenschein. All those who saw the encounter trembled hours after. Let us turn from it to a real affair of honour, which by contrast with such ignominy will seem almost refreshing. This affair of honour occurred at about the same period, and, on account of the solemn formality with which it was conducted, deserved the name, even to the point of absurdity. Hans Castorp did not assist in person at the successive episodes; but was informed of its involved and dramatic course by means of certain documents, protocols and formal declarations, touching the affair, circulated not only in the house and without, not only in the village, the canton, and the country, but even abroad and in America; and presented for the consideration of persons who most certainly were not in the faintest degree interested in the circumstances.

It was a Polish affair, a "pain in the honour," having its seat in the heart of the Polish group which had lately collected in the Berghof, a little colony, which pre-empted the "good" Russian table—Hans Castorp, be it said in passing, sat there no longer, having moved thence to the Kleefeld’s, then to Frau Salomon’s, finally to Fräulein Levi’s. Social relations in the Polish group were so elegant, so courtly, so polished, that one could only elevate one’s eyebrows and be prepared for anything. There was a married couple, and an unmarried young female who stood in friendly relations with one of the gentlemen; the rest were male, with such names as von Zutawski, Cieszynski, von Rosinski, Michael Lodygowski, Leo von Asarapetian, and others. Now it fell out that one of them, named Japoll, drinking champagne in the restaurant with two others of the party, made, in their presence, remarks of a certain nature about the wife of Herr von Zutawski, and about the young lady, named Kryloff, who was the intimate friend of Herr Lodygowski. And from this circumstance arose all the proceedings, acts, and formalities, which were the theme of a widely circulated composition. Hans Castorp read:

"Declaration, translated from the Polish original: On the 27th of March, 19—, M. Stanislaw von Zutawski addressed himself to MM. Dr. Anton Cieszynski and Stefan von Rosinski, with the request that they should betake themselves to M. Kasimir Japoil and in his name demand satisfaction in the usual way for the ‘calumny and detraction’ which the said M. Kasimir Japoll had been guilty of against M. Stanislaw von Zutawski’s wife, Mme. Jadwiga von Zutawska, in the presence of and in con-versation with MM. Janusz Teofil Lenart and Leo von Asarapetian.

"When the above conversation, which took place at the end of November, came, indirectly, to M. von Zutawski’s knowledge, he took immediate steps to assure himself of the fact and the circumstances of the calumny and detraction. On the previous day, the 27th of March, 19—, he was able to confirm the fact of the said calumny and detraction by the mouth of an immediate witness to the conversation in which the offensive words and insinuations had been uttered. And thus M. Stanislaw von Zutawski was constrained to apply without delay to the undersigned and to authorize them to institute honourable proceedings against the said M. Kasimir Japoll.

"The undersigned make the following statement:

"1. On the basis of a protocol of the 9th of April, 19—, drawn up at the instance of one party, written at Lemberg by M. Zdzistaw Zygulski and Tadeusz Kadyi in the affair of M. Ladislaw Goduleczny versus M. Kasimir Japoll; and further, on the basis of the declaration of the court of honour of the 18th of June, 19—, drawn up in Lemberg with reference to the same affair, both which documents agree in establishing that M. Kasimir Japoll, ‘in consequence of repeated conduct not to be reconciled with the principles of honour, cannot be regarded as a gentleman,’

"2. the undersigned, having reference to the significant conclusions to be deduced from the foregoing, assert and confirm the absolute impossibility of any longer considering M. Kasimir Japoll as capable of affording satisfaction,

"3. and the undersigned, for their own persons, consider it inadmissible, with reference to a man who stands outside the pale of honour, to act either as principals or as seconds in any affair of honour.

"With reference to this state of affairs, the undersigned inform M. Stanislaw von Zutawski that it would be fruitless to proceed against M. Kasimir Japoll according to the procedure laid down in affairs of honour; and recommend him instead to have recourse to a criminal court, in order to prevent further injury on the part of a person otherwise incapacitated from giving satisfaction.—Dated and signed: Dr. Anton Cieszynski. Stefan von Rosinski."

And further, Hans Castorp read: "Protocol

"of witnesses to the affair between M. Stanislaw von Zutawski, M. Michael Lodygowski,

"and MM. Kasimir Japoll and Janusz Teofil Lenart, in the bar of the Kurhaus in K—and on the 2d of April, 19—, between 7.30 and 7.45.

"As M. Stanislaw von Zutawski, with reference to the representations of his friends, MM. Dr. Anton Cieszynski and Stefan von Rosinski, in connexion with the occurrences of the 27th of March, 19—, had after mature consideration come to the conclusion that the taking of the judicial steps which they recommended against M. Kasimir Japoll for the calumny and detraction uttered against his wife Jadwiga would afford him no satisfaction whatever, since

"1. There was a justifiable suspicion that M. Kasimir Japoll would not appear before the court, and since, he being an Austrian subject, further proceedings would be difficult if not impossible,

"2. and since furthermore, a legal chastisement of M. Kasimir Japoll would in no wise atone for the insult by which he had sought to injure and defame the name and family of M. Stanislaw von Zutawski,

"now therefore, M. Stanislaw von Zutawski took what appeared to him the shortest, most thorough, and in view of the circumstances most appropriate course, after having indirectly ascertained that M. Kasimir Japoll purposed leaving the place on the following day,

"and, on the 2d of April, 19—, between 7.30 and 7.45 in the evening, in the presence of his wife Jadwiga and MM. Michael Lodykowski and Ignaz von Mellin, administered several boxes on the ear to M. Kasimir Japoll, who was seated in the company of M. Janusz Teofil Lenart and two unknown young women, in the American bar of the Kurhaus, imbibing alcoholic drinks.

"Immediately thereafter, M. Michael Lodygowski boxed the ears of M. Kasimir Japoll, stating that he did so in return for the insult offered to Fräulein Kryloff and himself;

"and immediately thereafter M. Michael Lodygowski boxed the ears of M. Janusz Teofil Lenart, in return for the unqualifiable injury offered to M. and Mme. von Zutawski, and further,

"without losing a moment, M. Stanislaw von Zutawski likewise, and repeatedly, boxed the ears of M. Janusz Teofil Lenart for the calumnious defamation of his wife as well as of Mlle. Kryloff.

"MM. Kasimir Japoll and Janusz Teofil Lenart remained entirely passive during the whole of the above proceedings. Dated and signed: Michael Lodygowski, Ign. v. Meilin."

The prevailing temper did not permit Hans Castorp to laugh, as he would otherwise surely have done, at this rapid fire of boxes on the ear. Instead, he quaked as he read. The irreproachable bearing of the one side, the contemptibleness and total lack of self-respect of the other were both apparent in the document, which was, despite its frigid objectivity, so impressive as to move him deeply. So it was with them all. The Polish affaire d’honneur was conned far and wide, and discussed through clenched teeth. A counterblast by Herr Kasimir Japoll fell rather flat. The substance of it was that Zutawski had been perfectly well aware that he, Japoll, had been declared incapable of giving satisfaction by some conceited puppy in Lemberg, once on a time, and that his whole proceeding had been a pretence, since he knew full well it would not issue in a duel. Furthermore, the sole and only reason Zutawski had declined to institute proceedings was that all the world, himself included, was aware that his wife Jadwiga had provided him with a complete assortment of horns; as to the truth of which fact Japoll would have found nothing easier than to give evidence; and that lastly the appearance of the Kryloff before a court would have been little edifying for anybody concerned. Anyhow, it was only his own honour that had been impeached, not that of his partner in the famous conversation; von Zutawski had entrenched himself behind the fact in order not to involve himself in any danger. As for the rôle played by Herr von Asarapetian in the whole affair, he preferred not to speak of it, but for the encounter in the Kurhaus bar, he, Japoll, though ready of tongue and wit, was admittedly of very feeble strength; he was at a great physical disadvantage with Zutawski and his friends and the uncommonly powerful Zutawska; while the two young ladies who were in his and Lenart’s society were lively creatures enough, but timid as rabbits. Under the circumstances, and in order to avoid a free fight and public scandal, he had compelled Lenart, who would have put himself on the defensive, to be quiet, and to suffer in God’s name the transient social contact with MM. von Zutawski and Lodygowski, which had not hurt them at all, and which had been regarded in the light of a pleasantry by the bystanders.

Thus Japoll, for whom, of course, not much could be said. His defence did not greatly invalidate the elegant contrast of honour with pusillanimity presented by the document on the other side; the less because he had not the manifolding facilities disposed of by his opponents, and could only distribute a few typed duplicates of his reply. The protocol, on the contrary, everyone received, even the most uninterested. Naphta and Settembrini, for instance, had copies sent them, which Hans Castorp saw in their hands, and remarked, to his surprise, that they too perused them with bitter concentration. For him the ruling temper of the Berghof was too much—he was powerless to dissipate its mood by a burst of blithe and cleansing laughter, but this he had confidently expected to hear from Herr Settembrini. Alas, no, even the unclouded eye of the Freemason was dimmed by the prevailing spleen; it weighed on his spirit, stilling his mirth; it made him susceptible to the rasping provocation of the tale of the ear-boxing. Moreover he, the protagonist of Life, was suffering in spirit from the state of his health. Slowly, remorselessly, with deceptive interludes of brighter hope, it grew worse. He despised, he scorned it, and himself; but had reached the point where it obliged him, every few days, to take to his bed.

His housemate and antagonist was no better off. The organic disease which had been the cause—or must we say pretext—for the untimely end to his activities within his order, made rapid progress; even the high and thin conditions of life up here could not give it pause. Naphta too was often confined to his bed; the crack in his voice was more cracked than ever when he talked; and as his fever increased he talked more, and more malignantly, than ever. That ideal opposition to the forces of disease and death, the forced surrender of which before the superior power of abject nature gave Herr Settembrini such pain, was foreign to little Naphta. His way of taking the deterioration of his physical part was not with sorrow or aversion, but with a sort of jeering levity, an unnatural lust of combat, a mania of intellectual doubt, denial, and distraction, that was a sore irritant to the other’s melancholy, and daily embittered more the intellectual quarrel between them. Hans Castorp, of course, could only speak of those at which he was present; but he felt tolerably sure he did not miss any; that his presence, the presence of the bone of pedagogic contention, was necessary, to give rise to a disputation of any magnitude. And though he did not spare Herr Settembrini the pain of finding Naphta’s gibes worth hearing, he had to admit that these were latterly going beyond all bounds and often enough overstepping the border-line of mental sanity.

For this sufferer possessed neither the power nor the good will to rise above his illness; but rather saw all the world in its sign and image. In the presence of Herr Settembrini’s quivering resentment, who would sooner have drawn his nursling away from the room or even stopped his ears, Naphta declared that matter was so bad a material that the spirit could not be realized within it. Any effort in that direction was sheer folly; nothing could come of it but distortion and fatuity. What had been the net result of the vainglorious French Revolution—what but the capitalistic bourgeois State? A magnificent outcome, truly! And one it was hoped to improve upon, forsooth, by making the horror universal! A world-republic! That would bring happiness, beyond a doubt. Progress? It was the cry of the patient who constantly changes his position thinking each new one will bring relief. The unconfessed but secretly quite general desire for war was another manifestation of the same condition. It would come, this war, and it would be a good thing, though the consequences of it would not be those anticipated by its authors. Naphta sneered at the security of the bourgeois State. He took occasion to animadvert upon it one day in autumn as they were walking on the main street. It came on to rain, and suddenly, as though at the word of command, all the world put up its umbrellas. Which served Naphta as a symbol of the cowardice and vulgar softness engendered by civilized life. An incident like the going-down of the Titanic was like the writing on the wall: it flung people back upon primitive conditions and fears, and thus was salutary. Afterwards, of course, came the great outcry that transportation must be safeguarded. Always the greatest outcry whenever security was threatened. It was pathetic; and the flabby humanitarianism of it went hand in hand with the wolfish cruelty and baseness of the economic conflict within the bourgeois State. War, war! For his part, he was for it; the general hankering seemed to him comparatively creditable.

Herr Settembrini introduced the word justice into the discussion, and sought to apply this lofty principle as a preventive measure against political catastrophes both foreign and domestic. But as soon as he did so, Naphta, who just previously had found the spiritual too high ever to succeed in manifesting itself in material form, now set to work to cast doubts on, to derogate from, that very spiritual. Justice! Was it, as a conception, worth worshipping? Was it first-class? Was it of divine origin? God and Nature were not even-handed, they played favourites, they exercised the right of choice, they graced one individual with dangerous distinction, to another granted the easy common lot. And as for the man of action—for him justice was on the one hand a paralysing weakness, doubt itself, on the other a trumpet-call to unscrupulous deeds. And since, in order to remain within the moral code, such a man had always to correct "justice" in the second sense by "justice" in the first, where then was the Absolute, the radical, in the conception? Moreover, one was "just" according to one standard or according to the other. All the rest was liberalism—in which nobody nowadays took any stock. Justice, in short, was an empty husk, a stock-in-trade of bourgeois rhetoric; to get down to business, one had always to know which justice one was dealing with: the one which would give a man his own, or the one which would give everybody alike.

Out of his shoreless stream of words, we have hit upon these in illustration of the way he sought to confound the reason. But even worse was the way he talked about science—in which he did not believe. He did not believe, he said, in it, because it was permissible to exercise choice, whether to believe in it or not. It was a belief, like any other, only worse, stupider than any; the word science was the expression of the silliest realism, which did not blush to take at their face value the more than dubious reflections of objects in the human intellect; to pass them current, and to shape out of them the sorriest, most spiritless dogma ever imposed upon humanity. Was not the idea of a material world existing by and for itself the most laughable of all self-contradictions? But the modern natural sciences, as dogma, rested upon the metaphysical postulate that time, space, and causality, the forms of cognition, in which all phenomena are enacted, are actual conditions, existing independently of our knowledge of them. This monistic position was an insult to the spirit. Space, time, and causality—in monistic language, evolution: here was the central dogma of a free-thinking, atheistical, bastard religion, by virtue of which one thought to supersede the first book of Moses, and oppose the pure light of knowledge to a stultifying fable—as though Haeckel had been present at the creation! Empiricism! The universal ether—based on exact knowledge, of course? The atom, that pretty mathematical joke of the smallest, the indivisible particle of matter—its existence had been demonstrated, undoubtedly? The doctrine of the illimitability of time and space was, surely, based on experience? In fact, anybody with a very little logic could make very merry over the theory of the endlessness and the reality of space and time; and could arrive at the result of—nothing: that is, at the view that realism is your true nihilism. How? Quite simply; since the relation to infinity of any size you chose to postulate was as zero. There was no size to the infinite; in eternity was neither duration nor change. In the spatially infinite, since every distance was, mathematically, as zero, there could not even be two points close together, to say nothing of two bodies, or of motion as such. He, Naphta, stated this, in order to counter the arrogance of materialistic science, which gave out for absolute knowledge its astronomical quackery, its windbaggery about the universe. Pitiable human kind, that by a vain mustering of meaningless figures have let themselves be driven to a conclusion of their own insignificance, to the destruction of any emphasis upon their own importance! It might be tolerable that human reason and knowledge should confine themselves to the terrestrial, and within this sphere treat as actual their experience with the subjective object. But let them go beyond that, let them once attempt to grapple with the riddle of eternity, and invent so-called cosmologies and cosmogonies, and it was beyond a jest; the presumptuousness of it reached a climax. What blasphemous rubbish, to reckon the "distance" of any star from the earth in terms of trillions of kilometres, or in light years, and to imagine that with such a parade of figures the human spirit was gaining an insight into the essence of infinity and eternity—whereas infinity had absolutely nothing whatever to do with size, nor yet eternity with duration or distance in time; they had nothing in common with natural science, being, as they were, the abrogation of that which we called nature! Verily, the simplicity of a child, who thinks the stars are holes in the tent of heaven, through which the eternal brightness shines, was a thousand times more to his mind than the whole hollow, preposterous, overweening drivel of monistic science on the subject of the "universe."

Settembrini asked him if that about the stars represented his own personal belief. He answered that on this point he reserved to himself the freedom, and the humble-mindedness, of doubt. From which again it might be seen what he understood by free-dom, and whither such a conception of it might lead. If only Herr Settembrini had not ground for the fear that Hans Castorp found all this highly worth listening to!

Naphta’s malicious wit lay in ambush, to spy out the weaknesses of the nature-compelling forces of progress, and convict its standard-bearers and pioneers of human relapses into the irrational. Aviators, flying men, he said, were mostly a bad lot, untrustworthy, above all exceedingly superstitious. They carried mascots on board with them, pigs and ravens and such-like; they spat three times in different directions, they wore the gloves of lucky flyers. How could such primitive unreason be reconciled with the conception of the universe which underlay their calling? The contradiction diverted him, he held forth upon it in extenso. But such illustrations of Naphta’s malevolence are without number—let us abandon them for the all-too-pertinent tale we have to tell.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. The party consisted of Naphta and Settembrini, Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal. In two one-horse sleighs, Hans Castorp with the humanist, Naphta with Ferge and Wehsal, the last-named sitting with the coachman, they left the greengrocer’s at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and well bundled up drove off to the friendly music of bells, that sounds so pleasant through still, snowy air. They took the right-hand road, past Frauenkirch and Claris, southwards. Storm-clouds pushed up rapidly from that direction, and soon the only streak of blue in the sky lay behind them, over the Rhätikon. The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They went at a foot-pace. Coasting-parties rode downhill toward them, and had to dismount as they met. Sometimes from round a bend in the road would come the clear and warning sound of other bells; sleighs driven tandem would be approaching and some skill was required to pass in the narrow road. Near their destination was a beautiful view of a rocky stretch of the Zügenstrasse. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist—superterrestrial, Valhallari, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible—and afforded Herr Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

One might have lodgment here; in the upper story were numbered rooms, and on the same floor the dining-room, furnished in peasant style, and well heated. They ordered a bite from the obliging landlady: coffee, honey, white bread and "pear bread," a sort of sweetmeat, the speciality of the place; red wine was sent out to the coachman. At the other tables were sitting Swiss and Dutch visitors.

We should have been glad to relate that our friends, being warmed and cheered by the hot and excellent coffee, proceeded to elevating discourse. But the statement would be inexact. For the discourse, after the first few words, took the form of a monologue by Naphta, and even as a monologue was conducted in a manner singularly offensive, from the social point of view; the ex-Jesuit flatly turning his back on Herr Settembrini, completely ignoring the other two gentlemen, and devoting himself to Hans Castorp, to whom he held forth with marked affability.

It would have been hard to give a name to the subject of this discourse, to which Hans Castorp listened, nodding from time to time as though in partial agreement. We may presume that it was scarcely a connected argument, but rather moved loosely in the realms of the intellectual; in general pointing out, with an accompanying comment which we may characterize as cheerless, the equivocal nature of the spiritual phenomena of life, the changeful aspects and contentious unserviceability of the great abstract conceptions man has based on them, and indicating in what a rainbow-hued garment the Absolute appears upon this earth.

At any rate, we might take as the nucleus of his lecture the problem of freedom, which he treated in the sense of confusion. He spoke, among other matters, of the Romantic movement, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and its fascinating double meaning; pointing out how before it the conceptions of reaction and revolution went down, in so far as they were not incorporated in a new and higher one. For it was of course utterly absurd to try to associate the conception of revolution solely with progress and victoriously advancing enlightenment. The Romantic movement in Europe had been above all a movement of liberation: anti-classic, anti-academic, directed against French classicism, the old school of reason, whose defenders it derided as "powdered wigs."

And Naphta began upon wars of liberation, talked of Fichtean enthusiasms, of a singing, frenzied popular uprising against that unbearable tyranny, as which, unfortunately—he tittered—freedom, that is to say the revolutionary idea, had taken shape. Very droll it was: singing loudly, the people had set out to shatter the revolutionary tyranny for the benefit of reactionary princely authority—and this they did in the name of freedom.

The youthful listener would perceive the distinction, even the opposition, between foreign and domestic freedom; also note the ticklish question, which unfreedom was soonest—he he!—which least compatible with a nation’s honour.

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Part 8 of 8

Freedom, indeed, was a conception rather romantic than illuminating. Like romanticism, it inevitably limited the human impulse to expansion; and the passionate individualism in them both had similar repressive results. Individualistic thirst for freedom had produced the historic and romantic cult of nationalism, which was warlike in character, and was called sinister by humanitarian liberalism, though the latter also preached individualism, only the other way about. Individualism was romantic-mediæval, in its conviction of the infinite, the cosmic, importance of the single human being, whence was deduced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the geocentric doctrine, and astrology. But on the other hand, individualism was an aspect of liberalizing humanism, which inclined to anarchy and would in any case protect the precious individual from being offered up on the altar of the general. Such was individualism, in its two aspects—all things unto all men.

One had to admit that the freedom-pathos had produced the most brilliant enemies of freedom, the most brilliant knights-errant of tradition at war with irreverent, destructive progress. Naphta cited Arndt, who cursed industrialism and glorified the nobility; and Görres, the author of Christian mysticism. Perhaps his hearer would ask what mysticism had to do with progress? Had it not been anti-scholastic, anti-dogmatic, anti-priestly? One was, indeed, compelled to recognize in the Hierarchy a force making for freedom: had it not set limits to the boundless pretensions of monarchy? But the mysticism of the end of the Middle Ages had shown its liberal character as forerunner of the Reformation—he he!—which in its turn had been an inextricable and tangled weave, a weft of freedom with a warp of mediævalism.

^^Oh, yes, what Luther did possessed the merit of demonstrating crudely and vividly the dubious character of the deed itself, the deed in general. Did Naphta’s listener know what a deed was? A deed, for example, was the murder of Councillor Kotzebue by Sand, the theological student and member of the Burschenschaft. What was it, to speak the language of criminology, had put the weapon into the hand of young Sand? Enthusiasm for freedom, of course. But looked at more nearly, it had rather been moral fanaticism, and the hatred of light foreign ways. Kotzebue had been in the employ of Russia, in the service of the Holy Alliance, and thus Sand’s shot had presumably been fired for freedom; which again declined into improbability by virtue of the circumstance that there were several Jesuits among his nearest friends. In short, whatever the "deed" might be, it was in any case a poor way of making one’s meaning clear; as also it contributed little toward the clarification of intellectual problems.

"Might I take the liberty of inquiring if you will be bringing these scurrilities of yours to an end before long?"

Herr Settembrini put the question in withering tones. He had been drumming on the table, and twisting his moustaches. But now his patience was exhausted. It was too much. He sat upright, and more than upright, he sat, so to speak, on tiptoe, for only his shanks touched the chair; and with flashing black eyes faced the enemy, who turned toward him in assumed surprise.

"What, may I ask, was the expression you were pleased to use?" Naphta countered.

"I was pleased to say," said the Italian, swallowing, "I am pleased to say, that I am resolved to prevent you from continuing to molest a defenceless youth with your equivocations."

"I invite you, sir, to take heed to your words."

"The reminder, sir, is unnecessary. I am accustomed to take heed to my words. They will precisely fit the fact if I say that your way of misleading unsettled youth, of dissipating and undermining his moral and intellectual powers, is infamous, and cannot receive a stronger chastisement than it merits."

With the word infamous, Settembrini struck the table with the flat of his hand, and pushing back his chair, stood up. It was a signal for the rest to do likewise. People looked across from the other tables—or, rather, from one, as the Swiss guests had left and only the Dutchmen remained, listening in amazement.

At our table they all stood there stiffly: Hans Castorp and the two antagonists, with Ferge and Wehsal opposite. All five were pale and wide-eyed, with twitching lips. Might not the three onlookers have made an effort to calm the troubled waters, to lighten the atmosphere with a jest, or bring affairs to a peaceful conclusion with some kind of human appeal? They did not try. The prevailing temper prevented them. They stood, all trembling, with hands that clenched involuntarily into fists. Even A. K. Ferge, to whom all elevated thoughts were foreign, who disclaimed from its inception any power to measure the seriousness of the dispute—even he was convinced that this was a quarrel à outrance, and that there was nothing to do but let it take its course. His good-natured moustaches worked violently up and down.

There was a stillness, in which could be heard the gnashing of Naphta’s teeth. To Hans Castorp, this was an experience like the one with Wiedemann’s hair. He had supposed it to be a figure of speech, something which did not actually occur. Yet here was Naphta, and in the silence his teeth could be heard to grate; a horribly unpleasant, a wild, incredible sound, which yet evinced a self-control equally fearsome, for he did not storm, but said in quite a low voice, though with a sort of cackling half-laugh; "Infamous? Chastisement? Ah, so the bleating sheep have taken to butting? Have we driven the policemen of civilization so far that they draw their weapons? That is a triumph; won in passing; I must say, considering what mild provocation sufficed to summon to arms the guardians of our morality! As for the rest, sir, it will follow in due course. The chastisement too. I hope your civilian principles will not prevent you from knowing what you owe me—else I shall be forced to put these principles to a test that—"

Herr Settembrini drew himself up; the movement was so expressive that Naphta went on: "Ah, I see, that will not be necessary. I am in your way, you are in mine—good. We will transfer the settlement of our differences to a suitable place. For the moment, only this: your sentimental solicitude for the scholastic interpretation of the Jacobin Revolution envisages a pedagogic crime in my manner of leading youth to doubt, of throwing categories to the winds, of robbing ideas of their academic dignity. And your anxiety is justified; for it happens on account of your humanity, be assured of that—happens and is done. For your humanity is to-day nothing but a tail end, a stale classicistic survival, a spiritual ennui; it is yawning its head off, while the new Revolution, our Revolution, my dear sir, is coming on apace to give it its quietus. We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical scepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. This for your instruction, and my justification. For the rest we must turn over the page. You will hear from me."

"And you will find a hearing, sir," Settembrini called after him, as the Jesuit left his place and hurried to the hat-stand to seek his cloak. Then the Freemason let himself fall back with a thud on his hard chair, and pressed both hands to his heart. "Distruttore! Cane arabbiato! Bisogna ammazzarlo!" burst from him, pantingly.

The others still stood at the table. Ferge’s moustaches went on wagging up and down. Wehsal’s jaw was set hard awry. Hans Castorp was imitating his grandfather’s famous attitude, for his neck was all a-tremble. They were thinking how little they had expected such an outcome as this to their excursion. And all of them, even Herr Settembrini, felt how fortunate it was that they had come in two sleighs. It simplified the return. But afterwards?

"He challenged you," Hans Castorp said, heavily.

"Undoubtedly," answered Herr Settembrini, and cast a glance upward at his neighbour, only to turn away again at once and lean his head on his hand.

"Shall you take it up?" Wehsal wanted to know.

"Can you ask?" answered Settembrini, and looked a moment at him too. "Gentlemen," he said then, and sat up, having brought himself again to perfect control, "I regret the outcome of our pleasure excursion; but in life one must be prepared to reckon with such events. Theoretically I disapprove of the duel, I am of a law-abiding temper. In practice, however, it is another matter. There are situations where—quarrels that—in short, I am at this man’s service. It is well that in my youth I fenced a little. A few hours’ practice will make my wrist supple again. Shall we go? The rendezvous will have to be made. I assume our gentleman will already have ordered them to put to the horses."

Hans Castorp had moments, during the drive home, and afterwards, when he became giddy in contemplation of what lay before them. Still more, when it subsequently appeared that Naphta would not hear of cut and thrust, but insisted on a duel with pistols. And he, as the injured party, had the choice of weapons. There were moments, we say, when Hans Castorp was able, to a certain extent, to free himself from embroilment with the prevailing temper and tell himself that all this was madness, and must be prevented.

"If even there were a real injury," he cried, in discussion with Herr Settembrini, Ferge and Wehsal—Naphta, on the way home, had invited the last-named to be his second, and he acted as intermediary between the factions. "An affront like that, purely civilian and social! If one of them had dragged the other’s good name in the dirt, if it was a question of a woman, or anything else really momentous, that you could take hold of, so that you felt there was no possibility of reconciliation! For such cases the duel is the last resort; and when honour is satisfied and the affair has gone off with credit to all parties, and the antagonists part friends, as they say, why, then it seems a very good arrangement, quite useful and practical, too, in complicated cases. But what was it he did? I don’t mean to stand up for him, I only ask what the insult consisted in. He threw the categories to the winds, as you say, and robbed conceptions of their academic dignity. And you felt yourself insulted thereby—justifiably, let us assume—"

"Assume?" repeated Herr Settembrini, and looked at him.

"Oh, justifiably, quite justifiably! He affronted you. But he did not insult you. There is a difference. Permit me to say so. It was a matter of abstractions, an intellectual disagreement. On intellectual topics he could affront you, perhaps, but not insult you. That is axiomatic, any court of honour would tell you the same, I swear to God they would. And so neither was your answer to him, about infamy and chastisement an insult; because it was in an intellectual sense, the whole affair was in the intellectual sphere, and has nothing to do with the personal, and an insult can only be personal. The intellectual can never be personal, that is the conclusion and the explanation of the axiom, and therefore—"

"You err, my friend," answered Settembrini, with closed eyes. "You err first of all in the assumption that the intellectual cannot assume a personal character. You should not think that," he said, and smiled a peculiarly fine and painful smile. "The point at which you go wrong is in your estimation of the things of the mind, in general. You obviously think they are too feeble to engender conflicts and passions comparable for sternness with those real life brings forth, the only issue of which can be the appeal to force. All incontro! The abstract, the refined-upon, the ideal, is at the same time the Absolute—it is sternness itself; it contains within it more possibilities of deep and radical hatred, of unconditional and irreconcilable hostility, than any relation of social life can. It astonishes you to hear that it leads, far more directly and inexorably than these, to radical intimacy, to grips, to the duel and actual physical struggle? The duel, my friend, is not an "arrangement," like another. It is the ultimate, the return to a state of nature, slightly mitigated by regulations which are chivalrous in character, but extremely superficial. The essential nature of the thing remains the primitive, the physical struggle; and however civilized a man is, it is his duty to be ready for such a contingency, which may any day arise. Whoever is unable to offer his person, his arm, his blood, in the service of the ideal, is unworthy of it; however intellectualized, it is the duty of a man to remain a man."

Thus was Hans Castorp put in his place. What should he answer? He preserved a depressed and brooding silence. Herr Settembrini had spoken with composure, logically. But his words sounded strange in his mouth. His thoughts were not his own thoughts, the idea of the duel was one he would never have come upon of himself. He had only taken it over from the terroristic little Naphta. And what he said was but an expression of the strength of that prevailing temper, whose tool and underling Herr Settembrini’s fine understanding had become. What? The intellectual, simply because it was so stern, must lead relentlessly to the animal, to the issue of physical combat? Hans Castorp set himself against it—or at least he tried, only to discover, in affright, that even he was powerless to do so. In him too the prevailing temper was strong, he was not the man to win free. There was an area of his brain where memory showed him Wiedemann and Sonnenschein grappled like animals; and with horror he understood that at the end of everything only the physical remained, only the teeth and the nails. Yes, they must fight; only thus could be assured even that small mitigation of the primitive by the rules of chivalry. Hans Castorp offered to act as Herr Settembrini’s second.

The offer was refused. No, it was not fitting, it would not do, he was told: first by Herr Settembrini himself, with that fine, rueful smile; then, after brief consideration, by Ferge and Wehsal, who also, without specified reason, found it would not do for Hans Castorp to assist at the encounter in this capacity. As a neutral party, perhaps—the presence of such an one was a part of the prescribed chivalrous mitigations—he might be present. Even Naphta, through his second, let it be known that this was his view, and Hans Castorp was satisfied. As witness, or as neutral party, in either case he was able to exert his influence upon the details of the procedure now to be discussed and settled—an influence which proved necessary indeed.

For Naphta’s proposals went beyond all bounds. He demanded a distance of five paces, and, if necessary, three exchanges of fire. These insane conditions he sent by Wehsal the very evening of the quarrel; Wehsal had succeeded in fully identifying himself with Naphta’s mad ideas, and partly as representative, but certainly also in accordance with his personal taste, obstinately insisted upon them. Settembrini, of course, found nothing in them to object to. But Ferge, as second, and the neutral Hans Castorp, were beside themselves, and the latter fell heavily upon the wretched Wehsal. Was he not ashamed to bring forward such frantic and inhuman ideas to meet a case where the injury was purely abstract, not sensible at all? As though pistols were not bad enough, that they must add these murderous conditions! Where did the chivalrous mitigation come in? He might as well suggest firing across a handkerchief! He, Wehsal, was not going to be fired at five paces off—it was easy for him to be blood-thirsty! And so forth. Wehsal shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that precisely that extreme case was a contingency; thus reducing to silence Hans Castorp, who was inclined to forget the fact. But he succeeded, during the negotiations of the following day, in fixing the number of shots at one instead of three, and in dealing with the question of distance so as to arrange that the combatants should be placed fifteen paces apart, and have the right to advance five paces before firing. But in exchange for these concessions, he had to promise that no attempt should be made at reconciling the parties.—It was discovered that none of them had any pistols.

Herr Albin had. Besides the shiny little revolver with which he loved to frighten the ladies, he had a pair of officer’s pistols from Belgium in a velvet case: Browning automatics, with brown wooden butts holding the magazine, blued steel mechanism and shining barrels, with crisp little sights atop. Hans Castorp had seen them in Herr Albin’s room, and against his own convictions, out of sheer compulsion from the prevailing temper, offered to borrow them. He made no concealment of the purpose they were to serve, but appealing to the young swaggerer’s honour, readily swore him to secrecy. Herr Albin instructed him how to load the pistols, and they tested both weapons with blank shots in the open.

All this took time: two days and three nights intervened between the quarrel and the meeting. The place was of Hans Castorp’s choosing: that picturesque blue-blossoming scene of his retreat and stock-taking activities. On this spot the affair should take place, on the third morning, as soon as there should be light enough to see. The evening before, rather late, it occurred to Hans Castorp, by this time thoroughly wrought up, that there ought to be a physician present.

He immediately advised with Ferge, who foresaw great difficulty. Rhadamanthus himself was an old corps-student; but it would be impossible to ask the head of the establishment to act in an illegal affair, and between patients to boot. It was scarcely likely a doctor could be found who would be willing to lend a hand in a pistol duel between two severe cases. As for Krokowski, for all his brain, it was a question whether the technique of wound treatment would be his strong point.

Wehsal, who was present, announced that Naphta had already expressed himself to the effect that he wanted no doctor. He was not going to the meeting-place to be salved and bandaged, but to lay about him, and that in grim earnest. It sounded a sinister declaration enough; but Hans Castorp tried to interpret it as meaning that Naphta felt there would be no need of a physician. Ferge too bore back a message from Herr Settembrini, that they might dispose of the question, it did not interest him. It was thus not unreasonable to hope that both antagonists had resolved not to let it come to the shedding of blood. Two nights had passed since the quarrel, and there would be yet a third. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

Hans Castorp’s reflections proved in the event not far from justified; but justified in a manner unlike anything he could have dreamed. So far as Herr Settembrini was concerned, he was entirely right. But had he suspected in what direction Leo Naphta would have altered his intentions beforehand, or at the decisive moment, not even the prevailing temper, of which all this was the outcome, could have driven him to let the affair go on.

At seven o’clock next morning, the sun showed no sign of making an appearance above the mountain; yet day was dawning, difficultly, in a reek of mist, as Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to go to the rendezvous. The maidservants cleaning the hall looked after him in wonder. The house door, however, was unbolted; Ferge and Wehsal, alone or in company, had undoubtedly passed that threshold, the one to accompany Settembrini, the other Naphta, to the field of battle. He, Hans, went alone, his capacity of neutral not permitting him to attach himself to either party.

He moved mechanically, under the compulsion of honour, under pressure from the prevailing temper. It was necessary for him to be present at the encounter—that went without saying. Impossible to stop away and await the event in bed, in the first place because—but he did not finish his firstly, but hastened on to secondly, which was that one could not leave the thing to itself. Thus far, thank Heaven, nothing dreadful had happened; and nothing dreadful need happen, it was really highly improbable that anything would. They had had to get up and dress by artificial light. and breakfastless, in the bitter frost, betake themselves to the appointed spot. But once there, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp’s presence, the whole thing would surely be turned aside, work out for good—in some manner not yet foreseen, and best left unguessed at, since experience showed that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.

All which notwithstanding, this was the unpleasantest morning within his memory. He felt stale and seedy, his teeth tended to chatter; in the depth of his being he was prone to mistrust his own powers of self-control. These were such singular times. The lady from Minsk, who shattered her health on the point of a quarrel with her corsetière, the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish ear-boxes—drearily he thought of them. Simply he could not picture two people, before his eyes, in his presence, standing up to shoot at each other, spill each other’s blood. But when he remembered what it had come to, what he had actually seen, in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, then he misdoubted himself, misdoubted all the world, and shivered in his fur jacket; though at the same time a feeling of the extraordinariness, the abnormality of all this, heightened by the quality of the early morning air, began now surprisingly to elevate and stimulate him.

In the dusk of that slow-brightening dawn, moved by such mingled and fluctuating hopes and feelings, he mounted the narrow path along the slope, from the village end of the bob-run; arrived at the deeply drifted woods, crossed the little wooden bridge over the course, and followed a way among the tree-trunks trodden by feet in the snow rather than cleared by any shovel. He walked fast, and very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter holding the case of pistols with one hand under his cloak. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and, coming abreast, was aware of Naphta and Wehsal, only a few paces in advance.

"Cold morning; at least eighteen degrees of frost," said he, in the purity of his intentions, but started at the frivolity of his own remark, and added: "Gentlemen, I am convinced—"

The others were silent. Ferge’s good-natured moustache wagged up and down. After a while Settembrini came to a pause, took Hans Castorp’s hand, laid his own other one upon it, and spoke.

"My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I will offer myself to his bullet, that is all that honour can demand. But I will not kill, you may trust me."

He released the young man and walked on. Hans Castorp was deeply moved. After a few steps he said: "That is splendid of you, Herr Settembrini. Now—on the other side—if he, for his part— "

But Herr Settembrini shook his head. Hans Castorp reflected that if one party did not fire, the other would surely not be able to bring himself to do it either; and his heart perceptibly lightened. Everything was going well, his predictions seemed about to be verified.

They crossed the foot-bridge over the gorge, where the waterfall hung stiff and silent. Naphta and Wehsal were walking up and down before the bench now upholstered with thick white cushions of snow: the bench on which Hans Castorp, lying to await the end of his nose-bleeding, had experienced such lively memories out of the distant past. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp questioned himself if he should do the same, but found he had no faintest desire. It seemed to him an affectation in the other. With the pleasure he always felt in these surroundings, he looked about at them in their icy state and found them not less beautiful than in the season of their blue blossom-time. The fir that jutted so boldly into the picture had its trunk and branches laden with snow.

"Good-morning," he said cheerily, with the idea of lending the scene a note of the natural, which should help to dissipate its evil bearing—but was out of luck, for nobody answered. The greetings consisted in silent bows, so stiff as to be almost imperceptible. However, he was resolved to convert the energy from his walk, the splendid warmth engendered by brisk motion in the cold air, at once and without delay to good purpose; and so began: "Gentlemen, I am convinced—"

"You will develop your convictions another time," Naphta cut him off icily. "The weapons, if you please," he added, in the same arrogant tone. Hans Castorp, thus slapped on the mouth, had to look on while Ferge brought out the fatal étui from beneath his cloak, and handed one pistol to Wehsal to pass on to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge’s hand. The latter in a murmur asked them to make a space, and began measuring off the ground. He marked off the outer limits by lines dug with his heel in the snow, the inner by means of two canes, his own and Settembrini’s.

Our good-natured sufferer, what sort of work was this for him? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged, he took proper strides, the fifteen paces, at least, were a goodly distance—but the cursed canes, alas, were not far apart at all. Certainly, he was acting in all honour; but what a grip the prevailing temper had upon him, to enforce him to a procedure so monstrous in its significance!

Naphta had flung his fur cloak on the ground, so that its mink lining showed. Pistol in hand, he moved to one of the outer barriers directly it was established, and while Ferge was still marking off the other. When that was fixed, Settembrini took up his position, his shabby fur coat open in front. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of a stealing paralysis, and flung himself once more into the breach.

"Gentlemen," he said, choking, "don’t be hasty. It is my duty, after all—"

"Silence!" cried out Naphta sharply. "Give the signal."

But no one gave the signal. It had not been arranged for. Somebody, of course, ought to say: "Fire!" but it had not been realized that it was the office of the neutral party to give the dread sign—at least, it had not been mentioned. Hans Castorp remained silent, and nobody spoke in his place.

"We will begin," Naphta declared. "Come forward, sir, and fire," he called across to his antagonist, and began himself to advance, holding the pistol at arm’s length, directed at Settembrini—an unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At the third step the other, without firing, was already at the barrier—the Italian raised the pistol very high, and fired. The shot awaked repeated echoes, the mountains flung back the sound and the rebound, the valley reverberated with the shock, until it seemed to Hans Castorp people must come running.

"You fired in the air," Naphta said collectedly to Settembrini, letting his own weapon sink.

Settembrini answered: "I fired where it pleased me to fire."

"You will fire again!"

"I have no such intention. It is your turn." Herr Settembrini, lifting his face toward the sky, had turned himself somewhat side-wise to his opponent. It was touching to realize that he had heard one should not offer one’s breast full face to an opponent’s

fire; and that he was acting according to the regulations.

"Coward!" Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with duelling, and shot himself in the head.

Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered, or tottered, while the mountains played ball with the sound of his shot, a few steps backward, flinging out his legs jerkily; executed a right turn with his whole body, and fell with his face in the snow. They all stood a moment rigid. Settembrini, hurling his weapon from him, was first at Naphta’s side.

"Infelice!" he cried. "Che cosa fai, per l’amor di Dio?"

Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the blackened red hole in the temple. They looked into a face that one would do well to cover with the silk handkerchief, one corner of which hung out of Naphta’s breast pocket.

The Thunderbolt

SEVEN years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the "bad" Russian table, and his company there two Armenians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the "bad" Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indifference to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The Authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk—she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity—did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being "asked" any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further—an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, indeed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripening in his breast. He was "settled," established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Did not the very fact that he was sitting at the "bad" Russian table witness a certain abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages or disadvantages. We make bold to say that here was a democracy of tables, all honourable alike. The same tremendous meals were served here as at the others; Rhadamanthus himself occasionally folded his huge hands before the doctor’s place at the head; and the nations who ate there were respectable members of the human race, even though they boasted no Latin, and were not exaggeratedly dainty at their feeding.

Time—yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable—time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points (and now we are sure the unhappy deceased Naphta would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. For example, the boy Teddy was discovered, one day—not one single day, of course, but only rather indefinitely from which day—to be a boy no longer. No more might ladies take him on their laps, when, on occasion, he left his bed, changed his pyjamas for his knickerbockers, and came downstairs. Imperceptibly that leaf had turned. Now, on such occasions, he took them on his instead, and both sides were as well, or even better pleased. He was become a youth; scarcely could we say he had bloomed into a youth; but he had shot up. Hans Castorp had not noticed it happening, and then, suddenly, he did. The shooting-up, however, did not suit the lad Teddy; the temporal became him not. In his twenty-first year he departed this life; dying of the disease for which he had proved receptive; and they cleansed and fumigated after him. The fact makes little claim upon our emotions, the change being so slight between his one state and his next.

But there were other deaths, and more important; deaths down in the flat-land, which touched, or would once have touched, our hero more nearly. We are thinking of the recent decease of old Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and foster-father, of faded memory. He had carefully avoided unfavourable conditions of atmospheric pressure, and left it to Uncle James to stultify himself; yet an apoplexy carried him off after all; and a telegram, couched in brief but feeling terms—feeling more for the departed than for the recipient of the wire—was one day brought to Hans Castorp where he lay in his excellent chair. He acquired some black-bordered note-paper, and wrote to his uncle-cousins: he, the doubly, now, so to say, triply orphaned, expressed himself as being the more distressed over the sad news, for that circumstances forbade him interrupting his present sojourn even to pay his great-uncle the last respects.

To speak of sorrow would be disingenuous. Yet in these days Hans Castorp’s eyes did wear an expression more musing than common. This death, which could at no time have moved him greatly, and after the lapse of years could scarcely move him at all, meant the sundering of yet another bond with the life below; gave to what he rightly called his freedom the final seal. In the time of which we speak, all contact between him and the flat-land had ceased. He sent no letters thither, and received none thence. He no longer ordered Maria Mancini, having found a brand up here to his liking, to which he was now as faithful as once to his old-time charmer: a brand that must have carried even a polar explorer through the sorest and severest trials; armed with which, and no other solace, Hans Castorp could lie and bear it out indefinitely, as one does at the sea-shore. It was an especially well cured brand, with the best leaf wrapper, named "Light of Asia"; rather more compact than Maria, mouse-grey in colour with a blue band, very tractable and mild, and evenly consuming to a snow-white ash, that held its shape and still showed traces of the veining on the wrapper; so evenly and regularly that it might have served the smoker for an hour-glass, and did so, at need, for he no longer carried a timepiece. His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his "freedom." Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance had found full play.

Thus he lay; and thus, in high summer, the year was once more rounding out, the seventh year, though he knew it not, of his sojourn up here.

Then, like a thunder-peal—

But God forbid and modesty withhold us from speaking overmuch of what the thunder-peal bore us on its wave of sound! Here rodomontade is out of place. Rather let us lower our voice to say that then came the peal of thunder we all know so well; that deafening explosion of long-gathering magazines of passion and spleen. That historic thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that fired the mine beneath the magic mountain, and set our sleeper ungently outside the gates. Dazed he sits in the long grass and rubs his eyes—a man who, despite many warnings, had neglected to read the papers.

His Mediterranean friend and mentor had ever tried to prompt him; had felt it incumbent upon him to instruct his nursling, the object of his solicitude, in what was going on down below; but his pupil had lent no ear. The young man had indeed, in a stocktaking way, preoccupied himself with this or that among the subjective shadows of things; but the things themselves he had heeded not at all, having a wilful tendency to take the shadow for the substance, and in the substance to see only shadow. For this, however, we must not judge him harshly, since the relation between substance and shadow has never been defined once and for all.

Long ago it had been Herr Settembrini who brought sudden illumination into the room, sat down beside the horizontal Hans and sought to influence and instruct him upon matters of life and death. But now it was the pupil, who, seated with his hands between his knees, at the bedside of the humanist, or near his couch in the cosy and retired little mansard study, with the carbonaro chairs and the water-bottle, kept him company and listened courteously to his utterances upon the state of Europe—for in these days Herr Ludovico was seldom on his legs. Naphta’s violent end, the terroristic deed of that desperate antagonist, had dealt his sensitive nature a blow from which it could scarcely rally; weakness and infirmity had since been his portion. He could no longer work on the Sociological Pathology; the League waited in vain for that lexicon of all the masterpieces of letters having human suffering for their central theme. Herr Ludovico had perforce to limit to oral efforts his contribution to the organization of progress; and even so much he must have foregone had not Hans Castorp’s visits given him opportunity to spread his gospel.

His voice was weak, but he spoke with conviction, at length and beautifully, upon the self-perfecting of the human spirit through social betterment. Softly, as though on the wings of doves, came the words of Herr Ludovico. Yet again, when he came to speak of the unification and universal well-being of the liberated peoples, there mingled a sound—he neither knew nor willed it, of course—as of the rushing pinions of eagles. That was the political key, the grandfatherly inheritance that united in him with the humanistic gift of the father, to make up the littérateur—precisely as humanism and politics united in the lofty ideal of civilization, an ideal wherein were blended the mildness of doves and the boldness of eagles. That ideal was only biding its time, until the day dawned, the Day of the People, when the principle of reaction should be laid low, and the Holy Alliance of civic democracies take its place. Yes, here seemed to sound two voices, with differing counsels. For Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, yet at the same time, half explicitly, he was warlike too. In the duel with the outrageous little Naphta he had borne himself like a man. But in general it still remained rather vague what his position was to be, when humanity in an outburst of enthusiasm united itself with politics in support of a triumphant and dominating world-civilization, and the burgher’s pike was dedicated upon the altar of humanity. There was some doubt whether he would then hold back his hand from the shedding of blood. Yes, it seemed the prevailing temper more and more held sway in the Italian’s mind and view; the boldness of the eagle was gradually outbidding the mildness of the dove.

Not infrequently his attitude toward the existing great political systems was divided, embarrassed, disturbed by scruples. The diplomatic rapprochement between his country and Austria, their co-operation in Albania, had reflected itself in his conversation: a co-operation that raised his spirits in that it was directed against Latinless half-Asia—knout, Schlüsselburg, and all—yet tormented them in that it was a misbegotten alliance with the hereditary foe, with the principle of reaction and subjugated nationalities. The autumn previous, the great French loan to Russia, for the purpose of building a network of railways in Poland, had awakened in him similar misgivings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Francophile party in his own country, which was not surprising when one recalled that his grandfather had compared the six days of the July Revolution to the six days of the creation, and seen that they were as good. But the understanding between the enlightened republic and Byzantine Scythia was too much for him, it oppressed his breast, and at the same time made him breathe quicker for hope and joy at the thought of the strategic meaning of that network of railways. Then came the Serajevo murder, for everyone excepting German Seven-Sleepers a storm-signal; decisive for the informed ones, among whom we may reckon Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp saw him shudder as a private citizen at the frightful deed, while in the same moment his breast heaved with the knowledge that this was a deed of popular liberation, directed against the citadel of his loathing. On the other hand, was it not also the fruit of Muscovite activity, and as such giving rise to great heart-searchings? Which did not hinder him, three weeks later, from characterizing the extreme demands of the monarchy upon Servia as a hideous crime and an insult to human dignity, the consequences of which he could foresee well enough, and awaited in breathless excitement.

In short, Herr Settembrini’s feelings were as complex as the fatality he saw fast rolling up, for which he sought by hints and half-words to prepare his pupil, a sort of national courtesy and compunction preventing him from speaking out. In the first days of mobilization, the first declaration of war, he had a way of putting out both hands to his visitor, taking Hans Castorp’s own and pressing them, that fairly went to our young noodle’s heart, if not precisely to his head. "My friend," the Italian would say, "gunpowder, the printing-press, yes, you have certainly given us all that. But if you think we could march against the Revolution—Caro! . . ."

During those days of stifling expectation, when the nerves of Europe were on the rack, Hans Castorp did not see Herr Settembrini. The newspapers with their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balcony, they disorganized the house, filled the dining-room with their sulphurous, stifling breath, even penetrated the chambers of the dying. These were the moments when the "Seven-Sleeper," not knowing what had happened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes—yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero’s mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment—not of his own motion, he was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers, of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice? Would Life receive again her erring and "delicate" child—not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, penitentially—perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner? Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin. And in this attitude Herr Settembrini found him—figuratively and most figuratively spoken, for full well we know our hero’s traditional reserve would render such theatricality impossible. Herr Settembrini, in fact, found him packing his trunk. For since the moment of his sudden awakening, Hans Castorp had been caught up in the hurry and scurry of a "wild" departure, brought about by the thunder-peal. "Home"—the Berghof—was the picture of an ant-hill in a panic: its little population was flinging itself, heels over head, five thousand feet downwards to the catastrophe-smitten flat-land. They stormed the little trains, they crowded them to the footboard—luggageless, if needs must, and the stacks of luggage piled high the station platform, the seething platform, to the height of which the scorching breath from the flat-land seemed to mount—and Hans Castorp stormed with them. In the heart of the tumult Ludovico embraced him, quite literally enfolded him in his arms and kissed him, like a southerner—but like a Russian too—on both his cheeks; and this, despite his own emotion, took our wild traveller no little aback. But he nearly lost his composure when, at the very last, Herr Settembrini called him "Giovanni" and, laying aside the form of address common to the cultured West, spoke to him with the thou!

"E così in giù, " he said. "Così vai in giù finalmente—addio, Giovanni mio! Quite otherwise had I thought to see thee go. But be it so, the gods have willed it thus and not otherwise. I hoped to discharge you to go down to your work, and now you go to fight among your kindred. My God, it was given to you and not to your cousin, our Tenente! What tricks life plays! Go, then, it is your blood that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man. But forgive me if I devote the remnant of my powers to incite my country to fight where the Spirit and sacro egoismo point the way. Addio!"

Hans Castorp thrust out his head among ten others, filling the little open window-frame. He waved. And Herr Settembrini waved back, with his right hand, while with the ring-finger of his left he delicately touched the corner of his eye.

What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to burst, by the beat of a drum coming faster, faster—There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on.—Beyond, a line of hill stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames. About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; athwart it a bemired high road, disguised with broken branches and from it again a deeply furrowed, boggy field-path leading off in curves toward the distant hills. Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye, a cold rain falls. Ah, a signpost! Useless, though, to question it, even despite the half-dark, for it is shattered, illegible. East, west? It is the flat-land, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the way-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and noways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely led hither by the spirit of our narrative, merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drum-mustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more in the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years, the genial sinner whose voice we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.

They have been brought forward, these comrades, for a final thrust in a fight that has already lasted all day long, whose objective is the retaking of the hill position and the burning villages beyond, lost two days since to the enemy. It is a volunteer regi-ment, fresh young blood and mostly students, not long in the field. They were roused in the night, brought up in trains to morning, then marched in the rain on wretched roads—on no roads at all, for the roads were blocked, and they went over moor and ploughed land with full kit for seven hours, their coats sodden. It was no pleasure excursion. If one did not care to lose one’s boots, one stooped at every second step, clutched with one’s fingers into the straps and pulled them out of the quaking mire. It took an hour of such work to cover one meadow. But at last they have reached the appointed spot, exhausted, on edge, yet the reserve strength of their youthful bodies has kept them tense, they crave neither the sleep nor the food they have been denied. Their wet, mud-bespattered faces, framed between strap and grey-covered helmet, are flushed with exertion—perhaps too with the sight of the losses they suffered on their march through that boggy wood. For the enemy, aware of their advance, have concentrated a barrage of shrapnel and large-calibre grenades upon the way they must come; it crashed among them in the wood, and howling, flaming, splashing, lashed the wide ploughed land.

They must get through, these three thousand ardent youths; they must reinforce with their bayonets the attack on the burning villages, and the trenches in front of and behind the line of hills; they must help to advance their line to a point indicated in the dispatch their leader has in his pocket. They are three thousand, that they may be two thousand when the hills, the villages are reached; that is the meaning of their number. They are a body of troops calculated as sufficient, even after great losses, to attack and carry a position and greet their triumph with a thousand-voiced huzza—not counting the stragglers that fall out by the way. Many a one has thus fallen out on the forced march, for which he proved too young and weak; paler he grew, staggered, set his teeth, drove himself on—and after all he could do fell out notwithstanding. Awhile he dragged himself in the rear of the marching column, overtaken and passed by company after company; at length he remained on the ground, lying where it was not good to lie. Then came the shattering wood. But there are so many of them, swarming on—they can survive a bloodletting and still come on in hosts. They have already overflowed the level, rain-lashed land; the high road, the field road, the boggy ploughed land; we shadows stand amid and among them. At the edge of the wood they fix their bayonets, with the practised grips; the horns enforce them, the drums roll deepest bass, and forward they stumble, as best they can, with shrill cries; nightmarishly, for clods of earth cling to their heavy boots and fetter them.

They fling themselves down before the projectiles that come howling on, then they leap up again and hurry forward; they exult, in their young, breaking voices as they run, to discover themselves still unhit. Or they are hit, they fall, fighting the air with their arms, shot through the forehead, the heart, the belly. They lie, their faces in the mire, and are motionless. They lie, their backs elevated by the knapsack, the crowns of their heads pressed into the mud, and clutch and claw in the air. But the wood emits new swarms, who fling themselves down, who spring up, who, shrieking or silent, blunder forward over the fallen.

Ah, this young blood, with its knapsacks and bayonets, its mud-befouled boots and clothing! We look at it, our humanistic-æsthetic eye pictures it among scenes far other than these: we see these youths watering horses on a sunny arm of the sea; roving with the beloved one along the strand, the lover’s lips to the ear of the yielding bride; in happiest rivalry bending the bow. Alas, no, here they lie, their noses in fiery filth.

They are glad to be here—albeit with boundless anguish, with unspeakable sickness for home; and this, of itself, is a noble and a shaming thing—but no good reason for bringing them to such a pass.

There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize him at a distance, by the little beard he assumed while sitting at the "bad" Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with his hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing? As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly:

"And loving words I’ve carven
Upon its branches fair—"

He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him and buries its nose in the ground; explodes inside there, with hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together—now they are scattered, commingled and gone.

Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more!—But our friend? Was he hit? He thought so, for the moment. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin, it hurt, but he smiles at it. Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all un-consciously singing:

"Its waving branches whiispered
A mess—age in my ear—"
and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out ot our sight.

Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life’s delicate child! Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But after all, it was your story, it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought; we will not disclaim the pedagogic weakness we conceived for you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger delicately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.

Farewell—and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?

FINIS OPERIS

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Author’s Note

THE MAKING OF The Magic Mountain

SINCE it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. For the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing; and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment—even if the critic were not, at the same time, the author.

In selecting my Magic Mountain for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest that this one of all my books received in America. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human.

Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss The Magic Mountain in English. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordi-nary declaration of love to Madame Chauchat, the Kirghiz-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. It eases his embarrassment and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language. "Parler français" he says, "c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière." In short, it helps him over his inhibitions—and an author who feels embarrassed at having to talk about his own works is in the same way relieved at being able to talk about them in another language.

There are authors whose names are associated with a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. Dante is the Divina Commedia, Cervantes is Don Quixote. But there are others—and I must count myself among them—whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. And not only his lifework, but actually his life itself, his personality. He strives, that is, to overcome the laws of time and continuity. He tries to produce himself completely in each thing he writes, but only actually does so in the way The Magic Mountain does it; I mean by the use of the leitmotiv, the magic formula that works both ways, and links the past with the future, the future with the past. The leitmotiv is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment.

In a broader sense, the whole lifework of the author has its leading motifs, which serve to preserve its unity, to make that unity perceptible to the reader, and to keep the whole picture present in each single work. But just for that reason, it may be unfair to the single work to look at it by itself, disregarding its connection with the others, and not taking into account the frame of reference to which it belongs. For instance, it is almost impossible to discuss The Magic Mountain without thinking of the links that connect it with other works; backwards in time to Buddenbrooks and to Death in Venice; forwards to the Joseph novels. Let me first of all tell you something of the origin and conception of the novel, just as events in my life brought them about.

In the year 1912—over a generation ago now—my wife was suffering from a lung complaint, fortunately not a very serious one; yet it was necessary for her to spend six months at a high altitude, in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. I stayed with the children either in Munich or at our country home in Tölz, in the valley of the Isar. But in May and June I visited my wife for some weeks at Davos. There is a chapter in The Magic Mountain, entitled "Arrival," where Hans Castorp dines with his cousin Joachim in the sanatorium restaurant, and tastes not only the excellent Berghof cuisine but also the atmosphere of the place and the life "bei uns hier oben." If you read that chapter, you will have a fairly accurate picture of our meeting in this sphere and my own strange impressions of it.

The impressions grew stronger and stronger during the three weeks I spent at Davos visiting my wife while she was a patient. They are the same three weeks Hans Castorp originally meant to spend at Davos—though for him they turned into the seven fairy-tale years of his enchanted stay. I may even say that they threatened to do the same for me. At least one of his experiences is a pretty exact transference to my hero of things that happened to me; I mean the examination of the carefree visitor from the "flatland," and the resulting discovery that he himself is to become a patient too!

I had been at the so-called Berghof ten days, sitting out on trie balcony in cold, damp weather, when I got a troublesome bronchial cold. Two specialists were in the house, the head physician and his assistant, so I took the obvious course of consulting them. I accompanied my wife to the office, she having been summoned to one of her regular examinations. The head doctor, who of course looked rather like Hofrat Behrens, thumped me about and straightway discovered a so-called moist spot in my lung.

If I had been Hans Castorp, the discovery might have changed the whole course of my life. The physician assured me that I should be acting wisely to remain there for six months and take the cure. If I had followed his advice, who knows, I might still be there! I wrote The Magic Mountain instead. In it I made use of the impressions gathered during my three weeks’ stay. They were enough to convince me of the dangers of such a milieu for young people—and tuberculosis is a disease of the young. You will have got from my book an idea of the narrowness of this charmed circle of isolation and invalidism. It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life. Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale. The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity for any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.

Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels.

THE idea of making a story out of my Davos impressions and experiences occurred to me very soon. After finishing the novel Royal Highness I wrote the long short story Death in Venice. This I had nearly finished when I went to Davos; and I now con-ceived the idea of The Magic Mountain (from the very first the tale bore that title). It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished. The atmosphere was to be that strange mixture of death and lightheadedness I had found at Davos. Death in Venice portrays the fascination of the death idea, the triumph of drunken disorder over the forces of a life consecrated to rule and discipline. In The Magic Mountain the same theme was to be humorously treated. There was to be a simple-minded hero, in conflict between bourgeois decorum and macabre adventure. The end of the story was not decided, but it would come as I wrote. It seemed an easy and amusing thing to do, and would not take much time. When I got back to Tölz and Munich I set to work on the first chapters.

A private intuition soon began to steal over me that this subject matter tended to spread itself out and lose itself in shoreless realms of thought. I could not conceal from myself the fact that the theme afforded a dangerously rich complex of ideas. Perhaps I am not the only author who tends to underestimate the extent of an enterprise he has embarked on. When I conceive a piece of work, it comes to me in such innocent, practicable guise, I feel sure I shall have no great difficulty in carrying it out. My first novel, Buddenbrooks, was meant to be a book of some two hundred and fifty pages, after the pattern, of Scandinavian novels of family and merchant life. It became two fat volumes. Death in Venice was to be a short story for a magazine. The same thing is true of the Joseph novels; they were to be something in the form of a story, about the length of Death in Venice. The Magic Mountain proved no exception to the rule. Perhaps this self-deception is necessary and fruitful. If a writer had before him from the start all the possibilities and all the drawbacks of a projected work, and knew what the book itself wanted to be, he might never have the courage to begin. It is possible for a work to have its own will and purpose, perhaps a far more ambitious one than the author’s—and it is good that this should be so. For the ambi-tion should not be a personal one; it must not come before the work itself. The work must bring it forth and compel the task to completion. Thus, I feel, all great works were written, and not out of an ambition to write something great which set itself from the beginning.

In short, I soon saw that this Davos story had its own ideas and that it thought about itself quite otherwise than I thought about it. This was even outwardly true. The humorous and expansive English style, itself a relief from the austerity of Death in Venice, took up space and time. Then the First World War broke out. It did two things: put an immediate stop to my work on the book, and incalculably enriched its content at the same time. I did not work on it again for years.

In those years I wrote The Reflections of a Non-Political Man, a work of painful introspection, in which I sought light upon my own views of European problems and conflicts. Actually, it became a preparation for the work of art itself; a preparation that grew to mammoth proportions and consumed vast amounts of time. Goethe once called his Faust "this very serious jest." Well, my preparation was for a work of art which could only become a jest—a very serious jest—by dint of my unburdening myself of a quantity of material in the polemical and analytical piece of writing. "This very serious jest." It is a good definition of art, of all art, of The Magic Mountain as well. I could not have jested and played without first living through my problem in deadly, human reality. Only then could I rise, as an artist, above it.

In 1924, at last, appeared the two volumes that had grown out of my proposed short story. Including the long interruptions, they had taken me not seven but actually twelve years of my life. Its reception might have been much less friendly than it was, and still would have surpassed my expectations. It is my way, when I have finished a book, to let it drop with a resigned shrug and not the faintest confidence in its chances in the world. The charm it once possessed for me, its sponsor, has long since vanished; that I have finished it at all is a feat due to my convictions regarding the ethics of craftsmanship—due indeed, at bottom, to obstinacy; and, altogether, obstinacy seems to me to have played such a part in these crabbed years-long preoccupations. I regard them so much as a highly dubious private enjoyment that I question the likelihood of anyone caring to follow on the track of my idiosyncrasies.

My surprise is the greater when, as has happened to me repeatedly, they are welcomed by an almost turbulent following; and in the case of The Magic Mountain my astonishment was particularly profound. Would anyone expect that a harassed public, economically oppressed, would take it on itself to pursue through twelve hundred pages the dreamlike ramifications of this figment of thought? Would, under the circumstances then prevailing, more than a few hundred people be found, willing to spend money and time on such odd entertainment, which had really little or nothing in common with a novel in the usual sense of the word? Certain it is that ten years earlier the book would not have found readers—nor could it even have been written. It needed the experiences that the author had in common with his countrymen; these he had betimes to let ripen within him, and then, at the favorable moment, as once before, to come forward with his bold production. The subject matter of The Magic Mountain was not by its nature suitable for the masses. But with the bulk of the educated classes these were burning questions, and the national crisis had produced in the general public precisely that alchemical "keying up" in which had consisted the actual adventure of young Hans Castorp. Yes, certainly the German reader recognized himself in the simple-minded but shrewd young hero of the novel. He could and would be guided by him.

The Magic Mountain is a very German book, and that might be the reason foreign critics very much underestimated its universal appeal. A Swedish critic, member of the Swedish Academy, with a decisive voice in the Nobel Prize awards, told me in public, and very decidedly, that nobody would dare to venture a translation of this book in a foreign language, as it was absolutely unsuited to such a purpose. That was a false prophecy. The Magic Mountain has been translated into all the European languages, and, so far as I can judge, no other of my books has had an equal suc-cess—I may say with pride that this is especially the case in America.

Now what is there that I can say about the book itself, and the best way to read it? I shall begin with a very arrogant request that it be read not once but twice. A request not to be heeded, of course, if one has been bored at the first reading. A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else. But if you have read The Magic Mountain once, I recommend that you read it twice. The way in which the book is composed results in the reader’s getting a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. Just as in music one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I intentionally used the word "composed" in referring to the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more commonly apply to the writing of music. For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often "really" something else; they are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it.

People have pointed out the influence of Wagner’s music on my work. Certainly I do not disclaim this influence. In particular, I followed Wagner in the use of the leitmotiv, which I carried over into the work of language. Not as Tolstoy and Zola use it, or as I used it myself in Buddenbrooks, naturalistically and as a means of characterization—so to speak, mechanically. I sought to employ it in its musical sense. My first attempts were in Tonio Kröger. But the technique I there employed is in The Magic Mountain greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way. That is why I make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice. Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time, the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards.

I return to something I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it seeks to present the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history. And secondly, because time is one of its themes: time, dealt with not only as a part of the hero’s experience, but also in and through itself. The book itself is the substance of that which it relates: it depicts the hermetic enchantment of its young hero within the timeless, and thus seeks to abrogate time itself by means of the technical device that attempts to give complete presentness at any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it comprises. It tries, in other words, to establish a magical nunc stans, to use a formula of the scholastics. It pretends to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks.

But its pretensions are even more far-reaching, for the book deals with yet another fundamental theme, that of "heightening," enhancement (Steigerung). This Steigerung is always referred to as alchemistic. You will remember that my Hans is really a simple-minded hero, the young scion of good Hamburg society, and an indifferent engineer. But in the hermetic, feverish atmosphere of the enchanted mountain, the ordinary stuff of which he is made undergoes a heightening process that makes him capable of adventures in sensual, moral, intellectual spheres he would never have dreamed of in the "flatland." His story is the story of a heightening process, but also as a narrative it is the heightening process itself. It employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It passes beyond realism by means of sym-bolism, and makes realism a vehicle for intellectual and ideal elements.

All the characters suffer this same process; they appear to the reader as something more than themselves—in effect they are nothing but exponents, representatives, emissaries from worlds, principalities, domains of the spirit. I hope this does not mean that they are mere shadow figures and walking parables. And I have been reassured on this score; for many readers have told me that they have found Joachim, Clavdia Chauchat, Peeperkorn, Settembrini, very real people indeed.

THE book, then, both spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author had set. The short story became a thumping two-volume novel—a misfortune that would not have happened if The Magic Mountain had remained, as many people even today still see it, a satire on life in a sanatorium for tubercular patients. When it appeared, it made a stir in professional circles, partly of approval, partly of the opposite, and there was a little tempest in the medical journals. But the critique of sanatorium therapeutic methods is only the foreground of the novel. Its actuality lies in the quality of its backgrounds. Settembrini, the rhetorical rationalist and humanist, remains the protagonist of the protest against the moral perils of the Liegekur and the entire unwholesome milieu. He is but one figure among many, however—a sympathetic figure, indeed, with a humorous side; sometimes a mouthpiece for the author, but by no means the author himself. For the author, sickness and death, and all the macabre adventures his hero passes through, are just the pedagogic instrument used to accomplish the enormous heightening and enhancement of the simple hero to a point far beyond his original competence. And precisely as a pedagogic method they are extensively justified; for even Hans Castorp, in the course of his experiences, overcomes his inborn attraction to death and arrives at an understanding of a humanity that does not, indeed, rationalistically ignore death, nor scorn the dark, mysterious side of life, but takes account of it, without letting it get control over his mind.

What he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health; in just the same way that one must have a knowledge of sin in order to find redemption. "There are," Hans Castorp once says, "two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius." It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation.

That description is not original with me. I got it recently from a critic and make use of it in discussing The Magic Mountain because I have been much helped by foreign criticism and I consider it a mistake to think that the author himself is the best judge of his work. He may be that while he is still at work on it and living in it. But once done, it tends to be something he has got rid of, something foreign to him; others, as time goes on, will know more and better about it than he. They can often remind him of things in it he has forgotten or indeed never quite knew. One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s whole self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves. As for me, I am glad to be instructed by critics about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go back to them in my mind. My regular formula of thanks for such refreshment of my consciousness is: "I am most grateful to you for having so kindly recalled me to myself." I am sure I wrote that to Professor Hermann Weigand of Yale University when he sent me his book on The Magic Mountain, the most fundamental and comprehensive critical treatment the work has received.

I read a manuscript by a young scholar of Harvard University, Howard Nemerov, called "The Quester Hero. Myth as Universal Symbol in the Works of Thomas Mann," and it considerably refreshed my memory and my consciousness of myself. The author places The Magic Mountain and its simple hero in the line of a great tradition that is not only German but universal. He classifies it as an art that he calls "The Quester Legend," which reaches very far back in tradition and folklore. Faust is of course the most famous German representative of the form, but behind Faust, the eternal seeker, is a group of compositions generally known as the Sangraal or Holy Grail romances. Their hero, be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker, the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with them, and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil, with death and the other world, with the supernatural, the world that in The Magic Mountain is called "questionable." He is forever searching for the Grail—that is to say, the Highest: knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the philosophers’ stone, the aurum potabile, the elixir of life.

The writer declares that Hans Castorp is one of these seekers. Perhaps he is right. The Quester of the Grail legend, at the beginning of his wanderings, is often called a fool, a great fool, a guileless fool. That corresponds to the naïveté and simplicity of my hero. It is as though a dim awareness of the traditional had made me insist on this quality of his. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister—is he too not a guileless fool? To a great extent he is identified with his creator; but even so, he is always the object of his irony. Here we see Goethe’s great novel, too, falling within the Quester category. And after all, what else is the German Bildungsroman (educational novel)—a classification to which both The Magic Mountain and Wilhelm Meister belong—than the sublimation and spiritualization of the novel of adventure? The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre Périlleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom, is always bound up with the "other world," with night and death.

In The Magic Mountain there is a great deal said of an alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy, of transubstantiation. And I, myself a guileless fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those very words that are always used in connection with the mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and its rites play a role in The Magic Mountain, for Freemasonry is the direct descendant of initiatory rites. In a word, the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life. And my Hans Castorp, the Bildungsreisende, has a very distinguished knightly and mystical ancestry: he is the typical curious neophyte—curious in a high sense of the word—who voluntarily, all too voluntarily, embraces disease and death, because his very first contact with them gives promise of extraordinary enlightenment and adventurous advancement, bound up, of course, with correspondingly great risks.

Young Nemerov’s is a most able and charming commentary. I have used it to help me instruct you—and myself—about my novel, this late, complicated, conscious and yet unconscious link in a great tradition. Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail. You would never have thought it when you read his story—if I did myself, it was both more and less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the book again from this point of view. And perhaps you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest reward, for which not only the foolish hero but the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the chapter called "Snow," where Hans Castorp, lost on the perilous heights, dreams his dream of humanity. If he does not find the Grail, yet he divines it, in his deathly dream, before he is snatched downwards from his heights into the European catastrophe. It is the idea of the human being, the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death. The Grail is a mystery, but humanity is a mystery too. For man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon reverence before the mystery that is man.

THOMAS MANN

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About the Author

THOMAS MANN was born in 1875, in the ancient Hanseatic city of Lübeck, of a line of influential merchants. His father had been a senator and twice mayor of the Free City; his mother was of Germanic-Creole descent. An ideal boyhood was passed for the most part in the comfortable family home in Lübeck.

He was nineteen when he removed to Munich, where he worked in an insurance office. In 1894, after the publication of his first novelette, Gefallen, he gave up office work for the study of art and literature at the University of Munich. Then came one year in Rome, and from that time on, Thomas Mann devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

After several visits to the United States, he settled temporarily in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lectured at the University. In 1941 he built a home in Pacific Palisades, California, and it was there that he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. In 1949 Thomas Mann made a brief visit to Germany, his first contact with his native land in sixteen years; in 1952 he returned to Europe to take up permanent residence in Switzerland. He died at Zurich on August 12, 1955.

Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, The Transposed Heads, Confessions of Felix Krull, Doctor Faustus and Letters of Thomas Mann are available in Vintage Books.