The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann

[admin]

Part 8 of 8

Dr. Krokowski was there too, short, stout, solid, with his black alpaca shirt fastened like a domino on his shoulders, the sleeves dangling. He was holding his punch-glass with his hand at the level of his eyes and twisting the wrist round as he talked and jested with a group of masqueraders. Music was heard; the tapir-faced lady was playing Handel’s Largo on the violin, and then a drawing-room sonata by Grieg, characteristically northern in mood. The Mannheimer accompanied her on the piano. There was good-natured applause, even from the bridge-tables, which had been set up and occupied by maskers, with bottles in coolers at their sides. The doors were all open, and some of the guests stood in the hall as well. A group about the punch-table watched the Hofrat, who was introducing a new diversion. Bent over the table with his eyes closed and his head thrown back in evidence of good faith, he was sketching with his mighty hand a figure on the back of a visiting-card, the outline of a pig. It was rather more fanciful than realistic, yet undoubtably the lineaments of a pig, which under these difficult conditions, without the help of his eyes, he had managed to trace. It was a feat, and he could perform it. The little eyes were almost in the right place, so was the pointed ear, and the tiny legs under the rounded little belly; the curving line of the back ended in a small neat ringlet of tail. There was a general "Ah!" as he finished; then everyone was fired with an ambition to emulate the master. What abortions were brought forth! They lacked all coherence. The eyes were outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, the line of the latter came nowhere near joining, the little tail curled away by itself without organic connexion with the figure, an in-dependent arabesque. They nearly split with laughing; the group increased. The notice of the bridge party was attracted, the players were drawn by curiosity and came up holding their cards fan-shaped in their hands. The bystanders watched the performer to see that he did not wink—which his feeling of powerlessness made him sometimes do; they giggled and guffawed while he committed his frantic blunders, and burst out in extravagant mirth when he at last opened his eyes and looked down upon his ridiculous handiwork. Blatant self-confidence lured everyone on to try his hand. The card, a large one, was soon filled on both sides with overlapping failures. The Hofrat contributed a second from his case; whereon Lawyer Paravant, after taking thought, essayed to draw a pig without lifting the pencil—and lo, the measure of his unsuccess led all the rest: his creation had no faintest likeness either to a pig or to anything else on the broad earth. It was greeted with hilarity and boisterous congratulations. Menu cards were fetched from the dining-room, and now several people could draw at the same time; each performer having his own circle of onlookers and aspirants, waiting for the pencil he was using. There were three pencils, they snatched them out of each other’s hands. The Hofrat, having set the sport afoot, and seen it thriving, withdrew with his adjutants.

Hans Castorp stood in the thick of the crowd, at Joachim’s back, watching. He rested his elbow on his cousin’s shoulder and supported his chin with all five fingers of that hand, his other arm set akimbo on his hip. He was talking and laughing, anxious to try his skill; asked on all sides for a pencil, and at length received a stump of a thing, hardly to be held between thumb and forefinger. Then he shut his eyes, lifted his face to the ceiling, and drew, all the time uttering objurgations against the pencil, some horrible inanity upon the paper, in his haste spoiling even this, and running off the paper on to the tablecloth. "That doesn’t count!" he cried as his audi-ence burst out in well-merited jeers. "What can you do with a pencil like that—deuce take it!" and he flung the offending morsel into the punch-bowl. "Has anybody a decent one? Who will lend me a pencil? I must have another try. A pencil, a pencil, who has a pencil?" he shouted, leaning with his left hand on the table, and shaking the other high in the air. There was no answer. Then he turned and, passing through the room, went straight up to Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he was well aware, was standing near the door of the little salon, watching with a smile the throng round the punch-table.

Behind him he heard someone calling—euphonious words, in a foreign tongue: "Eh, Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa, Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!" But he drowned out the voice with his own, and Herr Settembrini, flinging up his hand with a swing of the arm—a gesture common in his own country, whose meaning it would be hard to put into words—and giving vent to a long-drawn "Eh—h!" turned his back on the room and the carnival gaieties.—But Hans Castorp was standing on the tiled court of the school yard, gazing at close quarters into these blue-grey-green epicanthus eyes, above the prominent cheekbones, and saying: "Do you happen to have a pencil?"

He was deadly pale, as pale as when he had come back blood-spattered to the lecture, from that walk of his. The nerves controlling the blood-vessels that supplied his face functioned so well that the skin, robbed of all its blood, went quite cold, the nose looked peaked, and the hollows beneath the young eyes were lead-coloured as any corpse’s. And the Sympathicus caused his heart, Hans Castorp’s heart, to thump, in such a way that it was impossible to breathe except in gasps; and shivers ran over him, due to the functioning of the sebaceous glands, which, with the hair follicles, erected themselves.

She stood there, in her paper cap, and looked him up and down, with a smile that betrayed no trace of pity, nor any concern for the ravages written on his brow. The sex knows no such compassion, no mercy for the pangs that passion brings; in that element the woman is far more at home than the man, to whom, by his very nature, it is foreign. Nor does she ever encounter him in it save with mocking and malignant joy—compassion, indeed, he would have none of.

He had used the second person singular. She answered: "I? Perhaps I have, let me see." Her voice and smile did betray an excitement, a consciousness—such as comes when the first word is uttered in a relationship long secretly sustained—a subtle con-sciousness, which concentrates all the past in a single moment of the present. "You are so eager—you are very ambitious"—she continued thus to mock him, in her slightly veiled, pleasantly husky voice, with her quaint pronunciation, giving a foreign sound to the r and making the vowels too open, even accenting the word ambitious on the first syllable, with exotic effect; rummaging and peering the while in her leather bag, whence she fetched out, first a handkerchief, and then a little silver pencil, slender and fragile, a pretty trinket scarcely meant for use—the other, the first one, had been something more to take hold of.

"Voilà," she said, and held the toy by its end before his eyes, between thumb and forefinger, and lightly turned it to and fro.

Since she thus both gave and withheld it, he took it, so to speak, without receiving it: that is, he held out his hand, with the fingers ready to grasp the delicate thing, but not actually touching it. His eyes—in their leaden sockets—went from the little object to Clavdia’s Tartar physiognomy. His bloodless lips were open, and so remained, he did not use them to utter the words, as he said: "You see, I knew you would have one."

"Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile" she said. "C’est à visser, tu sais."

Their heads bent over it together, and she showed him the mechanism—it was quite ordinary, the little needle of hard, probably worthless lead came down as one loosened the screw.

They stood bent toward each other. The stiff collar of his evening dress served him to support his chin.

"A poor thing—but yours," he said, brow to brow with her, speaking down upon the pencil, stiff-lipped, so that most of the labials went unsounded.

"Ah, so you are even witty," she answered him, with a short laugh. She straightened up, and surrendered the pencil. It is a question by what means he was witty, since it was plain there was not a drop of blood in his head. "Well, away with you, go and draw, draw yourself out!" And wittily in her turn, she seemed to drive him away.

"But you have not drawn yet, you must draw too," he said, without managing the m in must, and drew a step backwards, invitingly.

"I?" she said again, with an inflection of surprise which seemed to have reference to something else than his invitation. She stood a moment in smiling confusion, then as if magnetized followed him a few steps toward the punch-table.

But interest in the activity there seemed to have fallen away. Someone was still drawing, but without an audience. The cards were covered with futilities, they had all done their worst, and now the current had set in another direction. Directly the doctors had left the scene, the word had gone round for a dance, already the tables were being pushed back; spies were posted at the doors of the writing- and music-rooms, with orders to give the sign in case the "old man," Krokowski, or the Oberin should show themselves. A young Slavic youth attacked con espressione the keyboard of the little nut-wood piano, and the first couple began to turn about within an irregular circle of chairs and tables, on which the spectators perched themselves.

Hans Castorp dismissed the departing punch-table with a wave of the hand, and indicated with his chin two empty seats in a sheltered corner of the small salon, near the portières. He did not speak, perhaps because the music was too loud. He drew up a seat—it was a reclining-chair with plush upholstery—for Frau Chauchat, in the corner he had indicated, and took for himself a creaking, crackling basket-chair with curling arms, in which he sat down, bent forward toward her, his own arms on the arms of the chair, her pencil in his hand and his feet drawn back under his seat. She lay buried in the plushy slope, her knees brought high; notwithstanding which, she crossed one leg over the other, and swung her foot in the air, in its black patent-leather shoe and black silk stocking spanned over the anklebone. There was a coming and going in the room, some of the guests standing up to dance, while others took their places to rest.

"You’ve a new frock on," he said, as an excuse for looking at her; and heard her answer.

"New? So you are acquainted with my wardrobe?"

"Am I right?"

"Yes—I had it made here lately; the tailor down in the village, Lukaçek, did it. He does work for several of the ladies up here. Do you like it?"

"Very much," he said, surveying her once more and then casting down his eyes. "Would you like to dance?" he added.

"Would you like to?" she asked, with lifted brows, yet smiling, and he answered:

"I would, if you wished."

"That is not so brave as I thought you were," she said, and when he laughed deprecatingly, she went on: "Your cousin has gone up already."

"Yes, he is my cousin," he confirmed her, unnecessarily. "I noticed he had gone, he is probably in the rest-cure by now."

"C’est un jeune homme très étroit, très honnête, très allemand."

"Étroit? Honnête?" he repeated. "I understand French better than I speak it. You mean he is pedantic. You think we are pedantic, we Germans—nous autres allemands ?"

"Nous causons de votre cousin. Mais c’est vrai, you are a little bourgeois. Vous aimez l’ordre mieux que la liberté, toute l’Europe le sait."

"Aimer, aimer—qu’est-ce que c’est? Ça manque de définition, ce mot là. We love what we have not—that is proverbial," Hans Castorp asserted. "Lately," he went on, "I’ve thought very much about liberty. That is, I’ve heard the word so often, I’ve begun to think about it. Je te le dirai en français, what I have been thinking. Ce que toute l’Europe nomme la liberté, c’est peut-être une chose assez pédante et assez bourgeoise en comparaison de notre besoin d’ordre—c’est ça!"

"Tiens! C’est amusant! C’est ton cousin à qui tu penses en disant des choses étranges comme ça?"

"No, c’est vraiment une bonne âme, a simple nature, not exposed to intellectual dangers, tu sais. Mais il n’est pas bourgeois, il est militaire."

"Not exposed?" she repeated his word, not without difficulty. "Tu veux dire une nature tout à fait ferme, sûr d’elle-même? Mais il est sérieusement malade, ton pauvre cousin."

"Who told you so?"

"We all know about each other, up here."

"Was it Hofrat Behrens?"

"Peut-être en me faisant voir ces tableaux."

"C’est à dire: en faisant ton portrait!"

"Pourquoi pas? Tu l’as trouvé réussi, mon portrait?"

"Mais oui, extrêmement. Behrens a très exactement rendu ta peau, oh, vraiment très

fidèlement. J’aimerais beaucoup être portraitiste, moi aussi, pour avoir l’occasion d’étudier ta peau comme lui."

"Parlez allemand, s’il vous plaît!"

"Oh, I speak German, even in French. C’est une sorte d’étude artistique et médicale—en un mot: il s’agit des lettres humaines, tu comprends.—What do you say, shall we dance?"

"Oh, no, it would be childish—behind their backs! Aussitôt que Behrens reviendra, tout le monde va se précipiter sur les chaises. Ce sera fort ridicule."

"Have you such respect for him as that?"

"For whom?" she said, giving her query a curt, foreign intonation.

"For Behrens."

"Mais va donc avec ton Behrens! But there really is not room to dance. Et puis sur le tapis—Let us look on."

"Yes, let’s," he assented, and gazed beyond her, with his blue eyes, his grandfather’s musing eyes, in his pale young face, at the antics of the masked patients in salon and writing-room. There was the Silent Sister capering with the Blue Peter, there was Frau Salomon as master of ceremonies, dressed in evening clothes with a white waistcoat and swelling shirt-front; she wore a monocle and a tiny painted moustache, and twirled upon tiny, high-heeled patent-leather shoes, that came out oddly beneath her black trousers, as she danced with the Pierrot, whose blood-red lips stared from his ghastly white face, with the eyes of an albino rabbit. The Greek flourished his symmetrical legs in their lavender tights alongside the darkly glittering Rasmussen in his low-cut gown. Lawyer Paravant in his kimono, Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt, and young Gänser danced all three together, with their arms round each other. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing the bristles as though they were a man’s hair.

"Yes, let’s," Hans Castorp repeated, mechanically. They spoke in low tones, covered by the music. "Let us sit here, and look on, as though in a dream. For it is like a dream to me, that we are sitting like this—comme un rêve singulièrement profond, car il faut dormir très profondément pour rêver comme cela. Je veux dire—c’est un rêve bien connu, rêvé de tout temps, long, éternel, oui, être assis près de toi comme à présent, voilà l’éternité."

"Poète!" she said. "Bourgeois, humaniste, et poète—voilà l’allemand au complet, comme il faut!"

"Je crains que nous ne soyons pas du tout et nullement comme il faut," he answered. "Sous aucun égard. Nous sommes peut-être des delicate children of life, tout simplement."

"Joli mot. Dis-moi donc.—Il n’aurait pas été fort difficile de rêver ce rêve-là plus tôt. C’est un peu tard, que monsieur se résout d’adresser la parole à son humble servante."

"Pourquoi des paroles?" he said. "Pourquoi parler? Parler, discourir, c’est une chose bien républicaine, je le concède. Mais je doute, que ce soit poétique au même degré. Un de nos pensionnaires, qui est un peu devenu mon ami, M. Settembrini—"

"Il vient de te lancer quelques paroles."

"Eh bien, c’est un grand parleur sans doute, il aime même beaucoup à réciter de beaux vers—mais est-ce un poète, cet homme-là?"

"Je regrette sincèrement de n’avoir jamais eu le plaisir de faire la connaissance de ce chevalier."

"Je le crois bien."

"Ah, tu le crois?"

"Comment? C’était une phrase tout-à-fait indifférente, ce que j’ai dit là. Moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français. Pourtant, avec toi je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière—sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve. Tu comprends?"

"A peu près"

"Ça suffit.—Parler," went on Hans Castorp, "pauvre affaire! Dans l’éternité, on ne parle point. Dans l’éternité, tu sais, on fait comme en dessinant un petit cochon: on penche la tête en arrière et on ferme les yeux."

"Pas mal, ça! Tu es chez toi dans l’éternité, sans aucun doute, tu le connais à fond. Il faut avouer, que tu es un petit rêveur assez curieux.’"

"Et puis," said Hans Castorp, "si je t’avais parlé plus tôt, il m’aurait fallu te dire ‘vous’."

"Eh bien, est-ce que tu as l’intention de me tutoyer pour toujours?"

"Mais oui. Je t’ai tutoyé de tout temps et je te tutoierai éternellement."

"C’est un peu fort, par exemple. En tout cas, tu n’auras pas trop longtemps l’occasion de me dire ‘tu’. Je vais partir."

It took time for the words to penetrate his consciousness. Then he started up, staring about him as though roused out of a dream. The conversation had proceeded rather slowly, for Hans Castorp spoke French uneasily, feeling for the sense. The piano had been silent awhile, now it sounded again, under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had relieved the Slavic youth. He put some music in place, and Fräulein Engelhart sat down beside him to turn the leaves. The party was thinning out; many of the guests had presumably taken up the horizontal. From where they sat they could see no one; but there were players at the card-tables in the writing-room.

"You are going to—what?" Hans Castorp asked, quite dashed.

"I am going away," she repeated, smiling with pretended surprise at his discomfiture.

"Impossible," he said. "You are jesting."

"Not at all. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving."

"When?"

"To-morrow. Après dîner."

There took place within him a feeling of general collapse. He said: "Where?"

"Far away."

"To Daghestan?"

"Tu n’es pas mal instruit. Peut-être, pour le moment—"

"Are you cured, then?"

"Quant à ça—non. But Behrens thinks there is not greatly more to be gained here, for the present. C’est pourquoi je vais risquer un petit changement d’air."

"Then you are coming back!"

"That is the question. Or, rather, the question is when. Quant à moi, tu sais, j’aime la liberté avant tout et notamment celle de choisir mon domicile. Tu ne comprends guère ce que c’est: d’être obsédé d’indépendance. C’est de ma race, peut-être."

"Et ton mari au Daghestan te l’accorde—ta liberté?"

"C’est la maladie qui me la rend. Me voilà à cet endroit pour la troisième fois. J’ai passé un an ici, cette fois. Possible que je revienne. Mais alors tu seras bien loin depuis longtemps."

"You think so, Clavdia?"

"Mon prénom aussi! Vraiment tu les prends bien au sérieux, les coutumes du carnaval!"

"Then you know about my case too?"

"Oui—non—comme on sait ces choses ici. Tu as une petite tache humide là dedans et un peu de fièvre, n’est-ce pas?"

"Trente-sept et huit ou neuf l’après-midi" said Hans Castorp. "And you?"

"Oh, mon cas, tu sais, c’est un peu plus compliqué—pas tout-à-fait simple."

"Il y a quelque chose dans cette branche de lettres humaines dite la médecine" Hans Castorp said, "qu’on appelle bouchement tuberculeux des vases de lymphe."

"Ah! Tu as mouchardé, mon cher, on le voit bien."

"Et toi—forgive me! Let me ask you a question—ask it in all earnestness: six months ago, when I left the table for my first examination—you looked round after me—do you remember?"

"Quelle question! Il y a six mois!"

"Did you know where I was going?"

"Certes, c’était tout-à-fait par hasard—"

"Behrens had told you?"

"Toujours ce Behrens!"

"Oh, il a représenté ta peau d’une façon tellement exacte—D’ailleurs, c’est un veuf aux joues ardentes et qui possède un service à café très remarquable. Je crois bien qu’il connaît ton corps non seulement comme médecin, mais aussi comme adepte d’une autre discipline de lettres humaines."

"Tu as décidément raison de dire, que tu parles en rêve, mon ami."

"Soit. Laisse-moi rêver de nouveau, après m’avoir réveillé si cruellement par cette cloche d’alarme de ton départ. Sept mois sous tes yeux—et à présent, où en réalité j’ai fait ta connaissançe, tu me parles de départ!"

"Je te répète, que nous aurions pu causer plus tôt."

"You would have liked it?"

"Moi? Tu ne m’échapperas pas, mon petit. Il s’agit de tes intérêts, à toi. Est-ce que tu étais trop timide pour t’approcher d’une femme à qui tu parles en rêve maintenant, ou est-ce qu’il y avait quelqu’un qui t’en a empêché?"

"Je te l’ai dit. Je ne voulais pas te dire ‘vous.’ "

"Farceur! Réponds donc—ce monsieur beau parleur, cet italien-là qui a quitté la soirée—qu’est-ce qu’il t’a lancé tantôt?"

"Je n’en ai entendu absolument rien. Je me soucie très peu de ce monsieur, quand mes yeux te voient. Mais tu oublies—il n’aurait pas été si facile du tout de faire ta connaissance dans le monde. Il y avait encore mon cousin, avec qui j’étais lié et qui incline très peu à s’amuser ici; il ne pense à rien qu’à son retour dans les plaines, pour se faire soldat."

"Pauvre diable! Il est, en effet, plus malade qu’il ne sait. Ton ami italien du reste ne va pas trop bien non plus."

"Il le dit lui-même. Mais mon cousin—est-ce vrai? Tu m’effraies."

"Fort possible qu’il va mourir, s’il essaye d’être soldat dans les plaines."

"Qu’il va mourir. La mort. Terrible mot, n’est-ce pas? Mais c’est étrange, il ne m’impressionne pas tellement aujourd’hui, ce mot. C’était une façon de parler bien conventionnelle, lorsque je disais: ‘Tu m’effraies.’ L’idée de la mort ne m’effraie pas. Elle me laisse tranquille. Je n’ai pas pitié—ni de mon bon Joachim ni de moi-même, en entendant qu’il va peut-être mourir. Si c’est vrai, son état ressemble beaucoup au mien et je ne le trouve pas particulièrement imposant. Il est moribond, et moi, je suis amoureux, eh bien!—Tu as parlé à mon cousin à l’atelier de photographie intime, dans l’antichambre, tu te souviens."

"Je me souviens un peu."

"Donc ce jour-là Behrens a fait ton portrait transparent!"

"Mais oui."

"Mon dieu! Et l’as-tu sur toi?"

"Non, je l’ai dans ma chambre."

"Ah—dans ta chambre. Quant au mien, je l’ai toujours dans mon portefeuille. Veux-tu que je te le fasse voir?"

"Mille remerciements. Ma curiosité n’est pas invincible. Ce sera un aspect très innocent."

"Moi, j’ai vu ton portrait extérieur. J’aimerais beaucoup mieux voir ton portrait intérieur qui est enfermé dans ta chambre. Laisse-moi demander autre chose! Parfois un monsieur russe qui loge en ville vient te voir. Qui est-ce? Dans quel but vient-il, cet homme?"

"Tu es joliment fort en espionnage, je l’avoue. Eh bien, je réponds. Oui, c’est un compatriote souffrant, un ami. J’ai fait sa connaissance à une autre station balnéaire, il y a quelques années déjà. Nos relations? Les voilà: nous prenons notre thé ensemble, nous fumons deux ou trois papiros, et nous bavardons, nous philosophons, nous parlons de l’homme, de Dieu, de la vie, de la morale, de mille choses. Voilà mon compte rendu. Es-tu satisfait?"

"De la morale aussi! Et qu’est-ce que vous avez trouvé en fait de morale, par exemple?"

"La morale? Cela t’intéresse? Eh bien, il nous semble, qu’il faudrait chercher la morale non dans la vertu, c’est-à-dire dans la raison, la discipline, les bonnes moeurs, l’honnêteté, mais plutôt dans le contraire, je veux dire dans le péché, en s’abandonnant au danger, à ce qui est nuisible, à ce qui nous consume. Il nous semble qu’il est plus moral de se perdre et même de se laisser dépérir, que de se conserver. Les grands moralistes n’étaient point de vertueux, mais des aventuriers dans le mal, des vicieux, des grands pécheurs qui nous enseignent à nous incliner chrétiennement devant la misère. Tout ça doit te déplaire beaucoup, n’est-ce pas?"

He was silent; sitting as before, with his feet twined together, thrust back beneath the creaking wicker chair, leaning toward the figure opposite, in its cocked hat; her pencil between his fingers. With Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes he looked out into the room. It was empty, the company dispersed. The piano, in the corner diagonally opposite, was being touched softly and lightly with one hand, by the Mannheimer, by whose side sat Fräulein Engelhart, turning the leaves of a music-book she held on her knee. At this pause which had ensued in the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, the pianist left off playing, and sat with his hand in his lap, while Fräulein Engelhart continued to turn the pages of her music-book. These four alone remained, from all the carnival merry-makers; they sat here motionless. The silence lasted several minutes. Deeper and deeper, under its weight, sank the heads of the pair at the piano: his toward his keyboard, hers toward her book; but at last the two as by common consent stood up cautiously, and carefully refraining from any glance in the direction of the opposite corner, their heads drawn down in their shoulders, their arms hanging stiffly at their sides, disappeared together, on tiptoe, through the writing-room.

"Everyone is going," said Frau Chauchat. "C’étaient les derniers. Il se fait tard. Eh bien, la fête de carnaval est finie." She raised her arms to remove the paper cap from her head, with its reddish braid wound round it like a wreath. "Vous connaissez les conséquences, monsieur."

But Hans Castorp gainsaid them, closing his eyes, and not otherwise changing his position. He answered: "Jamais, Clavdia. Jamais je te dirai ‘vous,’ jamais de la vie ni de la mort, if one may say that—one should be able to. Cette forme de s’adresser à une personne, qui est cette de l’Occident cultivé et de la civilisation humanitaire, me semble fort bourgeoise et pédante. Pourquoi, au fond, de la forme? La forme, c’est la pédanterie elle-même! Tout ce que vous avez fixé à l’égard de la morale, toi et ton compatriote souffrant—tu veux sérieusement que ça me surprenne? Pour quel sot me prends-tu? Dis donc, qu’est-ce que tu penses de moi?"

"C’est un sujet qui ne donne pas beaucoup à penser. Tu es un petit bonhomme convenable, de bonne famille, d’une tenue appétissante, disciple docile de ses précepteurs et qui retournera bientôt dans les plaines, pour oublier complètement qu’il a jamais parlé en rêve ici et pour aider à rendre son pays grand et puissant par son travail honnête sur le chantier. Voilà ta photographie intime, faite sans appareil. Tu la trouves exacte, j’espère?"

"Il y manque quelques détails que Behrens y a trouvés."

"Ah, les médecins en trouvent toujours, ils s’y connaissent."

"Tu parles comme M. Settembrini. Et ma fièvre? D’où vient-elle?"

"Allons donc, c’est un incident sans conséquence qui passera vite."

"Non, Clavdia, tu sais bien que ce que tu dis là n’est pas vrai et tu le dis sans conviction, j’en suis sûr. La fièvre de mon corps et le battement de mon coeur harassé et le frissonement de mes membres, c’est le contraire d’un incident, car ce n’est rien d’autre" —and his pale face with the twitching lips bent closer over hers—"rien d’autre que mon amour pour toi, oui, cet amour qui m’a saisi à l’instant, où mes yeux t’ont vue, ou, plutôt, que j’ai reconnu quand je t’ai reconnue toi—et c’était lui, évidemment, qui m’a mené à cet endroit—"

"Quelle folie!"

"Oh, l’amour n’est rien, s’il n’est pas de la folie, une chose insensée, défendue et une aventure dans le mal. Autrement, c’est une banalité agréable, bonne pour en faire de petites chansons paisibles dans les plaines. Mais quant à ce que je t’ai reconnue et que j’ai reconnu mon amour pour toi—oui, c’est vrai, je t’ai déjà connue, anciennement, toi et tes yeux merveilleusement obliques et ta bouche et ta voix, avec laquelle tu parles—une fois déjà, lorsque j’étais collégien, je fea demandé ton crayon, pour faire enfin ta connaissance mondaine, parceque je t’aimais irraisonablement, et c’est de là, sans doute, c’est de mon ancien amour pour toi, que ces marques me restent que Behrens a trouvées dans mon corps, et qui indiquent que jadis aussi j’étais malade—"

His teeth struck together. As he raved, he had drawn one foot from under his chair, and moved it forward, so that the other knee touched the floor, there he knelt before her, his head bent, his whole body quivering. "Je t’aime," he babbled, "je t’ai aimée de tout temps, car tu es le Toi de ma vie, mon rêve, mon sort, mon envie, mon éternel désir—"

"Allons, allons!" she said. "Si tes précepteurs te voyaient—"

But he shook his head, violently, bowed as it was toward the carpet, and replied: "Je m’en ficherais, je me fiche de tous ces Carducci et de la République éloquente et du progrès humain dans le temps, car je t’aime!"

She caressed softly the close-cropped hair at the back of his head.

"Petit bourgeois!" she said. "Joli bourgeois à la petite tache humide. Est-ce vrai que tu m’aimes tant?"

And beside himself at her touch, now on both his knees, with bowed head and closed eyes, he went on: "Oh, l’amour, tu sais—Le corps, l’amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu’un. Car le corps, c’est la maladie et la volupté, et c’est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l’amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie! Mais la mort, tu comprends, c’est d’une part une chose mal famée, impudente, qui fait rougir de honte; et d’autre part c’est une puissance très solennelle et très majestueuse—beaucoup plus haute que la vie riante gagnant de la monnaie et farcis-sant sa panse—beaucoup plus vénérable que le progrès qui bavarde par les temps—parcequ’elle est l’histoire et la noblesse et la piété et l’éternel et le sacré qui nous fait tirer le chapeau et marcher sur la pointe des pieds.—Or, de même, le corps, lui aussi, et l’amour du corps, sont une affaire indécente et fâcheuse, et le corps rougit et pâlit à sa surface par frayeur et honte de lui-même. Mais aussi il est une grande gloire adorable, image miraculeuse de la vie organique, sainte merveille de la forme et de la beauté, et l’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde! Oh, enchantante beauté organique qui ne se compose ni de teinture à l’huile ni de pierre, mais de matière vivante et corruptible, pleine du secret fébrile de la vie et de la pourriture! Regarde la symétrie merveilleuse de l’édifice humain, les épaules et les hanches et les mamelons fleurissants de part et d’autre sur la poitrine, et les côtes arrangées par paires, et le nombril au milieu dans la mollesse du ventre, et le sexe obscur entre les cuisses! Regarde les omoplates se remuer sous la peau soyeuse du dos, et l’échine qui descend vers la luxuriance double et fraîche des fesses, et les grandes branches des vases et des nerfs qui passent du tronc aux rameaux par les aisselles, et comme la structure des bras correspond à celle des jambes. Oh, les douces régions de la jointure intérieure du coude et du jarret, avec leur abondance de délicatesses organiques sous leurs coussins de chair! Quelle fête immense de les caresser, ces endroits délicieux du corps humain! Fête à mourir sans plainte après! Oui, mon dieu, laisse-moi sentir l’odeur de la peau de ta rotule, sous laquelle l’ingénieuse capsule articulaire sécrète son huile glissante! Laisse-moi toucher dévotement de ma bouche l’Arteria femoralis qui bat au front de ta cuisse et qui se divise plus bas en les deux artères du tibia! Laisse-moi ressentir l’exhalation de tes pores et tâter ton duvet, image humaine d’eau et d’albumine, destinée pour l’anatomie du tombeau, et laisse-moi périr, mes lèvres aux tiennes!"

He did not stir, or open his eyes; on his knees with bowed head, his hands holding the silver pencil outstretched before him, he remained, swaying and quivering.

She said: "Tu es en effet un galant qui sait solliciter d’une manière profonde, à l’allemande. " And she set the paper cap on his head.

"Adieu, mon prince Carnaval! Vous aurez une mauvaise ligne de fièvre ce soir, je vous le prédis."

She slipped from her chair, and glided over the carpet to the door, where she paused an instant, framed in the doorway; half turned toward him, with one bare arm lifted high, her hand upon the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly: "N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon."

And went out.

[admin]

Part 1 of 9

CHAPTER 6

Changes

WHAT is time? A mystery, a figment—and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of Space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing’s "brought about" by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement—for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite—apparently in the hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more so than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit in time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less, to zero? Is it possible, in eternity, to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe—how do these fare? Are they consistent with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adopt? Again we ask, and again echo answers.

Hans Castorp revolved these queries and their like in his brain. We know that from the very first day of his arrival up here his mind had been much disposed to such sleeveless speculation. Later, perhaps, a certain sinister but strong desire of his, since gratified, had sharpened it the more and confirmed it in its general tendency to question and to carp. He put these queries to himself, he put them to good cousin Joachim, he put them to the valley at large, lying there, as it had these months on end, deep in snow; though from none of these quarters could he expect anything like an answer, from which the least would be hard to say. For himself, it was precisely because he did not know the answers that he put the questions. For Joachim, it was hardly possible to get him even to consider them, he having, as Hans Castorp had said, in French, on a certain evening, nothing else in his head but the idea of being a soldier down below. Joachim wrestled with these hopes of his, that now seemed al-most within his grasp, now receded into the distance and mocked him there; the struggle grew daily more embittered, he even threatened to end it once for all by a single bold bid for liberty. Yes, the good, the patient, the upright Joachim, so affected to discipline and the service, had been attacked by fits of rebellion, he even questioned the authority of the "Gaffky scale": the method employed in the laboratory—the lab, as one called it—to ascertain the degree of a patient’s infection.

Whether only a few isolated bacilli, or a whole host of them, were found in the sputum analysed, determined his "Gaffky number," upon which everything depended. It infallibly reflected the chances of recovery with which the patient had to reckon; the number of months or years he must still remain could with ease be deduced from it, beginning with the six months that Hofrat Behrens called a "week-end," and ending with the "life sentence," which, taken literally, often enough meant very little indeed. Joachim, then, inveighed against the Gaffky scale, openly giving notice that he questioned its authority—or perhaps not quite openly, he did not say so to the authorities, but expressed his views to his cousin, and even in the dining-room. "I’m fed up with it, I won’t be made a fool of any longer," he said, the blood mounting to his bronzed face. "Two weeks ago I had Gaffky two, a mere nothing, my prospects were the best. And to-day I am regularly infested—number nine, if you please. No talk of getting away. How the devil can a man know where he is? Up on the Schatzalp there is a man, a Greek peasant, an agent had him sent here from Arcadia, he has galloping consumption, there isn’t the dimmest hope for him. He may die any day—and yet they’ve never found even the ghost of a bacillus in his sputum. On the other hand, that Belgian captain that was discharged cured the other day, he was simply alive with them, Gaffky ten—and only the very tiniest cavity. The devil fly away with Gaffky! I’m done, I’m going home, if it kills me!" Thus Joachim; and all his company were pained to see the gentle, serious youth so overwrought. Hans Castorp, when he heard the threat, could scarcely refrain from quoting a certain opinion he had heard expressed in French, by a third party. But he was silent. Was he to set himself up to his cousin for a model of patience, as did Frau Stöhr, who actually admonished Joachim not to be blasphemous, but to humble his pride, and take pattern by her, Caroline Stöhr, and the faithfulness and firm resolve which made her hold out up here, instead of returning to queen it in her Cannstadt home—to the end that when she did go back it would be as a sound and healthy wife to the arms of her impatient husband? No, such language was not for Hans Castorp—since Carnival he had had a bad conscience towards his cousin. Conscience told him Joachim must surely be aware of a certain matter never referred to between them; must see in it something very like disloyalty and desertion—taken in connexion with a pair of brown eyes we know, an unwarranted tendency to laughter, and an orange-scented handkerchief, to whose influence Joachim was daily five times exposed, yet gave no ground to evil, but steadfastly fixed his eyes upon his plate. Yes, even the silent hostility which Joachim opposed to his cousin’s problems and speculations on the subject of time, Hans Castorp felt as an expression of the military decorum which reproached himself. While as for the valley, that snowed-in winter valley, when Hans Castorp, lying in his excellent chair, directed upon it his inquiring metaphysical gaze, it was silent too. Its peaked summits, its domes and crests and brown-green-reddish forests stood there silent, and mortal time flowed over and about them: sometimes luminous against a deep-blue sky, sometimes shrouded in vapours, sometimes glowing rosy in the parting sun, sometimes glittering with hard, diamondlike brilliance in the magic moonlight—but always, always in snow, for six long, incredible, though scurrying months. All the guests declared they could not bear to look any more at the snow, they were sick of it; they had had their fill in the summer-time, and now these masses and heaps and slopes and cushions of snow, day in and day out, were more than they could stand, their spirits sank under the weight of it. And they took to coloured glasses, green, yellow, and red, to save their eyes, but still more their feelings.

Mountain and valley, then, had been lying in deep snow for six months; nay, seven, for as we talk, time strides on—not only present time, taken up with the tale we are telling, but also past time, the bygone time of Hans Castorp and the companions of his destiny, up among the snows—time strides on, and brings changes with it. The prophecy which so glibly, so much to Herr Settembrini’s disgust, Hans Castorp had made on the eve of Carnival, was in a fair way to be fulfilled. True, the solstice was not immediately at hand; yet Easter had passed over the valley, April advanced, with Whitsuntide in plain view; spring, with the melting of the snows, would soon be here. Not all the snow would melt: on the heights to the south, and on the north in the rocky ravines of the Rhatikon, some would still remain, and through the summer months more was sure to fall, though it would scarcely lie. Yet the year revolved, and promised changes in its course; for since that night of Carnival when Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil of Frau Chauchat and afterwards returned it to her again, receiving in its stead a remembrance which he carried about with him in his pocket, since that night six weeks had passed, twice as many as made up the original term of Hans Castorp’s sojourn among those up here.

Yes, six weeks had gone by, since that evening when Hans Castorp made the acquaintance of Clavdia Chauchat, and then returned so much later to his chamber than the duty-loving Joachim to his. Six weeks since the day after, bringing her depar-ture, her departure for the present, her temporary departure, for Daghestan, far away eastwards beyond the Caucasus. That her absence would be only temporary, that she intended to return, that she would or must return, at some date yet unspecified, of this Hans Castorp possessed direct and verbal assurances, given, not during that reported conversation in the French tongue, but in a later interval, wordless to our ears, during which we have elected to intermit the flow of our story along the stream of time, and let time flow on pure and free of any content whatever. Yes, such consolatory promises must have been vouchsafed our young man before he returned to number thirty-four; for he had had no word with Frau Chauchat on the day following, had not seen her indeed, save twice at some distance: once when the glass door slammed, and she had slipped for the last time to her place at table, clad in her blue cloth skirt and white sweater. The young man’s heart had been in his throat—only the sharp regard Fräulein Engelhart bent upon him had hindered him from burying his face in his hands. The other time had been at three o’clock, when he stood at a corridor window giving on the drive, a witness to her departure.

It took place just as other such which Hans Castorp had witnessed during his stay up here. The sleigh or carriage halted before the door, coachman and porter strapped fast the trunks, while friends gathered about to say good-bye to the departing one, who, cured or not, and whether for life or death, was off for the flat-land. Others besides friends gathered round as well, curious on-lookers, who cut the rest-cure for the sake of the diversion thus afforded. There would be a frock-coated official representing the management, perhaps even the physicians themselves; then out came the gracious recipient of the attentions paid by this little world to a departing guest; generally with a beaming face, and a bearing which the excitement of the moment rendered far more animated than usual. To-day it was Frau Chauchat who issued from the portal, in company with her concave fellow-countryman, Herr Buligin, who was to accompany her for part of the way. She wore a long, shaggy, fur-trimmed travelling-cloak, and a large hat; she was all smiles, her arms were full of flowers, she too seemed possessed by the pleasurable excitement due to the prospect of change, if to nothing else, which was common to all those who left, whatever the circumstances of their leaving, and whether with the consent of the physicans, or in sheer desperation and at their own risk. Her cheeks were flushed, and she chattered without stopping, probably in Russian, while the rug was being arranged over her knees. People presented farewell bouquets, the great-aunt gave a box of Russian sweetmeats. Nu-merous other guests besides Frau Chauchat’s Russian companions and table-mates, stood there to see her off; among them Dr. Krokowski, showing his yellow teeth through his beard in a hearty smile, the schoolmistress, and the man from Mannheim, who gazed gloomily and furtively from a distance, and whose eyes found out Hans Castorp as he stood at his corridor window looking down upon the scene. Hofrat Behrens did not show himself—he had probably ere now taken private leave of the traveller. The horses started up, amid farewells and hand-wavings from the bystanders; and then, as Frau Chauchat sank smilingly back against the cushions of the sleigh, her eyes swept the façade of the Berghof, and rested for the fraction of a second upon Hans Castorp’s face. In pallid haste he sought his loggia, thence to get a last glimpse of the sleigh as it went jingling down the drive toward the Dorf. Then he flung himself into his chair, and drew out his keepsake, his treasure, that consisted, this time, not of a few reddish-brown shavings, but a thin glass plate, which must be held toward the light to see anything on it. It was Clavdia’s x-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh.

How often had he looked at it, how often pressed it to his lips, in the time which since then had passed and brought its changes with it—such changes as, for instance, getting used to life up here without Clavdia Chauchat, getting used, that is, to her re-moteness in space! Yet after all, this adaptation took place more rapidly than one might have thought possible; for was not time up here at the Berghof arranged and organized to the end that one should get very rapidly used to things, even if the getting used consisted chiefly in getting used to not getting used? No longer might he expect that rattle and crash at the beginning of each of the five mighty Berghof meals. Somewhere else, in some far-off clime, Clavdia was letting doors slam behind her, somewhere else she was expressing herself by that act, as intimately bound up with her very being and its state of disease as time is bound up with the motion of bodies in space. Perhaps, indeed, her whole disease consisted in that, and in nothing else.—But though lost to view, she was none the less invisibly present to Hans Castorp; she was the genius of the place, whom, in an evil hour, an hour unattuned to any simple little ditty of the flat-land, yet one of passing sweetness, he had known and possessed, whose shadowy presentment he now wore next his months-long-labouring heart.

At that hour his twitching lips had stammered and babbled, in his own and foreign tongues, for the most part without his own volition, the maddest things: pleas, prayers, proposals, frantic projects, to which all consent was denied, and rightly: as, that he might be permitted to accompany the genius beyond the Caucasus; that he might follow after it; that he might await it at the next spot which its free and untrammelled spirit should select as a domicile; and thereafter never be parted from it more—these and other such rash, irresponsible utterances. No, all that our simple young adventurer carried away from that hour was his ghostly treasure trove, and the possibility, perhaps the probability, of Frau Chauchat’s return for a fourth sojourn at the Berg-hof—sooner or later, as the state of her health might decree. But whether sooner or later—as she had said again at parting—Hans Castorp would by that time be "long since far away." It was a prophecy whose slighting note would have been harder to bear had he not known that prophecies are sometimes made in order that they may not come to pass—as a spell, indeed, against their fulfilment. Prophecies of this kind mock the future: saying to it how it should shape itself, to the end that it shall shame to be so shaped. The genius, in the course of the conversation we have repeated, and elsewhere, called Hans Castorp a "joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide," which might in some sense be considered a translation of the Settembrinian epithet "life’s delicate child"; and the question thus was, which constitutes of the mingled essence of his being would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other. The genius, though, had failed to take into consideration the fact that Hans Castorp too had come about a good deal in the world, and might easily return hither at a fitting moment—though, in all soberness, was he not sitting up here entirely in order that he might not need to return. Precisely and explicitly that was with him, as with so many others, the very ground of his continued presence.

One prophecy, indeed, made on that carnival evening, made in mockery, was fulfilled: Hans Castorp’s fever chart did display a sharply rising curve. He marked it down with a feeling of solemnity. Thereafter it fell a trifle, and then ran on, unchanged save for slight undulations, well above its accustomed level. It was fever, the degree and persistency of which, according to the Hofrat, was out of all proportion to the condition of his lung. "H’m, young fellow me lad, you’re more infected than one would take you for," he said. "We’ll have to come on to the hypos. They’ll serve your turn, or I’m a Dutchman. In three or four months you ought to be as fit as a fiddle." Thus it came about that Hans Castorp had to produce himself, twice in the week, Monday and Saturday after the morning exercise, down in the "lab," where he was given his injections.

These were given by either physician indifferently; but the Hofrat performed the operation like a virtuoso, with a fine sweep, squeezing the little syringe at the very moment he pressed the point home. And he cared not a doit where he thrust his needle, so that the pain was often acute, and the spot hard and inflamed long afterwards. The effect of the inoculations on the entire organism was very noticeable, the nervous system reacted as after hard muscular exertion; and their strength was displayed in the heightened fever which was their immediate result. The Hofrat had said they would have this effect, and so it fell out. The whole affair, each time, took but a second; one after another, the row of patients received their dosage, in thigh or arm, and turned away. But once or twice, when the Hofrat was in a more lively mood, not depressed by the tobacco he had smoked, Hans Castorp came to speech with him, and conducted the brief conversation somewhat as follows:

"I still remember the coffee and the pleasant talk we had last autumn, Herr Hofrat," he would say. "Only yesterday, or perhaps the day before, was it, I was reminding my cousin of how we happened to—"

"Gaffky seven," said the Hofrat. "Last examination. The chap simply can’t part with his bacilli. And yet he keeps at me worse than ever, to let him get away so he can wear a sword tied round his middle. What a child it is! Makes me a scene over a month or so of time, as though it were aeons passing over our heads. Means to leave, whether or no—does he say the same to you? You ought to give him a pretty straight talking-to. Take it from me, you’ll have him hopping the twig if he is too previous about going down and breathing the nice damp air into his weak spot. A sword-swallower like that doesn’t necessarily possess so much grey matter; but you, as the steady civilian, you ought to see to it he doesn’t make an ass of himself."

"I do talk to him, Herr Hofrat," Hans Castorp responded, taking the reins again into his hands. "I do, often, when he begins to kick against the pricks—and I think he will listen to reason. But the examples he has before his eyes are all the wrong kind. He is always seeing people going off on their own, without authority from you; it looks mighty gay, as though they were really leaving for good, and that is a temptation to all but the strongest characters. For instance, lately—who was it went off? A lady, from the ‘good’ Russian table, that Frau Chauchat. She’s gone to Daghestan, they say.

Well, Daghestan—I don’t know the climate, it is probably better, when all is said and done, than being right down on the water. But after all, it is the flat-land, according to our ideas up here—though for aught I know it may be mountainous, geographically speaking; I am not much up on the subject. But how can a person who isn’t sound live out there, where all the proper ideas are totally lacking, and nobody has a notion of the regimen, the rest-cure, and measuring, and all that? Anyhow, she will be coming back, she told me so herself—happened to. How did we come to speak of her?—Yes, Herr Hofrat, I remember as thought it was yesterday, how we met you in the garden, or, rather, you met us, for we were sitting on a bench—I could show you the very bench, to-day, that we were sitting on—we were sitting and smoking. Or, rather, I was smoking, for my cousin doesn’t smoke, oddly enough. You were smoking too, and we exchanged our brands, I recall. Your Brazil I found excellent; but I suspect one has to go about them a little gingerly, or something may happen as it happened to you that time with the two little imported—when your bosom swelled with pride, and you nearly toddled off, you know. I may joke about it, since it turned out all right. I’ve ordered another couple of hundred of my Maria lately. I’m very dependent on her, she suits me in every respect. But the carriage and customs make the cost rather mount up—so if you have anything good to suggest, Herr Hofrat, I’m ready to have a go at the domestic product—I see some attractive weeds in the windows. Yes, we were privileged to look at your paintings, I remember the whole thing so well. And I was perfectly amazed at your oil technique, I’d never venture anything like it. You showed us the portrait you made of Frau Chauchat, simply first-class treatment of the skin—I must say I was very much struck by it. At that time I was not personally acquainted with the sitter, only by sight. But just before she went off, I got to know her."

"You don’t say!" answered the Hofrat—a little as he had that time when Hans Castorp told him, shortly before the first examination, that he had fever. He said no more.

"Yes," went on the youth, "I made her acquaintance—a thing that isn’t so easy, hereabouts, you know. But Frau Chauchat and I, we managed, at the eleventh hour, we had some conversation—Ff—f!" went Hans Castorp, and drew his breath sharply through his teeth. The needle had gone in. "That was certainly a very important nerve you happened to hit on, Herr Hofrat," he said. "I do assure you, it hurt like the devil. Thanks, a little massage does it good. . . Yes, we came a little closer to each other, in conversation."

"Ah? Well?" the Hofrat said. His manner was as one expecting from his own experience a very favouring reply, and expressing his agreement in anticipation by the way he puts the question.

"I’m afraid my French was rather lame," Hans Castorp answered evasively. "I haven’t had much occasion to use it. But the words somehow come into one’s mind when one needs them—so we understood each other tolerably well."

"I believe you," said the Hofrat. "Well?" he repeated his inquisition; and even added, of his own motion: "Pretty nice, what?"

Hans Castorp stood, legs and elbows extended, his face turned up, buttoning his shirt-collar.

"It’s the old story," he said. "At a place like this, two people, or two families, can live weeks on end under one roof, without speaking. But some day they get acquainted, and take to each other, only to find that one of the parties is on the point of leaving. Regrettable incidents like that happen, I suppose. In such cases, one feels like keeping in touch by post, at least. But Frau Chauchat—"

"Tut, she won’t, won’t she?" the Hofrat laughed.

"No, she wouldn’t hear of it. Does she write to you, now and again, from where she is staying?"

"Lord bless you!" Behrens answered, "she’d never think of it. In the first place, she’s too lazy, and in the second—how could she? I can’t read Russian, though I can jabber it, after a fashion, when I have to, but I can’t read a word—nor you either, I should suppose. And the puss can purr fast enough in French or in book German, but writing—it would floor her altogether. Think of the spelling! No, my poor young friend, we’ll have to console each other. She always comes back again, sooner or later. Different people take it differently—it’s a question of procedure, or of temperament. One goes off and keeps coming back, another stops long enough that he doesn’t need to come back. Just put it to your cousin that if he goes off now, you’re likely to be still here to see him return in state."

"But Herr Hofrat, how long do you mean that I—?"

"That you? You mean that he, don’t you? That he won’t stop as long a time below as he has been up here, that is what I mean, and so I tell you. That’s my humble opinion, and I lay it on you to tell him so from me, if you will be so kind as to undertake the commission."

Such, more or less, would be the trend of their conversation, artfully conducted by Hans Castorp, who, however, reaped nothing or less than nothing for his pains. How long one must remain in order to see the return of a person departed before her time—on that point the result was equivocal; while as for direct news of the departed fair one, he got simply none at all. No, he would have no news of her, so long as they were separated by the mystery of time and space. She would never write, and no opportunity would be afforded him to do so. And when he came to think of it, how should it be otherwise? Was it not very bourgeois, even pedantic, of him, to imagine they ought to write, when he himself had been of opinion that it was neither necessary nor desirable for them to speak? Had he even spoken with her, that carnival evening—anything that might be called speaking, and not rather the utterance of a dream, couched in a foreign tongue, and very little "civilized" in its drift? Why should he write to her, on letter-paper or on postcards, setting down for her edification, as he did for that of his people at home, the fluctuations of his curve? Clavdia had been right in feeling herself dispensed from writing by virtue of the freedom her illness gave her. Speaking and writing were of course the first concern of a humanistic and republican spirit; they were the proper affair of Brunetto Latini, the same who wrote the book about the virtues and the vices, and taught the Florentines the art of language and how to guide their state according to the rules of politics.

And here Hans Castorp was reminded of Ludovico Settembrini, and flushed, as once he had when the Italian entered his sick-room and turned on the light. Hans Castorp might have applied to him with his metaphysical puzzles, if only by way of challenge or in a carping spirit, without any serious expectation of an answer from the humanist, whose concerns and interests, of course, were all of this earth. But since the carnival gaieties, and Settembrini’s impassioned exit from the music-room, there had been a coolness between them, due on Hans Castorp’s side to a bad conscience, on the other’s to the deep wound dealt his pedagogic pride. They avoided each other, and for weeks exchanged not a single word. In the eyes of one whose view it was that all moral sanctions resided in the reason and the virtue, Hans Castorp must have ceased to be "a delicate child of life"; Herr Settembrini must by now have given him up for lost. The youth hardened his heart, he scowled and stuck out his lips when they met, and the Italian’s darkly ardent gaze rested upon him in silent reproach. But his resentment dissolved on the instant, the first time Herr Settembrini spoke to him,

which, as we have said, happened after weeks of silence. Even so, it was in passing, and in the form of a classical allusion, for the understanding of which some training in occidental culture was required. They met, after dinner, in the glass door—that door which nowadays was never guilty of banging. Settembrini overtook the young man, and in the act to pass him, said: "Well, Engineer, and how have you enjoyed the pomegranate?"

Hans Castorp smiled, overjoyed, but in confusion. He answered: "I don’t quite understand, Herr Settembrini. Did we have any pomegranates? I don’t recall having tasted—oh, yes, once in my life I had pomegranate juice and soda; it was too sweet."

The Italian, already in front of him, turned his head to say: "Gods and mortals have been known to visit the nether world and find their way back again. But in that kingdom they know that he who tastes even once of its fruits belongs to them."

He passed on, in his everlasting check trousers, and left Hans Castorp behind, presumably, and to a certain extent actually, staggered by so much allusiveness; though he was stirred to irritation at its being taken for granted, and muttered through his teeth after the departing back: "Carducci-Latini-humani-spagheti—get along, do, and leave me in peace!"

Yet he was at bottom sincerely glad to have the silence broken. For despite his keepsake, the macabre trophy he wore next his heart, he leaned upon Herr Settembrini, set great store by his character and opinions; and the thought of being cast off would have weighed upon his spirit more heavily than that remembered boyish feeling of being left behind at school and not counting any more, of enjoying, like Herr Albin, the boundless advantages of his shameful state. He did not venture, however, himself to address his mentor; who, for his part, let weeks elapse before he again approached his "delicate child."

The ocean of time, rolling onwards in monotonous rhythm, bore the Easter-tide on its billows. And they observed the season at the Berghof, as they did consistently all the recurrent feasts of the year, by way of breaking up and articulating the long stretches of time. At early breakfast there was a nosegay of violets at each place; at second breakfast each guest had a coloured egg; while sugar and chocolate hares adorned and made festive the midday table.

"Have you ever made a voyage by steamship, Tenente? Or you, Engineer?" asked Herr Settembrini, strolling up to the cousins’ table, toothpick in mouth. Most of the guests were shortening the main rest-cure in honour of the day, and devoting a quarter-hour to coffee and cognac. "These rabbits and coloured eggs somehow remind me of the life on board a great oceangoing boat, where you stare at a briny waste and a bare horizon for weeks on end, and even the exaggerated ease of the life scarcely avails to make you forget its precariousness, the submerged consciousness of which continues to gnaw at the depths of your being. I still recall the spirit in which the passengers in such an ark piously observe the feasts of terra firma: they have thoughts of the outer world, they are sensitive to the calendar. On shore it would be Easter to-day, they say; or, to-day they are celebrating the King’s birthday—and we will celebrate too, as best we may. We are human beings too. Isn’t that the idea?"

The cousins acquiesced. It was precisely that. Hans Castorp, touched by being once more addressed, and pricked by his conscience, praised Herr Settembrini’s words in sounding tones; pronounced them capital; said how spirited they were, how much the language of a literary man. He could not say too much. Undoubtedly, though only superficially, as Herr Settembrini, in his plastic way, had remarked, the comfort on board an ocean steamer did make one forget the element of risk in the circumstances. If he might venture to add anything, he would say it even induced a sort of light-headedness, a tempting of fate, which the ancients—in his desire to please he quoted the classics!—had called hubris. Belshazzar, King of Babylon, and that sort of thing. In short, it came close to being blasphemous. Yet, on the other hand, the luxury of an ocean-going vessel connoted (!) a majestic triumph of the human spirit, it was an honour to human kind, to launch all this comfort and luxury upon the salt sea foam and there sustain it—man thus boldly set his foot, as it were, upon the forces of nature, controlled the wild elements; and that connoted (!) the victory of civilization over chaos—if he might make so free as to employ the phrase.

Herr Settembrini listened attentively, legs and arms crossed, daintily stroking with the toothpick his flowing moustaches.

"It is remarkable," he said. "A man cannot make general observations to any extent, on any subject, without betraying himself, without introducing his entire individuality, and presenting, as in an allegory, the fundamental theme and problem of his own existence. This, Engineer, is what you have just done. All you have just now said came from the very depths of your personality; even the present stage you have arrived at found there poetic expression, and showed itself to be still the experimental—"

"Placet experiri," Hans Castorp said, with the Italian c, laughed and nodded.

"Sicuro—if what is involved is not recklessness and loose living, but an honourable passion to explore the universe. You spoke of hubris, that was the word you employed. The hubris which the reason opposes to the powers of darkness is the highest human expression, and calls down "upon it the swift revenge of envious gods—as when, per esempio, such an ark de luxe gets shipwrecked and goes gallantly beneath the waves. That is defeat with honour. Prometheus too was guilty of hubris—and his torture on the Scythian cliffs was from our point of view a holy martyrdom. But what about that other kind of hubris, which perishes in a wanton trifling with the forces of unreason and hostility to the human race? Is that—can that—be honourable? Sí, o no?"

Hans Castorp stirred his coffee-cup, though there was nothing in it.

"Engineer, Engineer," said the Italian, and nodded musingly, his black eyes fixed on space, "are you not afraid of the hurricane which is the second circle of the Inferno, and which whirls and whips the offenders after the flesh, those lost unhappy ones who sacrificed their reason to their desire? Gran dio! When I picture you, flapping about in the gale, heels over head—I could almost swoon out of sheer pity, and fall ‘as a dead body falls.’ "

They laughed, glad that he should be pleased to jest and talk poetry. But Settembrini added: "You remember, Engineer, on the evening of mardi gras, as you sat over your wine, you took your leave of me—yes, in a way, it amounted to that. Well, to-day it is my turn. You see me, gentlemen, in act to bid you farewell. I am leaving House Berghof."

The cousins were aghast.

"Impossible! You are joking," Hans Castorp cried, as he had cried once before, on a like occasion. He was nearly as much startled now as then.

Settembrini answered, in his turn: "Not at all. It is as I tell you. More than that, the news should be to you no news. I once explained to you that in the moment when I became aware that my hope of looking forward to a return to my work within any reasonable time was no longer tenable, in that moment I was settled to strike my tent, so far as this establishment is concerned, and seek in the village a permanent logis. Well—the moment has arrived. I cannot recover, that is settled. I can prolong my days, but only up here. My final sentence is for life—Hofrat Behrens with his customary vivacity has pronounced my doom. Very well, I have drawn the inevitable inference. I have taken new quarters, and am about to remove thither my small earthly possessions, and the tools of my literary craft. It is not far from here, in the Dorf; we shall surely see each other, surely I will not lose sight of you; but as a fellow-guest of this establishment I have the honour to take my leave."

Such was the announcement Settembrini had made, that Easter Sunday. Both cousins had shown themselves exceedingly upset. They had talked at length and repeatedly with him, on the subject of his resolve; also about how he could carry on the service of the cure even after he left the Berghof; about his taking with him and continuing the great encyclopædic task he had set himself, that survey of the masterpieces of belles-lettres, from the point of view of human suffering and its elimination; finally, about Herr Settembrini’s future lodging, in the house of a "petty chandler," as the Italian called him. The chandler, it appeared, let his upper storeys to a Bohemian ladies’-tailor, who in his turn let out lodgings. And now all these arrangements lay in the past. Time had moved steadily on, and brought more than one change in its train. Settembrini had ceased to have residence at the Berghof, he had taken up his abode with Lukaçek, the ladies’ tailor—and that indeed some weeks back. He had not made his exit in a sleigh, but on foot, wearing a short yellow coat, garnished sparsely with fur at the collar and wrists, and accompanied by a man who trundled the earthly and literary baggage of the humanist on a hand-lorry. He pinched one of the dining-room girls in the cheek with the back of two fingers, and went off down the drive, swinging his stick—they watched him go. This, as we said, was well on in April, three-quarters of the month lay in the past. It was still the depth of winter—in their chambers the thermometer registered scarcely more than forty degrees; outside there were fifteen degrees of frost, and if one left one’s ink-well in the loggia, it froze overnight into an icy lump, like a piece of coal. Yet one knew that spring was nigh. There were days when the sun shone, on which one felt in the air its delicate presence. The melting of the snows was at hand, and brought with it certain changes to the Berghof—despite the authority of Hofrat Behrens, despite all he could say, in dining-hall and bed-chamber, at every meal, at every visit, at every examination, to combat the prevailing prejudice against the season.

Were they, he asked, up here for the winter sports, or were they patients? And if the latter, what good on earth were snow and ice to them? Had they the notion in their heads that the melting snow was a bad time for them to be here? Nonsense!—it was the best time of all. He could show them that there were relatively fewer bedridden, in the whole valley, at this time than at any other in the year. And there was not a spot in the world that was not less favourable to lung-patients at this season than the one they were in. Anybody with a spark of common sense would stop on, and give himself the benefit of the hardening process which this sort of weather afforded. Then, provided they remained for their appointed time, they would be fully healed, staunch against any rigours of any climate in the world. And so forth. But the prejudice stuck, let him say what he would. The Berghof emptied. Perhaps it was the oncoming spring that got in their bones and upset even the steadiest-going; but at all events, the number of "wild," unauthorized departures from House Berghof increased until the situation verged upon the critical. For instance, Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, despite the pleasure she got from displaying her lace underwear at examinations, despite the fact that she was not improving, but getting steadily worse, took an entirely mad and illegitimate leave for the flat-land. Her sojourn in the valley extended much further back than Hans Castorp’s; she had entered more than a year ago, with only a slight weakness, for which a three months’ stay had been prescribed. Four months later the word was that she would be perfectly sound inside another six weeks. But at the end of that time there was heard no talk of a cure; she must stop for at least another four months. Thus it had gone on: certainly this was no bagnio, no Siberian penal settlement; Frau Salomon had remained, and displayed her beauteous underwear. But now, when the snows were melting, and she was prescribed, at her examination, another six months, on account of whistling sounds in the upper left lung, and unmistakable discords under the left shoulder-blade, her patience suddenly came to an end, and she left for her wet and windy Amsterdam, uttering invectives against Dorf and Platz, the far-famed climate, the doctors, and the International Sanatorium Berghof. Was that well done?

Hofrat Behrens raised shoulders and arms, and let the latter fall with a clap against his sides. At latest, he said, Frau Salomon would be back in the autumn—and for good and all. We shall be able to test the truth of his prophecy, for we are destined to spend yet much earthly time at this pleasure resort. But the Salomon case was far from being the only one of its kind. Time brought about many changes. Time always did—but more gradually, in the rule, not so strikingly. There were gaps at the tables, all seven of them, at the "good" as well as at the "bad" Russian table, and at those that stood transversely to the room. Not that this alone would have given an exact or fair picture of the situation; for there were always arrivals, as well as leave-takings, the bedrooms might be full—though there one dealt with patients whose condition had finally put an end to their exercising any choice in the matter. The gaps in the dining-room were partly due to the exercise of choice; but some of them yawned in a particularly hollow manner—as, for instance, at Dr. Blumenkohl’s place—he being dead. That expression he wore, as of something bad-tasting in the mouth, had grown more and more pronounced. Then he became permanently bedridden, and then he died—no one knew precisely when, his affair being disposed of with the usual tact and delicacy. A gap. Frau Stöhr sat next it—it made her shudder, so she moved over to Joachim Ziemssen’s other side, in the room of Miss Robinson, discharged cured, and opposite the schoolmistress, Hans Castorp’s neighbour, still faithful to her post. The latter was sitting, for the time, alone on her side of the table, for the other three places were free. The student Rasmussen had grown daily thinner and weaker, he was now bedridden, probably moribund. The great-aunt, with her niece and the full-breasted Marusja, had gone a journey—that was the usual way to put it, because everybody knew they would be back again. They would certainly be back by autumn, so you could hardly say they had left. The summer solstice—once Whitsuntide was past—stood immediately before them; and after the longest day in the year they would go downhill with a rush, toward winter. At that rate the great-aunt and Marusja were as good as back again—which was as it should be, for the lively Marusja was very far from being cured, and the schoolmistress knew positively that the brown-eyed one had tuberculous ulcers on her swelling bosom, which had more than once already necessitated an operation. Hans Castorp, as Fräulein Engelhart said this, gave a hasty glance at Joachim bending sedulously over his plate a face gone all mottled.

The lively great-aunt had given her table-mates a farewell supper in the restaurant, to which were bidden the cousins, Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Engelhart—a proper banquet, with caviar, champagne, and liqueurs. Joachim had been very silent, in fact had spoken only once or twice, and then hardly above a whisper; so that the old lady, in a burst of good feeling, had sought to cheer him up, even going so far as to set aside accepted forms and address him with the thou. "Never mind, Väterchen, cheer up, eat, drink, and be merry, we’ll be coming back again," she said. "Let’s all eat, drink, and be merry, and begone, dull care! God will send the autumn in His own good time, before we know it—so why be sad?" Next morning she presented half the dining-room with gay boxes of confits and left, with her two charges, on their little outing.

And Joachim? Did he find things easier, for that? Or did he suffer an agony of inward emptiness in view of the vacant places at table? Had his unwonted irritability, his threats of taking un-sanctified leave, anything to do with Marusja’s departure? Or, on the other hand, that he had after all not left, but lent an ear to the Hofrat’s gospel of the melting snows—was that fact any way connected with the circumstance that the full-bosomed Marusja was not gone for good but only on a journey, and would be back again in five of the smallest time-units known to House Berghof? Ah, yes, they were both true, this and the other, as Hans Castorp was well aware, without ever having exchanged a syllable with Joachim on the subject—which he was as careful to refrain from doing as his cousin was, on his side, to avoid mention of another person also lately gone off for a little trip.

In the mean time, who was sitting at Settembrini’s table, in the place vacated by the Italian and in the company of certain Dutchmen who were possessed of such mighty appetites that every day, before the five-course Berghof dinner, even before the soup, each one of them ordered and ate three fried eggs? Who, we say, but Anton Karlowitsch Ferge, the same who had experienced the hellish torment of the pleura-shock! Yes, Herr Ferge was out of bed. Without the aid of the pneumothorax he had so improved as to be able to spend most of the day up and dressed, and even to assist at the Berghof meals, with his bushy, good-natured moustaches, and his exaggerated Adam’s apple, just as good-natured. The cousins chatted with him sometimes, in dining-room or salon, or even inclined their hearts unto that simple sufferer, and took him with them on the daily walks. Elevated discourse was beyond him; but within his limits he could talk very acceptably about the manufacture of galoshes, and about distant parts of the Russian empire, Samara, Georgia and so on, as they plodded through slush and fog.

For the roads were really hardly passable. They streamed with water and reeked with mist. The Hofrat, indeed, said it was not mist, only cloud; but in Hans Castorp’s judgment this was quibbling. The spring fought out a bitter struggle, with a hundred setbacks into the depth of winter; the battle lasted months long, well into June. There were times in March when the heat was almost unendurable, as one lay, in the lightest of clothing, in the reclining-chair on the balcony, with the little parasol erected against the sun. In those days some of the ladies plumped for summer, and arrayed themselves in muslins for early breakfast—excusably, perhaps, in view of the singularity of the climate up here, which was favourable to illusion on the score of weather, jumbling, as it did, all the seasons together. Yet their forehandedness was but short-sightedness after all, showing paucity of imagination, the stupidity which cannot conceive anything beyond the present moment; even more was it an avidity for change, a time-devouring restlessness and impatience. It was March by the calendar, therefore it was spring, which meant as good as summer; and they pulled out their summer clothes, to appear in them before autumn should overtake them. Which, in fact, it did. With April, cold, wet, cloudy weather set in. A long spell of rain turned at length into flurries of fresh snow. Fingers were stiff in the loggia, both camel’s-hair rugs were called into service, it did not lack much of putting the fur sleeping-sack in requisition anew; the management brought itself to turn on the heat, and on all hands were heard bitter complainings—the spring had betrayed them. Toward the end of the month the valley lay deep in snow; but then it thawed, just as certain experienced or weather-sensitive among the guests had prophesied it would: Frau Stöhr, the ivory Levi, but equally the Widow Hessenfeld, smelt and felt it simultaneously, before ever the smallest little cloud showed itself over the top of the granite formation to the south. Frau Hessenfeld got colic, Fräulein Levi became bedridden, and Frau Stöhr, drawing back her lips from her ratlike teeth with the churlish expression she had, daily and hourly gave utterance to her superstitious fear of a hæmorrhage—for it was common talk that the thaw brought them about, or at least favoured them. It became unbelievably warm. The heat was turned off, balcony doors were left open all night, and still it was over fifty degrees in the morning. The snow melted apace, it turned grey, became porous and saturated; the drifts shrank together, and seemed to sink into the earth. There was a gurgling, a trickling and oozing, all abroad. The trees dripped, their masses of snow slid off; the shovelled-up barricades in the streets, the pallid layers carpeting the meadows, disappeared alike, though not all at once, they had lain too heavy for that. Then what lovely apparitions of the springtime revealed themselves! It was unheard-of, fairylike. There lay the broad meadows, with the cone-shaped summit of the Schwarzhorn towering in the background, still in snow, and close in on the right the snow-buried Skaletta glacier. The common scene of pasture and hayrick was still snow-clad, though with a thin and scanty coat, that everywhere showed bare patches of dark earth or dry grass sucking through. Yet after all, the cousins found, what a curious sort of snow it was! Thick in the distance, next the wooded slopes, but in the foreground a mere sprinkling at most; the stretches of discoloured and winter-killed grass were dappled or sprigged with white. They looked closer, they bent down surprised—it was not snow, it was flowers: snow-flowers, a snow of flowers, short-stemmed chalices of white and palest blue. They were crocuses, no less; sprung by millions from the soggy meadow-bottom, and so thick that one actually confused them with the snow into which they merged.

The cousins smiled at the deception, and for joy at the wonder before their eyes—at this timorous and lovely assumption of protective coloration, as it were, on the part of these first shy returning motions of organic life. They picked some of the flowers, studied the structure of their charming cups, and stuck them in their buttonholes; wore them home and put them in glasses on their stands; for the deathly torpor of the winter had lasted long indeed—however short it had seemed.

But that flowery snow was soon covered with real; even the blue soldanellas and red and yellow primroses that followed on suffered the same fate. What a fight that was, spring had to wage up here, before it finally conquered! It was flung back ten times before it could get a foothold—back to the next onset of winter, with icy wind, flurries of snow, and a heated house. At the beginning of May—for while we have been talking of crocuses, April has merged into May—it was real torture to write even so much as a postcard while sitting in the loggia, the fingers so stiffened in the raw, Novemberish air. The four or five shade-trees in the Platz were as bare as they would be in a valley January. It rained days on end, a whole week. Only the compensating excellence of the type of reclining-chair in use up here could render tolerable the ordeal of lying hours with wet and stiffened face, out here in the reeking mist. Yet all the while, in secret, it was a spring rain that fell; and more and more, the longer it lasted, did it betray itself as such. Under it the snow melted quite away, there was no more white, only here and there a vestige of dirty grey—and now, at long last, the meadows began to green!

What a joy that was, what a boon to the eyes, after so much white! But there was another green, surpassing in its tender softness even the hue of the new grass, and that was the green of young larch buds. Hans Castorp could seldom refrain from caressing them with his hand, or stroking his cheeks with them as he went on his walks—their softness and freshness were irresistible. "It almost tempts one to be a botanist," he said to his companion. "It’s a fact, I could almost wish to be a natural scientist, out of sheer joy at the reawakening of nature, after a winter like this up here. That’s gentian, man, that you see up there on the cliffs; and this is a sort of little yellow violet—something I’m not familiar with. And this is ranunculus, they look just the same down below, the natural order Ranunculaceæ: compound, I remember, a particularly charm-ing plant, androgynous, you can see a lot of stamens and pistils, an androecium and a gynaeceum, if I remember rightly. I really must root out some old volume of botany or other, and polish up my knowledge in this field.—My hat, how gay it’s getting to look in the world!"

"It will be even more so in June," Joachim said. "The flowering-time in these parts is famous. But I hardly think I’ll be here for it.—That’s probably from Krokowski, that you get the idea of studying botany?"

Krokowski? What made him say that? Oh, very likely because Dr. Krokowski had been uttering himself botanically in one of his lectures of late. Yes, we shall be in error if we assume that because time has brought about many changes at the Berghof, Dr. Krokowski no longer delivers his lectures. He delivers them as before, one every two weeks, in a frock-coat, though no longer in sandals, for those he wears only in the summer, and soon will be donning them again: delivers them every second Monday, in the dining-room, as on that far-off day when Hans Castorp returned late and blood-bespattered from his walk. For three-quarters of a year now had the analyst held forth on the subject of love and disease. Never much at one time, in little chats, from half to three-quarters of an hour long, he had dealt out the treasures of his intellect; and one received the impression that he need never leave off, that he could as well go on for ever. It was a sort of half-monthly Thousand and One Nights’ Entertainment, spinning itself out at will, calculated, like the stories of Scheherazade, to gratify the curiosity of a prince, and turn away his wrath. Dr. Krokowski’s theme, in its untrammelled scope, reminded one, indeed, of the undertaking to which Settembrini had vowed himself, the Encyclopædia of Suffering. And the extent to which it offered points of departure could be seen from the circumstance that the lecturer had lately talked about botany—to be precise, about mushrooms. But he had perhaps slightly changed his theme by now. He was at present discussing love and death; finding occasion for observations in part subtly poetic in their nature, in part ruthlessly scientific. And thus it was, in this connexion, that the learned gentlemen, speaking with his drawling, typically Eastern cadence, and his softly mouthed r, came upon the subject of botany; that is to say, upon the subject of mushrooms. These creatures of the shade, luxuriant and anomalous forms of organic life, were fleshly by nature, and closely related to the animal kingdom. The products of animal metabolism, such as albumen, glycogen, animal starch, in short, were present in them. And Dr. Krokowski went on to speak of a mushroom, famous in classical antiquity and since, on account of its form and the powers ascribed to it—a fungus in whose Latin name the epithet impudicus occurred; and which in its form was suggestive of love, in its odour of death. For it was a striking fact that the odour of the Impudicus was that of animal decay: it gave out that odour when the viscous, greenish, spore-bearing fluid dripped from its bell-shaped top. Yet even to-day, among the ignorant, the mushroom passed for an aphrodisiac.

All that, Lawyer Paravant found, had been a bit strong for the ladies. He was still here, having hearkened to the Hofrat’s propaganda, and stuck out the melting season. Likewise Frau Stöhr, who had shown strength of character and set her face against every temptation to unlawful departure, expressed herself at table to the effect that Krokowski had been positively "obscure" to-day, with his classical mushroom. She had actually said obscure, the poor creature, and gone on making one howler after another.

But what surprised Hans Castorp was that his cousin should have mentioned Dr. Krokowski and his botanical allusions; for the psycho-analyst had been as little referred to between them as Clavdia Chauchat or Marusja. By common consent they had passed over his ways and works in silence. But now Joachim had mentioned him—though in an irritable tone. His saying, too, that he would not be here for the flowering season had sounded very much out of sorts. Good Cousin Joachim seemed on the way to losing his equilibrium. His voice vibrated with irritation when he talked, and the old gentleness and moderation were of the past. Was it that he missed the orange perfume? Did the way they put him off with his Gaffky number drive him to the verge of despair? Or was he of more than one mind whether he should await the autumn up here or resolve on unlawful departure?

[admin]

Part 2 of 9

In reality it was something besides all these that had given the shade of vexation to Joachim’s voice and made him mention the recent botanical lecture with contempt. Hans Castorp did not know this—or rather, he did not know that Joachim knew it; as for himself, he knew it well enough, did this venturesome spirit, this delicate nursling of life, this schoolmaster’s plague! In a word, Joachim had caught his cousin at his tricks again, had found him out in another species of disloyalty, not so unlike the one he had been guilty of on the evening of carnival, only possessed of a still keener point in the circumstance that of this one he made a practice. In the rhythmic monotony of time’s flow, in the well-nigh minute articulation of the normal day—that day which was ever, even unto confusion and distraction, the same day, an abiding eternity, so that it was hard to say how it ever managed to bring forth any change—in the inviolable, unbreachable regimen, we say, of that normal day, Dr. Krokowski’s routine of visits took him, as of yore, through all the rooms, or rather through all the balconies, from chair to reclining-chair, between half past three and four in the afternoon. How often had the normal day of the Berghof renewed itself, since the far-off time when Hans Castorp lay and grumbled within himself because Dr. Krokowski described an arc about him and left him on one side! The guest of that day had long become the comrade—Dr. Krokowski often thus addressed him when he made his rounds; and if, as Hans Castorp said to Joachim, the military associations of the word, with the exotic pronunciation of the r, sounded singularly inappropriate in his mouth, yet the word itself did not go so badly with his robust and hearty, confidence-inviting manner. But that again, in its turn, was belied by his blackness and pallor, so that some aura of the questionable always hung about the man.

"Well, comrade, and how goes it?" the doctor said, as, coming from the barbarian Russians, he approached the head end of Hans Castorp’s reclining-chair. The patient, hands folded on his chest, smiled daily at the blithe address, smiled with a friendly, albeit rather harassed mien, watching the doctor’s yellow teeth, that were visible through his beard. "Slept right well, did you?" Dr. Krokowski would go on. "Curve going down? Up, eh? Never mind, it will be all right before you come to get married. Good day to you." And he would go on into Joachim’s balcony. For these afternoon rounds were merely a coup d’oeil, no more.

But once in a way he would stop rather longer, standing there broad-shouldered and sturdy, ever with his manly smile, chatting with the comrade of this and that: the weather, the various departures and new arrivals, the mood the patient was in, whether good or bad; sometimes about his personal affairs, origin and prospects—before he uttered the formula: "Good day to you" and passed on. Hans Castorp would shift his hands to behind his head, and reply to all he was asked, smiling in his turn. He experienced a penetrating sense of uncanniness, yes, but he answered. They spoke in low tones, so that Joachim, despite the fact that the glass partition only half separated them, could not make out what they said—indeed, made not the slightest effort to do so. He heard his cousin get up from his chair and go indoors, probably to show the doctor his curve; and the conversation seemed to be further prolonged inside the chamber, to judge from the length of time before the Assistant appeared, this time from the inside, through his room.

What did the comrades talk about? Joachim never put the question. But if one of us were to do so, an answer in general terms might be forthcoming, as that there is much matter for an exchange of views, between two comrades and fellow-men when they possess ideas in common, and one of them has arrived at the point of conceiving the material universe in the light of a downfall of the spirit, a morbid growth upon it, while the other, as physician, is wont to treat of the secondary character of organic disease. Yes, there was, we should say, much to talk about, much to say on the subject of the material as the dishonourable decay of the immaterial, of life as the impudicity of substance, or disease as an impure manifestation of life. With the current lectures for background, the conversation might swing from the subject of love as a force making for disease, from the supersensory nature of the indications, to "old" and "fresh" infected areas, to soluble toxins and love potions, to the illumination of the unconscious, to the blessings of psycho-analysis, the transference of symptoms—in short, how can we know what all they talked about, Dr. Krokowski and young Castorp, when all these are merely guesses and suppositions thrown out in response to a hypothetic question!

In any case, they talked no longer; it had lasted only a few weeks. Of late the Assistant spent no more time with this particular patient than with the others, but confined himself chiefly to the "Well, comrade?" and "Good day to you," on his rounds. But now Joachim had made another discovery, he had fathomed the duplicity of his cousin—without, be it said, any faintest intention of so doing, without having bent his military honour to the office of spy. It happened quite simply that he had been summoned, one Wednesday, from the first rest period, to go down to the basement and be weighed by the bathing-master. He came down the clean linoleum-covered steps that faced the consulting-room door, with the x-ray cabinets on either side: on the left the organic, on the right, round the corner and one step lower down, the analytic, with Dr. Krokowski’s visiting-card tacked on the door. Joachim paused half-way down the stair, as he saw his cousin coming from the consulting-room, where he had just had an injection. He stepped hastily through the door, closed it with both hands, and without looking round, turned toward the door which had the card fastened on it with drawing-pins. He reached it with a few noiseless, crouching steps, knocked, bent to listen, with his head close to the tapping finger. And as the "Come in" in an exotic baritone sounded on the other side, Joachim saw his cousin disappear into the half-darkness of Dr. Krokowski’s analytic lair.

A New-Comer

LONG days—the longest, objectively speaking, and with reference to the hours of daylight they contained; since their astronomical length could not affect the swift passage of them, either taken singly or in their monotonous general flow. The vernal equinox lay three months back, the solstice was at hand. But the seasons up here followed the calendar with halting steps, and only within the last few days had spring fairly arrived: a spring still without hint of summer’s denser air, rarefied, ethereal, and balmy, with the sun sending silvery gleams from a blue heaven, and the meadows blithe with parti-coloured flowers.

Hans Castorp found bluebells and yarrow on the hill-side, like the ones Joachim had put in his room to greet him when he came; and seeing them, realized how the year was rounding out. Those others had been the late blossoms of the declining summer; whereas now the tender emerald grass of the sloping meadows was thick-starred with every sort of bloom, cup-shaped, bell-shaped, star-shaped, any-shaped, filling the sunny air with warm spice and scent: quantities of wild pansies and fly-bane, daisies, red and yellow primulas, larger and finer than any Hans Castorp had ever seen down below, so far as he could recall noticing, and the nodding soldanella, peculiar to the region, with its little eye-lashed bells of rose-colour, purple, and blue.

Hans Castorp gathered a bunch of all this loveliness and took it to his room; by no means with the idea of decoration, but of set and serious scientific intent. He had assembled an apparatus to serve his need: a botanical text-book, a handy little trowel to take up roots, a herbarium, a powerful pocket-lens. The young man set to work in his loggia, clad in one of the light summer suits he had brought up with him when he came—another sign that his first year was rounding out its course.

Fresh-cut flowers stood about in glasses within his room, and on the lamp-stand beside his highly superior chair. Flowers half faded, wilted but not dry, lay scattered on the floor of the loggia and on the balustrade; others, between sheets of blotting-paper, were giving out their moisture under pressure from heavy stones. When they were quite dry and flat, he would stick them with strips of paper into his album. He lay with his knees up, one crossed over the other, the manual open face down upon his chest like a little gabled roof; holding the thick bevelled lens between his honest blue eyes and a blossom in his other hand, from which he had cut away with his pocket-knife a part of the corolla, in order the better to examine the thalamus—what a great fleshy lump it looked through the powerful lens! The anthers shook out their yellow pollen on the thalamus from the tips of their filaments, the pitted pistil stood stiffly up from the ovaries; when Hans Castorp cut through it longitudinally, he could see the narrow channel through which the pollen grains and utricles were floated by the nectar secretion into the ovarian cavity. Hans Castorp counted, tested, compared; he studied the structure and grouping of calyx and petals as well as the male and female organs; compared what he found with the sketches and diagrams in his book; and saw with satisfaction that these were accurate when tested by the structure of such plants as were known to him. Then he went on to those he had not known the names of, and by the help of his Linnæus established their class, group, order, species, family, and genus. As he had time at his disposal, he actually made some progress in botanical systematization on the basis of comparative morphology. Beneath each dried speci-men in his herbarium he carefully inscribed in ornamental lettering the Latin name which a humanistic science had gallantly bestowed on it; added its distinguishing characteristics, and submitted the whole to the approval of the good Joachim, who was all admiration.

Evenings he gazed at the stars. He was seized with an interest in the passing year—he who had already spent some twenty-odd cycles upon this earth without ever troubling his head about it. If the writer has been driven to talk about the vernal equinox and suchlike, it is because these terms formed the present mental furniture of our hero, which he now loved to set out on all occasions, here too surprising his cousin by the fund of information at his command.

"The sun," he might begin, as they took their walks together, "will soon be entering the sign of the Crab. Do you know what that means? It is the first summer sign of the zodiac, you know. Then come Leo and Virgo, and then the autumn, the equinox, toward the end of September, when the rays of the sun fall vertically upon the equator again, as they did in March, when the sun was in the sign of the Ram."

"I regret to say it escaped my attention," Joachim said grumpily. "What is all that you are reeling off so glibly about the Ram and the zodiac?"

"Why, you know what the zodiac is—the primitive heavenly signs: Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and the rest. How can you help being interested in them? At least, you must know there are twelve of them, three for each season, the ascending and the declining year, the circle of constellations through which the sun passes. I think it’s great. Imagine, they have been found employed as ceiling decoration in an Egyptian temple—and a temple of Aphrodite, to boot—not far from Thebes. They were known to the Chaldeans too, the Chaldeans, if you please, those Arabic-Semitic old necromancers, who were so well versed in astrology and soothsaying. They knew and studied the zone in the heavens through which the planets revolve; and they divided it into twelve signs by constellations, the dodecatemoria, just as they have been handed down to us. Magnificent, isn’t it? There’s humanity for you!"

"You talk about humanity just like Settembrini."

"Yes—and yet not just the same either. You have to take humanity as it is; but even so I find it magnificent. I like to think about the Chaldeans when I lie and look at the planets they were familiar with—for, clever as they were, they did not know them all. But the ones they did not know I cannot see either. Uranus was only recently discovered, by means of the telescope—a hundred and twenty years ago."

"You call that recently?"

"I call it recently—with your kind permission—in comparison with the three thousand years since their time. But when I lie and look at the planets, even the three thousand years get to seem ‘recently,’ and I begin to think quite intimately of the Chaldeans, and how in their time they gazed at the stars and made verses on them—and all that is humanity too."

"I must say, you have very tall ideas in your head."

"You call them tall, and I call them intimate—it’s all the same, whatever you like to call it. But when the sun enters Libra again, in about three months from now, the days will have shortened so much that day and night will be equal. The days keep on getting shorter until about Christmas-time, as you know. But now you must please bear in mind that, while the sun goes through the winter signs—Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces—the days are already getting longer! For then spring is on the way again—the three-thousandth spring since the Chaldeans; and the days go on length-ening until we have come round the year, and summer begins again."

"Of course."

"No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!"

"For goodness’ sake, stop!"

"The feast of the solstice—midsummer night! Fires on the mountain-top, and ring-around-a-rosy about the leaping flames! I have never seen it; but they say our rude forefathers used thus to celebrate the first summer night, the night with which autumn begins, the very midday and zenith of the year, the point from which it goes downhill again: they danced and whirled and shouted and exulted—and why, really, all that primitive exultation? Can you make it out? What were they so jolly about? Was it because from then on the world went down into the dark—or perhaps because it had up till then gone uphill, and now the turning-point was reached, the fleeting moment of midsummer night and midsummer madness, the meeting-place of tears and laughter? I express it as it is, in the words that come to me. Tragic joy, triumphant sadness that was what made our ancestors leap and exult around the leaping flames: they did so as an act of homage to the madness of the circle, to an eternity without duration, in which everything recurs—in sheer despair, if you like."

"But I don’t like," growled Joachim. "Pray don’t put it off on me. Pretty large concerns you occupy yourself with, nights when you do your cure."

"Yes, I’ll admit you are more practically occupied with your Russian grammar. Why, man, you’re bound to have perfect command of the language before long; and that will be a great advantage to you if there should be a war—which God forbid."

"God forbid? You talk like a civilian. War is necessary. Without it, Moltke said, the world would soon go to pieces altogether it would rot."

"Yes, it has a tendency that way, I admit. And I’ll go so far as to say," began Hans Castorp, and was about to return to the Chaldeans, who had carried on wars too, and conquered Babylonia, even if they were a Semitic people, which was almost the same as saying they were Jews—when the cousins became simultaneously aware that two gentlemen, walking close in front of them, had been attracted by what they were saying and interrupted their own conversation to look around.

They were on the main street, between the Kurhaus and Hotel Belvedere, on their way back to the village. The valley was gay in its new spring dress, all bright and delicate colour. The air was superb. A symphony of scents from meadows full of flowers filled the pure, dry, lucent, sun-drenched air. They recognized Ludovico Settembrini, with a stranger; but it seemed as though he for his part either did not recognize them or did not care for a meeting, for he turned round again, quickened his step, and plunged into conversation, accompanied by his usual lively gestures. When the cousins came up on his right and gaily greeted him, he exclaimed: "Sapristi!" and "Well, well, well!" with every mark of delighted surprise; yet would have held back and let them pass on, but that they failed to grasp his intention—or else saw no sense in it. For Hans Castorp was genuinely pleased to see him thus, after a lapse of time: he stopped and warmly shook hands, asked how he did, and looked in polite expectation at his companion. Settembrini was thus driven to do what he obviously preferred not to do, but what seemed the only natural thing, under the circumstances: namely, to present them to each other, which he accordingly did, with much appropriate gesticulation, and the gentlemen shook hands, half standing, half walking on.

It appeared that the stranger, who might be about Settembrini’s age, was a housemate of his, the other tenant of Lukaçek the ladies’ tailor. His name, so the young people understood, was Naphta. He was small and thin, clean-shaven, and of such piercing, one might almost say corrosive ugliness as fairly to astonish the cousins. Everything about him was sharp: the hooked nose dominating his face, the narrow, pursed mouth, the thick, bevelled lenses of his glasses in their light frame, behind which were a pair of pale-grey eyes—even the silence he preserved, which suggested that when he broke it, his speech would be incisive and logical. According to custom he was bare-headed and overcoatless—and moreover very well dressed, in a dark-blue flannel suit with white stripes. Its quiet but modish cut was at once marked down by the cousins, whose worldly glances were met by their counterpart, only quicker and keener, from the little man’s own side. Had Ludovico Settembrini not known how to wear with such easy dignity his threadbare pilot coat and check trousers, he must have suffered by contrast with his company. This happened the less in that the checks had been freshly pressed, doubtless by the hands of his landlord, and might, at a little distance, have been taken for new. The worldly and superior quality of the ugly stranger’s tailoring made him stand nearer to the cousins than to Settembrini; yet it was not only his age which ranged him rather with the latter, but also a quite pronounced something else, most conveniently exemplified by the complexion of the four. For the two younger were brown and burnt, the two elder pale: Joachim’s face had in the course of the winter turned an even deeper bronze, and Hans Castorp’s glowed rosy red under his blond poll. But over Herr Settembrini’s southern pallor, so well set off by his dark moustache, the sun’s rays had no power; while his companion, though blond-haired—his hair was a metallic, colourless ashen-blond, and he wore it smoothed back from a lofty brow straight over his whole head—also showed the dead-white complexion of the brunette races. Two out of the four—Hans Castorp and Settembrini—carried walking-sticks; Joachim, as a military man, had none, and Naphta, after the introductions, clasped his hands again behind him. They, and his feet as well, were small and delicate, as befitted his build. He had a slight cold, and coughed unobtrusively.

Herr Settembrini at once and elegantly overcame the hint of embarrassment or vexation he had betrayed at first sight of the young people. He was in his gayest mood, and made all sorts of jesting allusions as he performed the introductions—for example, he called Naphta "princeps scholasticorum." Joy, he said, quoting Aretine, held brilliant court within his, Settembrini’s, breast; a joy due to the blessing of the springtime—to which commend him. The gentlemen knew he had a certain grudge against life up here often enough he had railed against it!—All honour, then, to the mountain spring! It was enough of itself to atone for all the horrors of the place. All the disquieting, provocative elements of spring in the valley were here lacking: here were no seething depths, no steaming air, no oppressive humidity! Only dryness, clarity, a serene and piercing charm. It was after his own heart, it was superb.

They were walking in an uneven row, four abreast whenever possible; when people came towards or passed them, Settembrini, on the right wing, had to walk in the road, or else their front for the moment broke up, and one or the other stepped back—either Hans Castorp, between the humanist and Cousin Joachim, or little Naphta on the left side. Naphta would give a short laugh, in a voice dulled by his cold: its quality in speaking was reminiscent of a cracked plate tapped on by the knuckle.

Indicating the Italian by a sidewise nod, he said, with a deliberate enunciation: "Hark to the Voltairian, the rationalist! He praises nature, because even when she has the chance she doesn’t befog us with mystic vapours, but preserves a dry and classic clarity. And yet—what is the Latin for humidity?"

"Humor," cried Settembrini, over his shoulder. "And the humour in the professor’s nature-observations lies in the fact that like Saint Catherine of Siena he thinks of the wounds of Christ when he sees a red primula in the spring."

"That would be witty, rather than humorous," Naphta retorted. "But in either case a good spirit to import into nature; and one of which she stands in need."

"Nature," said Settembrini, in a lower voice, not so much over as along his shoulder, "needs no importations of yours. She is Spirit herself."

"Doesn’t your monism rather bore you?"

"Ah, you confess, then, that it is simply to divert yourself that you wrench God and nature apart, and divide the world into two hostile camps?"

"I find it most interesting to hear you characterize as love of diversion what I mean when I say Passion and Spirit."

"And you, who put such large words to such empty uses, don’t forget that you sometimes reproach me for being rhetorical."

"You will stick to it that Spirit implies frivolity. But it cannot help being what it is: dualistic. Dualism, antithesis, is the moving, the passionate, the dialectic principle of all Spirit. To see the world as cleft into two opposing poles—that is Spirit. All monism is tedious. Solet Aristoteles quærere pugnam."

"Aristotle? Didn’t Aristotle place in the individual the reality of universal ideas? That is pantheism."

"Wrong. When you postulate independent being for individuals, when you transfer the essence of things from the universal to the particular phenomenon, which Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, as good Aristotelians, did, then you destroy all unity between the world and the Highest Idea; you place the world outside of God and make God transcendent. That, my dear sir, is classic mediævalism."

"Classic medievalism! What a phrase!"

"Pardon me, I merely apply the concept of the classic where it is in place: that is to say, wherever an idea reaches its culmination. Antiquity was not always classic. And I note in you a general repugnance to the Absolute; to the broader application of categories. You don’t even want absolute Spirit. You only want to have Spirit synonymous with democratic progress."

"I should hope we are at one in the conviction that Spirit, however absolute, ought never to become the advocate of reaction."

"Yet you are always claiming it as the advocate of freedom!"

"Why do you say ‘yet’? Is it freedom that is the law of love of one’s kind, or is it nihilism and all uncharitableness?"

"At any rate, it is the last two of which you are so obviously afraid."

Settembrini flung up his arm. The skirmish broke off. Joachim looked bewildered from one to the other, and Hans Castorp with lifted brows stared at the path before him. Naphta had spoken sharply and apodictically; yet he had been the one to defend the broader conception of freedom. He had a way of saying "Wrong!" with a ringing nasal sound, and then clipping his lips tightly together over it—the effect was not ingratiating. Settembrini had countered for the most part lightly, yet with a fine warmth in his tone, as when he urged their essential agreement upon certain fundamental points. He now began, as Naphta did not speak again, to gratify the natural curiosity of the young people about the new-comer—some sort of explanation being obviously their due after the dialogue just ended. Naphta passively let him go on, without heeding. He was, so Settembrini said, professor of ancient languages in the Fridericianum—bringing out the title with pompous emphasis, as Italians do. His lot was the same as the speaker’s own: that is, he had been driven to the conclusion that his stay would be a long one, and had left the sanatorium for private quarters under the roof of Lukaçek the ladies’ tailor. The high school of the resort had cannily secured the services of this distinguished Latinist—the pupil of a religious house, as Settembrini father vaguely expressed it—and it went without saying that he was an adornment to his position. In short, Settembrini extolled the ugly Naphta not a little, regardless of the abstract disputation they had just had, which now, it seemed, was to be resumed.

Settembrini went on to explain the cousins to Herr Naphta, whereby it came out that he had already spoken of them. Here, he said, was the young engineer who had come up on three weeks’ leave, only to have Herr Hofrat Behrens find a moist place in his lung; and here was that hope of the Prussian army organization, Lieutenant Ziemssen. He spoke of Joachim’s revolt and intended departure, and added that one must not insult the Engineer by imputing to him any less zealous desire to return to his interrupted labours.

Naphta made a wry face.

"The gentlemen have an eloquent advocate. Far be it from me to question the accuracy of his interpretation of your thoughts and wishes. Work, work—why, he would call me nothing less than an enemy of mankind—inimicus humanæ naturæ—if I dared suggest that there have been times when talk in that vein would utterly fail to produce the desired effect: times when the precise opposite to his ideal was held in incomparably higher esteem. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, preached an order of progress towards perfection quite different from any Signor Ludovico ever dreamed of. Would you like to hear what it was? His lowest stage was in the ‘mill,’ the second on the ‘ploughed field,’ the third, and most commendable—don’t listen, Settembrini!—was upon ‘the bed of repose.’ The mill was the symbol of earthly life—not a bad figure. The ploughed field represented the soul of the layman, the scene of the labours of priest and teacher. This was a stage higher than the mill. But the bed—"

"That will do, we understand," cried Settembrini. "Sirs, is he going to expatiate now upon the purpose and uses of the ‘lewd day-bed’?"

"I did not know, Ludovico, that you were a prude. To see you looking at the girls. . . What has become of your pagan single-mindedness? I continue: the bed is the place of intercourse between the wooing and the wooed: symbolically, it typifies devotional retirement from the world for the purpose of contact with God."

"Fie! Andate, andate!" the Italian fended him off, in a voice almost tearful. They all laughed. But Settembrini went on, with dignity: "No, no, I am a European, an Occidental, whereas the order of progress you describe is purely Eastern. The Orient abhors activity. Lao-Tse taught that inaction is more profitable than anything else between heaven and earth. When all mankind shall have ceased to do anything whatever, then only will perfect repose and bliss reign upon this earth. There you have your intercourse with God."

"Oh, indeed! And what about Western mysticism—and what about quietism, a religion that numbers Fénelon among its disciples? Fénelon taught that every action is faulty, since every will to act is an insult to God, who wills to act alone. I cite the propositions of Molinos. There is no doubt that the spiritual possibility of finding salvation in repose has been disseminated pretty generally all over the world."

Here Hans Castorp put in his word. With the courage of simplicity he mixed in the debate, and, gazing into space, delivered himself thus: "Devotion, retirement—there is something in it, it sounds reasonable. We practise a pretty high degree of retirement from the world, we up here. No doubt about it. Five thousand feet up, we lie in these excellent chairs of ours, contemplating the world and all that therein is, and having our thoughts about it. The more I think of it, the surer I am that the bed of repose—by which I mean my deck-chair, of course—has given me more food for thought in these ten months than the mill down in the flat-land in all the years before. There’s simply no denying it."

Settembrini looked at him, a melancholy gleam in his dark eye. "Engineer!" he said, restrainingly. He took Hans Castorp’s arm and drew him a little aside, as though to speak to him in private "How often have I told you that one must realize what one is and think accordingly! Never mind the propositions. Our Western heritage is reason—reason, analysis, action, progress: these, and not the slothful bed of monkish tradition!"

Naphta had been listening. He turned his head to say, "Monkish tradition! As if we did not owe to the monks the culture of the soil of all Europe! As if it were not due to them that Germany, France and Italy yield us corn and wine and fruit to-day, instead of being covered with primeval forest and swamp! The monks, my dear sir were hard workers—"

"Ebbè! Well, then!"

"Certainly against his intentions, at least. What I am calling your attention to is nothing less than the distinction between the utilitarian and the humane."

"And what I am calling your attention to is the fact, which I observe with indignation, that you are still dividing the world up into opposing factions."

"I grieve to have incurred your displeasure. Yet it is needful to make distinctions, and to preserve the conception of the Homo Dei, free from contaminating constituents. It was you Italians that invented banking and exchange, which may God forgive you! But the English invented the economic social theory, and the genius of humanity can never forgive them that."

"Ah, the genius of humanity was alive in that island’s great economic thinkers too!—You wanted to say something Engineer?"

Hans Castorp demurred—yet said something anyhow, Naphta as well as Settembrini listening with a certain suspense: "From what you say, Herr Naphta, you must sympathize with my cousin’s profession, and understand his impatience to be at it. As for me I am an out-and-out civilian, my cousin often reproaches me with it. I have never seen service; I am a child of peace, pure and simple, and have even sometimes thought of becoming a clergyman—ask my cousin if I haven’t said as much to him many a time! But for all that, and aside from my personal inclinations—or even, perhaps, not altogether aside from them—I have some understanding and sympathy for a military life. It has such an infernally serious side to it, sort of ascetic, as you say—that was the expression you used, wasn’t it? The military always has to reckon on coming to grip with death, just as the clergy has. That is why there is so much discipline and decorum and regularity in the army, so much ‘Spanish etiquette,’ if I may say so; and it makes no great difference whether one wears a uniform collar or a starched ruff, the main thing is the asceticism, as you so beautifully said.—I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in making my train of thought quite—"

"Oh, quite," said Naphta, and flung a glance at Settembrini, who was twirling his cane and looking up at the sky.

"And that," went on Hans Castorp, "is why I thought you must have great sympathy with the feelings of my cousin Ziemssen. I am not thinking of ‘Church and King’ and suchlike associations of ideas, that a lot of perfectly well-meaning and conventional people stand for. What I mean is that service in the army—service is the right word—isn’t performed for commercial advantage, nor for the sake of the economic doctrine of society, as you call it—and that must be the reason why the English have such a small army, a few for India, and a few at home for reviews—"

"It is useless for you to go on, Engineer," Settembrini interrupted him. "The soldier’s existence—I say this without intending the slightest offence to Lieutenant Ziemssen—cannot be cited in the argument, for the reason that, as an existence, it is purely formal—in and for itself entirely without content. Its typical representative is the infantry soldier, who hires himself out for this or that campaign. Take the soldiers of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, for instance, or of the various revolutionary armies, the Napoleonic or Garibaldian—or take the Prussian. I will be ready to talk about the soldier when I know what he is fighting for."

"But that he does fight," rejoined Naphta, "remains the distinctive feature of his existence as a soldier. Let us agree so far. It may not be enough of a distinction to permit of his being ‘cited in the argument’; but even so, it puts him in a sphere remote from the comprehension of your civilian, with his bourgeois acceptation of life."

"What you are pleased to call the bourgeois acceptation of life," retorted Settembrini, speaking rather tight-lipped, with the corners of his mouth drawn back beneath the waving moustache, while his neck screwed up and around out of his collar with fantastic effect, "will always be ready to enter the lists on any terms you like, for reason and morality, and for their legitimate influence upon young and wavering minds."

A silence followed. The young people stared ahead of them, embarrassed. After a few paces, Settembrini said—having brought his head and neck to a natural posture once more: "You must not be surprised to hear this gentleman and me indulging in long disputations. We do it in all friendliness, and on a basis of considerable mutual understanding."

That had a good effect—it was human and gallant of Herr Settembrini. But then Joachim, meaning well in his turn, and thinking to carry forward the conversation within harmless channels, was fated to say: "We happened to be talking about war, my cousin and I, as we came up behind you."

"I heard you," Naphta answered. "I caught your words and turned round. Were you talking politics, discussing the world situation?"

"Oh, no," laughed Hans Castorp. "How should we come to be doing that? For my cousin here, it would be unprofessional to discuss politics; and as for me, I willingly forgo the privilege. I don’t know anything about it – I haven’t had a newspaper in my hand since I came."

Settembrini, as once before, found this reprehensible. He proceeded to show himself immensely well informed upon current events, and gave his approval to the state of world affairs, in so far as they were running a course favourable to the progress of civilization. The European atmosphere was full of pacific thought and plans for disarmament. The democratic idea was on the march. He said he had it on reliable authority that the "Young Turks" were about to abandon their revolutionary undertakings. Turkey as a national, constitutional state—what a triumph for humanity!

"Liberalization of Islam," Naphta scoffed. "Capital! enlightened fanaticism—oh, very good indeed! And of interest to you too," he said, turning to Joachim. "Because when Abdul Hamid falls, then there will be an end of your influence in Turkey, and England will set herself up as protector.—You must always give full weight to the information you get from our friend Settembrini," he said to both cousins—and this too sounded almost insolent: as though he thought they would be inclined to take Set-tembrini lightly. "On national-revolutionary matters he is very well informed. In his country they cultivate good relations with the English Balkan Committee. But what is to become of the Reval agreement, Ludovico, if your progressive Turks are successful? Edward VII will no longer be able to give the Russians free access to the Dardanelles; and if Austria pulls herself together to pursue an active policy in the Balkans, why—"

"Oh, you, with your Cassandra prophecies!" Settembrini parried. "Nicholas is a lover of peace. We owe him the Hague conferences, which will always be moral events of the first order."

"Yes, Russia must give herself time to recover from her little mishap in the East."

"Fie, sir! Why should you scoff at human nature’s yearning for social amelioration? A people that thwarts such aspirations exposes itself to moral obloquy. ‘

"But what is politics for, then, if not to give both sides a chance to compromise themselves in turn?"

"Are you espousing the cause of Pan-Germanism?"

Naphta shrugged his shoulders, which were not quite even—in fact, to add to his ugliness, he was probably a little warped. He disdained to reply, and Settembrini pronounced judgment: "At all events, what you say is cynical. You see nothing but political trickery in the lofty exertions of democracy to fulfil itself internationally—"

"Where you would like me to see idealism or even religiosity. What I do see is the last feeble stirrings of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system. The catastrophe will and must come—it advances on every hand and in every way. Take the British policy. England’s need to secure the Indian glacis is legitimate. But what will be the consequences of it? Edward knows as well as you and I that Russia has to make good her losses in Manchuria, and that internal peace is as necessary to her as daily bread. Yet—he probably can’t help himself—he forces her to look westward for expansion, stirs up slumbering rivalries between St. Petersburg and Vienna—"

"Oh, Vienna! Your interest in that ancient obstruction is due, I presume, to the fact that her decaying empire is a sort of mummy, as it were, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German people."

"While you, I suppose, are Russophil out of humanistic affinity with Cæsaro-papism.

"Democracy, my friend, has more to hope from the Kremlin than she has from the Hofburg; and it is disgraceful for the country of Luther and Gutenberg—"

"It is probably not only disgraceful, but stupid into the bargain. But even this stupidity is an instrument of fate—"

"Oh, spare me your talk about fate! Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate!"

"One always wills one’s fate. Capitalistic Europe is willing hers."

"One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it."

"Your abhorrence of war is logically disjointed if you do not make the state itself your point of departure."

"The national state is the temporal principle, which you would like to ascribe to the evil one. But when nations are free and equal, when the small and weak are safe-guarded from aggression, when there is justice in the world, and national boundaries—"

"Yes, I know, the Brenner frontier. The liquidation of Austria. If I only knew how you expect to bring that about without war!"

"And I should like to know when I ever condemned a war for the purpose of realizing national aspirations!"

"But you say—"

"No, here I must really corroborate Herr Settembrini," Hans Castorp mixed in the dispute, which he had been following as they went, regarding attentively each speaker in turn, with his head on one side. "My cousin and I have had the privilege of frequent conversations with him on this and kindred subjects—what it amounted to, of course, was that we listened while he explained and developed his views—so I can vouch for the fact, and my cousin here will confirm me, that Herr Settembrini spoke more than once, with great enthusiasm, of the revolutionary principle, and about rebellion and reform—which is no very peaceful principle, I should think—and of the mighty efforts still to be made before it triumphs everywhere, and the great universal world-republic can come into being. Those were his words, though of course it sounded much more plastic and literary as he said it. But the part I have the most exact memory of, and have retained quite literally, because being a thorough-going civilian I found it quite alarming, was that he said the day would come, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles—it was the eagles’ pinions I was startled at—and that Vienna must be brought low before peace and prosperity could ensue. So it is not possible to say that Herr Settembrini condemned war as such. Am I right, Herr Set-tembrini?"

"More or less," said the Italian shortly, twirling his cane, with averted head.

"Too bad," Naphta smiled maliciously. "There you are, convicted of warlike inclinations out of the mouth of your own pupil. ‘Assument pennas ut aqailæ’ —"

"Voltaire himself approved of a war for civilization, and advised Frederick to fight Turkey."

"Instead of which, he allied himself with her—he he! And then the world-republic! I refrain from asking what becomes of the principle of revolt when peace and prosperity have once been brought about. For it is plain that from that moment rebellion becomes a crime—"

"You know quite well, as do these young men here, that we are dealing with a progress in human affairs conceived of as endless."

"But all motion is in circles," said Hans Castorp. "In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity and the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac—that is, the half of it that is visible to us—and think about the wise men of antiquity—"

"You ought not to brood and dream, Engineer," Settembrini interrupted him. "You must resolve to trust to the instincts of your youth and your blood, urging you in the direction of action. And also your training in natural science is bound to link you to progressive ideas. You see, through the space of countless ages, life developing from infusorium up to man: how can you doubt, then, that man has yet before him endless possibilities of development? And in the sphere of the higher mathematics, if you would rest your case thereon, then follow your cycle from perfection to perfection, and, from the teaching of our eighteenth century, learn that man was originally good, happy, and without sin, that social errors have corrupted and perverted him, and that he can and will once more become good, happy, and sinless, by dint of labour upon his social structure—"

"Herr Settembrini has omitted to add," broke in Naphta, "that the Rousseauian idyll is a sophisticated transmogrification of the Church’s doctrine of man’s original free and sinless state, his primal nearness and filial relation to God; to which state he must finally return. But the re-establishment of the City of God, after the dissolution of all earthly forms, lies at the meeting-place of the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual; redemption is transcendental—and as for your capitalistic world-republic, my dear Doctor, it is odd in this connexion to hear you talking about instinct. The instinctive is entirely on the side of the national. God Himself has implanted in men’s breasts the instinct which bids them separate into states. War—"

"War," echoed Settembrini, "war, my dear sir, has been forced before now to serve the cause of progress; as you will grant if you will recall certain events in the history of your favourite epoch—I mean the period of the Crusades. These wars for civilization stimulated economic and commercial relations between peoples, and united Western humanity in the name of an idea."

"And how tolerant you always are towards an idea! I would the more courteously remind you that the effect of the Crusades and the economic relations they stimulated was anything but favourable to internationalism. On the contrary, they taught the peoples to become conscious of themselves, and thus furthered the development of the national idea."

"Right; that is to say, right in so far as it was a question of the relation between the peoples and the priesthood; for it was indeed at that time that the mounting consciousness of national honour began to harden itself against hieratical presumption—"

"Though what you call hieratical presumption is nothing else than the conception of human unity in the name of the Spirit!"

"We are familiar with that spirit—and we have no great love for it."

"Your mania for nationalism obviously shrinks from the world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church. Still, I cannot see how you reconcile your nationalism with your horror of war. Because your obsolescent cult of the State must make you a champion of a positive conception of law, and as such—"

"Oh, if we are talking about law—the conceptions of natural law and universal human reason have survived, my dear sir, in international law."

"Pshaw, your international law is only another Rousseauian transmogrification of the ius divinum, which has nothing in common with either nature or human reason, resting as it does upon revelation—"

"Let us not quarrel over names, Professor! What I call natural and international law, you are free to call the ius divinum. The important thing is that above the explicit jurisprudence of national states there rises a higher jurisdiction, empowered to decide between conflicting interests by means of courts of arbitration."

"Courts of arbitration! The very name is idiotic! In a civil court, to pronounce upon matters of life and death, communicate the will of God to man, and decide the course of history!—Well, so much for the ‘wings of doves.’ Now for the ‘eagles’ pinions’—what about them?"

"Civilian society—"

"Oh, society doesn’t know what it wants. It shouts for a campaign against the fall in the birth-rate, it demands a reduction in the cost of bringing up children and training them to a profession—and meanwhile men are herded like cattle, and all the trades and professions are so overcrowded that the fight round the feeding-trough puts in the shade the horrors of past wars. Open spaces, garden cities! Strengthening the stock! But why strengthen it, if civilization and progress have decided there shall be no more war? Whereas war would cure everything—it would ‘strengthen the stock’ and at the same time stop the decline in the birth-rate."

"You are joking, of course—you can’t mean what you say. And our discussion comes to an end at the right moment, for here we are," Settembrini said, and pointed out to the cousins with his stick the cottage before whose gate they had paused. It stood near the beginning of the village: a modest structure, separated from the street by a narrow front garden. A wild grape-vine, springing from bare roots at the door, flung an arm along the ground-floor wall towards the display window of a tiny shop. The ground-floor, Settembrini explained, belonged to the chandler; Naphta was domi-ciled a floor higher up, with the tailor’s shop, and his own quarters were in the roof, where he had a peaceful little study.

Naphta, with unexpectedly spontaneous cordiality, expressed the hope that he might have the pleasure of meeting them again. "Come and see us," he said. "I would say:

‘Come and see me,’ if Dr. Settembrini here had not prior claims upon your friendship. Come, however, as often as you like, whenever you feel you would like a talk. I prize highly an interchange of ideas with youth, and am perhaps not entirely without pedagogic tradition. Our Master of the Lodge here"—he nodded toward Settembrini—"would have it that the bourgeois humanism of the day has a monopoly of the pedagogic gift; but we must take issue with him. Until another time, then!"

Settembrini made difficulties—there were difficulties, he said. The days of the Lieutenant’s sojourn up here were numbered; and as for the Engineer, he would doubtless redouble his zeal in the service of the cure, in order to follow his cousin down to the valley with all the speed he might.

Both young men assented in turn. They had bowed their acceptance of Herr Naphta’s invitation, and next minute they also bowed their acknowledgment of the justice of Herr Settembrini’s remarks. So everything was left open.

"What did he call him?" asked Joachim, as they climbed the winding path to the Berghof.

[admin]

Part 3 of 9

"I understood him to say ‘Master of the Lodge,’ " answered Hans Castorp. "I was just wondering about it. It was probably some joke or other, they have such odd names for each other. Settembrini called Naphta ‘princeps scholasticorum’—not so bad, either. The schoolmen were the theologians of the Middle Ages, the dogmatic philosophers, if you like. They spoke several times of the Middle Ages; it reminded me of the first day I came, when Settembrini said there was a good deal up here that was mediæval—it was Adriatica von Mylendonk, her name, I mean, made him say so.—How did you like him?"

"Who? The little man? Not very much. Though he said some things I liked. That about courts of arbitration—they are nothing but canting hypocrisy, of course. But I did not care much for the man himself—a person may say as many good things as he likes, it doesn’t matter to me, if he himself is a queer fish. And queer he is, you can’t deny it. That stuff about the ‘place of intercourse’ was distinctly shady, not to mention anything else. And did you see the big Jewish nose he had? Nobody but Jews have such puny figures. Are you really thinking of visiting the man?"

"Visit him—of course we’ll visit him," declared Hans Castorp. "When you talk about his being puny, that’s only the military in you speaking. And as for his nose, the Chaldeans had the same kind, and they knew devilish well what they were about, on more subjects than alchemy. Naphta has something of the mystagogue about him, he interests me a good deal. I won’t say that I make him out altogether, yet, but if we meet him often perhaps we shall; I don’t think it at all unlikely we may learn something from the acquaintance with him."

"Oh, you, with your learning! Getting wiser all the time, with your biology, and your botany, and your continual changing from one idea to another! You began philosophizing about time the first day you came. But we didn’t come up here to acquire wisdom. We came to acquire health, to get healthier and healthier until we are entirely well, and are free to quit, and go down below where we belong!"

" ‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights,’ " quoted Hans Castorp airily. "Tell me first what freedom is," he went on. "Naphta and Settembrini disputed over it a good deal without coming to any conclusion. Settembrini says it is the law of love of one’s kind; that sounds like his ancestor, the Carbonaro. But however valiant he was, and however valiant our Settembrini himself is—"

"Yes, he got uncomfortable when we talked about physical courage."

"I can’t help thinking he would be afraid of things little Naphta wouldn’t be, and that his freedom and his bravery are more or less folderol. Do you think he would have the courage ‘de se perdre ou même se laisser dépérir’?"

"Why do you suddenly begin talking French?"

"Oh, I don’t know. The atmosphere up here is so international. I don’t know which would find more pleasure in it—Settembrini for the sake of his bourgeois world-republic, or Naphta for his hierarchical cosmopolis. As you see, I kept my ears open; but even so I found it far from clear. On the contrary, the result was more confusion than anything else."

"It always is. You will find that when people discuss and express their views nothing ever comes of it but confusion worse confounded. I tell you, it doesn’t matter in the least what a man’s views are, so long as he is a decent chap. The best thing is to have no opinions, and just do one’s duty."

"Yes, you can say that because you are a soldier, and your existence is purely formal. But it’s different with me, I am a civilian, and more or less responsible. And I must say it’s rather upsetting to have on the one hand a man preaching an international world-republic, and absolutely barring war, and yet so patriotic that he is for ever demanding the rectification of the Brenner frontier, to the point of fighting a war for civilization over it; and then on the other a little chap contending that every national state is an invention of the devil, and hurrahing for some universal unification he sees on the far horizon—yet in the next minute justifying our national instincts and making awful fun of peace conferences. What a mix-up! By all means we must go visit him, and try to understand what it is all about. You say we did not come up here to get wiser, but healthier, and that is true. But all this confusion must be reconciled; and if you don’t think so, why then you are dividing the world up into two hostile camps, which, I may tell you, is a grievous error, most reprehensible."

Of the City of God, and Deliverance by Evil

HANS CASTORP was in his loggia, studying a plant which, now that the astronomical summer had begun, and the days were shortening, flourished luxuriantly in many places: the columbine or aquilegia, of the ranunculus family, which grew in clumps, with long stalks bearing the blue, violet, or reddish-brown blossoms, and spreading herbaceous foliage. They grew everywhere, but most profusely in that quiet bottom where, nearly a year ago, he had first seen them: that remote and wooded ravine, filled with the sound of rushing water, where on the bench above the foot-bridge, that ill-risked, ill-timed, ill-fated walk of his had ended. He revisited it now and again.

It was, if one began it a little less rashly than he had, no great distance thither. If you mounted the slope from the end of the sledge-run in the village, you could reach in some twenty minutes the picturesque spot where the wooden bridge of the path through the forest crossed above the run as it came down from the Schatzalp, provided you kept to the shortest route, did not loiter about, nor pause too long to get your breath. Hans Castorp, when Joachim was detained at home in the service of the cure, for some examination, blood-test, x-ray photography, weighing, or injection, would stroll thither in good weather, after second breakfast, or even after first; or he would employ the hours between tea and dinner in a visit to his favourite spot, to sit on the bench where once the violent nose-bleeding had overtaken him, to listen with bent head to the sound of the torrent and gaze at the secluded scene, with the hosts of blue aquilegias blooming in its depths.

Was it only for this he came? No, he sat there to be alone: to recall and go over in his mind the events and impressions of the past months. They were many, varied, and hard to classify; so interwoven and mingled they seemed, as almost to obscure any clear distinction between the concrete fact and the dreamed or imagined. But one and all, they had in their essence something fantastic, something which made his heart, unreliable as it had been from his first day up here, stand still when he thought of them, and then wildly flutter. Or could its flutterings be sufficiently accounted for by the reflection that a round year had gone by since first he sat here, that on this very spot whither once he had come in a condition of lowered vitality and seen the apparition of Pribislav Hippe, the aquilegias were blossoming anew?

Now, at least, on his bench by the rushing water, he had no more nose-bleeding—that was a thing of the past. Joachim had said from the very first that it was not easy to get acclimatized, and at the time of that earlier visit he was still finding it difficult. But he had made progress; and now, after eleven months, the process must be regarded as finished. More, in that direction, could not be expected. The chemistry of his digestion had adjusted itself, Maria had her ancient relish, his parched mucous membranes having sufficiently recovered to let him savour again the bouquet of that estimable brand of cigars. He still loyally ordered them from Bremen whenever his stock ran low, although the shop-windows of the international resort displayed attractive wares. Maria, he felt, made a sort of bond between him, the exile, and his home in the "flat-land"—a bond more effectual than the postcards he now and then sent to his uncle, the intervals between which grew longer in proportion as he imbibed the more spacious time conceptions prevalent "up here." He mostly sent picture postcards, as being pleasanter to receive, with charming views of the valley in winter and in summer dress. They gave precisely the room he needed to tell his kinsmen the latest news of his state, whatever had been let fall by the doctors after the monthly or general examination: such as that, both to sight and hearing, he had unmistakably improved, but was still not entirely free from infection; that his continued slight excess of temperature came from small infected areas which were certain to disappear without a trace if he had patience, and then he would never need to return hither. He well knew that long letters were neither asked nor expected, it being no humanistic or literary circle to which he addressed himself down there, and the replies he received were equally lacking in expansiveness. They merely accompanied the means of subsistence which came to him from home, the income from his paternal inheritance. Turned into Swiss currency, this was so advantageous that he had never spent one instalment when the next arrived, enclosed in a letter of a few typed lines signed "James Tienappel," conveying his greetings and best wishes for recovery, together with the same from Grand-uncle Tienappel and sometimes from the seafaring Peter as well.

The Hofrat, so Hans Castorp told his people, had latterly given up the injections: they did not suit the young patient. They gave him headache and fatigue, caused loss of appetite, reduced his weight, and, while making his temperature go up at first, had not succeeded in reducing it in the long run. His face glowed rosy-red with dry, internal heat, a sign that for this child of the lowland, bred in an atmosphere that rejoiced in a high degree of humidity, acclimatization could only consist in "getting used to not getting used to it"—which, in fact, Rhadamanthus himself never did, being perpetually purple-cheeked. "Some people can’t get used to it," Joachim had said; and this seemed to be Hans Castorp’s case. For even that trembling of the neck, which had come upon him soon after his arrival here, had never quite passed off, but would attack him as he walked or talked—yes, even up here in his blue-blossoming retreat, while he sat pondering the whole complex of his adventures; so that the dignified chin-support of Hans Lorenz Castorp had become almost fixed habit with him. He himself would all at once be conscious of using it and have a swift memory of the old man’s choker collar, the provisional form of the ruff; the pale gold round of the christening basin; the ineffably solemn sound of the "great-great-great." These and suchlike associations would gradually in their turn lead him back to reflect upon the whole mass of his adventures in life.

Pribislav Hippe never again appeared to him in bodily form, as once eleven months before. The progress of acclimatization was over, there were no more visions. No more did his body lie supine while his ego roved back to a far-off present. No more of such incidents. The vividness and clarity of that memory-picture, if it returned to hover before his eyes, yet kept within sane and normal bounds—but might move Hans Castorp to draw out of his breast pocket the glass plate which he had received as a gift, and kept there in an envelope enclosed in a letter-case. It was a small negative. Held in the same plane with the ground, it was black and opaque; but lifted against the light, it revealed matter for a humanistic eye: the transparent reproduction of the human form, the bony framework of the ribs, the outline of the heart, the arch of the diaphragm, the bellows that were the lungs; together with the shoulder and upper-arm-bones, all shrouded in a dim and vaporous envelope of flesh—that flesh which once, in Carnival week, Hans Castorp had so madly tasted. What wonder his unstable heart stood still or wildly throbbed when he gazed at it, and then, to the sound of the rushing waters, leaning with crossed arms against the smooth back of his bench, his head inclined upon one shoulder, among the blossoming aquilegias, began to turn over everything in his mind!

It hovered before his eyes—the image of the human form divine, the masterpiece of organic life—as once upon that frosty, starry night when he had plunged so profoundly into the study of it. His contemplation of its inner aspect was bound up in the young man’s mind with a host of problems and discriminations, not of a kind the good Joachim had need to concern himself with, but for which Hans Castorp had come to feel as a civilian responsible. True, down in the plain he had never been aware of them, nor probably ever would have been. It was up here that the thing came about, where one sat piously withdrawn, looking down from a height of five thousand feet or so upon the earth and all that therein was—and it might be, also, by virtue of one’s physical condition, with one’s body brought, as it were, into higher relief by the toxins that were released by the localized inner infection to burn, a dry heat, in the face. His musings brought him upon Settembrini, organ-grinder and pedagogue, whose father had seen the light of day in Hellas, who chose to define love of the image as comprehending politics, eloquence, and rebellion, and who would consecrate the burgher’s pike upon the altar of humanity. He thought of Comrade Krokowski, and the traffic they two had been having in the twilighted room below stairs. He thought of the twofold nature of analysis, and questioned how far it was applicable to realities and conducive to progress, how far related to the grave and its noisome anatomy. He called up the figures of the two grandfathers, the rebel and the loyalist, both, for reasons diametrically opposed, black-clad; confronted them with each other, and tried their worth. He went further, and took counsel with himself over such vast problems as form and freedom, body and spirit, honour and shame, time and eternity—and succumbed to a brief but violent spell of giddiness, on a sudden thought that all about him the columbines were in blossom once more, and his year here rounding to its close.

He had an odd name for the serious mental preoccupations which absorbed him in his picturesque retreat; he called them "taking stock"; the expression, crude as it was, defined for him an employment which he loved, even though it was bound up in his mind with the phenomena of fear and giddiness and palpitation, and made his face burn even more than its wont. Yet there seemed a peculiar fitness in the fact that the mental strain involved obliged him to make use of the ancestral chin-support; that way of holding his head lent him an outward dignity in keeping with thoughts which passed through his brain as he contemplated the image.

"Homo dei"—that was what the ugly Naphta had called the image, when he was defending it against the English doctrine of an economic society. And, by a natural association, Hans Castorp decided that in the interest of these mental activities of his, and his responsible position as a civilian member of society, he must really—and Joachim must too—pay that little man the honour of a visit. Settembrini did not like the idea, as Hans Castorp was shrewd and thin-skinned enough to know. Even the first meeting had displeased the humanist, who had obviously tried to prevent it and protect his pupils from intercourse with Naphta, notwithstanding that he personally associated and discussed with him. His "pupils"—thus life’s delicate child disin-genuously put it, knowing all the time that it was himself alone who was the object of Settembrini’s solicitude. So it is with schoolmasters. They permit themselves relaxations, saying that they are "grown up," and refuse the same to their pupils, saying that they are not "grown up." It was a good thing, then, that the hand-organ man was not actually in a position to deny young Hans Castorp anything—nor had even tried to do so. It was only necessary that the delicate child should conceal his thin-skinned perceptions and assume an air of unconsciousness; when there was nothing to prevent his taking friendly advantage of Naphta’s invitation. Which, accordingly, he did, Joachim going along with him, willy-nilly, on a Sunday afternoon after the main rest-cure, not many days later than their first meeting.

It was but a few minutes’ walk from the Berghof down to the vine-wreathed cottage door. They went in, passing on their right the entrance to the little shop, and climbed the narrow brown stairs to the door of the first storey. Near the bell was a small plate, with the name of Lukaçek, Ladies’ Tailor. The door was opened by a half-grown boy, in a sort of livery of gaiters and striped jacket, a little page, with shaven poll and rosy cheeks. Him they asked for Professor Naphta, impressing their names on his mind, as they had brought no cards; he said he would go and deliver them to Herr Naphta—whom he named without a title. The door opposite the entrance stood open, and gave a view of the shop, where, regardless of the holiday, Lukaçek the tailor sat cross-legged on a table and stitched. He was sallow and bald-headed, with a large, drooping nose, beneath which his black moustaches hung down on both sides his mouth and gave him a surly look.

"Good-afternoon," Hans Castorp greeted him.

"Grütsi," answered the tailor, in the Swiss dialect, which fitted neither his name nor his looks and sounded queer and unsuitable.

"Working hard?" went on Hans Castorp, motioning with his head. "Isn’t to-day Sunday?"

"Something pressing," the tailor said curtly, stitching.

"Is it pretty? Are you making it in a hurry for a party?" Hans Castorp guessed.

The tailor let this question hang, for a little; bit off his cotton and threaded his needle afresh. After a while he nodded.

"Will it be pretty?" persisted Hans Castorp. "Will it have sleeves?"

"Yes, sleeves; it’s for an old ‘un," answered Lukaçek, with a strong Bohemian accent. The return of the lad interrupted this parley, which had been carried on through the doorway. Herr Naphta begged the gentlemen to come in, he announced, and opened a door a few steps further on in the passage, lifting the portière that hung over it to let them enter. Herr Naphta, in slippers, stood on a mossy green carpet just within, and received his guests.

Both cousins were surprised by the luxury of the two-windowed study. They were even astonished; for the poverty of the cottage, the mean stair and wretched corridor, led one to expect nothing of the kind. The contrast lent to Naphta’s elegant fur-nishings a note of the fabulous, which of themselves they scarcely possessed, and would not otherwise have had in the eyes of Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen. Yet they were elegant too, even strikingly so; indeed, despite writing-table and bookshelves the room hardly had a masculine look. There was too much silk about—wine-coloured, purplish silk; silken window-hangings, silken portières, and silken coverings to the furniture arranged on the narrow side of the room in front of a wall almost entirely covered with a Gobelin tapestry. Baroque easy-chairs with little pads on the arms were, grouped about a small metal-bound table, and behind it stood a baroque sofa with velvet cushions. Bookcases lined the entrance wall on both sides of the door. They and the writing-table or, rather, roll-top desk, which stood between the windows, were of carved mahogany; the glass doors of the bookcases were lined with green silk. But in the corner to the left of the sofa-group stood a work of art, a large painted wood-carving, mounted on a red-covered dais: a pietà, profoundly startling, artlessly effective to the point of being grotesque. The Madonna, in a cap, with gathered brows and wry, wailing mouth, with the Man of Sorrows on her lap—considered as a work of art it was primitive and faulty, with crudely emphasized and ignorant anatomy, the hanging head bristling with thorns, face and limbs blood-besprinkled, great blobs of blood welling from the wound in the side and from the nail-prints in hands and feet. This show-piece did indeed give a singular tone to the silken chamber. The wall-paper, on the window wall and above the bookcases, had obviously been supplied by the tenant: the green stripe in it matched the soft velvet carpet spread over the red drugget. The windows had cream-coloured blinds down to the floor. Only the ceiling had been impossible to treat: it was bare and full of cracks; but a small Venetian lustre hung down from it.

"We’ve come for a little visit," said Hans Castorp, with his eyes more on the pious horror in the corner than on the owner of the surprising room, who was expressing his gratification that the cousins had kept their word. With a hospitable motion of his small right hand he would have ushered them to the satin chairs. But Hans Castorp went as if spellbound straight up to the wooden group, and stood before it, arms akimbo and head on one side.

"What is this you have here?" he asked, in a low voice. "It’s frightfully good. What depiction of suffering! It’s old, of course?"

"Fourteenth century," answered Naphta. "Probably comes from the Rhine. Does it impress you?"

"Enormously," said Hans Castorp. "It would impress anybody—couldn’t help it. I should never have thought there could be anything in the world at once so—forgive me—so ugly, and so beautiful."

"All works of art whose function it is to express the soul and the emotions," Naphta responded, "are always so ugly as to be beautiful, and so beautiful as to be ugly. That is a law. Their beauty is not fleshly beauty, which is merely insipid—but the beauty of the spirit. Moreover, physical beauty is an abstraction," he added; "only the inner beauty, the beauty of religious expression, has any actuality."

"We are most grateful to you for making these distinctions clear," Hans Castorp said. "Fourteenth century?" he inquired of himself; "that means thirteen hundred so-and-so? Yes, that is the Middle Ages, the way the books say; and I can more or less recognize in this thing the conception I have been getting of them lately. I never knew anything about the Middle Ages before, myself, being on the technical side. But up here they have been brought home to me in various ways. There was no economic doctrine of society then, that’s plain enough. What is the name of the artist?"

Naphta shrugged his shoulders.

"What does it matter?" he said. "We should not ask—for in the time when it was made they never did. It was not created by some wonderful and well-advertised single genius. It is an anonymous product, anonymous and communal. Moreover, it is very advanced Middle Ages—Gothic, signum mortificationis. No more of the palliating and beautifying that the Roman epoch thought proper to a depiction of the Crucifixion: here you have no royal crown, no majestic triumph over martyrdom and the world. It is the most utter and radical declaration of submission to suffering and the weakness of the flesh. Pessimistic and ascetic—it is Gothic art alone which is truly that. You are probably not familiar with the work of Innocent III, De miseria humanæ conditionis: an exceedingly witty piece of writing—it was written at the end of the twelfth century, but this was the earliest art to furnish an illustration to it."

Hans Castorp heaved a deep sigh. "Herr Naphta," he said, "every word you say interests me enormously. ‘Signum mortificationis’—is that right? I’ll remember it. ‘Anonymous and communal’—and that will take some thinking about too. You are quite right in assuming I don’t know the work of that pope—I take it Innocent III was a pope? Did I understand you to say it is witty and ascetic? I must confess I should never have thought the two things went hand in hand; but when I put my mind to it, of course it is obvious that a discourse on human misery gives one a good chance to poke fun at the things of the flesh. Is the work obtainable? Perhaps if I got up my Latin I could read it."

"I have it here," Naphta said, motioning with his head toward one of the bookcases. "It is at your service. But, shall we not sit down? You can look at the pietà from the sofa. Tea is just coming in."

The little servant was fetching the tea, also a charming silver-bound basket containing slices of layer cake. And behind him, on the threshold, who should stand, on winged feet, wreathed in his subtle smile, and exclaiming: "Sapperlot!" and "Accidente"—who, indeed, but the lodger from upstairs, Herr Settembrini, dropped in to keep them company? From his little window, he said, he had seen the cousins enter, and made haste to finish the page of the encyclopædia which he had at the moment in hand, in order to beg an invitation. Nothing more natural than his coming: it was justified by his old acquaintance with the Berghof guests, no less than by his relations with Naphta, which, despite deep-seated divergences of opinion, were lively on both sides, the host accepting his presence as a thing of course. All this did not prevent Hans Castorp from getting two impressions from his advent, one as clearly as the other: first, that Herr Settembrini had come to prevent them—or rather him—from being alone with little Naphta, and to establish, as it were, a pedagogic equilibrium; second, that Herr Settembrini did not object the least in the world, but rather the contrary, to exchanging his room in the loft for a sojourn in Naphta’s fine and silken chamber, nor to taking a good and proper tea. He rubbed together his small yellow hands, with their line of hair running down the back from the little finger, before he fell to, with unmistakable and outspoken relish upon the layer cake, which had a chocolate filling.

The conversation continued on the subject of the pietà, Hans Castorp holding it to the point with look and word, and turning to the humanist as though to put him in critical rapport with the work of art. Herr Settembrini’s aversion was obvious in the very air with which he turned towards it—for he had originally sat down with his back to that corner of the room. He was too polite to express all he felt, and confined himself to pointing out certain defects in the physical proportions of the work, offences against nature, which were far from working upon his emotions, because they did not spring from archaic ineptitude, but from deliberate bad intent—a fundamentally opposed principle.—In which latter statement Naphta maliciously concurred. Certainly, there was no question of technical lack of skill. What we had here was conscious emancipation from the natural, a contempt for nature manifested by a pious refusal to pay her any homage whatever. Whereupon Settembrini declared that disregard of nature and neglect of her study only led men into error. He character-ized as absurd the formlessness to which the Middle Ages and all periods like them had been a prey, and began, in sounding words, to exalt the Græco-Roman heritage, classicism, form, and beauty, reason, the pagan joy of life. To these things and these alone, he said, was it given to ameliorate man’s lot on earth. Hans Castorp broke in here. What, he asked, about Plotinus, then, who was known to have said that he was ashamed of having a body? Or Voltaire, who, in the name of reason, protested against the scandalous Lisbon earthquake? Were they absurd? Perhaps. Yet it seemed to him, as he thought about it, that what one characterized as absurd might also be thought of as intellectually honourable; from which it would follow that the absurd hostility to nature evinced by Gothic art, when all was said and done, was as fine in its way as the gestures of Plotinus or Voltaire, since it testified to the selfsame emancipation, the same indomitable pride, which refused to abdicate in favour of blind natural forces—

Naphta burst out laughing. He sounded more than ever like a cracked plate and ended in a fit of coughing.

Settembrini said floridly to Hans Castorp: "Your brilliance is almost a discourtesy to our host, since it makes you appear ungrateful for this delicious cake. But I don’t know that gratitude is your strong point. The kind I mean consists in making a good use of favours received."

As Hans Castorp looked rather mortified, he added in his most charming manner: "We all know you for a wag, Engineer: but your sly quips at the expense of the true, the good, and the beautiful will never make me doubt your fundamental love of them. You are aware, of course, that there is only one sort of revolt against nature which may be called honourable; that which revolts in the name of human beauty and human dignity. All others bring debasement and degradation in their train, even when not directed to that end. And you know, too, what inhuman atrocities, what murderous intolerance were displayed by the century to which the production behind me owes its birth. Look at that monstrous type, the inquisitor—for instance, the sanguinary figure of Conrad von Marburg—and his infamous zeal in the persecution of everything that stood in the way of supernatural domination! You are in no danger of acclaiming the sword and the stake as instruments of human benevolence!"

"Yet in its service," countered Naphta, "laboured the whole machinery by means of which the Holy Office freed the world of undesirable citizens. All the pains of the Church, even the stake, even excommunication, were inflicted to save the soul from everlasting damnation—which cannot be said of the mania for destruction displayed by the Jacobins. Permit me to remark that any system of pains and penalties which is not based upon belief in a hereafter is simply a bestial stupidity. And as for the deg-radation of humanity, the history of its course is precisely synchronous with the growth of the bourgeois spirit. Renaissance, age of enlightenment, the natural sciences and economics of the nineteenth century, have left nothing undone or untaught which could forward this degradation. Modern astronomy, for example, has converted the earth, the centre of the All, the lofty theatre of the struggle between God and the Devil for the possession of a creature burningly coveted by each, into an indifferent little planet, and thus—at least for the present—put an end to the majestic cosmic position of man—upon which, moreover, all astrology bases itself."

"For the present?" Herr Settembrini asked, threateningly. His own manner of speaking had something in it of the inquisitor waiting to pounce upon the witness so soon as he shall have involved himself in an admission of guilt.

"Certainly. For a few hundred years, that is," assented Naphta, coldly. "A vindication, in this respect, of scholasticism is on the way, is even well under way, unless all signs fail. Copernicus will go down before Ptolemy. The heliocentric thesis is meeting by degrees with an intellectual opposition which will end by achieving its purpose. Science will see itself philosophically enforced to put back the earth in the position of supremacy in which she was installed by the dogma of the Church."

"What? What? Intellectual opposition? Science philosophically enforced? What sort of voluntarism is this you are giving vent to? And what about pure knowledge, what about science? What about the unfettered quest for truth? Truth, my dear sir, so indissolubly bound up with freedom, the martyrs in whose cause you would like us to regard as criminals upon this planet but who are rather the brightest jewels in her crown?"

Herr Settembrini’s question, and its delivery, were prodigious. He sat very erect, his righteous words rolled down upon little Naphta, and he let his voice swell out at the end, so that one could tell how sure he was his opponent could only reply with shame-faced silence. He had been holding a piece of layer cake between his fingers, but now he laid it back on his plate, as if loath to bite into it after launching his question.

Naphta responded, with disagreeable composure: "My good sir, there is no such thing as pure knowledge. The validity of the Church’s teaching on the subject of science, which can be summed up in the phrase of Saint Augustine: Credo, ut intellegam: I believe, in order that I may understand, is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of knowledge, intellect secondary. Your pure science is a myth. A belief, a given conception of the universe, an idea—in short, a will, is always in existence; which it is the task of the intellect to expound and demonstrate. It comes down every time to the quod erat demonstrandum. Even the conception of evidence itself, psychologically speaking, contains a strong element of voluntarism. The great schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were agreed that what is false in theology cannot be true in philosophy. We can, if you like, leave theology out of the argument; but a humanity, a cultural conception, which refuses to recognize that what is philosophically false cannot be scientifically true, is not worthy the name. The accusation of the Holy Office against Galileo stated that his thesis was philosophically absurd. A more crushing arraignment could not well be."

"Aha! The reasoning of our great genius turned out in the long run to have the greater validity! No, let us be serious, Professore! Answer me this, answer me in the presence of these two young listeners: Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth, to strive after the attainment of which is the highest law of all morality, and whose triumphs over authority form the most glorious page in the history of the human spirit?"

Hans Castorp and Joachim—the first faster than the second—turned their heads from Settembrini to Naphta.

Naphta replied: "There can be no such triumphs as those you speak of; for the authority is man himself—his interests, his worth, his salvation—and thus between it and truth no conflict is possible. They coincide."

"Then truth, according to you—"

"Whatever profits man, that is the truth. In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth. Any theoretic science which is without practical application to man’s salvation is as such without significance, we are commanded to reject it. Throughout the Christian centuries it was accepted fact that the natural sciences afforded man no edification. Lactantius, who was chosen by Constantine the Great as tutor to his son, put the position very clearly when he asked in so many words what heavenly bliss he could attain by knowing the sources of the Nile, or the twaddle of the physicists anent the heavenly bodies. Answer him if you can! Why have we given the Platonic philosophy the preference over every other, if not because it has to do with knowledge of God, and not knowledge of nature? Let me assure you that mankind is about to find its way back to this point of view. Mankind will soon perceive that it is not the task of true science to run after godless understanding; but to reject utterly all that is harmful, yes, even all that ideally speaking is without significance, in favour of instinct, measure, choice. It is childish to accuse the Church of having defended darkness rather than light. She did well, and thrice well, to chastise as unlawful all unconditioned striving after the ‘pure’ knowledge of things—such striving, that is, as is without reference to the spiritual, without bearing on man’s salvation; for it is this unconditioned, this a-philosophical natural science that always has led and ever will lead men into darkness."

"Your pragmatism," Settembrini responded, "needs only to be translated into terms of politics for it to display its pernicious character in full force. The good, the true, and the just, is that which advantages the State: its safety, its honour, its power form the sole criterion of morality. Well and good. But mark that herewith you fling open the door for every sort of crime to enter; while as for human truth, individual justice, democracy, you can see what will become of them—"

"If I might be permitted," Naphta interpolated, "to introduce a little logic into the premisses, I should state the question thus: either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man’s being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary—and this is the only sort of individualism I can recognize as consistent—or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no suprasensible world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the theatre of a struggle between two hostile principles, and becomes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely between his individual and his collective interest; and the will of the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality. Either one thing or the other."

"I protest!" cried Settembrini, holding his tea-cup outstretched at arm’s length toward his host. "I protest against the imputation that the modern State means the subjugation of the individual to evil ends! I protest against the dilemma in which you seek to place us, between Prussianism and Gothic reaction! Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to State absolutism of every kind. Truth and justice are the immediate jewels of personal morality. If, at times, they may appear to stand counter, even to be hostile, to the interests of the State, they may do so while all the time holding before their eyes her higher, yes, let us boldly say, her spiritual weal. To find in the Renaissance the origin of State-worship—what bastard logic! The achievements wrung from the past—I use the word literally, my dear sir—wrung from the past by the Renaissance and the intellectual revival are personality, freedom, and the rights of man."

The listeners heaved each a deep sigh—they had been holding their breaths during Herr Settembrini’s great replication. Hans Castorp did not let himself go altogether, yet could not refrain from slapping the edge of the table with his hand. "Magnificent," he said, between clenched teeth. Joachim too evinced lively approval, despite the word Herr Settembrini had let fall about Prussianism. Both of them turned toward the antagonist who had just suffered this crushing rebuff— Hans Castorp with such eagerness that he fell unconsciously into the very posture he had taken at the pig-drawing, his elbows on the table and his chin in his palm, and peered in suspense into Herr Naphta’s face.

And Naphta sat there, tense and motionless, his lean hands in his lap. He said: "I try to introduce a little logic into the debate, and you answer me with lofty sentiments. I was already tolerably well aware that what is called liberalism—individualism the humanistic conception of citizenship—was the product of the Renaissance. But the fact leaves me entirely cold, realizing as I do that your great heroic age is a thing of the past its ideals defunct, or at least lying at their latest gasp, while the feet of those who will deal them the coup de grâce are already before the door. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionist. But you err in holding that future revolutions will issue in freedom. In the past five hundred years, the principle of freedom has outlived its usefulness. An educational system which still conceives itself as a child of the age of enlightenment, with criticism as its chosen medium of instruction, the liberation and cult of the ego the solvent of forms of life which are absolutely fixed—such a system may still, for a time, reap an empty rhetorical advantage; but its reactionary character is, to the initiated, clear beyond any doubt All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and significant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality. And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience."

Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp reddened. Herr Settembrini excitedly twisted his fine moustache.

"No," Naphta went on. "Liberation and development of the individual are not the key to our age, they are not what our age demands. What it needs, what it wrestles after, what it will create—is Terror."

He uttered the last word lower than the rest; without a motion of his body. Only his eye-glasses suddenly flashed. All three of them, as they heard it, jumped, even Herr Settembrini, who, however, promptly collected himself and smiled.

"And may one ask," he queried, "whom, or what—you see I am all question, I ask even how to ask—whom, or what you envisage as the bringer of this—this—I repeat the word with some unwillingness—this Terror?"

Naphta sat motionless, flashing like a drawn blade. He said: "I am at your service. I believe I do not err in assuming our agreement in the conception of an original ideal state of man, a condition without government and without force, an unmediated condition as the child of God, in which there was neither lordship nor service, neither law nor penalty, nor sin nor relation after the flesh; no distinction of classes, no work, no property: nothing but equality, brotherhood, and moral perfectitude."

"Very good. I agree," declared Settembrini. "I agree with everything except the relations after the flesh, which obviously must at all times have subsisted, since man is a highly developed vertebrate, and, like other creatures of his kind—"

"As you like. I am merely stating our fundamental agreement with respect to the original, paradisial state of man, his freedom from law, and his unmediated relation with God, which state was lost to him by his fall. I believe we may go side by side for another few steps of the way: in that we both explain the State as a social contract, taking account of the Fall and entered into as a safeguard against evil, and that we both see in it the origin of sovereign power—"

"Benissimo!" cried Settembrini. "Social contract—why, that is Enlightenment, that is Rousseau. I had no idea—"

"One moment, pray. We part company here. All power and all control was originally vested in the people, who made it over, together with the right to make laws, to their princes. But from this your school deduces in the first instance the right of the people to revolt from the monarchy. Whereas we, on the contrary—"

"We?" thought Hans Castorp, breathlessly. "Who are ‘we’? I must certainly ask Settembrini afterwards, whom he means by ‘we.’ "

"We, for our part," Naphta was saying, "perhaps no less revolutionary than you, have consistently deduced the supremacy of the Church over the secular power. The temporal nature of the power of the State is, as it were, written on its forehead; but even if it were not, it would be enough to point to the historical fact that its authority goes back to the will of the people, whereas that of the Church rests upon the divine sanction, to establish its character as a device which, if not precisely contrived by the power of evil, is nevertheless a faulty and inadequate makeshift."

"The State, my dear sir—"

"I am acquainted with your views on the subject of the national State. As your Virgil has it: ‘Fatherland-love conquers all, and hunger unsated for glory.’ You add the corrective of a somewhat liberal individualism—that is democracy, but it leaves quite untouched your fundamental relation to the State. That the soul of democracy is the power of money, apparently does not impugn it—or would you deny the fact? Antiquity was capitalistic, because of its State cult. The Christian Middle Ages clearly recognized the inherent capitalism of the secular State: ‘Money will be emperor’ is a prophecy made in the eleventh century. Would you deny that it has now literally come to pass, and with it the utter bedevilment of life in general?"

"My dear friend, you have the floor. I am only eager to make the acquaintance of the Great Unknown, the bringer of the Terror."

"A perilous curiosity on your part, as the spokesman of a class of society which has acted as the standard-bearer of freedom—considering it is that very freedom that has dragged the world to the brink of destruction. Your goal is the democratic Imperium, the apotheosis of the principle of the national State in that of the universal, the World-State. And the emperor of this World-State? Your Utopia is monstrous—and yet, at this point, we find ourselves to a certain extent again on common ground. For your capitalistic world-republic is, in truth, transcendental in character; the World-State is the secular State transcended; and we unite in the faith that the final, perfected State, lying dim upon the far horizon, should correspond to man’s original, primitive perfection. Since the time of Gregory the Great, the founder of the State of God, the Church has always regarded it as her task to bring mankind back under the divine guidance. Gregory’s claim to temporal power was put forward not for its own sake, but rather because his delegated dictatorship was to be the means and the way to the goal of redemption—a transitional stage between the pagan State and the heavenly kingdom. You have spoken to your pupils here of the bloody deeds of the Church, her chastisements and her intolerance; very foolishly so, for it stands to reason that the zeal of the godly cannot be pacifistic in character—Gregory himself said: ‘Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from the shedding of blood.’ That power is evil we know. But if the kingdom is to come, then it is necessary that the dualism between good and evil, between power and the spirit, here and hereafter, must be for the time abrogated to make way for a single principle, which shall unify asceticism and domination. This is what I mean by the necessity for the Terror."

"But the standard-bearer, the standard-bearer?"

"Do you still ask? Is your Manchester liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of economic thought which means the triumph of man over economics, and whose principles and aims precisely coincide with those of the kingdom of God? The Fathers of the Church called mine and thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the montrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words—and misusing to one’s own advantage and another’s disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation."

"Benissimo!" cried Hans Castorp, in his excitement availing himself of Herr Settembrini’s formula of assent. "The time—a universal, God-given dispensation! That is highly important."

"Quite," said Naphta. "Indeed, these humane spirits were revolted by the idea of the automatic increase of money; they regarded as usury every kind of interest-taking and speculation, and declared that every rich man was either a thief or the heir of a thief. They went further. Like Thomas Aquinas, they considered trade, pure and simple, buying and selling for profit, without altering or improving the product, a contemptible occupation. They were not inclined to place a very high value on labour in and for itself, as being an ethical, not a religious concern, and performed not in the service of God, but as a part of the business of living. This being the case, they demanded that the measure of profit or of public esteem should be in proportion to the actual labour expended, and accordingly it was not the tradesman or the industrialist, but the labourer and the tiller of the soil, who were honourable in their eyes. For they were in favour of making production dependent upon necessity, and held mass pro-duction in abhorrence. Now, then: after centuries of disfavour these principles and standards are being resurrected by the modern movement of communism. The similarity is complete, even to the claim for world-domination made by international labour as against international industry and finance; the world-proletariat, which is to-day asserting the ideals of the Civitas Dei in opposition to the discredited and decadent standards of the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the politico-economic means of salvation demanded by our age, does not mean domination for its own sake and in perpetuity; but rather in the sense of a temporary abrogation, in the Sign of the Cross, of the contradiction between spirit and force; in the sense of overcoming the world by mastering it; in a transcendental, a transitional sense, in the sense of the Kingdom. The proletariat has taken up the task of Gregory the Great, his religious zeal burns within it, and as little as he may it withhold its hand from the shedding of blood. Its task is to strike terror into the world for the healing of the world, that man may finally achieve salvation and deliverance, and win back at length to freedom from law and from distinction of classes, to his original status as child of God."

Thus Naphta. The little group was silent. The young men looked to Herr Settembrini. It was, they felt, his affair.

He said: "Astounding. I am staggered—I admit it. I had not expected this. Roma locuta. Rome has spoken, and how—how has she spoken! Herr Naphta has before our eyes performed a hieratic salto mortale—if the epithet is inconsistent, the incon-sistency has been ‘temporarily abrogated’—oh, yes! I repeat, it is astounding. Could you conceive, Professor, of any possible criticism, if only on the score of consistency? A few minutes ago you were at pains to make comprehensible to us a Christian in-dividualism based on the dualism of God and the world, and to prove its pre-eminence over all politically determined morality. And now you profess a socialism pushed to the point of dictatorship and terrorism. How do you reconcile the two things?"

"Opposites," said Naphta, "may be consistent with each other. It is the middling, the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other that is preposterous. Your individualism, as I have already taken the liberty of remarking, is defective. It is a confession of weakness. It corrects its pagan State morality by the admixture of a little Christianity, a little ‘rights of man,’ a little so-called liberty—but that is all. An individualism that springs from the cosmic, the astrological importance of the individual soul, an individualism not social but religious, that conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society, but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit—a genuine individualism like that sorts very well with the most binding communism."

"Anonymous and communal," said Hans Castorp.

Settembrini glared at him. "Be quiet, Engineer," he said, with a severity probably due to nervous irritation. "Inform yourself, but don’t try to express your views. That is an answer, at least," he said, turning to Naphta again. "It gives me cold comfort, but it is an answer. Let us examine all the consequences flowing from it. Along with industry, your Christian communism would reject machinery, technique, material progress. Along with what you call trade—money and finance, which in antiquity ranked higher than agriculture and manual labour—you reject freedom. For it is clear, so clear as to be evident to the meanest intelligence, that all social relations, public and private, would be attached to the soil, as in the Middle Ages; even—I feel some reluctance to say it—even the person of the individual. If only the soil can maintain life, then only the possession of it can confer freedom. Manual labourers and peasants, however honourable their position, if they possess no real property, can only be the property of those who do. As a matter of fact, until well on in the Middle Ages the great mass of the population, even the town-dwellers, were serfs. In the course of our discussion you have let fall various allusions to the dignity of the human being. Yet you are defending the morality of an economic system which deprives the individual of liberty and self-respect."

"About self-respect and the lack of it," responded Naphta, "there is a good deal to be said. For the moment, I should be glad if the association were to make you conceive of liberty less as a beautiful gesture and more as a serious problem. You assert that Christian morality, with all its beauty and benignity, makes for servitude. And I, on the other hand, assert that the question of freedom—the question of cities, to put it more concretely—has always been a highly ethical question, and is historically bound up with the inhuman degeneration of commercial morality, with all the horrors of modern industrialism and speculation, and with the devilish domination of money and finance."

[admin]

Part 4 of 9

"I must insist that you do not take refuge behind scruples and antinomies, but come out squarely where you belong, in favour of the blackest sort of reaction."

"It would be the first step toward true liberty and love of humanity to free one’s mind of the flabby fear engendered by the very mention of the word reaction."

"Well, that is enough," declared Herr Settembrini, in a voice that trembled slightly, pushing away his cup and plate—they were empty by now—and rising from the satin sofa. "Enough for to-day, enough for a whole day, I should think. Our thanks, Professor, for the delicious entertainment, and for the very spirituel discourse. My young friends here from the Berghof are summoned by the service of the cure, and I should like, before they go, to show them my cell up above. Come, gentlemen. Addio, Padre!"

Hans Castorp marked the appellation with lifted brows. So now it was padre! They submitted to Herr Settembrini’s breaking up the little party and disposing of themselves without giving Naphta the chance to come along supposing he had been inclined. The young men in their turn thanked their host and took their leave, urged by Naphta to come again. They went with Herr Settembrini, Hans Castorp bearing with him the crumbling pasteboard volume containing De miseria humanæ conditionis, which his host put into his hands. The surly Lukaçek still sat on his table and sewed at the sleeved garment for the old woman. They had to pass his open door to mount the ladderlike stair to the top storey. It was, properly speaking, scarcely a storey at all, being simply a loft with naked rafters and beams inside the roof; it had the close air of a garret and smelt of warm shingles. But it was divided into two rooms, which served the republican capitalist and belletristic collaborator on the Sociology of Suffering as study and sleeping-cabinet. These he blithely displayed to his young friends, characterizing them as retired and cosy, in order to supply them with suitable adjectives in which to praise them, which they accordingly did. They both found his quarters charmingly cosy and retired, just as he said. They had a glimpse into the tiny sleeping-chamber, merely a short and narrow bedstead in the corner under the sloping roof, and a small drugget on the floor beside it; then they turned again to the study, which was no less sparsely furnished, but orderly to the point of formality, or even frigid. Heavy old-fashioned chairs, four in number, with rush seats, were sym-metrically placed on either side the door, the divan was pushed against the wall, and a round table with a green cover held the centre of the room, upon which for all ornament—or, possibly, for refreshment, but in any case with an effect of chaste sobriety—there stood a water-bottle with a glass turned upside-down over it. Books and pamphlets leaned against each other in a little hanging shelf, and at the open window stood a high-legged, flimsy folding desk, with a small, thick felt mat on the floor beneath it, just large enough to afford standing-room. Hans Castorp took up position here for a minute to try what it was like. This was Herr Settembrini’s workshop, where he wrote articles in belles-lettres to contribute to the encyclopædia of human suffering. The young man rested his elbows on the slanting surface of the desk, and announced that he found the little apartment very retired and cosy. Thus, he presumed, aloud, might Ludovico’s father, with his long, aristocratic nose, have bent over his work at Padua—and learned that he was standing, indeed, at the very desk of the deceased scholar; nay, more, that the chairs, the table, even the water-bottle, had been his, and that the chairs had come down from the Carbonaro grandfather, the walls of whose law office at Milan they once had graced. That made a great impression on the young people; the chairs straightway began in their eyes to betray affinity with political agitation—Joachim, who had been sitting all unconscious on one, with his legs crossed, got up at once, looked at it mistrustfully, and did not sit down again. But Hans Castorp, at the elder Settembrini’s desk, thought how the younger now laboured here, to mingle the politics of the grandfather and the father’s humanism in a blend of literary beauty. At length they all went off together, the author having offered to see his friends to their door.

They were silent for some way; but the silence spoke of Naphta, and Hans Castorp could wait. He felt sure Herr Settembrini would mention his house-mate, had come out with them for that very purpose. He was not mistaken.

Drawing a long breath, as if to get a good start, the Italian began: "My friends, I should like to warn you."

As he paused, after that, Hans Castorp asked, affecting surprise: "Against what?" He might as well have said against whom, but expressed himself impersonally to show how completely unconscious he was of Herr Settembrini’s meaning—a meaning which even Joachim perfectly comprehended.

"Against the personage whose guest we have just been," answered Settembrini, "and whose acquaintance I have unwillingly been the means of your making. Chance willed it, as you saw, I could not prevent it. But the responsibility is mine, and as such I feel it. It is my duty to point out to your tender years the intellectual perils of intercourse with this man, and to beg you to keep your acquaintance with him within safe limits. His form is logic, but his essence is confusion."

"He does seem rather weird," was Hans Castorp’s view. "Some of the things he said were very queer: it sounded as if he meant to say that the sun revolves round the earth." But how could they, he went on, have suspected that a friend of his, Herr Settembrini’s, was an unsuitable person for them to associate with? As he himself admitted, they had made the acquaintance through him, had met the man first in his company, and seen that the two walked and took tea together. Surely that must mean—

"Of course, Engineer, of course." Herr Settembrini’s voice was full of mild resignation, it even trembled. "I am open to this rejoinder, and so you make it. Good. I am quite ready to accept the responsibility. I live under the same roof as this man, our meetings are unavoidable, one word leads on to another, an acquaintance is formed. Herr Naphta is a person of most unusual mental powers. He is by nature discursive, and so am I. Condemn me if you will—I avail myself of the opportunity to cross swords with an antagonist who is after all my equal. I have no one else—anywhere.—In short, it is true that I visit him and he me, we take walks together. We dispute. We quarrel, nearly every day, till we draw blood; but I confess the contrariness and mischievousness of his ideas but render our acquaintance the more attractive. I need the friction. Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them—and I am only confirmed in mine. How could you assert so much of yours, Lieutenant, or you, Engineer? You are defenceless against intellectual sophistry, you are exposed to danger from the influence of this half fanatical, half pernicious quackery—danger to the intellect and to the soul."

Hans Castorp rejoined that it was probably all true; he and his cousin were naturally more or less prone to such dangers—it was the same old story about the delicate child of life, he understood perfectly. But on the other hand, one might cite Petrarch and his maxim, which was familiar to Herr Settembrini. And after all it was worth listening to, all that Naphta had to say. One must admit that that about the communistic period, when no one would be allowed to receive interest, was first-rate; also some of the things he said about education which he, Hans Castorp, would probably never otherwise have got to hear.

Settembrini compressed his lips, and Hans Castorp hastened to say that, as for his own attitude, it was of course entirely non-partisan; he only meant that he had enjoyed hearing what Naphta had to say about the deepest desire of youth. "But do explain this one thing to me," he went on. "This person—I call him that by way of showing my detachment, and that I don’t by any means altogether agree with all he says, but am inclined to make important reservations—"

"And very rightly so," cried Settembrini gratefully. "—He had a great deal to say against money, the soul of the State, as he expressed himself, and against property-holding, which he considers thievery; in short, against the capitalistic system, which he called, if I remember rightly, fuel for the fires of hell, or something like that. He sang the praises of the Middle Ages for forbidding the taking of interest. And all the time the man himself must have, if I may say so—you get such a surprise when you first enter his room and see all that silk—"

"Ah, yes," smiled Settembrini, "the taste is very characteristic of him."

"—the beautiful old furniture," Hans Castorp went on, "the pieta out of the fourteenth century, the Venetian lustre, the little page in livery—and such a lot of chocolate layer cake, too—he must personally be pretty well off, I should think—"

"Herr Naphta," Settembrini answered, "is, personally, as little of a capitalist as I am."

"But?" queried Hans Castorp. "There is a but in your tone, Herr Settembrini."

"Well, those people never let anyone lack who belongs to them."

"Those people?"

"The Fathers."

"Fathers? What Fathers?"

"Why, Engineer, I mean the Jesuits."

A pause ensued. The cousins displayed the greatest astonishment. Hans Castorp cried out: "What! Good Lord!—you can’t mean it! You don’t mean to say the man is a Jesuit!"

"You have guessed aright," Herr Settembrini said with punctilio.

"I never in all my life—who would ever think of such a thing? So that is why you called him padre!"

"That was a polite exaggeration," Settembrini answered. "Herr Naphta is not a Father. His illness is to blame for his not having got that far. But he has finished his noviciate and taken his first vows. The state of his health obliged him to give up his theological studies, after which he spent some years in a school belonging to the Society, where he acted as prefect and preceptor of the younger pupils. That was in sympathy with his pedagogic leanings, and he continues in the same line up here, by teaching Latin at the Fridericianum. He has been here five years. When, or if, he can leave this place, remains in doubt. But he belongs to the Society, and even if the bond were a looser one than it is, he would never want for anything. As I told you, he is personally poor; that is to say, without possessions. That is the rule of the Society; which, however, commands immense riches, and, as you saw, looks well after its own."

"Thunder and lightning!" Hans Castorp said. "And I never even knew that such things existed any more! A Jesuit! Well, well! But do tell me—if he is so well looked after by those people, why in the world does he live—I don’t mean to say a word about your lodgings, Herr Settembrini, and you are certainly charmingly fixed, at Lukaçek’s, it is so retired and cosy there; but I mean, if Naphta really has such a pile as that, to speak vulgarly, why doesn’t he take another apartment, in a better house, more stately, with a proper entrance and large rooms? There is something secret and suspicious-looking about him, there in that hole, with all that silk—"

Settembrini shrugged his shoulders.

"He is probably guided by considerations of taste and tact," he said "I imagine he salves his anti-capitalistic conscience by living in a poor house, and indemnifies himself by living in the style he keeps. And I should say that discretion plays some role in the affair too. No use advertising to all the world how well the Devil takes care of his own. He shows an unpretentious façade, and behind it gives free rein to tastes—such as a prince of the Church—"

"Extraordinary!" Hans Castorp said. "It is all perfectly new and astonishing to me—I am free to confess. Why, Herr Settembrini we are really very much indebted to you for this new acquaintance. Many a time and oft we shall be going down to pay him a visit—I am sure of that. Such discourse does wonders in the way of enlarging the horizon—it gives one glimpses into a world the existence of which one never dreamed. A proper Jesuit! When I say proper the adjective stands for all that passes through my mind ss I say it. I mean, is he a real, actual Jesuit? I know you mean a person can’t be proper with the Devil supporting him from behind—but what I mean is, is he proper as a Jesuit? That is what I am thinking. He said certain things—you know the ones I mean—about modern communism, and the religious zeal of the proletariat, and not withholding its hand from bloodshed—I wont discuss them further, but surely your grandfather, with his citizen’s pike, was a perfect ewe lamb by comparison—please forgive my language. Is that allowed? Do his authorities stand for it? Is that the doctrine of the Roman Church, which all the religious societies all over the world propagate by means of intrigue, or so they say? Isn’t it—what is the word? —heretical, abnormal, incorrect? Those are the things I am thinking about Herr Naphta—and I should be pleased to have your opinion on them."

Settembrini smiled. "Very simple. Herr Naphta is, of course, first of all a Jesuit. He is that always, and before everything else. But he is also a man of intellect—or I should not be seeking his society—and as such he is always searching for new combinations, new associations and adaptations, new shades of meaning proper to the time. You saw how he surprised even me by his theories. He had never gone so far with me before. I made use of the very evident stimulus of your presence to stir him up to the point of saying his last word on a certain subject. It sounded ridiculous enough, monstrous enough—"

"Yes, yes; but tell me, why did he never become a Father? He was old enough, wasn’t he?"

"I did tell you—it was his illness prevented him."

"Well, but don’t you think—if he is first a Jesuit and second a man of intellect, always making new combinations—don’t you think this second, added characteristic has to do with his illness?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"I only mean—look: he has a moist spot, and that hinders him from becoming a Father. But his combinations would probably have hindered him anyhow, and so, in a certain way, the spot and the combinations hang together. In his way he too is a sort of delicate child—a joli jésuite with a petite tache humide."

They had reached the sanatorium, but stood in a little group on the terrace before the house talking still awhile before parting, and watched by a few guests who happened to be lounging there. Herr Setrembrini said: "I repeat, my young friends—I warn you. I cannot prevent you from cultivating the acquaintance now it is made, if curiosity leads you to do so. But arm yourselves, arm your hearts and minds with suspicion, oppose him with a critical spirit. I will characterize this man for you with a single word. He is a voluptuary."

The cousins made astonished faces. Hans Castorp asked: "A—what? But he is a member of a Society. They have to take certain vows, I have always supposed—and then he is such a poor creature physically, so—"

"You are talking rubbish, Engineer," Settembrini interposed. "It has nothing to do with physical insufficiency; while as for the vows you speak of, there are always reservations. I was speaking in a broader, more intellectual sense, your comprehension of which I felt I might presume upon, by now. You probably remember my visiting you one day in your room—it was long ago, frightfully long ago—you had just finished your three weeks in bed, after being received into the sanatorium."

"Of course. You came in at dusk, and turned on the light—I remember it as if it were yesterday—"

"Good. We fell into talk, as we have often done, I rejoice to say, and upon somewhat elevated subjects. We spoke, I believe, of life and death: of the dignity of death in so far as it is the condition and appurtenance of life, and the grotesqueness into which it declines so soon as the mind erects it into an independent principle. Young men," went on Herr Settembrini, standing close to the two, with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand splayed out like a fork, as if to collect their attention, while he raised the forefinger of his right in warning, "imprint it upon your minds: the mind is sovereign. Its will is free, it conditions the moral world. Let it once dualistically isolate death, and death will become, in actual fact, actu, by this mental act of will, you understand me, a power in itself, the power opposed to life, the inimical principle, the great temptation; whose kingdom is the kingdom of the flesh. You ask me why of the flesh? I answer you: because it unlooses and delivers, because it is deliverance—yet not deliverance from evil, but deliverance by evil. It relaxes manners and morals, it frees man from discipline and restraint, it abandons him to lust. If I warn you against this man, whose acquaintance with you I have unwillingly brought about, if I exhort you to go thrice-armed with a critical spirit in all your dealings with him, it is because all his thoughts are voluptuous, and stand under the ægis of death—and death is the most dissolute of powers, as I told you then, Engineer—I well remember my words, for I never fail to retain in my mind any good and telling phrase I may have chanced to avail myself of—a power hostile to civilization and progress, to work and to life, against whose mephitic breath it is the noblest task of the teacher to shield the mind of youth."

Who could talk more beautifully than Herr Settembrini, who clearer, or in better-rounded periods? Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen thanked him most warmly for all he had said, and mounted the Berghof steps, while Herr Settembrini betook himself once more to his humanistic writing-desk, in the storey above Naphta’s silken cell.

This first visit of the cousins to Naphta, whose course we have described, was followed by two or three others; one, even, in the absence of Herr Settembrini. All of them afforded young Hans Castorp much food for thought, when, in his blue-blossoming retreat, with the image of the human form divine, called Homo Dei, hovering before his mind’s eye, he sat and "took stock."

Choler. And Worse

AUGUST arrived, and with its entry slipped past the anniversary of our hero’s arrival in these parts. So much the better when it was gone—young Hans Castorp had scarcely looked forward to it with pleasure. And that was the rule. The anniversary was not popular. The old inhabitants passed it by without thought; and—though in general they seized on every pretext for jollification, and took occasion to celebrate their own private anniversaries in addition to these that accented the recurrent rhythm of the year; making merry with popping of corks in the restaurant, over birthdays, general examinations, imminent departures whether "wild" or sanctioned, and the like—they accorded to the anniversary of arrival no other attention than that of a profound silence. They let it slip past, perhaps they actually managed to forget it, and they might be confident that no one else would remember. They set store by a proper articulation of the time, they gave heed to the calendar, observed the turning-points of the year, its recurrent limits. But to measure one’s own private time, that time which for the individual in these parts was so closely bound up with space—that was held to be an occupation only fit for new arrivals and short-termers. The settled citizens preferred the unmeasured, the eternal, the day that was for ever the same; and delicately each respected in others the sentiment he so warmly cherished himself. To say to anybody that this day three years ago was the day of his arrival, that would have been considered brutal, in consummately bad taste—it simply never happened. Even Frau Stöhr, whatever her lacks in other respects, was far too tactful and well disciplined to let it slip out. Certainly she united great ignorance with her infected and feverish physical state. Recently at table she had alluded to the "affectation" of the tip of her lung; and the conversation having taken a historical turn, she explained that dates were her "ring of Polycrates"—a remark which made her hearers stare. But it was unthinkable that she should remind young Ziemssen his year would be up in February—though she had very likely thought of it. For the unhappy creature’s head was full of useless baggage, and she loved to keep track of other people’s affairs. But the tradition of the place held her in check.

Thus also on Hans Castorp’s anniversary. She may have even tried to nod at him meaningfully, at table; but encountering a vacant stare dexterously withdrew. Joachim too had kept silence, though he probably had clearly in mind the date on which he had fetched the guest from the Dorf station. Joachim was ever by nature taciturn; had always talked less than his cousin, even before they came up here—there had never been any comparison between him and the humanists and controversialists of their ac-quaintance—and in these days his silence had assumed heroic proportions, only monosyllables passed his lips. His manner, however, spoke volumes. It was plain that in his mind the Dorf station was associated with another order of ideas than those of arrival or meeting people. He was conducting a lively correspondence with the flat-land; his resolve was ripening, his preparations drawing to a head.

July had been warm and bright. But with August bad weather set in, cloudy and damp; with first a sleety drizzle and then actual snow. And it lasted—with interludes of single resplendent days—all through the month, and on into September. At first the rooms held the warmth of the summery period just past: they stood at fifty degrees, which passed for comfortable. But it grew rapidly colder; there were rejoicings when the snowfall whitened the valley, for the sight of it—the sight alone, for the mere drop of the temperature would not have sufficed—compelled the management to heat, first the dining-room, then the chambers as well; so that when one rolled out of the rugs, at the end of a rest period, and re-entered one’s chamber, one might warm one’s stiffened fingers against the hot pipes, though the dry air these gave out did accentuate the burning in the cheeks.

Was it winter again? Almost the senses thought so. On every hand were loud complaints, that they had been cheated out of their summer; though they had really cheated themselves, abetted by conditions both natural and artificial, and by a consumption of time-units reckless alike within and without. Reason was aware that fine autumnal weather was certain to follow, there would be a succession of brilliant days each outvying the other, and so fine that one might still honour them with the name of summer, save for the flatter arc the sun made in its course, and its earlier setting. But the effect of the winter landscape on the spirit was stronger than the power of such consolatory thoughts. The cousins would stand at the closed door into the balcony, and look out with loathing into the whirl of flakes—it was Joachim who stood thus, and in a suppressed voice he said: "So that’s to begin all over again, is it?"

From behind him in the room Hans Castorp responded: "That would be rather early—surely it can’t be settling down to winter already—but it has a terribly final look. If winter consists in darkness and cold, snow and hot pipes, then there’s no denying it’s winter again. And when you think we’d just finished with it and that the snow only just melted—at least, it seems that way, doesn’t it, as though spring were only just over—well, it gives one a turn, I will say. It is actually a blow to one’s love of life—let me explain to you how I mean. I mean the world as normally arranged is conducive to man’s needs and his pleasure in life—isn’t that so? I won’t go so far as to say that the whole natural order of things, for instance the size of the earth, the time it takes to revolve on its axis and about the sun, the division between day and night, summer and winter—in short, the whole cosmic rhythm, if you like to call it that—was especially arranged for our use and behoof; that would be cheek, I suppose, and simple-minded into the bargain. It would be teleological reasoning, as the philos-ophers express it. No, it would be truer to say that our needs are—thank God that it should be so—in harmony with the larger, the fundamental facts of nature. I say thank God, for it is really ground for praising Him. Now, when summer or winter comes along down below, the past summer or winter is far enough in the past to make one glad to see it again—and therein lies some of the joy we have in life. But up here this order and harmony are destroyed: first because there are no proper seasons, as you yourself said when I first came, but only summer days and winter days all mixed up together; and secondly, because what we spend up here isn’t time at all, and the new winter, when it comes, isn’t new, but the same old winter all the time. All that explains perfectly the disgust you feel when you look out at the window."

"Thanks," Joachim said. "And now that you have explained it, you feel so satisfied that you are even satisfied with the situation itself—although in all human—no!" said he. "I’m done. Fed up. It’s beastly. The whole thing is just one tremendous, rotten, beastly sell; and I, for my part—" He went with hasty steps through the room, and shut the door angrily behind him. Unless Hans Castorp was much mistaken, there had been tears in the mild, beautiful eyes.

He left the other staggered. So long as Joachim had confined himself to putting his determination into words, his cousin had not taken it too seriously. But now that silence spoke for him, and his behaviour too, Hans Castorp was alarmed, for he saw that the military Joachim was the man to translate words into deeds—he was so alarmed that he grew pale, and his pallor was for them both. "Fort possible qu’il va mourir," he thought. And that piece of third-hand information mingled itself with an old, painful, never-quite-to-be-suppressed fear, which made him say to himself: "Is it possible he could leave me alone up here—me, who only came on a visit to him? That would be crazy, horrible; at the bare thought of it I can feel my heart flutter and my cheek pale. Because if I am left up here—as I shall be, if he goes down, for it is out of the question for me to go with him—if I am left up here, it is for ever; alone I should never find my way back. Never back down to the world again. And at the thought my heart stands still."

Such the course of Hans Castorp’s fearful musings. But that very afternoon, certitude was vouchsafed. Joachim declared himself, the die was cast, the bridges burnt.

They went down after tea to the basement for the monthly examination. This was the beginning of September. On entering the warm air of the consulting-room, they saw Dr. Krokowski sitting at his table, and the Hofrat, very blue in the face, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, tapping his shoulder with the stethoscope, and yawning at the ceiling. "Mahlzeit, children," said he, languidly. His mood was lax, resigned and melancholic, and he had probably been smoking. There were also, however, some objective grounds for his state, as the cousins had heard: international scandal of a kind only too familiar in the establishment. A certain young girl called Emmy Nolting had entered House Berghof two years before in the autumn, and after a stay of some nine months departed cured. But before September was out she had returned, saying she did not "feel well" at home. In February, with lungs from which all vestige of rhonchi had disappeared, she was sent home again—but by the middle of July was back in her place at Frau Iltis’s table. This Emmy, then, had been discovered in her room at one o’clock at night in company with another sufferer, a Greek named Polypraxios, the same whose shapely legs had attracted favourable attention the night of mardi gras—a young chemist whose father owned dye-works in the Piraeus. The discovery had been made through the jealousy of another young girl, a friend of Emmy, who had found her way to Emmy’s room by the same route the Greek had taken—namely, across the balconies; and, distracted by her jealous rage, had made great outcry, so that everybody came running, and the scandal became known to the sparrows on the house-tops. Behrens had to send all three of them away; and had been at the moment going over the whole unsavoury affair with Krokowski, who had had both girls under private treatment. The Hofrat, as he examined, continued to let fall remarks, in resigned and dreary tones—for he was such a master of auscultation that he could listen to a man’s inside, dictate what he heard to his assistant, and talk about something else all the time.

"Ah, yes, gentlemen," he said, "this cursed libido. You can get some fun out of the thing, it’s all right for you.—Vesicular.—But a man in my position, verily I say unto you—dullness here—he hath his belly full. Is it my fault that phthisis and con-cupiscence go together—slight harshness here? I didn’t arrange it that way; but before you know where you are you find yourself the keeper of a stew—restricted here under the left shoulder. We have psycho-analysis, we give the noodles every chance to talk themselves out—much good it does them! The more they talk the more lecherous they get. I preach mathematics.—Better here, the rhonchi are gone.—I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh. Lawyer Paravant was a bad case; he took my advice, he is now busy squaring the circle, and gets great relief. But most of them are too witless and lazy, God help them!—Vesicular.—You see, I know it’s only too easy for young folk to go to the bad up here—I used to try to do something about these debauches. But it happened a few times that some brother or bridegroom asked me to my face what affair it was of mine—and since then I’ve stuck to my last.—Slight rales up on the right."

He finished with Joachim, thrust his stethoscope in the pocket of his smock, and rubbed his eyes with both huge hands, as was his habit when he had "backslidden" and become melancholy. Half mechanically, between yawns, he reeled off his patter: "Well, Ziemssen, just keep your pecker up, you’ll be all right yet. You aren’t like a picture in a physiology-book, there’s a hitch here and there, and you haven’t cleaned up your Gaffky, you’ve even gone up a peg or so, it’s six this time—but never mind, don’t pull a long face, you are better than you were when you came, I can hand it to you in writing. Just another five or six months—monaths, I mean. Did you know that is the earlier form of the word? I mean to say monath, after this—"

"Herr Hofrat," Joachim began. He stood bare to the waist, heels together and chest out, with a determined bearing, and as mottled in the face as ever he had been that time when Hans Castorp first made observations on the pallor of the deeply tanned.

Behrens ran on without noticing: "—and if you stop another round half year and do particular pipe-clay, why, you’ll be a made man, you can take Constantinople single-handed; you’ll be strong enough to command a regiment of Samsons—" Who knows how much more nonsense he might have uttered if Joachim’s unflinching determination to make himself heard had not brought him to a stand.

"Herr Hofrat," the young man said, "I should like to tell you, if you will pardon me, that I have decided to leave."

"What’s that? So you want to leave? I thought you wanted to go down later as a sound man, to be a soldier."

"No, I must leave now, Herr Hofrat, in a week, that is."

"Do you mean what you say? You want to hop out of the frying-pan into the fire? You’re going to hook it? Don’t you call that desertion?"

"No, Herr Hofrat, I don’t look at it in that light. I must join my regiment."

"Even though I tell you I can surely discharge you in half a year, but not before?"

Joachim’s bearing became even more correct. He took in his stomach, and replied, repressed and curt: "I have been here a year and a half, Herr Hofrat. I cannot wait any longer. Originally it was to have been three months. Since then it has been increased, first another three, then another six, and so on, and still I am not cured."

"Is that my fault?"

"No, Herr Hofrat. But I cannot wait any longer. If I don’t want to miss my opportunity, I cannot wait to make my full cure up here. I must go down now. I need a little time for my equipment and other arrangements."

"Your family knows what you are doing—do they consent?"

"My mother—yes. It is all arranged. The first of October I join the seventy-sixth regiment as cornet."

"At all hazards?" Behrens asked, and fixed him with his bloodshot eyes.

"I have the honour," Joachim answered, his lips twitching.

"Very good, Ziemssen." The Hofrat’s tone changed; he abandoned his position, he relaxed in every way. "Very well, then. Stir your stumps, go on, and God be with you. I see you know your own mind, and so much is certainly true, that it is your affair and not mine. Every pot stands on its own bottom. You go at your own risk, I take no responsibility. But good Lord, it may turn out all right. Soldiering is an out-of-doors job. It may do you good, you may come through all right."

"Yes, Herr Hofrat."

"Well, and what about your cousin, the peaceful citizen over there? He wants to go along with you, does he?" This was Hans Castorp, who was supposed to answer. He stood there as pale as at that first examination, which had ended by his being admitted as a patient. Now, as then, his heart could be seen hammering against his side. He said: "I should like to be guided by your opinion, Herr Hofrat."

"My opinion. Good." He drew him to him by the arm and began to tap and listen. He did not dictate. It went rather fast. When he finished, he said: "You may go."

Hans Castorp stammered: "You—you mean—I am cured?"

"Yes, you are cured. The place above in the left lobe is no longer worth talking about. Your temperature doesn’t go with it. Why you have it, I don’t know. I assume it is of no further importance. So far as I am concerned, you can go "

"But—Herr Hofrat—may I ask—that is—you are perhaps not altogether serious?"

"Not serious? Why not? What do you suppose? And incidentally, what do you think of me, might I be allowed to ask? What do you take me for? A bawdy-house keeper?"

He was in a towering passion. The blood flared up in his cheeks and turned their blue to violet, his one-sided lip was wrenched so high that the canines of the upper jaw were visible. He advanced his head like a steer, with staring, bloodshot watery eves "I won’t have it," he bellowed. "In the first place, I’m not the proprietor here! I’m on hire. I’m a doctor! I’m nothing but a doctor, I would give you to understand. I’m not a pimp. I’m no Signor Amoroso on the Toledo, in Napoti bella. I am a servant of suffering humanity! And if either one of you should perchance have conceived a different opinion of me and my character then you can both go to the devil with my compliments—you can go to the dogs or you can turn up your toes, whichever you like, and a pleasant journey to you!"

He strode across the room and was out of the door that led to the x-ray waiting-room. It crashed behind him.

The cousins looked imploringly at Dr. Krokowski, who buried his nose in his papers. They hurried into their clothes. On the stair Hans Castorp said: "That was awful. Have you ever seen him like that before?"

"No, not like that. But the authorities sometimes get these attacks. The important thing is to behave with dignity and let them pass over. He was irritated about the business with Polypraxios and Emmy Nolting. But did you see," Joachim went on, and the joy of having fought and won his battle mounted in him and almost took away his breath, "did you see how he gave in and showed no more fight, directly he saw I was in earnest? All one has to do is to show some pluck, and not let oneself be shouted down. Now I’ve even got a sort of leave—at least, he said himself I’ll probably pull out of it—and I’m travelling in a week—in three weeks I’ll be with the colours," he finished, altering his phrase, and confining the joy that trembled in his voice to his own affairs, without reference to Hans Castorp’s.

The latter was silent. He spoke no word, either of Joachim’s "leave" or his own—which might equally well have been mentioned. He made his preparations for the rest-cure, put the thermometer in his mouth, flung the camel’s-hair rugs about him with swift, practised hand, the perfected technique of that consecrated art the flat-land knows not of; then he lay still, neat as a sausage-roll, in his excellent chair, in the chill dampness of the early autumn afternoon.

The rain-clouds hung low. Remnants of snow rested on the boughs of the silver fir. The banner of the establishment was furled round its staff. A low murmur of voices rose from the rest-hall, whence last year, at much about this time, the voice of Herr Albin had risen to Hans Castorp’s ear. The cure was going on, the patients sat there with soon-chilled faces and fingertips. To him all this was long-established habit, the inevitable course of life; he knew the gratitude of the settled patient for the blessing of being able to lie, snugly ensconced, and think everything over at leisure.

So it was settled, Joachim was to go. Rhadamanthus had released him; not rite, not with a clean bill of health, yet half approvingly, on the ground, and in recognition, of his constant spirit. He would go down: first with the narrow-gauge road as far as Landquart, then to Romanshorn, then across the wide, bottomless lake, over which in the legend the rider rode, across all Germany, and home. He would stop there, in the valley world, among men with no notion of the way to live, ignorant of "measuring" and of the whole ritual of rug-wrapping, of fur sleeping-sacks, of the three daily walks, of—it was hard to say, hard to count all the things of which those down below stood in blank ignorance; but the mere picture of Joachim, after a year and a half up here, living in the darkness of that flat-landish incomprehension—a picture only of Joachim, with hardly the faintest hypothetical reference to Hans Castorp himself—so bewildered the young man that he closed his eyes and waved it away with a motion of the hand, murmuring: "Impossible!"

And since it was impossible, he would live on up here, alone, without Joachim? Yes, it came to that. How long? Until Behrens discharged him cured—in earnest, that is, not as he had to-day. But that was so indefinite a time-limit that he could no more prophesy it than could Joachim, on a like occasion long ago. Again, would the impossible by then have become any more possible? On the contrary, Joachim’s rash departure did—in honesty—offer his cousin a support, now, before the impossible should become utterly so, a guide and companion on a path which of himself he would never, never find again. Ah, if one consulted humanistic pedagogy, how humanistic pedagogy would adjure him to take the hand and accept the offered guidance! But Herr Settembrini was only a representative—of things and forces worth hearing about, it was true, but not the only forces there were. And with Joachim it was the same. He was a soldier. He was leaving—almost at the very time set for the return of the high-breasted one, for it was known that she would return in October. While the departure of the civilian Hans Castorp became impossible precisely because he had to wait for Clavdia Chauchat, whose return, as yet, was not even thought of. "I don’t look at it in that light," Joachim had answered when Rhadamanthus talked about desertion—though as far as Joachim was concerned that had probably only been some of the Hofrat’s melancholic maundering. But for him, the civilian, the thing was different. For him—ah, here was the right idea, the thought which he had set himself to evolve, as he lay out in the cold and damp—for him the real desertion would lie in his taking advantage of the occasion to dash off unlawfully—or half unlawfully—to the flat-land. It would be the abandonment of certain comprehensive responsibilities which had grown up out of his contemplation of the image called Homo Dei; it would be the betrayal of that appointed task of "stock-taking," that hard and harassing task, which was really beyond the powers native to him, but yet afforded his spirit such nameless and adventurous joys; that task it was his duty to perform, here in his chair, and up there in his blue-blossoming retreat.

He tore the thermometer out of his mouth, violently as never before save when the Oberin had sold him the toy and he had first used it. He looked at it with the same avid curiosity now as then. Ah, Mercurius had indeed bounded upwards: he stood at 100.5°, almost .6°.

Hans Castorp threw off his covers, sprang up and strode to the corridor door and back. Then he lay down again, called softly to Joachim, and asked him what he measured. "I’m not measuring any more," replied his cousin.

"Well, I’ve some temperament," Hans Castorp said, emulating Frau Stöhr; Joachim, behind the glass pane, answered never a word.

He said no more, on that day or the following; made no effort to find out his cousin’s plans—which would, indeed, be driven to declare themselves in no long time, by his either taking certain steps or refraining from them. They did so—by the latter. Hans Castorp seemed to hold with that quietism in whose view all action was an insult to God, who prefers to act by Himself. At all events, the young man’s activity during these days confined itself to a visit to Behrens; a consultation of which Joachim was aware, the result of which he could have accurately predicted beforehand. His cousin had explained that he took the liberty of placing more reliance upon the Hofrat’s oft-repeated exhortations to stop up here long enough to perfect his cure than he did upon an ill-considered verdict pronounced in the heat of the moment.

His temperature was 100.5°, one could not regard himself as discharged in form; and unless the Hofrat’s recent statement was to be regarded in the light of an expulsion, to which he, the speaker, was not aware he had laid himself open, he wished to say that upon mature consideration he had decided to remain and await the event of a complete cure. To all which the Hofrat had merely responded: "Bon! Werry good—no offence intended, none taken," or words to that effect. That was talking like a sensible man; hadn’t he seen first off that Hans Castorp had more talent as a patient than that fire-eater his cousin? And so on.

All of this corresponded pretty accurately to Joachim’s guess. He said nothing, only noting in silence that Hans Castorp made no move to join in his preparations for departure. But the good Joachim was busy enough, in all conscience, with his own affairs. He had no more time to concern himself with his cousin’s fate or further sojourn. Within his own bosom the tempest raged. It was as well he no longer took his temperature—he had, so he said, let his instrument fall, and broken it—for the thermometer might have given contrary counsel: so fearfully wrought up was he, now darkly glowing, now pale with joyful agitation. He could no longer lie still in the cure; Hans Castorp heard how he went up and down all day in his room, throughout those hours, four times each day, when all over House Berghof the horizontal obtained. A year and a half it had been. And now at last, at last, he was off for the flat-land, for home and his regiment! Even though with only half a discharge. It was no trifling event—Hans Castorp’s heart went out to his cousin as he heard his restless pacing. Eighteen months, the wheel full circle and halfway round again, he had lived up here, deep, deep into the life of the place, the inviolable ebb and flow of it, for seven times seventy days; and now he would go down to live among strangers and the uninitiate. What difficulties would he not have, to acclimatize himself? Would it be surprising if Joachim’s agitation consisted only in part of joyful emotion, and also in part of dread—if it was not also the pang of parting with all this familiar life that made him stride thus up and down his room? We leave Marusja out of account.

But joy weighed down the scale. The good Joachim’s heart overflowed at his lips. He spoke always of himself, he made no reference to Hans Castorp’s future. He said how fresh and new the world would seem, himself, all life, and every day, every hour of the time. Once more he would rejoice in real, solid time, the long, vital years of youth. He spoke of his mother, Hans Castorp’s step-aunt Ziemssen, who had the same gentle black eyes as her son. She had never visited him up here in all this time; put off like him from month to month, from half-year to half-year, she had delayed for the entire term of his stay in the mountains. He spoke of the oath of fidelity to the colours, which he would soon be taking—spoke ardently, with a smile on his face. It was a solemn ceremony: in the presence of the standard he would be sworn to it, literally, to the standard—" You don’t say! Seriously?" Hans Castorp asked. "To the flag-pole? To that scrap of bunting?" Even so! It was symbolic; in the artillery they were sworn to the gun. What fanatical customs, the civilian remarked; extravagantly emotional he found them. Joachim nodded, full of pride and joy.

He spent his time in preparations; settled his last account with the management, and days ahead of time began to pack. He packed his summer and winter clothing, and had the sleeping-bag and camel’s-hair rugs sewed up in sacking by one of the servants. They might be useful at manoeuvres. He began to make his farewells; paid visits to Naphta and Settembrini—alone, for his cousin did not offer to go with him, nor did he ask what Settembrini had said to Joachim’s imminent departure and to Hans Castorp’s imminent stopping-behind. Whether Settembrini had remarked "Yes, yes," or "I see, I see," or both, or merely "Poveretto!" To Hans Castorp it was evidently all one.

Came the eve of departure. Joachim performed for the last time each act of the daily round: each meal, each rest period, each walk; he took leave of the physicians and the Oberin. The morning dawned. He came to table with cold hands and burning eyes; he had not closed them all night. He ate scarce a mouthful; and when the dwarf waitress came to say that his trunks had been strapped, he started up from his chair to take leave of his table-mates. Frau Stöhr wept, the easy, brineless tears of the simple-minded; and after, behind Joachim’s back, shook her head at the schoolmistress and turned her hand about in the air, with the fingers spread out, thus expressing a cheap and common scepticism on the score of Joachim’s competence to depart, and his future welfare. Hans Castorp saw her do it, as he drank out his cup standing, in act to follow his cousin. Then came the business of tipping, and receiving the management’s official farewell in the vestibule. The usual group of spectators stood about: Frau Iltis with her "steriletto," the ivory Levi, the inordinate Popoff and his wife. They waved their handkerchiefs as the wagon went down the drive with the brake on. Joachim had been presented with roses. He wore a hat, Hans Castorp none.

The morning was glorious, with the first sunshine after days of gloom. The Schiahorn, the Green Towers, the round top of the Dorfberg stood out unchangeable and unmistakable against the blue; Joachim’s eyes rested on them. Hans Castorp said it was almost a pity the weather had turned so fine on the last day. There was a sort of spite about it; partings were always easier if some inhospitable impression was left at the end. To which Joachim: he didn’t need anything to make it easier, and this was excellent weather for manoeuvres, he could do with it down below. They said little else. Things being as they were between them, and the situation for them both, there was indeed not much to say. The lame porter sat on the box with the driver.

Erect and bouncing on the hard cushions, they laid the watercourse behind them, the narrow-gauge track; drove along the irregularly built-up street beside the latter, and drew up in the paved square before the station of the Dorf, that was little more than a shell. Hans Castorp with a thrill recalled first impressions. Since his arrival, thirteen months before, in the twilight, he had not seen the station. "Here was where I arrived," he remarked superfluously, to Joachim, who only said: "So you did," and paid the coachman.

The nimble lame man attended to tickets and luggage. They stood together on the platform by the miniature train, in one of whose grey-upholstered compartments Joachim kept a place with his overcoat, travelling-rug and roses. "Well, get along, and take your fanatical oath," Hans Castorp told his cousin, and Joachim answered: "I mean to." What else was there to say? Last greetings to exchange, greetings to those down below, to those up here. Hans Castorp drew patterns on the asphalt with his cane. "Take your places!" shouted the guard. Hans Castorp started; looked at Joachim, Joachim at him. They put out their hands. Hans Castorp was vaguely smiling; the other’s eyes looked sad, beseeching. "Hans!" he said—yes, incredible and painful as the thing was, it happened: he had called his cousin by his first name. Not with the thou, not "old fellow," or "man," by which forms they had addressed each other their lives long. No, in defiance of all reserve, almost gushingly, he called his cousin by his first name. "Hans!" he said, and pressed his hand imploringly—and the latter noted that the excitement of the journey, the sleepless night, the emotion, made Joachim’s head tremble on his neck, as his own did when he "took stock"—"Hans," he said earnestly, "come down soon!" He swung himself up. The door banged, the train whistled, the carriages shunted together. The little engine puffed and pulled off, the train glided after. The traveller waved his hat from the window, the other, on the platform, his hand. Desolately he stood, after that, a long time, alone. Then slowly he retraced the path that more than a year ago he had first traversed with Joachim.

An Attack, and a Repulse

THE WHEEL revolved. The hand on time’s clock moved forward. Orchis and aquilegia were out of bloom, and the mountain pink. The deep-blue, star-shaped gentian and the autumn crocus, pale and poisonous, appeared again among the damp grass, and a reddish hue overspread the forests. The autumn equinox was past. All Souls’ was in sight—and, for practised time-consumers, probably also the Advent season, the solstice, and Christmas. But for the moment there were lovely October days, a succession of them, like that on which the cousins had viewed the Hofrat’s paintings. Since Joachim’s departure Hans Castorp sat no more at Frau Stöhr’s table, the one with Dr. Blumenkohl’s empty place, at which the gay Marusja had been wont to smother her irresponsible mirth in her orange-scented pocket-handkerchief. New guests, strangers, sat there now. Our friend, two months deep in his second year, had been given a new place by the management at a near-by table, diagonally to his old one, between that and the "good" Russian table. In short, Settembrini’s table. Yes, Hans Castorp sat in the humanist’s vacated seat, again at the end, facing the "doctor’s place," which at each of the seven tables was left free for the Hofrat and his famulus to use when they could. At the upper end, next the place of the medical presiding of-ficer, the hump-backed Mexican sat, perched on many cushions; the amateur photographer, whose facial expression was that of a deaf person, because he possessed no language with which to communicate his thoughts. Beside him sat the ancient maiden lady from Siebenbürgen. She, as Herr Settembrini had said, claimed the interest of all and sundry for her brother-in-law, a man of whom nobody knew anything, or wished to know. Regularly at certain hours of the day this lady was to be seen at the balustrade of her loggia with a little Tula-silver-handled cane across the nape of her neck—it served also as a support on her walks—expanding her flat chest by means of deep-breathing exercises. Opposite her sat a Czech, whom everybody called Herr Wenzel, as his family name was impossible to pronounce. Herr Settembrini, indeed, did once essay to utter the involved succession of consonants; less in good faith than by way of testing gaily the elegant helplessness of his Latinity in face of that matted and tangled growth of sound. Although plump as a mole, with an appetite amazing even up here, the Czech had for four years been asseverating that there was no hope for him. Of an evening, he would strum the songs of his native land upon a beribboned mandolin; or talk about his sugar-beet plantation, and the pretty girls who worked it. On Hans Castorp’s either side sat the wedded pair from Halle, Magnus the brewer and his wife, about whom melancholy hung as a cloud, because they had no tolerance for certain important products of metabolism: he sugar, she albumen. Their spirits, particularly the sallow Frau Magnus’s, were proof against any ray of cheer; forlornity exhaled from her like damp from a cellar; even more than Frau Stöhr she represented that unedifying union of dullness and disease, which had offended Hans Castorp’s soul—under correction from Herr Settembrini. Herr Magnus was livelier and chattier, though only in a vein intolerable to the Italian’s literary sense. He was inclined to choler too, and often clashed with Herr Wenzel on political and other grounds. The nationalistic aspirations of the Czech exasperated him; again, the latter declared himself in favour of prohibition, and made moral remarks about the brewing industry, while Herr Magnus, very red in the face, defended from the hygienic viewpoint the unexceptionableness of the drink with which his interests were bound up. At such moments as these, Herr Settembrini’s light and humorous touch had often preserved the amenities; but Hans Castorp, in his place, found his authority little able to cope with the situation., everybody respects them. The main thing is to get well stunk out."

[admin]

Part 5 of 9

"Certainly, of course," said the Consul. "Thanks very much." The next morning he had vanished.

He was off, gone down with the first little train to the flat-land—though not without having put his affairs in order—that we would not suggest. He had paid his bill, and the fee for the fumigation of his room; then, in all haste, without a syllable to his relative, he had packed his hand-bags—probably the night before, or even in the dawning, when everybody else was asleep—and when Hans Castorp entered his uncle’s room at the hour for early breakfast, he found it empty.

Arms akimbo, he stood and said: "Well, well!" And a pensive smile overspread his features. "Yes, yes," he said, and nodded. Somebody had taken to his heels. In headlong haste, breathless, as though the moment of resolution must not be let slip, he had flung his things together and made off. Not with his cousin by his side, not after fulfilment of his lofty mission, but glad to save even himself by flight, the goodman had deserted to the flat-land—well, pleasant journey to you, Uncle James!

Hans Castorp let no one suspect his ignorance of his uncle’s plans. Particularly not the lame concierge who had taken his uncle to the station. From Lake Constance James sent back a card, saying that he had had a telegram requiring his immediate return for business reasons. He had not liked to disturb his cousin (a polite lie). And he wished him a continued pleasant sojourn at House Berghof. Was that said in mockery? If so, Hans Castorp found it highly disingenuous, for his uncle had been in no jesting mood when he cut short his stay. No, he had become inwardly aware—one could conceive him paling at the thought—that even as it was, after only a week up here, he would find eyerything down below wrong and out of place, and that the feeling would last a considerable time before readjustment set in: it would seem to him unnatural to go to his office, instead of taking a prescribed walk after breakfast, and thereafter lying ritually wrapped, horizontal in a balcony. And this dread perception had been the immediate ground of his flight.

Thus ended the campaign of the flat-land to recover its lost Hans Castorp. Our young man did not conceal from himself that the total failure of this embassy marked a crisis in the relations between himself and the world below. It meant that he gave it up, finally and with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders; it meant, for himself, the consummation of freedom—the thought of which had gradually ceased to make him shudder.

Operationes Spirituales

LEO NAPHTA came from a little place near the Galician-Volhynian border. His father, of whom he spoke with respect, obviously with the feeling that he was now remote enough from his native scene to view it with impartial benevolence, had been the village schochet, or slaughterer—a calling different indeed from that of the gentile butcher, who was labourer and tradesman, whereas Leo’s father was an official, and the holder of a spiritual office. Elie Naphta, after being tested by the rabbi in his pious proficiency, had been empowered by him to slaughter suitable animals after the Mosaic law and according to Talmudic prescription. The performance of his ritual task had imparted something priestly to his being; and his blue eyes, which the son described as sending out gleams like stars, had held in their depth a wealth of silent spiritual fervour. The solemnity of his bearing spoke of that early time when the killing of animals had been in actual fact a priestly office. Leo, or Leib, as he had been called in his childhood, had been allowed to watch in the court-yard while the father carried out his task, aided by his helper, a powerful youth of the athletic Jewish type, beside whom the slender Elie with his round blond beard seemed still more fragile and delicate. Standing near the victim, which was hobbled and bound indeed, but not stunned, he would lift the mighty slaughter-knife and bring it to rest in a deep gash close to the cervical vertebra; while the assistant held the quickly filling basins to receive the gushing, steaming blood, and the child looked on at the sight with that childish gaze which often pierces through the sense into the essential, and may have been in an unusual degree the gift of the starry-eyed Elie’s son. He knew that Christian butchers had to stun their cattle with a blow from a club before killing them, and that this regulation was made in order to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Yet his father, so fine and so intelligent by comparison with those louts, and starry-eyed as never one of them, did his task according to the Law, striking down the creature while its senses were undimmed, and letting its life-blood well out until it sank. The boy Leib felt that the stupid goyim were actuated by an easy and irreverent good nature, which paid less honour to the deity than did his father’s solemn mercilessness; thus the conception of piety came to be bound up in his mind with that of cruelty, and the idea of the sacred and the spiritual with the sight and smell of spurting blood. For he probably saw that his father had not chosen his bloody trade out of the same brutal tastes that moved the lusty gentile butcher or his own Jewish assistant to find gratification in it, but rather on spiritual grounds, and in a sense bespoken by the starry eyes.

Yes, Elie Naphta had been a brooding and refining spirit; a student of the Torah, but a critic as well, discussing the Scriptures with his rabbi—with whom he not infrequently disagreed. In his village, and not only among those of his own creed, he had passed for something unusual, for a man of more than common knowledge—knowledge for the most part of holy things, but possibly also of matters that might not be quite canny, and anyhow were not in the ordinary run. There was something irregular, schismatic, about him, something of the familiar of God, a Baal-Shem or Zaddik, a miracle-man. Once he had actually cured a woman of a malignant sore, and another time a boy of spasms, simply by means of blood and invocations. But it was precisely this aura of an uncanny piety, in which the odour of his blood-boltered calling played a part, that proved his destruction. There had been the unexplained death of two gentile boys, a popular uprising, a panic of rage—and Elie had died horribly, nailed crucifix-wise on the door of his burning home. His tuberculous, bedridden wife, the boy Leo, and four brothers and sisters, all wailing and lamenting with upflung arms, had fled the country.

Not utterly and entirely penniless, thanks to the father’s foresight, the little troop came to rest in a small town of the Vorarlberg. Frau Naphta found work in a cotton-spinning factory, where she laboured as long as her strength held out, while the children attended the common school. The mental pabulum purveyed by this establishment probably answered to the needs of Leo’s brothers and sisters; but for him, the eldest, it was quite insufficient. From his mother he had the seeds of his lung disease; from his father, besides his slenderness of build, an extraordinary intelligence: mental gifts that were from the first bound up with instinctive aspirations, a lofty ambition, and an ardent yearning for the more refined side of life, which caused him to reach out passionately beyond the sphere of his origin. The fourteen- and fifteen-year-old lad managed to get hold of books out of school hours, and with lawless avidity continued to educate himself and feed his growing and impatient mind. He thought and uttered things which made the failing mother draw her head down crookedly between her shoulders and look at him with both wasted hands flung out. His person and the answers he gave at religious instruction drew upon him the attention of the district rabbi, and this devout and learned man received him as a private pupil, gratifying his taste for form by instruction in Hebrew and the classics, his logical turn by mathematics. But the good man was ill paid for his pains; as time went on, it became ever clearer that he had nourished a viper in his bosom. As once between Elie Naphta and his rabbi, so it was here. They fell out, exasperation on religious and philosophical grounds ensued and grew more and more embittered; the upright cleric had everything to endure from the irritability, captiousness, scepticism, and cutting dialectic of young Leo. Added to that, the lad’s turn for sophistry and his insatiable intellect had latterly taken on a revolutionary cast. An acquaintance with the son of a social-democratic member of the Reichsrat, and with this popular hero himself, turned his thoughts on politics, and made him apply his passion for logic to the field of social criticism. He said things that made the hair stand up on the head of the good Talmudist, who in politics was entirely loyal, and gave the final blow to the relations between master and pupil. In brief it came to this: that Leo was cast out, forbidden to cross the threshold of his master’s study—precisely at the time when Rahel Naphta lay dying.

And then, immediately after the mother’s passing, Leo made the acquaintance of Father Unterpertinger. The sixteen-year-old lad sat lonely on a bench in the park district of the Margaretentop, as it was called, a small height on the bank of the Ill, overlooking the town, whence one had a pleasant spreading view over the valley of the Rhine. He sat there lost in troubled and bitter thoughts of his fate and his future, when a member of the teaching staff of the Morning Star, the pensionnat of the Society of Jesus, out for a walk, sat down near him, put down his hat on the bench, crossed one leg over the other under his cassock, and after reading his breviary awhile began a conversation which waxed very lively, and proved in the end a decisive factor in Leo’s destiny. The Jesuit, a much-travelled and cultured person, a judge and fisher of men, pedagogue by passion and conviction, pricked up his ears at the scornful tone, the clearly articulated sentences, in which the poor Jewish lad answered his first questions. A keen and tortured intellect breathed in the words, and, probing further, the good father discovered a command of fact and a caustic elegance of thought made only the more surprising by the ragged exterior of the youth. They spoke of Karl Marx, whose Capital Leo had studied in a cheap edition; and passed from him to Hegel, of whom or about whom he had also read enough to be able to say something striking. Whether from a general tendency to paradox, or with intent to be courteous, he called Hegel a "Catholic thinker"; and on the father’s laughing query how that could be substantiated, since Hegel, as Prussian State philosopher, must surely be counted definitely with the Protestants, the boy replied that precisely the phrase "State philosopher" strengthened his position, and justified his characterization in a religious, though, of course, not in a churchly-dogmatic sense. For (Leo loved the conjunction, it came from his mouth with a triumphant, ruthless ring, his eyes flashing behind his spectacles every time he could bring it in) politics and Catholicism were, as conceptions, psychologically akin, both of them belonging to a category which embraced all that was objective, feasible, empirical, with an issue into active life. Opposed to it stood the Protestant, the pietistic sphere, which had its origin in mysticism. Jesuitism, he added, clearly betrayed the political, the pedagogical element in Catholicism; the Society had always regarded statecraft and education as its rightful domain. And he cited Goethe, who, rooted in Protestantism and assuredly Protestant as he was, had yet, by virtue of his objectivity and his doctrine of action, possessed a strongly Catholic side. He had defended auricular confession, and as an educator had been well-nigh Jesuitical.

Naphta may have said these things out of conviction, or because they were clever, or because, being a poor lad, he knew how adroit flattery could be made to serve his ends. The Father laid less stress on their intrinsic value than upon the general ability of which they gave evidence. Their talk had been prolonged, the Father soon possessed himself of the facts of Leo’s personal situation, and finished by inviting the youth to visit him at the school.

And thus it was vouchsafed to Naphta to enter the precincts of the Stella Matutina. It is quite conceivable that he had already long since coveted the scholarly and social charms of that atmosphere; and now, by this turn of affairs, he had won a new master and patron far better calculated than the old one to prize and promote his peculiar aptitudes, a master cool by nature, whose value lay in his cosmopolitanism; an entry into whose circle now became the object of the Jewish lad’s desire. Like many gifted people of his race, Naphta was both natural aristocrat and natural revolutionary; a socialist, yet possessed by the dream of shining in the proudest, finest, most exclusive and conventional sphere of life. That first utterance which the society of a Catholic theologian had tempted from him was—however comparative and analytical in form—in substance a declaration of affection for the Roman Church, as a power at once spiritual and aristocratic (in other words anti-material), at once superior and inimical to worldly things (in other words, revolutionary). And the homage he thus paid was genuine, and profound; for, as he himself explained, Judaism, by virtue of its secular and materialistic leanings, its socialism, its political adroitness, had actually more in common with Catholicism than the latter had with the mystic subjectivity and self-immolation of Protestantism; the conversion of a Jew to the Roman Catholic faith was accordingly a distinctly less violent spiritual rupture than was that of a Protestant.

Sundered from the shepherd of his original fold, orphaned, forsaken, full of craving after freer air and forms of existence upon which his native gifts gave him a claim, Naphta, who was long past the age of consent, was so impatient for profession that he saved his patron all the trouble of winning this soul—or rather, this extraordinary head—for his sect. Even before Leo’s baptism he had, at the Father’s instigation, found temporary lodgment in the Stella Matutina, where he was given food for both body and mind; and had migrated hither with the greatest equanimity, and the callousness of the born aristocrat, leaving his brothers and sisters to the care of the Poor Guardians and a destiny suited to their lesser gifts.

The property of the establishment was extensive, comprising in its buildings space for four hundred pupils, with wood and meadow land, half a dozen playing-fields, farm buildings, and stalls for hundreds of cows. The institution was at once boarding-school, model farm, athletic training-school, foster-mother of future scholars, and temple of the muses—for there were constant performances of plays and music. The life was both monastic and manorial. With its discipline and elegance, its quiet good cheer, its well-being, its intellectual atmosphere, and the precision of its varied daily regimen, it soothed and flattered the lad Leo’s deepest instincts. He was exaggeratedly happy. He ate excellent meals in a spacious refectory where the rule of silence obtained—as in the corridors of the establishment—and in the centre of which a young prefect sat on a raised platform and read aloud. Leo’s zeal in his classes was fiery; and despite the weakness of his chest he made every effort to hold his own in the games and sports. He went devotedly to early mass, and took part in the Sunday service with a fervour which must have been gratifying to his priestly teachers. His social bearing was no less satisfactory to them. And on high days and holy-days, after the cake and wine, he made one of the long line of pupils who, in grey and green uniform with a stripe on the trousers, high collar and kepi, went walking in the country.

He thrilled with gratitude at the consideration they showed him, in respect of his origin, his infant Christianity, and his personal fortunes. No one in the institution seemed to know that he was an object of charity. The rules of the house favoured the concealment of his homeless and family-less state. It was forbidden to send parcels of food or sweets to the pupils; if any came, they were divided and Leo received his share with the others. And the cosmopolitanism of the institution prevented his race from being perceptible. There were other young exotics among the pupils, such as the Portuguese South-Americans, who looked even more "Jewish" than he did, and thus the idea did not come up. An Ethiopian prince had been received at the same time with Naphta; he had woolly hair, and was distinctly Moorish in appearance, though most distinguished.

In class Leo expressed the desire to study theology, in order to prepare himself for membership in the Society, in case he should be found worthy. In consequence, his place was changed from the "second school," where the food and living conditions were more modest, to the first, where he was served by waiters at table, and had a cubicle between a Silesian nobleman, the Count of Harbuval and Chamaré, and the young Marquis di Rangoni-Santacroce from Modena. He passed his examinations brilliantly, and, true to his resolve, quitted the pupil-life of the school to enter upon his noviciate in near-by Tisis, where he led a life of service and humility, silent subordination and religious discipline, and imbibed therefrom a spiritual relish fully equal to the fanatical expectations of his early years.

Meanwhile, however, his health suffered; less, indeed, through the severity of the noviciate, which was not lacking in physical recreation, than from within. The subtlety and acumen characteristic of the educational system of which he was now the object met his own natural tendencies half-way. He spent all his days and a good share of his nights in intellectual exercises, in searchings of the conscience, in contemplation, in introspection, into which he flung himself with such a passion of contentiousness as to involve him in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and con-troversies. He was the despair—if at the same time the greatest hope—of his tutors, whom he daily pushed to the limits of their endurance by his raging dialectic and the subtility of his mental processes. "Ad hoec quid tu?" he would ask, the glasses of his spectacles flashing. And the cornered Father could only admonish him to pray for a tranquil spirit—"ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat." This tranquillity, when achieved, consisted of a complete atrophy of the personality, a state of insensibility in which the individual became a lifeless tool; it was a veritable "graveyard peace," the uncanny outward signs of which Brother Naphta could see on the empty, staring faces of those about him, but to which he would never attain, even by the route of physical decay.

It spoke for the intellectual fibre of those in authority over him that his delays and drawbacks had no effect on his standing. At the end of his two years’ noviciate, the Pater Provincial himself sent for him, and after the interview sanctioned his admission into the Society. The young scholastic, having taken the four lowest orders of door-keeper, acolyte, lector, and exorcizor, and also the "simple" vows, was now definitely a member of the Society, and set out for Falkenberg, the Jesuit college in Holland, to begin his theological studies.

He was then twenty years old. At the end of three years, the unfavourable climate and the continued mental strain had so combined to aggravate his hereditary complaint that a longer stay would have endangered his life. His superiors were alarmed by a hæmorrhage; he hovered for weeks between life and death, when they hurried him, barely convalescent, back whence he had come. In the institution where he had been a pupil he found occupation as prefect and supervisor of the boarders, and teacher of the humanities and philosophy. Such an interval was in any case prescribed for the students of the Society; but it usually lasted only a few years, after which one returned to the college to take up again the seven years’ course of study and carry it to its conclusion. This, however, it was not granted Brother Naphta to do. He continued ailing; doctor and superior decided that it was best for him to serve his order here among the pupils, in the good country air, with plenty of outdoor occupation on the farm. He took indeed the first of the higher orders, and won therewith the right to chant the Epistle on Sundays at mass—a right, however, which he never exercised, first because he was entirely unmusical, and second because of his weak chest, which made his voice break and unfitted it for singing. He never got further than being sub-deacon—not even to diaconate, much less to priesthood. The hæmorrhages recurred, the fever persisted, and he had finally come to the mountains for an extended cure at the Society’s expense. This was now in its sixth year, and gradually coming to be no longer so much a cure as a fixed condition of existence, a residence for life in rarefied atmosphere, coloured by some activity as Latin master in the Davos gymnasium for slightly tubercular boys.

All this, in much greater detail, Hans Castorp learned in the course of visits to Naphta’s silken cell, either alone or in company with his table-mates Ferge and Wehsal, whom he had introduced there; or else when he met Naphta out on a walk, and strolled back to the Dorf in his company. He learned it as occasion offered, bit by bit, but also in the form of continuous narrative; and found it all highly extraordinary. Not only so, but he incited Ferge and Wehsal to find it the same, which they accord-ingly did. The former, indeed, all the while protested that he was just a plain man, and this high-flown stuff utterly beyond him, his experience with the pleura-shock having been the sole event in his life to raise it above the most humdrum sphere. Wehsal, however, obviously enjoyed this narrative of a man’s rise to success from humble and oppressed beginnings—and in any case there was no ground in it for arrogance, since the good fortune seemed dwindling away again in the prevailing fleshly infirmity.

Hans Castorp, for his part, regretted the reverse in Naphta’s affairs, thinking with pride and concern of the ambitious Joachim, who with a heroic effort had burst through the tough web of the Rhadamanthine rhetoric and flown to the colours, where his cousin’s fancy painted him clinging to the standard with three fingers upraised in the oath of fealty. To such a standard had Naphta too sworn faith, he too had been received beneath its folds: this had been the very figure he had employed when ex-plaining his Society to Hans Castorp. But obviously, with his deviations and combinations, he was less true to his oath than Joachim to his. Hans Castorp, listening to the future or ci-devant Jesuit, felt himself strengthened in his views as a civilian and child of peace, while realizing that this man and Joachim would each find something satisfying in the calling of the other and recognize its likeness with his own. For the one was as military as the other, and both in every sense of the word; both being ascetic, both hierarchical, both bound to strict obedience and "Spanish etiquette." This last in particular played a great rôle in Naphta’s society, originating as it did in Spain. Its exercises, which were a sort of pendant to the army regulations issued later by the Prussian Frederick to his infantry, were first written in the Spanish language, Naphta often making use of Spanish phrases in his narrative and descriptions. Thus he would speak of the "dos banderas"—the two standards—the Satanic and the celestial, beneath which the armies gathered for the great struggle: the one near Jerusalem, where Christ was the "capitán general" of all the faithful, the other on the plains of Babylon, of which the "caudillo" or chieftain was Lucifer.

And had not the establishment of the Morning Star been, precisely, a military academy, the pupils of which were drilled by divisions in military and spiritual decorum, a mingling, so to speak, of stand-up collar and Spanish ruff? And ideas of rank and preferment, which played such a brilliant part in Joachim’s profession—how plainly, Hans Castorp thought, were they visible in that other society, wherein Naphta, alas, by reason of his illness, had been prevented from making further headway! By his account, the Society was exclusively composed of officers on fire with zeal, moved by the single thought of distinguishing themselves (insignis esse, in Latin). And these, according to the teaching of their founder and first general, the Spanish Loyola, performed a far more splendid service than any could who were guided merely by their normal reason. For theirs was a work of supererogation (ex supererogatione) in that they not only combated the rebellion of the flesh (rebellio carnis), which after all was incumbent upon any average healthy human reason to do, but were hostile to even an inclination toward the things of the sense, toward love of self and love of worldly things, even where these had not been directly forbidden. For it was better and more honourable to assail the foe (agere contra), that is, to attack, than merely to defend oneself (resistere). To weaken and break the foe—those were the instructions in the service-book; and here again, its author, the Spanish Loyola, was of one mind with Joachim’s capitan general, the Prussian Frederick, with his motto of "Attack, attack! Keep on their heels! Attaquez donc toujours!"

But what Naphta’s and Joachim’s worlds had most of all in common was their attitude towards the shedding of blood, their axiom that one must not hold back one’s hand. Therein, as worlds, as orders, as states of society, they were in stern accord. The child of peace would listen with avidity to Naphta’s stories of the warlike monks of the Middle Ages, who, ascetic to the point of physical exhaustion, and filled with a ghostly lust of power, had been unsparing in bloodshed to the end of establishing the kingdom of God and its supernal overlordship; of the warlike Templars, who had held it of far greater worth to die in battle with the infidel than in their beds, and no crime but the highest glory, to kill or be killed for Christ’s sake. Luckily, Settembrini had not been present at that conversation. He continued to fill the rôle of organ-grinder, and sang the praises of peace to harp and psaltery, but there was always the holy war against Vienna, to which he never said nay, though Naphta visited his foible with scorn and contempt, and when the Italian was glowing with passionate feeling, would lead the bourgeoisie of all Christendom into the field against him, swearing that every country, or else no country at all, was his fatherland, and repeating with cutting effect the phrase of a general of the Society, named Nickel, according to which our love of country was "a plague, and the certain death of Christian love."

It was, of course, his ascetic ideal that made Naphta call patriotism a scourge—and what all did he not comprehend under the word, what all, according to him, did not run counter to the ascetic ideal and the kingdom of God. For not alone attachment to home and family, but even clinging to life and health were so set down, he made it a reproach to the humanist that the latter sang the praises of peace and happiness quarrelsomely accused him of love of the flesh (amor carnalis) and dependence upon bodily comfort (commodorum corporis), and told him to his face that it was the worst sort of bourgeois irreligiosity to ascribe to health or life itself any importance whatsoever.

That was in the course of the great disputation on sickness and health, which one day, close on Christmas, arose out of certain differences they had during a snowy walk to the Platz and back. They all took part Settembrini, Naphta, Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal—one and all slightly feverish, at once nervously stimulated and physically lethargic from walking and talking in the severe frost, all subject to fits of shivering, and—whether principals in the argument, like Settembrini and Naphta, or for the most part receptive, like the others, contributing only short ejaculations from time to time—all, without exception, so utterly absorbed that they stopped several times by the way, in a disorderly, gesticulating knot, blocking the path of the passers-by, who had to describe a circle to get round them. People even paused and listened in astonishment to their extravagance.

The discussion had grown out of a reference somebody made to Karen Karstedt, poor Karen with the open finger-ends, whose death had lately occurred. Hans Castorp had heard nothing of her sudden turn for the worse and final exit, else he would gladly have assisted at the last rites, as a comradely attention, if not simply out of his confessed liking for funerals. But the local practice of discretion had prevented him from hearing of it until too late. Karen had gone to take up the horizontal for good, in the garden of the Cupid with the crooked snow-cap. Requiem oeternam. He dedicated a few friendly words to her memory, interrupted by Herr Settembrini, who began making game of his pupil’s charitable activities, his visits to Leila Gerngross, Rotbein the business man, the "overfilled" Frau Zimmermann, the braggart son of Tous-les-deux, and the afflicted Natalie von Mallinckrodt. He censured Hans Castorp in retrospect for paying tribute in costly flowers to that dismal, ridiculous crew; and Hans Castorp replied that with the temporary exception of Frau von Mallinckrodt and the boy Teddy, the recipients of his attentions had now in all seriousness died—to which Herr Settembrini retorted by asking if that made them any more respectable. Well, after all, Hans Castorp responded, wasn’t there such a thing as Christian reverence before suffering? Before Settembrini could put him down, Naphta interposed, and began to speak of the devout excesses manifested by pious souls in the Middle Ages, astounding cases of fanatic devotion and ecstasy in the care of the sick: kings’ daughters kissing the stinking wounds of lepers, voluntarily exposing themselves to contagion and calling the ulcers they received their "roses"; or drinking the water that had been used for the cleansing of abscesses, and vowing that nothing had ever tasted so good.

Settembrini made as though he would vomit. It was not so much, he said, the physically disgusting element in these tales that turned his stomach as the monstrous lunacy which betrayed itself in such a conception of the love of humanity. Then, recovering his poise and good humour, he drew himself up and held forth upon the recent progress of humanitarian ideals, the triumphant forcing back of epidemic disease, upon hygiene and social reform; he contrasted the horrors of pestilence with the feats of modern medical science.

All these, Naphta responded, were very honest bourgeois achievements; but they would have done more harm than good in the centuries under discussion. They would have profited neither one side nor the other; the ailing and wretched as little as the strong and prosperous, these latter not having been piteous for pity’s sake, but for the salvation of their own souls. Successful social reform would have robbed them of their necessary justification, as it would the wretched of their sanctified state. The per-sistence of poverty and sickness had been in the interest of both parties, and the position could be sustained just so long as it was possible to hold to the purely religious point of view.

"A filthy point of view," Settembrini declared. A position the stupidity of which he felt himself above combating. This talk of the sanctified lot of the poor and wretched—yes, and what the Engineer, in his simplicity, had said about the Christian reverence due to suffering—was simply gammon, resting as it did on a misconception, on mistaken sympathy, on erroneous psychology. The pity the well person felt for the sick—a pity that almost amounted to awe, because the well person could not imagine how he himself could possibly bear such suffering—was very greatly exaggerated. The sick person had no real right to it. It was, in fact, the result of an error in thinking, a sort of hallucination; in that the well man attributed to the sick his own emotional equipment, and imagined that the sick man was, as it were, a well man who had to bear the agonies of a sick one—than which nothing was further from the truth. For the sick man was—precisely that, a sick man: with the nature and modified reactions of his state. Illness so adjusted its man that it and he could come to terms; there were sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral adaptation and relief, which the sound person naïvely failed to take into account. There could be no better illustration than the case of all this tuberculous crew up here, with their reckless folly, light-headedness and loose morals, and their total lack of desire for health. In short, let the sound man with all his respect for illness once fall ill himself, and he would soon see that being ill is a state of being in itself—no very honourable one either—and that he had been taking it a good deal too seriously.

At this point Anton Karlowitsch Ferge girded his loins to remonstrate—he defended the pleura-shock against sneers and contumely. So Herr Settembrini thought you could take the pleura-shock too seriously, did he? With all due respect and gratitude and all that, he, Ferge, must really beg Herr Settembrini’s pardon! His great Adam’s apple and his good-natured moustaches worked up and down as he repudiated any lack of respect for the sufferings he had undergone. He was just a plain man, an insurance agent, with no high-falutin ideas; even the present conversation soared far above his head. But if Herr Settembrini meant to suggest that the pleura-shock was a good example of what he was talking about—that torture by tickling, with its stench of sulphur and its three-coloured fainting fit—well, really he was very much obliged to Herr Settembrini, he really must thank him very kindly indeed; but there had been nothing of the sort about the pleura-shock—not it! Talk about adjustments and "merciful narcosis"—why, it had been the most sickening piece of business under the shining sun, and nobody who had not been through it could have the least idea—

"Yes, yes," Herr Settembrini said. Herr Ferge’s collapse got more and more remarkable as time went on, and he would presently be wearing it like a halo round his head. He, Settembrini, had no great respect for sick folk who laid claim to consideration on the score of their illness. He was ill himself, and seriously; but in all sincerity he felt inclined to be ashamed of the fact. However, his present remarks were purely abstract and impersonal; and the distinction he made between the nature and reactions of a well and a sick man was based on common sense, as the gentlemen would see if they would think about insanity—take, for instance, hallucinations. Suppose one of his companions, the Engineer, say, or Herr Wehsal, should enter his room to-night at dusk and see his deceased father sitting there in a corner, who should look at and speak to him—that would be absolutely monstrous, wouldn’t it? A shattering experience, which would confound both sense and reason, and make him get out of the room as fast as he could and put himself in the care of a specialist in nervous ailments. Or wouldn’t it? The joke of the thing was that such an experience would not be possible for any of the gentlemen present, since they were all in enjoyment of full mental health. If it did happen to any of them, it would be a sure sign that they were not sound, but diseased, and they would not react to the appearance with emotions of horror and by taking to their heels, but treat it as though it were entirely in order, and begin a conversation with it—this being, in fact, the reaction of a person suffering from a hallucination. To suppose that such hallu-cinations affected the person subject to them with the same horror as would be felt by a sound mind was a defect of the imagination to which normal persons were often prone.

Herr Settembrini spoke with droll and plastic effect. His picture of the father in the corner made them all laugh, even Ferge, put out though he was by the slight to his pleura-shock. Herr Settembrini took advantage of their hilarity to expatiate further on the contemptibleness of people who were subject to hallucinations, and of pazzi in general. It was his opinion that these people gave way a great deal more than they need, and often had it in their power to control their own freakishness. He had made this observation when he had visited asylums for the insane. For in the presence of the doctor, or of a stranger, the patients would mostly intermit their jabbering, grimaces, and weaving to and fro, and behave quite sensibly, as long as they felt themselves under scrutiny, only to let themselves go again afterwards. For lunacy undoubtedly in many cases meant the kind of self-abandonment which was the refuge of a weak nature against extreme distress, a defence against such overwhelming blows of destiny as it felt itself, when in its right mind, unable to cope with. But almost anybody might get in that state; and he, Settembrini, had held more than one lunatic to temporary self-control, simply by opposing to his humbuggery an air of inexorable reason.

Naphta laughed derisively; Hans Castorp protested his readiness to believe Herr Settembrini’s statement. Indeed, as he pictured him smiling beneath his moustaches and fixing the feeble-minded with the eye of remorseless reason, he could well understand how the poor fellow had had to pull himself together and behave with "temporary self-control," though probably finding Herr Settembrini’s presence a most unwelcome incident.—But Naphta too had had experience of asylums for the insane. He recalled a visit to the violent ward, where he had seen such sights as—my God, such sights as would have been a bit too much even for Herr Settembrini’s intelligent eye or disciplinary powers: Dantesque scenes, monstrous tableaux of horror and agony: naked madmen squatting in the continuous bath, in every posture of mental an-guish or in the stupor of despair; some shrieking aloud, others with uplifted arms and gaping mouths whence issued laughter that mingled all the elements of hell—

"Aha," cried Herr Ferge, and took leave to remind them of the laughter which had escaped him when they went over his pleura. In short, Herr Settembrini’s inexorable pedantry would have had to confess itself beaten before these sights in the violent ward; in the face of which, the shudder of religious awe would surely have been a more human reaction than this condescending twaddle about reason, which our Worshipful Brother and Eminent Preceptor saw fit to put forward as a treatment for insanity.

Hans Castorp was too preoccupied to question the new titles Naphta was conferring on Herr Settembrini. Hastily he made a resolve to look them up the first chance he got; for the moment, he had his hands full with the present conversation. Naphta was acrimoniously debating the general tendency which led the humanist to exalt health and cry down and belittle illness. Herr Settembrini’s attitude was, he thought, a remarkable, even admirable example of self-abnegation, considering he was ill himself. But the position, no matter how strikingly meritorious, was as mistaken as it could well be: resting as it did upon a respect and reverence for the human body which could only be justified if that body had remained in original sinlessness, instead of sinking to its present fallen state (statu degradationis). For it had been created immortal, and by the original sins of depravity and abomination, by the degeneration of its nature, it had become mortal and corruptible, and was thus to be regarded as the prison-house and torture-chamber of the soul, or as the fit instrument for rousing the conscience to a sense of shame and confusion (pudoris et confusionis sensum), as Saint Ignatius had it.

The humanist Plotinus, exclaimed Hans Castorp, was also known to have given expression to the same idea. But Herr Settembrini flung up his hands and ordered the young man not to confuse two different points of view—and, for the rest, to be advised and maintain an attitude of receptivity.

Naphta, continuing, derived the reverence which the Christian Middle Ages paid to physical suffering from the fact that it acquiesced on religious grounds in the sight of the anguish of the flesh. For the wounds of the body not only emphasized its sunken state, they also corresponded in the most edifying manner to the envenomed corruption of the soul, and thereby gave rise to emotions of true spiritual satisfaction: whereas blooming health was a misleading phenomenon, insulting to the conscience of man and requiring to be counteracted by an attitude of debasement and humility before physical infirmity, which was infinitely beneficial to the soul. Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Who will deliver me from the body of this death? There spoke the voice of the spirit, which was eternally the voice of true humanity.

On the contrary—according to Herr Settembrini’s view, presented with no little heat—it was a voice from the darkness, a voice from a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity was not yet risen. Truly, in his own physical person he was con-taminate; yet what mattered that, since his mind was untainted and sound—and quite competent to bring confusion to his priestly opponent in any discussion touching the body, or to laugh him to scorn over the soul? He took too high a flight in celebrating the human body as the true temple of the Godhead; for Naphta straightway declared that this mortal fabric was nothing more than a veil between us and eternity; whereupon Settembrini definitely forbade him the use of the word humanity—and so it went on. Bare-headed, their faces stiff in the cold, they trod in their rubber galoshes the crisp, creaking, cinder-strewn snow, or ploughed through porous masses in the gutter: Settembrini in a winter jacket with beaver collar and cuffs—the fur was worn to the pelt, and looked fairly mangy, but he knew how to carry it off with an air; Naphta in a long black overcoat that came down to his heels and up to his ears, and showed none of the fur with which it was lined throughout. Both speakers treated their theme as of the utmost personal concern; and both often turned, not to each other but to Hans Castorp, with argument and exposition, referring to their opponents with a jerk of the head or thumb. They had him between them, and he turned his head to assent first to one and then to the other; now and again he stood stock-still on the path, tipping his body back from the waist and gesturing with his fur-lined glove as he made some quite inadequate contribution to the talk. Ferge and Wehsal circled about, now in front and now behind, now in a single row until they had to break up their line again to let people pass.

It was due to some remark of theirs that the debate took on a less abstract tone, and all the company joined in a discussion of torture, cremation and punishment—both capital and corporal. It was Ferdinand Wehsal who introduced the last-named; with obvious relish, Hans Castorp observed. As was to be expected, Herr Settembrini, in high-sounding words, invoked the dignity of the human race against a procedure whose results were as devastating in education as in penology. And equally to be expected, though rendered startling by a certain kind of gloomy ferocity, was Naphta’s approval of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to prate about human dignity, since true dignity indwelt not in the flesh but in the spirit. The soul of man was for ever prone to suck the joys of this earthly life from the flesh instead of the spirit; thus pain, by rendering bitter to him the things of the senses, was highly efficacious, driving him back to the spirit and giving the latter the mastery over the flesh. It was shallow to contend that the discipline of the whipping-post had anything particularly shameful about it. Saint Elizabeth had been flogged by her confessor, Conrad von Marburg, until the blood came, and by such means her soul was rapt "to the third choir of angels." She herself, moreover, had beaten with rods an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. The members of a certain sect, and even other persons of devout and serious character, submitted to flagellation in order that the spiritual impulse might be strengthened. Would anyone seriously contend that such a procedure was barbarous and inhuman? It was true that corporal punishment was on the decline in certain countries which considered themselves in the van of progress: but the belief that such a decline was a sign of enlightenment became only the more comic the longer it persisted.

Well, anyhow, Hans Castorp considered, so much was granted: that in the antithesis between body and soul it was undoubtedly the body which embodied—the body embodied, that wasn’t so bad, was it?—the evil principle; in so far as the body was naturally nature—pretty good, too, that!—and nature, being diametrically opposed to the spirit and reason, was by that fact intrinsically evil—mystically evil, one might say, if it didn’t sound like showing off! But it followed from this that the body should be treated accordingly, and made to profit from disciplinary methods, which might also be called mystically evil. Herr Settembrini, for instance, that time when the weakness of the flesh had prevented him from attending the Congress for the Advancement of Civilization at Barcelona, ought to have had a Saint Elizabeth at his side—!

Everybody laughed; but while the humanist was bringing up his guns, Hans Castorp hastily began to talk about a beating he had once received, when he was in one of the lower forms in the gymnasium, where this form of punishment still survived to some extent, and there were always switches on hand. His, Hans Castorp’s social position had been too good for the masters to venture to lay hands on him; but he had once been whipped by a stronger pupil, a big lout of a fellow who had laid on with the flexible switch across Hans Castorp’s thin-stockinged calves. It had hurt so confoundedly—so "mystically"—that he had fairly sobbed for rage, and the tears had ignominiously flowed down. And he recalled having read that in the penitentiaries, when men are flogged, the most hardened reprobates will blubber like little children.

Herr Settembrini hid his face in his hands, that were clad in very shabby leather gloves; and Naphta, with statesmanlike calm, asked how else they would expect to reduce refractory criminals—unless by putting in the stocks, which were quite the suitable furnishing for a prison. A humane penitentiary would be neither one thing nor the other, an æsthetic compromise: if Herr Settembrini did not think so, then it was clear that, though an æsthete, he had very little sense of the fitness of things. And in the field of education, a conception of human dignity which would bar corporal punishment from the schools had its roots, according to Naphta, in the liberal-individualism of our bourgeois, humanitarian age, in an enlightened absolutism of the ego, which was, indeed, now dying off, to give place to social conceptions made of sterner stuff: ideas of discipline and conformity, of coercion and compliance, to the realization of which an element of godly severity would be needful, and which, when realized, would make us alter all our ideas on the subject of the chastisement of the human carcass.

"Hence the phrase perinde ac si cadaver," scoffed Settembrini. Naphta suggested that since God, in punishment of our sins, had visited us with the shameful and horrible sentence of bodily corruption, after all it was not such a frightful insult to that same body that it should now and then get a flogging. And then, somehow, all at once, they came upon the subject of cremation.

Settembrini paid it homage. That indignity of corruption, he said, of which Naphta spoke, could by its means be redressed. On practical as well as on ideal grounds, mankind was now about to redress it. He explained that he was helping prepare for an international congress for the promotion of cremation, the scene of whose labours would probably be Sweden. A model crematorium would be exhibited, planned in accordance with the latest researches and experiments, with a hall of urns; they hoped to rouse widespread interest and enthusiasm. What an effete and obsolete procedure burial was, under our modern conditions—the price of land, the expansion of our cities and consequent shoving of the graveyards out on to the periphery! And the chop-fallen funeral processions, with their dignity curtailed by present-day traffic conditions! Herr Settembrini had plenty of disillusioning facts at his command. He made a droll picture of a grief-stricken widower on his daily pilgrimage to the grave-side, to hold communion with the beloved departed; and said that the man must have a superfluity of that most precious of human commodities, time; and further, that the rush of business in a large modern burying-ground must surely dash his atavistic bliss. The destruction of the body by fire—what a cleanly, sanitary, dignified, yes, heroic conception that was, compared with abandoning it to the miserable processes of decay and assimilation by the lower forms of life! Yes, the newer method was more satisfying emotionally too, and kinder to the human longing after immortality. For what the fire destroyed was the more perishable part of the body, the elements which even during one’s life were got rid of by metabolism; whereas those which accompanied man through life, taking least share in the process of change, those became the ashes, and with them the survivors possessed the deceased’s imperishable part.

[admin]

Part 6 of 9

"Oh, charming," Naphta said. "Oh, really, very good! Man’s imperishable part, his ashes!"

Naphta evidently meant to hold humanity fast to its old, irrational position in the face of established biological fact; meant to force it to remain at the stage of primitive religion, where death was a spectre surrounded by such mysterious terrors that the gaze of reason could not be focused upon it. What barbarism! The fear of death went back to a very low cultural stage, when violent death was the rule, and its horrors thus became associated with the idea of death in general. But now, thanks to the development of hygiene and the increase in personal security, a natural death was the rule, a violent one the exception; modern man had come to think of repose, after exhaustion of his powers, as not at all dreadful, but normal and even desirable. No, death was neither spectre nor mystery. It was a simple, acceptable, and physiologically necessary phenomenon; to dwell upon it longer than decency required was to rob life of its due. Accordingly, the Hall of Death (as the modern crematory and vault for the urns was to be called) would be supplemented by a Hall of Life, where architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry would combine to draw the thoughts of the survivors from the contemplation of death, from weak and unavailing grief, and fix them upon the joys of life.

"On with the dance!" Naphta mocked. "Don’t let them make too much of the funeral rites, don’t let them pay too much respect to such a simple fact as death—but without that simple fact, there would never have been either architecture nor painting, sculpture nor music, poetry nor any other art."

"He deserts to the colours," murmured Hans Castorp dreamily.

"Your remark is incomprehensible," Settembrini answered him, "which doesn’t prevent it from being at the same time silly. Either the experience of death must be the last experience of life, or else it must be a bugaboo, pure and simple."

"Will there be obscene symbols employed in the Hall of Life, like those on the ancient sarcophagi?" Hans Castorp asked with a serious air.

"By all accounts," Naphta chimed in, "there will be a fine fat feeding for the senses." In oils and in marbles, a humanistic taste would celebrate the glories of the senses—of the sinful body whose flesh it had saved from putrefaction. There was nothing surprising about that—it was of a piece with its fastidiousness in the matter of corporal punishment.

Thus they came upon the subject of torture—introduced by Wehsal, to whom, it seemed, it made a particular appeal. "The question," now—what were the gentlemen’s views about it? He, Ferdinand, when he was "on the road," liked to visit those quiet retreats in the centres of ancient culture, where such research into the conscience of man used to be carried on. He had seen the torture-chambers of Nuremberg and Regensburg, he had made a study of them, and been edified. They had certainly devised a number of ingenious ways of man-handling the body for the good of the soul. There had never been any outcry—they rammed the famous choke-pear, itself such a very tasty morsel, into the victim’s mouth, and after that silence reigned.

"Porcheria!" Settembrini muttered.

Ferge professed his respect for the choke-pear, and the whole silent activity. But anything worse than the pinning back of his pleura he was sure had never been devised, not even in those times.

That had been done for his good!

The obdurate soul, offended justice, these warranted a temporary lack of mercy. But in fact, the torture was an invention of the human reason.

Settembrini presumed that the speaker was not quite in his senses.

Oh, yes, he was pretty well in possession of them. It was Herr Settembrini, the professed æsthete, who was probably not altogether familiar with the history of the development of mediæval jurisprudence. There had been, in fact, a process of continuous rationalization, in the course of which reason had taken the place of God, who had been shoved out of the department of justice. In other words, trial by battle had fallen into disuse, because it had been observed that the stronger man conquered even when he was in the wrong. It had been people of Herr Settembrini’s kidney, the doubters and critics, who had made the observation, and brought about the Inquisition, which superseded the old naïve procedure. Justice no longer relied on the intervention of God in favour of the truth, but aimed to get it out of the accused by confession. No sentence without confession—you could hear that still among the people, for the instinct lodged deep with them; the chain of evidence might be as strong as it liked, but if there had been no confession, there would remain a lurking feeling that the sentence was illegitimate. But how get at the confession? How procure the truth, out of the mass of circumstance and suspicion? How look into the heart, the brain, of a man who denied and concealed? If the spirit was recalcitrant, there remained the body, which could be got at. The torture was recommended to reason, as a means to an end, the end of bringing out the indispensable confession. But it was Herr Settembrini who had demanded and introduced confession, and he, accordingly, who was responsible for torture.

The humanist implored the others not to believe a word of all this. Herr Naphta was indulging in a diabolical joke. If the position had really been what he said, if it were true that the horrible thing was actually an invention of the human reason, that only showed how grievously she always needed sustaining and enlightening, and how little ground the instinct-worshippers had for their fear that things could ever be too much directed by reason on this earth! But the speaker was of course in error. The judicial abomination they were discussing could not be laid at the door of the human reason, because it went back to an original belief in hell. The rack, the pincers, the screws and tongs you saw in these chambers of torment and martyrdom represented the effort of a childish and deluded fancy to emulate what it piously believed to be the sufferings of the eternally damned. But that was not all. They thought to assist the evil-doer, whose spirit they assumed to be wrestling after confession, while his flesh, the evil principle, set itself against the soul’s desire: they had it in mind to do him a service of love, in breaking his body by torture. It was a madness of asceticism—

"How about the ancient Romans—did they harbour the same delusion?"

"The Romans? Ma che!"

"But they employed the torture as a judicial instrument."

Logical impasse. Hans Castorp tried to help out—as if it were his metier to guide such a conversation! Of his own accord, he flung into the arena the question of capital punishment. Torture, he said, was abolished—though examining magistrates still had ways of making an accused person pliable. But the death penalty persisted, it seemed impossible to do without it. It was practised by the most civilized nations. The French system of deportation had worked very badly. There was nothing feasible to do with certain half-human beings, except to make them a head shorter!

They were not "certain half-human beings" Settembrini corrected him. They were men, like the Engineer, like himself, Settembrini—only weak-willed victims of a defective social system. He cited the case of an abandoned criminal, the kind always referred to by the prosecuting attorneys as a "beast in human form," who had covered the walls of his cell with verse, and not at all bad verse either, much better than most prosecuting attorneys ever managed to write.

That cast a somewhat singular light on the art of verse-writing, Naphta retorted, but was not otherwise worth answering.

Hans Castorp said he was not surpiseed to hear that Naphta favoured the death penalty. To his mind, Naphta was as revolutionary as Settembrini, only in a conservative direction—a reactionary revolutionist.

Herr Settembrini, with a confident smile, assured them that the world, after passing through a period of inhuman reaction, would always return to the normal order of things. But Herr Naphta preferred to discredit art sooner than admit that it might have a humanizing effect upon a sunken wretch. He need not expect, by such fanatical talk, to make much headway with light-seeking youth. He, Settembrini, had the honour to belong to a newly-formed league, the scope of which was the abolition of capital punishment in all civilized countries. It was not yet settled where the first congress should meet; but one thing was sure, that those who addressed it would have plenty of arguments at hand. He submitted some of them forthwith: the ever-present possibility that justice might err and judicial murder be committed; the hope of reformation, which it was never possible to disregard; the biblical injunction "Vengeance is mine." Then he referred to the theory that the State, in its function not as the wielder of force, but as the instrument of human betterment, may not repay evil with evil; he attacked the conception of guilt, on the ground of scientific determinism; and lastly, he repudiated the whole theory of punishment.

On top of which "light-seeking youth" had to stand by while Naphta neatly wrung the neck of all these arguments, one after the other. He derided the humanist’s reluctance to shed blood, and his reverence for human life. He said that the latter was characteristic of our intensely bourgeois age, our policy of molly-coddle. Even so, its inconsistency was apparent. For let an idea arise that went beyond considerations of personal safety and well-being—and such ideas were the only ones worthy of human beings, and thus in a higher sense were the normal field of human activity—and the individual would, even under average emotional stress, be sacrificed without scruple to the higher claim. Nay, more: the individual, of his own free will, would expose himself without a thought. The philanthropy of his honoured opponent would elimi-nate from life all its stern and mortal traits; it would castrate life, as would the determinism of its so-called science. But determinism would never succeed in doing away with the conception of guilt. It could only add to its authority and its awfulness.

Oh, so he demanded that the unhappy victim of social maladjustment be convinced of his own sinfulness, and tread in full conviction the path to the scaffold?

"Quite. The evil-doer is filled with his guilt as with himself. For he is as he is, and can and will not be otherwise—and therein lies his guilt."

Naphta shifted the ground of the discussion from the empiric to the metaphysical. He went on to say that in behaviour, in action, determinism did indeed rule; there was no freedom of choice. But in being, the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.

"Deepest desire?"

"Deepest desire."

They all gritted their teeth. Hans Castorp gave a little cough, Wehsal set his jaw awry. Herr Ferge breathed a sigh, Settembrini shrewdly remarked: "There is a kind of generalization that has a distinctly personal cast. Have you ever had a desire to commit murder?"

"That is no concern of yours. But if I had, I should laugh in the face of any ignorant humanitarianism that tried to feed me on skilly till I died a natural death. It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together, as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, have, like them, the one acting, the other suffering him, shared a secret that binds them for ever together. They belong to each other."

Settembrini said frigidly that he lacked the brains necessary to the understanding of this death-and-murder mysticism—and he really didn’t miss them. No offence intended; Herr Naphta’s religious gift did undoubtedly far surpass his own, but he protested that he was not envious. His own nature had an unconquerable craving for fresh air; it kept him somewhat aloof from a sphere where reverence—and not merely the unthinking reverence of youth—was paid to suffering, and that in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. In that sphere, it was plain, virtue, reason, and healthiness counted for nothing, vice and disease were honoured in a wondrous way.

Naphta concurred. He said that being virtuous and healthy did not, in fact, constitute being in a state of religion at all. It would clear the air to have it plainly stated that religion had nothing to do with reason and morality.

"For," he added, "it has nothing to do with life. Life is based on conditions and built up on foundations which are partly the result of experience, and partly belong to the domain of ethics. We call the first kind time, space, and causality; the second,

morality and reason. But one and all of these are not only foreign to, utterly a matter of indifference to the nature of religion; they are even hostile to it. For they are precisely what make up life—the so-called normal life, which is to say, arch Philistinism, ultra-bourgeoisiedom, the absolute antithesis of which, the very genius of antithesis to which, is the life of religion."

Naphta went on to say that he would not deny to the other sphere the possibility of genius. There was much to admire in the monumental respectability, the majestic Philistinism of the middle-class consciousness. But one must never forget that as it stood, straddle-legged, firmly planted on earth, hands behind the back, chest well out, it was the embodiment of irreligion.

Hans Castorp, like a schoolboy, put up his hand. He wished, he said, not to offend either side. But since they were talking about progress, and thus, to a certain extent also, about politics, and the republic of eloquence and the civilization of the educated Occident, he might say that it seemed to him the difference—or, if Herr Naphta insisted, the antithesis—between life and religion went back to that between time and eternity. Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either. There, so to speak, one laid one’s head back in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality—he was aware that he had put it very badly.

The way he put it, Settembrini remarked, naïve as it was, was less objectionable than his fear of giving offence, his inclination to give ground to the Devil.

Oh, as far as the Devil was concerned, they two had talked about him aforetime, hadn’t they? "O Satana, O ribellione." But which devil was it he had been giving ground to just now? Was it Carducci’s one—rebellion, activity, critical spirit—or was it the other? It was pretty dangerous having a devil on either hand, like this; how in the Devil’s name should we get out of it?

That, Naphta said, was no proper description of the state of affairs as Herr Settembrini looked at them. For the distinctive feature of his cosmos was that he made God and the Devil two distinct persons or principles, with "life" as a bone of conten-tion between them—which, by the by, was just the way the Middle Ages had envisaged them. But in reality, God and the Devil were at one in being opposed to life, to bourgeoisiedom, reason and virtue, since they together represented the religious principle.

"What a disgusting hodge-podge—che guazzabuglio proprio stomachevole!" Good and evil, sanctification and criminal conduct, all mixed up together! Without judgment! Without direction! Without the possibility of repudiating what was vile! Did Herr Naphta realize what it was he denied and disavowed in the presence of youth, when he flung God and the Devil together and in the name of this mad two-in-oneness refused to admit the existence of an ethical principle? He denied every standard of values, he denied goodness! Horrible!—Very well, then there existed neither good nor evil, nothing but a morally chaotic All! There was not even the individual in possession of a critical faculty—there was only the all-consuming, the all-levelling universal communalty, and mystic immersion in her!

It was delicious, Herr Settembrini’s thinking of himself as an individualist! For to be that, one had at least to recognize the difference between morality and blessedness, which our honoured illuminant and monist most certainly did not! A society in which life was stupidly conceived as an end in itself, with no questions asked about its ulterior meaning and purpose, was governed by a tribal and social ethic, indeed, a vertebrate morality, if you liked, but certainly not by individualism. For individualism belonged, singly and solely, in the realm of the religious and mystical, in the so-called "morally chaotic All." And this morality of Herr Settembrini’s, what was it, what did it want? It was life-bound, and thus entirely utilitarian; it was pathetically unheroic. Its end and aim was to make men grow old and happy, rich and comfortable—and that was all there was to it. And this Philistine philosophy, this gospel of work and reason, served Herr Settembrini as an ethical system. As far as he, Naphta, was concerned, he would continue to deny that it was anything but the sheerest and shabbiest bourgeoisiedom.

Settembrini enjoined him to be calm—his own voice shaking with passion. He found Herr Naphta’s talk about bourgeoisiedom simply insufferable—and God knew why he should put on that contemptuous, aristocratic air! As if the opposite of life—and we all knew what that was—was likely to be more refined than life itself!

New cries, new catchwords! Now it was the "aristocratic principle." Hans Castorp, all flushed and depleted from taxing his brains in the cold, shaky as to his capacity for clear expression, hot and cold with his own audacity, heard himself babble that always since a child he had pictured death to himself as wearing a starched ruff, or at least a sort of half-uniform, with a stand-up collar, while life, on the other hand, wore an ordinary collar. His words sounded, even to himself, like a drunken impropriety; he hastened to assure the company that that was not at all what he had meant to say. And yet—wasn’t it a fact that one couldn’t imagine certain people dead, simply because they were so very ordinary? That must mean they were very fit for life, but could not die, because unfit for the consecration of death.

Herr Settembrini said he was confident Hans Castorp uttered such stuff merely for the sake of being contradicted. The young man would find him ever ready to lend a hand in the intellectual warfare, against attacks like the present. The Engineer had used the expression "fit for life"; had he intended it in a derogatory sense? To him it was synonymous with "worthy of life," the two conceptions being perfectly harmonious, and suggesting by a natural process of association another equally beautiful, "worthy of love." One might with truth say that he who was worthy of the one was fully worthy of the other. And both together, loveworthy and life-worthy, made up the true nobility.

Hans Castorp found that charming—most edifying. Herr Settembrini had quite won him over with his plastic theory. Say what you like—and there was a lot to be said for the idea that illness had something solemn and ennobling about it—yet after all, you couldn’t deny that illness was an accentuation of the physical, it did throw man back, so to speak, upon the flesh and to that extent was detrimental to human dignity. It dragged man down to the level of his body. Thus it might be argued that disease was un-human.

On the contrary, Naphta hastened to say. Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man. There were those who wanted to make him "healthy," to make him "go back to nature," when, the truth was, he never had been "natural." All the propaganda carried on to-day by the prophets of nature, the experiments in regeneration, the uncooked food, fresh-air cures, sun-bathing, and so on, the whole Rousseauian paraphernalia, had as its goal nothing but the dehumanization, the animalizing of man. They talked of "humanity," of nobility—but it was the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man’s spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit—in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man’s humanity? Herr Settembrini had progress ever on his lips: was he aware that all progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement.

"Aha!" thought Hans Castorp. "You unorthodox Jesuit, you, with your interpretations of the Crucifixion! It’s plain why you never became a priest, joli jésuite à la petite tache humide! Now roar, lion!" he mentally addressed Herr Settembrini. And the lion roared. He characterized all Naphta had said as quibbling, sophistry, and confusion.

"Say it!" he cried to his opponent, "say it in your character as schoolmaster, say it in the hearing of plastic youth, say straight out, that the soul is—disease! Verily you will thereby encourage them to a belief in the spiritual. Disease and death as nobility, life and health as vulgarity—what a doctrine whereby to hold fast the neophyte to the service of humanity! Davvero, è criminoso!" And like a crusader he entered the lists in defence of the nobility of life and health, of that which nature gave, for the soul of which one did not need to fear. "The Form," he said; and Naphta rejoined bombastically: "The Logos." But he who would have none of the Logos answered: "The Reason," and the man of the Logos retorted with "The Passion."

It was confusion worse confounded.

"The Object," cried one, the other: "The Ego!" "Art" and "critique" were bandied back and forth, then once more "nature" and "soul," and as to which was the nobler, and concerning the "aristocratic problem." But there was no order nor clarity, not even of a dualistic and militant kind. Things went not only by contraries, but also all higgledy-piggledy. The disputant not only contradicted each other, they contradicted themselves. How often had Settembrini not spent his oratory in praise of criticism, as being the aristocratic principle? Yet now it was for its opposite, for "art," that he made the same claim. How often had Naphta not stood for instinct, what time Settembrini called nature a blind force, mere "factum et fatum," before which reason and human pride must never abdicate! But here now was Naphta on the side of the soul and disease, wherein alone true nobility and humanity resided, while Settembrini flung himself into advocacy of nature and her noble sanity, regardless of his inconsistency on the score of emancipation from her. The "Object" and the "Ego" were no less involved in confusion—yes, and here the confusion, moreover, remained constant, was the most literal and incorrigible; so that nobody any longer knew who was the devout and who the free-thinker. Naphta sharply forbade Settembrini to call himself an individualist, for so long as he denied the antithesis between God and nature, saw in the problem of man’s inward conflict no more than the struggle between individual and collective interest, and was vowed to a materialistic and bourgeois ethic, in which life became an end in itself, limited to utilitarian aims, and the moral law subserved the interest of the State. He, Naphta, was well aware that man’s inner conflict based upon the antagonism between the sensible and the supra-sensible; it was he, not Settembrini, who represented the true, the mystical individualism. He, not Settem-brini, was in reality the free-thinker, the man who looked for guidance within himself. Hans Castorp reflected that if that were true, then what about the "anonymous and communal"—not to mention any other contradiction? And what about those striking comments he had made to Father Unterpertinger on the subject of Hegel’s Catholicism, and the affinity between Catholicism and politics, and the category of the objective which they together comprised? Had not statecraft and education always been the special province of the Society to which Naphta belonged? And what an education! Herr Settembrini himself was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of tedium; but he could simply not compete with Naphta in the matter of ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authority, iron discipline, coercion, submission, the Terror! All that might have its own value, but it paid scant homage to the individual and the dignity of his critical faculty. It was the army regulations of the Prussian Frederick, the Exercise-book of the Spanish Loyola all over again; it was rigid, it was devout, to the very marrow. But one question remained to be asked: how had Naphta arrived at this savage absolutism, he who, by his own account, believed not at all in pure knowledge or unfettered research, in other words not in truth, the objective, scientific truth, to strive after which was for Ludovico Settembrini the highest law of human morality. Here was the object of his rigid devotion, whereas Naphta with reprehensible looseness referred truth back to mankind itself, and declared that that was truth which advantaged man. Wasn’t it the most utter bourgeoisiedom, the sheerest utilitarian Philistinism, to make truth depend on the interest of mankind? It certainly could not be considered strict objectivity, there was much more free-thinking and subjectivity about it than Leo Naphta would admit—it was, indeed, quite as much politics as Herr Settembrini’s didactic phrase: "Freedom is the law of love of one’s kind." That, obviously, was to make freedom, as Naphta made truth, depend upon man, and thus was more orthodox than liberal. But here again were distinctions that tended to disappear in the process of definition.

Ah, this Settembrini—it was not for nothing he was a man of letters, son of a politician and grandson of a humanist! He had lofty ideas about emancipation and criticism—and chirruped to the girls in the street. On the other hand, knife-edged little Naphta was bound by the strictest sort of vows; yet in thought he was almost a libertine, whereas the other was a very fool of virtue, in a manner of speaking. Herr Settembrini was afraid of "Absolute Spirit," and would like to see it everywhere wedded to democratic progress; he was simply outraged at the religious licence of his militant opponent, which would jumble up together God and the Devil, sanctification and bad behaviour, genius and disease, and which knew no standards of value, no rational judgment, no exercise of the will. But who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp’s civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premisses apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphta’s "morally chaotic All." The confusion, the cross-purposes, became general, and Hans Castorp suspected that the antagonists would have been less exacerbated had not the dispute bitten into their very souls.

They had got up meantime to the Berghof. Then the three who lived there walked back with the others as far as their door, where they stood about in the snow for some further while, and Settembrini and Naphta continued to dispute. It was apparent to Hans Castorp that their zeal was the zeal of the schoolmaster, bent on making an impression upon his plastic mind. Herr Ferge reiterated that it was all too much for him; while Wehsal, so soon as they had got off the themes of torture and corporal punishment, showed small interest. Hans Castorp stood with bent head and burrowed with his stick in the snow, pondering the vasty confusion of it all.

They broke off at last. There were no limits to the subject—but they could not go on for ever. The three guests of the Berghof took their way home, and the two disputants had to go into the cottage together, the one to seek his silken cell, the other his humanistic cubby-hole with the pulpit-desk and the water-bottle. Hans Castorp betook himself to his balcony, his ears full of the hurly-burly and the clashing of arms, as the army of Jerusalem and that of Babylon, under the dos banderas, came on in battle array, and met each other midst tumult and shoutings.

Snow

DAILY, five times a day, the guests expressed unanimous dissatisfaction with the kind of winter they were having. They felt it was not what they had a right to expect of these altitudes. It failed to deliver the renowned meteorological specific in anything like the quantity indicated by the prospectus, quoted by old inhabitants, or anticipated by new. There was a very great failure in the supply of sunshine, an element so important in the cures achieved up here that without it they were distinctly retarded. And whatever Herr Settembrini might think of the sincerity of the patients’ desire to finish their cure, leave "home" and return to the flat-land, at any rate they insisted on their just dues. They wanted what they were entitled to, what their parents or husbands had paid for, and they grumbled unceasingly, at table, in lift, and in hall. The management showed a consciousness of what it owed them by installing a new apparatus for heliotherapy. They had two already, but these did not suffice for the demands of those who wished to get sunburnt by electricity—it was so becoming to the ladies, young and old, and made all the men, though confirmed horizontallers, look irresistibly athletic. And the ladies, even though aware of the mechanico-cosmetical origin of this conquering-hero air, were foolish enough to be carried away by it. There was Frau Schönfeld, a red-haired, red-eyed patient from Berlin. In the salon she looked thirstily at a long-legged, sunken-chested gallant, who described himself on his visiting-card as "Aviateur diplomé et Enseigne de la Marine allemande." He was fitted out with the pneumothorax and wore "smoking" at the midday meal but not in the evening, saying this was their custom in the navy. "My God," breathed Frau Schönfeld at him, "what a tan this demon has—he gets it from the helio—it makes him look like a hunter of eagles!" "Just wait, nixie!" he whispered in her ear, in the lift, "I’ll make you pay for looking at me like that!" It made goose-flesh and shivers run over her. And along the balconies, past the glass partitions, the demon eagle-hunter found his way to the nixie.

But the artificial sun was far from making up for the lack of the real one. Two or three days of full sunshine in the month—it was not good enough, gorgeous though these were, with deep, deep velvety blue sky behind the white mountain summits, a glitter as of diamonds and a fine hot glow on the face and the back of the neck, when they dawned resplendent from the prevailing thick mantle of grey mist. Two or three such days in the course of weeks could not satisfy people whose lot might be said to justify extraordinary demands from the external world. They had made an inward contract, by the terms of which they resigned the common joys and sorrows proper to flat-land humanity, and in exchange were made free of a life that was, to be sure, inactive, but on the other hand very lively and diverting, and care-free to the point of making one forget altogether the flight of time. Thus it was not much good for the Hofrat to tell them how favourably the Berghof compared with a Siberian mine or a penal settlement, nor to sing the praises of the atmosphere, so thin and light, well-nigh as rare as the empty universal ether, free of earthly admixture whether good or bad, and even without actual sunshine to be preferred to the rank vapours of the plain. Despite all he could say, the gloomy disaffection gained ground, threats of unlicensed departure were the order of the day, were even put into execution, without regard for the warning afforded by the melancholy return of Frau Salomon to the fold, now a "life member," her tedious but not serious case having taken that turn by reason of her self-willed visit to her wet and windy Amsterdam.

But if they had no sun, they had snow. Such masses of snow as Hans Castorp had never till now in all his life beheld. The previous winter had done fairly well in that respect, but it had been as nothing compared to this one. The snow-fall was monstrous and immeasurable, it made one realize the extravagant, outlandish nature of the place. It snowed day in, day out, and all through the night. The few roads kept open were like tunnels, with towering walls of snow on either side, crystal and alabaster surfaces that were pleasant to look at, and on which the guests scribbled all sorts of messages, jokes and personalities. But even this path between walls was above the level of the pavement, and made of hard-packed snow, as one could tell by certain places where it gave way, and let one suddenly sink in up to the knee. One might, unless one were careful, break a leg. The benches had disappeared, except for the high back of one emerging here and there. In the town, the street level was so raised that the shops had become cellars, into which one descended by steps cut in the snow.

And on all these lying masses more snow fell, day in, day out. It fell silently, through air that was moderately cold, perhaps ten to fifteen degrees of frost. One did not feel the cold, it might have been much less, for the dryness and absence of wind deprived it of sting. The mornings were very dark, breakfast was taken by the light of the artificial moon that hung from the vaulted ceiling of the dining-room, above the gay stencilled border. Outside was the reeking void, the world enwrapped in grey-white cotton-wool, packed to the window-panes in snow and mist. No sight of the mountains; of the nearest evergreen now and again a glimpse through the fog, standing laden, and from time to time shaking free a bough of its heavy load, that flew into the air, and sent a cloud of white against the grey. At ten o’clock the sun, a wan wisp of light, came up behind its mountain, and gave the indistinguishable scene some shadowy hint of life, some sallow glimmer of reality; yet even so, it retained its delicate ghostliness, its lack of any definite line for the eye to follow. The contours of the peaks dissolved, disappeared, were dissipated in the mist, while the vision, led on from one pallidly gleaming slope of snow to another, lost itself in the void. Then a single cloud, like smoke, lighted up by the sun, might spread out before a wall of rock and hang there for long, motionless.

At midday the sun would half break through, and show signs of banishing the mist. In vain—yet a shred of blue would be visible, and suffice to make the scene, in its strangely falsified contours, sparkle marvellously far and wide. Usually, at this hour, the snowfall stopped, as though to have a look at what it had done; a like effect was produced by the rare days when the storm ceased, and the uninterrupted power of the sun sought to thaw away the pure and lovely surface from the new-fallen masses. The sight was at once fairylike and comic, an infantine fantasy. The thick light cushions plumped up on the boughs of trees, the humps and mounds of snow-covered rock-cropping or undergrowth, the droll, dwarfish, crouching disguise all ordinary objects wore, made of the scene a landscape in gnome-land, an illustration for a fairytale. Such was the immediate view—wearisome to move in, quaintly, roguishly stimulating to the fancy. But when one looked across the intervening space, at the towering marble statuary of the high Alps in full snow, one felt a quite different emotion, and that was awe of their majestic sublimity.

Afternoons between three and four, Hans Castorp lay in his balcony box, well wrapped, his head against the cushion, not too high or too low, of his excellent chair, and looked out at forest and mountain over his thick-upholstered balustrade. The snow-laden firs, dark-green to blackness, went marching up the sides of the valley, and beneath them the snow lay soft like down pillows. Above the tree line, the mountain walls reared themselves into the grey-white air: huge surfaces of snow, with softly veiled crests, and here and there a black jut of rock. The snow came silently down. The scene blurred more and more, it inclined the eye, gazing thus into woolly vacuity, to slumber. At the moment of slipping off one might give a start—yet what sleep could be purer than this in the icy air? It was dreamless. It was as free from the burden—even the unconscious burden—of organic life, as little aware of an effort to breathe this contentless, weightless, imperceptible air as is the breathless sleep of the dead. When Hans Castorp stirred again, the mountains would be wholly lost in a cloud of snow; only a pinnacle, a jutting rock, might show one instant, to be rapt away the next. It was absorbing to watch these ghostly pranks; one needed to keep alert to follow the transmutations, the veiling and unveiling. One moment a great space of snow-covered rock would reveal itself, standing out bold and free, though of base or peak naught was to be seen. But if one ceased to fix one’s gaze upon it, it was gone, in a breath.

Then there were storms so violent as to prevent one’s sitting on the balcony for the driven snow which blew in, in such quantity as to cover floor and chair with a thick mantle. Yes, even in this sheltered valley it knew how to storm. The thin air would be in a hurly-burly, so whirling full of snow one could not see a hand’s breadth before one’s face. Gusts strong enough to take one’s breath away flung the snow about, drew it up cyclone-fashion from the valley floor to the upper air, whisked it about in the maddest dance; no longer a snow-storm, it was a blinding chaos, a white dark, a monstrous dereliction on the part of this inordinate and violent region; no living creature save the snow-bunting—which suddenly appeared in troops—could flourish in it.

And yet Hans Castorp loved this snowy world. He found it not unlike life at the sea-shore. The monotony of the scene was in both cases profound. The snow, so deep, so light, so dry and spotless, was the sand of down below. One was as clean as the other: you could shake the snow from boots and clothing, just as you could the fine-ground, dustless stone and shell, product of the sea’s depth—neither left trace behind. And walking in the snow was as toilsome as on the dunes; unless, indeed, a crust had come upon it, by dint of thawing and freezing, when the going became easy and pleasant, like marching along the smooth, hard, wet, resilient strip of sand close to the edge of the sea.

But the storms and high-piled drifts of this year gave pedestrians small chance. They were favourable only for skiing. The snow-plough, labouring its best, barely kept free the main street of the settlement and the most indispensable paths. Thus the few short feasible stretches were always crowded with other walkers, ill and well: the native, the permanent guest, and the hotel population; and these in their turn were bumped by the sleds as they swung and swerved down the slopes, steered by men and women who leaned far back as they came on, and shouted importunately, being obsessed by the importance of their occupation. Once at the bottom they would turn and trundle their toy sledges uphill again.

Hans Castorp was thoroughly sick of all the walks. He had two desires: one of them, the stronger, was to be alone with his thoughts and his stock-taking projects; and this his balcony assured to him. But the other, allied unto it, was a lively craving to come into close and freer touch with the mountains, the mountains in their snowy desolation; toward them he was irresistibly drawn. Yet how could he, all unprovided and foot bound as he was, hope to gratify such a desire? He had only to step beyond the end of the shovelled paths—an end soon reached upon any of them—to plunge breast-high in the snowy element.

Thus it was Hans Castorp, on a day in his second winter with those up here, resolved to buy himself skis and learn to walk on them, enough, that is, for his purposes. He was no sportsman, had never been physically inclined to sport; and did not behave as though he were, as did many guests of the cure, dressing up to suit the mode and the spirit of the place. Hermine Kleefeld, for instance, among other females, though she was constantly blue in the face from lack of breath, loved to appear at luncheon in tweed knickers, and loll about after the meal in a basket-chair in the hall, with her legs sprawled out. Hans Castorp knew that he would meet with a refusal were he to ask the Hofrat to countenance his plan. Sports activities were unconditionally forbidden at the Berghof as in all other establishments of the kind. This atmosphere, which one seemed to breathe in so effortlessly, was a severe strain on the heart, and as for Hans Castorp personally, his lively comment on his own state, that "the getting used to being up here consisted in getting used to not getting used," had continued in force. His fever, which Rhadamanthus ascribed to a moist spot, remained obstinate. Why else indeed should he be here? His desire, his present purpose was then clearly inconsistent and inadmissible. Yet we must be at the pains to understand him aright. He had no wish to imitate the fresh-air faddists and smart pseudo-sportsmen, who would have been equally eager to sit all day and play cards in a stuffy room, if only that had been interdicted by authority. He felt himself a member of another and closer community than this small tourist world; a new and a broader point of view, a dignity and restraint set him apart and made him conscious that it would be unfitting for him to emulate their rough-and-tumble in the snow. He had no escapade in view, his plans were so moderate that Rhadamanthus himself, had he known, might well have approved them. But the rules stood in the way, and Hans Castorp resolved to act behind his back.

He took occasion to speak to Herr Settembrini of his plan—who for sheer joy could have embraced him. "Si, si, si! Do so, do so, Engineer, do so with the blessing of God! Ask after nobody’s leave, but simply do it! Ah, your good angel must have whispered you the thought! Do it straightway, before the impulse leaves you. I’ll go along, I’ll go to the shop with you, and together we will acquire the instruments of this happy inspiration. I would go with you even into the mountains, I would be by your side, on winged feet, like Mercury’s—but that I may not. May not! If that were all, how soon would I do it! That I cannot is the truth, I am a broken man.—But you—it will do you no harm, none at all, if you are sensible and do nothing rash. Even—even if it did you harm—just a little harm—it will still have been your good angel roused you to it. I say no more. Ah, what an unsurpassable plan! Two years up here, and still capable of such projects—ah, yes, your heart is sound, no need to despair of you. Bravo, bravo! By all means pull the wool over the eyes of your Prince of Shadows! Buy the snow-shoes, have them sent to me or Lukaçek, or the chandler below-stairs. You fetch them from here to go and practise, you go off on them—"

So it befell. Under Herr Settembrini’s critical eye—he played the connoisseur, though innocent of sports—Hans Castorp acquired a pair of oaken skis, finished a light-brown, with tapering, pointed ends and the best quality of straps. He bought the iron-shod staff with the little wheel, as well, and was not content to have his purchases sent, but carried them on his shoulder to Settembrini’s quarters, where he arranged with the grocer to take care of them for him. He had looked on enough at the sport to know the use of his tools; and choosing for his practice-ground an almost treeless slope not far behind the sanatorium, remote from the hubbub of the spot where other beginners learned the art, he began daily to make his first blundering attempts, watched by Herr Settembrini, who would stand at a little distance, leaning on his cane, with legs gracefully crossed, and greet his nursling’s progress with applause. One day Hans Castorp, steering down the cleared drive toward the Dorf, in act to take the skis back to the grocer’s, ran into the Hofrat. Behrens never recognized him, though it was broad day, and our beginner had well-nigh collided with him. Shrouded in a haze of tobacco-smoke, he stalked past regardless.

Hans Castorp found that one quickly gets readiness in an art where strong desire comes in play. He was not ambitious for expert skill, and all he needed he acquired in a few days, without undue strain on wind or muscles. He learned to keep his feet tidily together and make parallel tracks; to avail himself of his stick in getting off; he learned how to take obstacles, such as small elevations of the ground, with a slight soaring motion, arms outspread, rising and falling like a ship on a billowy sea; learned, after the twentieth trial, not to trip and roll over when he braked at full speed, with the right Telemark turn, one leg forward, the other bent at the knee. Gradually he widened the sphere of his activities. One day it came to pass that Herr Settembrini saw him vanish in the far white mist; the Italian shouted a warning through cupped hands, and turned homewards, his pedagogic soul well-pleased.

It was beautiful here in these wintry heights: not mildly and ingratiatingly beautiful, more as the North Sea is beautiful in a westerly gale. There was no thunder of surf, a deathly stillness reigned, but roused similar feelings of awe. Hans Castorp’s long, pliant soles carried him in all directions: along the left slope to Clavadel, on the right to Frauenkirch and Claris, whence he could see the shadowy massif of the Amselfluh, ghostlike in the mist; into the Dischma valley, or up behind the Berghof in the direction of the wooded Seehorn, only the top of which, snow-covered, rose above the tree line, or the Drusatschâ forest, with the pale outline of the Rhätikon looming behind it, smothered in snow. He took his skis and went up on the funicular to the Schatzalp; there, rapt six thousand feet above the sea, he revelled at will on the gleaming slopes of powdery snow—whence, in good weather, there was a view of majestic extent over all the surrounding territory.

He rejoiced in his new resource, before which all difficulties and hindrances to movement fell away. It gave him the utter solitude he craved, and filled his soul with impressions of the wild inhumanity, the precariousness of this region into which he had ventured. On his one hand he might have a precipitous, pine-clad declivity, falling away into the mists; on the other sheer rock might rise, with masses of snow, in monstrous, Cyclopean forms, all domed and vaulted, swelling or cavernous. He would halt for a moment, to quench the sound of his own movement, when the silence about him would be absolute, complete, a wadded soundlessness, as it were, elsewhere all unknown. There was no stir of air, not so much as might even lightly sway the tree-boughs; there was not a rustle, nor the voice of a bird. It was primeval silence to which Hans Castorp hearkened, when he leaned thus on his staff, his head on one side, his mouth open. And always it snowed, snowed without pause, endlessly, gently, soundlessly falling.

No, this world of limitless silences had nothing hospitable; it received the visitor at his own risk, or rather it scarcely even received him, it tolerated his penetration into its fastnesses, in a manner that boded no good; it made him aware of the menace of the elemental, a menace not even hostile, but impersonally deadly. The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The latter scarcely knows the religious awe with which the other regards her, that awe which conditions all his feeling for her, and is present, a constant, solemn thrill, in the profoundest depth of his soul. Hans Castorp, standing there in his puttees and long-sleeved camel’s-hair waistcoat, on his skis de luxe, suddenly seemed to himself exceedingly presumptuous, to be thus listening to the primeval hush, the deathlike silence of these wintry fastnesses. He felt his breast lightened when, on his way home, the first chalets, the first abodes of human beings, loomed visible through the fog. Only then did he become aware that he had been for hours possessed by a secret awe and terror. On the island of Sylt he had stood by the edge of the thundering surf. In his white flannels, elegant, self-assured, but most respectful, he had stood there as one stands before a lion’s cage and looks deep into the yawning jaws of the beast, lined with murderous fangs. He had bathed in the surf, and heeded the blast of the coast-guard’s horn, warning all and sundry not to venture rashly beyond the first line of billows, not to approach too nearly the oncoming tempest—the very last impulse of whose cataract, indeed, struck upon him like a blow from a lion’s paw. From that experience our young man had learned the fearful pleasure of toying with forces so great that to approach them nearly is destruction. What he had not then felt was the temptation to come closer, to carry the thrilling contact with these deadly natural forces up to a point where the full embrace was imminent. Weak human being that he was—though tolerably well equipped with the weapons of civilization—what he at this moment knew was the fascination of venturing just so far into the monstrous unknown, or at least abstaining just so long from flight before it, that the adventure grazed the perilous, that it was just barely possible to put limits to it, before it became no longer a matter of toying with the foam and playfully dodging the ruthless paw—but the ultimate adventure, the billow, the lion’s jaws, and the sea.

In a word, Hans Castorp was valorous up here—if by valour we mean not mere dull matter-of-factness in the face of nature, but conscious submission to her, the fear of death cast out by irresistible oneness. Yes, in his narrow, hypercivilized breast, Hans Castorp cherished a feeling of kinship with the elements, connected with the new sense of superiority he had lately felt at sight of the silly people on their little sleds; it had made him feel that a profounder, more spacious, less luxurious solitude than that afforded by his balcony chair would be beyond all price. He had sat there and looked abroad, at those mist-wreathed summits, at the carnival of snow, and blushed to be gaping thus from the breastwork of material well-being. This motive, and no momentary fad—no, nor yet any native love of bodily exertion—was what impelled him to learn the use of skis. If it was uncanny up there in the magnificence of the mountains, in the deathly silence of the snows—and uncanny it assuredly was, to our son of civilization—this was equally true, that in these months and years he had already drunk deep of the uncanny, in spirit and in sense. Even a colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not precisely the canniest thing in the world, it too led one on into uncharted and perilous regions. So if we can speak of Hans Castorp’s feeling of kinship with the wild powers of the winter heights, it is in this sense, that despite his pious awe he felt these scenes to be a fitting theatre for the issue of his involved thoughts, a fitting stage for one to make who, scarcely knowing how, found it had devolved upon him to take stock of himself, in reference to the rank and status of the Homo Dei.

No one was here to blow a warning to the rash one—unless, indeed, Herr Settembrini, with his farewell shout at Hans Castorp’s disappearing back, had been that man. But possessed by valorous desire, our youth had given the call no heed—as little as he had the steps behind him on a certain carnival night. "Eh, Ingegnere, un po’ di ragione, sa!" "Yes, yes, pedagogic Satana, with your ragione and your ribellione" he thought. "But I’m rather fond of you. You are a wind-bag and a hand-organ man, to be sure. But you mean well, you mean much better, and more to my mind, than that knife-edged little Jesuit and Terrorist, apologist of the Inquisition and the knout, with his round eye-glasses—though he is nearly always right when you and he come to grips over my paltry soul, like God and the Devil in the mediæval legends."

He struggled, one day, powdered in snow to the waist, up a succession of snow-shrouded terraces, up and up, he knew not whither. Nowhither, perhaps; these upper regions blended with a sky no less misty-white than they, and where the two came together, it was hard to tell. No summit, no ridge was visible, it was a haze and a nothing, toward which Hans Castorp strove; while behind him the world, the inhabited valley, fell away swiftly from view, and no sound mounted to his ears. In a twinkling he was as solitary, he was as lost as heart could wish, his loneliness was profound enough to awake the fear which is the first stage of valour. "Præterit figura huius mundi," he said to himself, quoting Naphta, in a Latin hardly humanistic in spirit. He stopped and looked about. On all sides there was nothing to see, beyond small single flakes of snow, which came out of a white sky and sank to rest on the white earth. The silence about him refused to say aught to his spirit. His gaze was lost in the blind white void, he felt his heart pulse from the effort of the climb—that muscular organ whose animal-like shape and contracting motion he had watched, with a feeling of sacrilege, in the x-ray laboratory. A naïve reverence filled him for that organ of his, for the pulsating human heart, up here alone in the icy void, alone with its question and its riddle.

On he pressed; higher and higher toward the sky. Walking, he thrust the end of his stick in the snow and watched the blue light follow it out of the hole it made. That he liked; and stood for long at a time to test the little optical phenomenon. It was a strange, a subtle colour, this greenish-blue; colour of the heights and deeps, ice-clear, yet holding shadow in its depths, mysteriously exquisite. It reminded him of the colour of certain eyes, whose shape and glance had spelled his destiny; eyes to which Herr Settembrini, from his humanistic height, had referred with contempt as "Tartar slits" and "wolf’s eyes"—eyes seen long ago and then found again, the eyes of Pribislav Hippe and Clavdia Chauchat. "With pleasure," he said aloud, in the profound stillness. "But don’t break it—c’est à visser, tu sais." And his spirit heard behind him words of warning in a mellifluous tongue.

A wood loomed, misty, far off to the right. He turned that way, to the end of having some goal before his eyes, instead of sheer white transcendence; and made toward it with a dash, not remarking an intervening depression of the ground. He could not have seen it, in fact; everything swam before his eyes in the white mist, obliterating all contours. When he perceived it, he gave himself to the decline, unable to measure its steepness with his eye.

The grove that had attracted him lay the other side of the gully into which he had unintentionally steered. The trough, covered with fluffy snow, fell away on the side next the mountains, as he observed when he pursued it a little distance. It went downhill, the steep sides grew higher, this fold of the earth’s surface seemed like a narrow passage leading into the mountain. Then the points of his skis turned up again, there began an incline, soon there were no more side walls; Hans Castorp’s trackless course ran once more uphill along the mountain-side.

He saw the pine grove behind and below him, on his right, turned again toward it, and with a quick descent reached the laden trees; they stood in a wedge-shaped group, a vanguard thrust out from the mist-screened forests above. He rested beneath their boughs, and smoked a cigarette. The unnatural stillness, the monstrous solitude, still oppressed his spirit; yet he felt proud to have conquered them, brave in the pride of having measured to the height of surroundings such as these.

It was three in the afternoon. He had set out soon after luncheon, with the idea of cutting part of the long rest-cure, and tea as well, in order to be back before dark. He had brought some chocolate in his breeches pocket, and a small flask of wine; and told himself exultantly that he had still several hours to revel in all this grandeur.

[admin]

Part 7 of 9

The position of the sun was hard to recognize, veiled as it was in haze. Behind him, at the mouth of the valley, above that part of the mountains that was shut off from view, the clouds and mist seemed to thicken and move forward. They looked like snow—more snow—as though there were pressing demand for it! Like a good hard storm. Indeed, the little soundless flakes were coming down more quickly as he stood.

Hans Castorp put out his arm and let some of them come to rest on his sleeve; he viewed them with the knowing eye of the nature-lover. They looked mere shapeless morsels; but he had more than once had their like under his good lens, and was aware of the exquisite precision of form displayed by these little jewels, insignia, orders, agraffes—no jeweller, however skilled, could do finer, more minute work. Yes, he thought, there was a difference, after all, between this light, soft, white powder he trod with his skis, that weighed down the trees, and covered the open spaces, a difference between it and the sand on the beaches at home, to which he had likened it. For this powder was not made of tiny grains of stone; but of myriads of tiniest drops of water, which in freezing had darted together in symmetrical variation—parts, then, of the same anorganic substance which was the source of protoplasm, of plant life, of the human body. And among these myriads of enchanting little stars, in their hidden splendour that was too small for man’s naked eye to see, there was not one like unto another; an endless inventiveness governed the development and unthinkable differentiation of one and the same basic scheme, the equilateral, equiangled hexagon. Yet each, in itself—this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all—each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree—the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death—Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why the builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures.

He pushed off again, shuffling through the deep snow on his flexible runners, along the edge of the wood, down the slope, up again at random, to his heart’s content, about and into this lifeless land. Its empty, rolling spaces, its dried vegetation of single dwarf firs sticking up through the snow, bore a striking resemblance to a scene on the dunes. Hans Castorp nodded as he stood and fixed the likeness in his mind. Even his burning face, his trembling limbs, the peculiar and half-intoxicated mingled sensations of excitement and fatigue were pleasurable, reminding him as they did of that familiar feeling induced by the sea air, which could sting one like whips, and yet was so laden with sleepy essences. He rejoiced in his freedom of motion, his feet were like wings. He was bound to no path, none lay behind him to take him back whence he had come. At first there had been posts, staves set up as guides through the snow—but he had soon cut free from their tutelage, which recalled the coastguard with his horn, and seemed inconsistent with the attitude he had taken up toward the wild.

He pressed on, turning right and left among rocky, snow-clad elevations, and came behind them on an incline, then a level spot, then on the mountains themselves—how alluring and accessible seemed their softly covered gorges and defiles! His blood leaped at the strong allurement of the distance and the height, the ever profounder solitude. At risk of a late return he pressed on, deeper into the wild silence, the monstrous and the menacing, despite that gathering darkness was sinking down over the region like a veil, and heightening his inner apprehension until it presently passed into actual fear. It was this fear which first made him conscious that he had deliberately set out to lose his way and the direction in which valley and settlement lay—and had been as successful as heart could wish. Yet he knew that if he were to turn in his tracks and go downhill, he would reach the valley bottom—even if some distance from the Berghof—and that sooner than he had planned. He would come home too early, not have made full use of his time. On the other hand, if he were overtaken unawares by the storm, he would probably in any case not find his way home. But however genuine his fear of the elements, he refused to take premature flight; his being scarcely the sportman’s attitude, who only meddles with the elements so long as he knows himself their master, takes all precautions, and prudently yields when he must—whereas what went on in Hans Castorp’s soul can only be described by the one word challenge. It was perhaps a blameworthy, presumptuous attitude, even united to such genuine awe. Yet this much is clear, to any human understanding: that when a young man has lived years long in the way this one had, something may gather—may accumulate, as our engineer might put it—in the depths of his soul, until one day it suddenly discharges itself, with a primitive exclamation of disgust, a mental "Oh, go to the devil!" a repudiation of all caution whatsoever, in short with a challenge. So on he went, in his seven-league slippers, glided down this slope too and pressed up the incline beyond, where stood a wooden hut that might be a hayrick or shepherd’s shelter, its roof weighted with flat stones. On past this to the nearest mountain ridge, bristling with forest, behind whose back the giant peaks towered upward in the mist. The wall before him, studded with single groups of trees, was steep, but looked as though one might wind to the right and get round it by climbing a little way up the slope. Once on the other side, he could see what lay beyond. Accordingly Hans Castorp set out on this tour of investigation, which began by descending from the meadow with the hut into another and rather deep gully that dropped off from right to left.

He had just begun to mount again when the expected happened, and the storm burst, the storm that had threatened so long. Or may one say "threatened" of the action of blind, nonsentient forces, which have no purpose to destroy us—that would be comforting by comparison—but are merely horribly indifferent to our fate should we become involved with them. "Hullo!" Hans Castorp thought, and stood still, as the first blast whirled through the densely falling snow and caught him. "That’s a gentle zephyr—tells you what’s coming." And truly this wind was savage. The air was in reality frightfully cold, probably some degrees below zero; but so long as it remained dry and still one almost found it balmy. It was when a wind came up that the cold began to cut into the flesh; and in a wind like the one that blew now, of which that first gust had been a forerunner, the furs were not bought that could protect the limbs from its icy rigours. And Hans Castorp wore no fur, only a woollen waistcoat, which he had found quite enough, or even, with the faintest gleam of sunshine, a burden. But the wind was at his back, a little sidewise; there was small inducement to turn and receive it in the face; so the mad youth, letting that fact reinforce the fundamental challenge of his attitude, pressed on among the single tree-trunks, and tried to outflank the mountain he had attacked.

It was no joke. There was almost nothing to be seen for swimming snow-flakes, that seemed without falling to fill the air to suffocation by their whirling dance. The icy gusts made his ears burn painfully, his limbs felt half paralysed, his hands were so numb he hardly knew if they held the staff. The snow blew inside his collar and melted down his back. It drifted on his shoulders and right side; he thought he should freeze as he stood into a snowman, with his staff stiff in his hands. And all this under relatively favouring circumstances; for let him turn his face to the storm and his situation would be still worse. Getting home would be no easy task—the harder, the longer he put it off.

At last he stopped, gave an angry shrug, and turned his skis the other way. Then the wind he faced took his breath on the spot, so that he was forced to go through the awkward process of turning round again to get it back, and collect his resolution to advance in the teeth of his ruthless foe. With bent head and cautious breathing he managed to get under way; but even thus forearmed, the slowness of his progress and the difficulty of seeing and breathing dismayed him. Every few minutes he had to stop, first to get his breath in the lee of the wind, and then because he saw next to nothing in the blinding whiteness, and moving as he did with head down, had to take care not to ran against trees, or be flung headlong by unevennesses in the ground. Hosts of flakes flew into his face, melted there, and he anguished with the cold of them. They flew into his mouth, and died away with a weak, watery taste; flew against his eyelids so that he winked, overflowed his eyes and made seeing as difficult as it was now almost impossible for other reasons: namely, the dazzling effect of all that whiteness, and the veiling of his field of vision, so that his sense of sight was almost put out of action. It was nothingness, white, whirling noth-ingness, into which he looked when he forced himself to do so. Only at intervals did ghostly-seeming forms from the world of reality loom up before him: a stunted fir, a group of pines, even the pale silhouette of the hay-hut he had lately passed.

He left it behind, and sought his way back over the slope on which it stood. But there was no path. To keep direction, relatively speaking, into his own valley would be a question far more of luck than management; for while he could see his hand before his face, he could not see the ends of his skis. And even with better visibility, the host of difficulties must have combined to hinder his progress: the snow in his face, his adversary the storm, which hampered his breathing, made him fight both to take a breath and to exhale it, and constantly forced him to turn his head away to gasp. How could anyone—either Hans Castorp or another and much stronger than he—make head? He stopped, he blinked his lashes free of water drops, knocked off the snow that like a coat of mail was sheathing his body in front—and it struck him that progress, under the circumstances, was more than anyone could expect.

And yet Hans Castorp did progress. That is to say, he moved on. But whether in the right direction, whether it might not have been better to stand still, remained to be seen. Theoretically the chances were against it; and in practice he soon began to suspect something was wrong. This was not familiar ground beneath his feet, not the easy slope he had gained on mounting with such difficulty from the ravine, which had of course to be retraversed. The level distance was too short, he was already mounting again. It was plain that the storm, which came from the south-west, from the mouth of the valley, had with its violence driven him from his course. He had been exhausting himself, all this time, with a false start. Blindly, enveloped in white, whirling night, he laboured deeper and deeper into this grim and callous sphere.

"No, you don’t," said he, suddenly, between his teeth, and halted. The words were not emotional, yet he felt for a second as though his heart had been clutched by an icy hand; it winced, and then knocked rapidly against his ribs, as it had the time Rhadamanthus found the moist cavity. Pathos in the grand manner was not in place, he knew, in one who had chosen defiance as his rôle, and was indebted to himself alone for all his present plight. "Not bad," he said, and discovered that his facial muscles were not his to command, that he could not express in his face any of his soul’s emotions, for that it was stiff with cold. "What next? Down this slope; follow your nose home, I suppose, and keep your face to the wind—though that is a good deal easier said than done," he went on, panting with his efforts, yet actually speaking half aloud, as he tried to move on again: "but something has to happen, I can’t sit down and wait, I should simply be buried in six-sided crystalline symmetricality, and Settembrini, when he came with his little horn to find me, would see me squatting here with a snow-cap over one ear." He realized that he was talking to himself, and not too sensibly—for which he took himself to task, and then continued on purpose, though his lips were so stiff he could not shape the labials, and so did without them, as he had on a certain other occasion that came to his mind. "Keep quiet, and get along with you out of here," he admonished himself, adding: "You seem to be wool-gathering, not quite right in your head, and that looks bad for you."

But this he only said with his reason—to some extent detached from the rest of him, though after all nearly concerned. As for his natural part, it felt only too much inclined to yield to the confusion which laid hold upon him with his growing fatigue. He even remarked this tendency and took thought to comment upon it. "Here," said he, "we have the typical reaction of a man who loses himself in the mountains in a snow-storm and never finds his way home." He gasped out other fragments of the same thought as he went, though he avoided giving it more specific expression. "Whoever hears about it afterwards, imagines it as horrible; but he forgets that disease—and the state I am in is, in a way of speaking, disease—so adjusts its man that it and he can come to terms; there are sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis—yes, oh yes, yes. But one must fight against them, after all, for they are two-faced, they are in the highest degree equivocal, everything depends upon the point of view. If you are not meant to get home, they are a benefaction, they are merciful; but if you mean to get home, they become sinister. I believe I still do. Certainly I don’t intend—in this heart of mine so stormily beating it doesn’t appeal to me in the least—to let myself be snowed under by this idiotically symmetrical crystallometry."

In truth, he was already affected, and his struggle against oncoming sensory confusion was feverish and abnormal. He should have been more alarmed on discovering that he had already declined from the level course—this time apparently on the other slope. For he had pushed off with the wind coming slantwise at him, which was ill-advised, though more convenient for the moment. "Never mind," he thought, "I’ll get my direction again down below." Which he did, or thought he did—or, truth to tell, scarcely even thought so; worst of all, began to be indifferent whether he had done or no. Such was the effect of an insidious double attack, which he but weakly combated. Fatigue and excitement combined were a familiar state to our young man—whose acclimatization, as we know, still consisted in getting used to not getting used; and both fatigue and excitement were now present in such strength as to make impossible any thought of asserting his reason against them. He felt as often after a colloquy with Settembrini and Naphta, only to a far greater degree: dazed and tipsy, giddy, a-tremble with excitement. This was probably why he began to colour

his lack of resistance to the stealing narcosis with half-maudlin references to the latest-aired complex of theories. Despite his scornful repudiation of the idea that he might lie down and be covered up with hexagonal symmetricality, something within him maundered on, sense or no sense: told him that the feeling of duty which bade him fight against insidious sensory appeasements was a purely ethical reaction, representing the sordid bourgeois view of life, irreligion, Philistinism; while the desire, nay, craving, to lie down and rest, whispered him in the guise of a comparison between this storm and a sand-storm on the desert, before which the Arab flings himself down and draws his burnous over his head. Only his lack of a burnous, the unfeasibility of drawing his woollen waistcoat over his head, prevented him from following suit—this although he was no longer a child, and pretty well aware of the conditions under which a man freezes to death.

There had been a rather steep declivity, then level ground, then again an ascent, a stiff one. This was not necessarily wrong; one must of course, on the way to the valley, traverse rising ground at times. The wind had turned capriciously round, for it was now at Hans Castorp’s back, and that, taken by itself, was a blessing. Owing, perhaps, to the storm, or the soft whiteness of the incline before him, dim in the whirling air, drawing him toward it, he bent as he walked. Only a little further—supposing one were to give way to the temptation, and his temptation was great; it was so strong that it quite lived up to the many descriptions he had read of the "typical danger-state." It asserted itself, it refused to be classified with the general order of things, it insisted on being an exception, its very exigence challenged comparison—yet at the same time it never disguised its origin or aura, never denied that it was, so to speak, garbed in Spanish black, with snow-white, fluted ruff, and stood for ideas and fundamental conceptions that were characteristically gloomy, strongly Jesuitical and anti-human, for the rack-and-knout discipline which was the particular horror of Herr Settembrini, though he never opposed it without making himself ridiculous, like a hand-organ man for ever grinding out "ragione" to the same old tune.

And yet Hans Castorp did hold himself upright and resist his craving to lie down. He could see nothing, but he struggled, he came forward. Whether to the purpose or not, he could not tell; but he did his part, and moved on despite the weight the cold more and more laid upon his limbs. The present slope was too steep to ascend directly, so he slanted a little, and went on thus awhile without much heed whither. Even to lift his stiffened lids to peer before him was so great and so nearly useless an effort as to offer him small incentive. He merely caught glimpses: here clumps of pines that merged together; there a ditch or stream, a black line marked out between overhanging banks of snow. Now, for a change, he was going downhill, with the wind in his face, when, at some distance before him, and seeming to hang in the driving wind and mist, he saw the faint outline of a human habitation.

Ah, sweet and blessed sight! Verily he had done well, to march stoutly on despite all obstacles, until now human dwellings appeared, in sign that the inhabited valley was at hand. Perhaps there were even human beings, perhaps he might enter and abide the end of the storm under shelter, then get directions, or a guide if the dark should have fallen. He held toward this chimerical goal, that often quite vanished in mist, and took an exhausting climb against the wind before it was reached; finally drew near it—to discover, with what staggering astonishment and horror may be imagined, that it was only the hay-hut with the weighted roof, to which, after all his striving, by all his devious paths, he had come back.

That was the very devil. Hans Castorp gave vent to several heart-felt curses—of which his lips were too stiff to pronounce the labials. He examined the hut, to get his bearings, and came to the conclusion that he had approached it from the same direc-tion as before—namely, from the rear; and therefore, what he had accomplished for the past hour—as he reckoned it—had been sheer waste of time and effort. But there it was, just as the books said. You went in a circle, gave yourself endless trouble under the delusion that you were accomplishing something, and all the time you were simply describing some great silly arc that would turn back to where it had its beginning, like the riddling year itself. You wandered about, without getting home. Hans Castorp recognized the traditional phenomenon with a certain grim satisfaction—and even slapped his thigh in astonishment at this punctual general law fulfilling itself in his particular case.

The lonely hut was barred, the door locked fast, no entrance possible. But Hans Castorp decided to stop for the present. The projecting roof gave the illusion of shelter, and the hut itself, on the side turned toward the mountains, afforded, he found, some little protection against the storm. He leaned his shoulder against the rough-hewn timber, since his long skis prevented him from leaning his back. And so he stood, obliquely to the wall, having thrust his staff in the snow; hands in pockets, his collar turned up as high as it would go, bracing himself on his outside leg, and leaning his dizzy head against the wood, his eyes closed, but opening them every now and then to look down his shoulder and across the gully to where the high mountain wall palely appeared and disappeared in mist.

His situation was comparatively comfortable. "I can stick it like this all night, if I have to," he thought, "if I change legs from time to time, lie on the other side, so to speak, and move about a bit between whiles, as of course I must. I’m rather stiff, naturally, but the effort I made has accumulated some inner warmth, so after all it was not quite in vain, that I have come round all this way. Come round—not coming round—that’s the regular expression they use, of people drowned or frozen to death.—I suppose I used it because I arn not quite so clear in the head as I might be. But it is a good thing I can stick it out here; for this frantic nuisance of a snow-storm can carry on until morning without a qualm, and if it only keeps up until dark it will be quite bad enough, for in the dark the danger of going round and round and not coming round is as great as in a storm. It must be toward evening already, about six o’clock, I should say, after all the time I wasted on my circular tour. Let’s see, how late is it?" He felt for his watch; his numbed fingers could scarcely find and draw it from his pocket. Here it was, his gold hunting-watch, with his monogram on the lid, ticking faithfully away in this lonely waste, like Hans Castorp’s own heart, that touching human heart that beat in the organic warmth of his interior man.

It was half past four. But deuce take it, it had been nearly as much before the storm burst. Was it possible his whole bewildered circuit had lasted scarcely a quarter of an hour? " ‘Coming round’ makes time seem long," he noted. "And when you don’t ‘come round’—does it seem longer? But the fact remains that at five or half past it will be regularly dark. Will the storm hold up in time to keep me from running in circles again? Suppose I take a sip of port—it might strengthen me."

He had brought with him a bottle of that amateurish drink, simply because it was always kept ready in flat bottles at the Berghof, for excursions—though not, of course, excursions like this unlawful escapade. It was not meant for people who went out in the snow and got lost and night-bound in the mountains. Had his senses been less befogged, he must have said to himself that if he were bent on getting home, it was almost the worst thing he could have done. He did say so, after he had drunk several swallows, for they took effect at once, and it was an effect much like that of the Kulmbacher beer on the evening of his arrival at the Berghof, when he had angered Settembrini by his ungoverned prattle anent fish-sauces and the like—Herr Ludovico, the pedagogue, the same who held madmen to their senses when they would give themselves rein. Hans Castorp heard through thin air the mellifluous sound of his horn; the orator and schoolmaster was nearing by forced marches, to rescue his troublesome nursling, life’s delicate child, from his present desperate pass and lead him home.—All which was of course sheer rubbish, due to the Kulmbacher he had so foolishly drunk. For of course Herr Settembrini had no horn, how could he have? He had a hand-organ, propped by a sort of wooden leg against the pavement, and as he played a sprightly air, he flung his humanistic eyes up to the people in the houses. And furthermore he knew nothing whatever of what had happened, as he no longer lived in House Berghof, but with Lukaçek the tailor, in his little attic room with the water-bottle, above Naphta’s silken cell. Moreover, he would have no right nor reason to interfere—no more than upon that carnival night on which Hans Castorp had found himself in a position quite as mad and bad as this one, when he gave the ailing Clavdia Chauchat back son crayon—his, Pribislav Hippe’s, pencil. What position was that? What position could it be but the horizontal, literally and not metaphorically the position of all long-termers up here? Was not he himself used to lie long hours out of doors, in snow and frost, by night as well as day? And he was making ready to sink down when the idea seized him, took him as it were by the collar and fetched him up standing, that all this nonsense he was uttering was still inspired by the Kulmbacher beer and the impersonal, quite typical and traditional longing to lie down and sleep, of which he had always heard, and which would by quibbling and sophistry now betray him.

"That was the wrong way to go to work," he acknowledged to himself. "The port was not at all the right thing; just the few sips of it have made my head so heavy I cannot hold it up, and my thoughts are all just confused, stupid quibbling with words. I can’t depend on them—not only the first thought that comes into my head, but even the second one, the correction which my reason tries to make upon the first—more’s the pity. ‘Son crayon!’ That means her pencil, not his pencil, in this case; you only say son because crayon is masculine. The rest is just a pretty feeble play on words. Imagine stopping to talk about that when there is a much more important fact; namely, that my left leg, which I am using as a support, reminds me of the wooden leg on Settembrini’s hand-organ, that he keeps jolting over the pavement with his knee, to get up close to the window and hold out his velvet hat for the girl up there to throw something into. And at the same time, I seem to be pulled, as though with hands, to lie down in the snow. The only thing to do is to move about. I must pay for the Kulmbacher, and limber up my wooden leg."

He pushed himself away from the wall with his shoulder. But one single pace forward, and the wind sliced at him like a scythe, and drove him back to the shelter of the wall. It was unquestionably the position indicated for the time; he might change it by turning his left shoulder to the wall and propping himself on the right leg, with sundry shakings of the left, to restore the circulation as much as might be. "Who leaves the house in weather like this?" he said. "Moderate activity is all right; but not too much craving for adventure, no coying with the bride of the storm. Quiet, quiet—if the head be heavy, let it droop. The wall is good, a certain warmth seems; to come from the logs—probably the feeling is entirely subjective.—Ah, the trees, the trees! Oh, living climate of the living—how sweet it smells!"

It was a park. It lay beneath the terrace on which he seemed to stand—a spreading park of luxuriant green shade-trees, elms, planes, beeches, birches, oaks, all in the dappled light and shade of their fresh, full, shimmering foliage, and gently rustling tips. They breathed a deliciously moist, balsamic breath into the air. A warm shower passed over them, but the rain was sunlit. One could see high up in the sky the whole air filled with the bright ripple of raindrops. How lovely it was! Oh, breath of the homeland, oh, fragrance and abundance of the plain, so long foregone! The air was full of bird song—dainty, sweet, blithe fluting, piping, twittering, cooing, trilling, warbling, though not a single little creature could be seen. Hans Castorp smiled, breathing gratitude. But still more beauties were preparing. A rainbow flung its arc slanting across the scene, most bright and perfect, a sheer delight, all its rich glossy, banded colours moistly shimmering down into the thick, lustrous green. It was like music, like the sound of harps commingled with flutes and violins. The blue and the violet were transcendent. And they descended and magically blended, were transmuted and re-unfolded more lovely than before. Once, some years earlier, our young Hans Castorp had been privileged to hear a world-famous Italian tenor, from whose throat had gushed a glorious stream to witch the world with gracious art. The singer took a high note, exquisitely; then held it, while the passionate harmony swelled, unfolded, glowed from moment to moment with new radiance. Unsuspected veils dropped from before it one by one; the last one sank away, revealing what must surely be the ultimate tonal purity—yet no, for still another fell, and then a well-nigh incredible third and last, shaking into the air such an extravagance of tear-glistening splendour, that confused murmurs of protest rose from the audience, as though it could bear no more; and our young friend found that he was sobbing.—So now with the scene before him, constantly transformed and transfigured as it was before his eyes. The bright, rainy veil fell away; behind it stretched the sea, a southern sea of deep, deepest blue shot with silver lights, and a beautiful bay, on one side mistily open, on the other enclosed by mountains whose outline paled away into blue space. In the middle distance lay islands, where palms rose tall and small white houses gleamed among cypress groves. Ah, it was all too much, too blest for sinful mortals, that glory of light, that deep purity of the sky, that sunny freshness on the water! Such a scene Hans Castorp had never beheld, nor anything like it. On his holidays he had barely sipped at the south, the sea for him meant the colourless, tempestuous northern tides, to which he clung with inarticulate, childish love. Of the Mediterranean, Naples, Sicily, he knew nothing. And yet—he remembered. Yes, strangely enough, that was recognition which so moved him. "Yes, yes, its very image," he was crying out, as though in his heart he had always cherished a picture of this spacious, sunny bliss. Always—and that always went far, far, unthinkably far back, as far as the open sea there on the left where it ran out to the violet sky bent down to meet it.

The sky-line was high, the distance seemed to mount to Hans Castorp’s view, looking down as he did from his elevation onto the spreading gulf beneath. The mountains held it embraced, theiï tree-clad foot-hills running down to the sea; they reached in half-circle from the middle distance to the point where he sat, and beyond. This was a mountainous littoral, at one point of which he was crouching upon a sun-warmed stone terrace, while before him the ground, descending among undergrowth, by moss-covered rocky steps, ran down to a level shore, where the reedy shingle formed little blue-dyed bays, minute archipelagoes and harbours. And all the sunny region, these open coastal heights and laughing rocky basins, even the sea itself out to the islands, where boats plied to and fro, was peopled far and wide. On every hand human beings, children of sun and sea, were stirring or sitting. Beautiful young human creatures, so blithe, so good and gay, so pleasing to see—at sight of them Hans Castorp’s whole heart opened in a responsive love, keen almost to pain.

Youths were at work with horses, running hand on halter alongside their whinnying, head-tossing charges; pulling the refractory ones on a long rein, or else, seated bareback, striking the flanks of their mounts with naked heels, to drive them into the sea. The muscles of the riders’ backs played beneath the sun-bronzed skin, and their voices were enchanting beyond words as they shouted to each other or to their steeds. A little bay ran deep into the coast line, mirroring the shore as does a mountain lake; about it girls were dancing. One of them sat with her back toward him, so that her neck, and the hair drawn to a knot above it smote him with loveliness. She sat with her feet in a depression of the rock, and played on a shepherd’s pipe, her eyes roving above the stops to her companions, as in long, wide garments, smiling, with outstretched arms, alone, or in pairs swaying gently toward each other, they moved in the paces of the dance. Behind the flute-player—she too was white-clad, and her back was long and slender, laterally rounded by the movement of her arms—other maidens were sitting, or standing entwined to watch the dance, and quietly talking. Beyond them still, young men were practising archery. Lovely and pleasant it was to see the older ones show the younger, curly-locked novices, how to span the bow and take aim; draw with them, and laughing support them staggering back from the push of the arrow as it leaped from the bow. Others were fishing, lying prone on a jut of rock, waggling one leg in the air, holding the line out over the water, approaching their heads in talk. Others sat straining forward to fling the bait far out. A ship, with mast and yards, lying high out of the tide, was being eased, shoved, and steadied into the sea. Children played and exulted among the breaking waves. A young female, lying outstretched, drawing with one hand her flowered robe high between her breasts, reached with the other in the air after a twig bearing fruit and leaves, which a second, a slender-hipped creature, erect at her head, was playfully withholding. Young folk were sitting in nooks or the rocks, or hesitating at the water’s edge, with crossed arms clutching either shoulder, as they tested the chill with their toes. Pairs strolled along the beach, close and confiding, at the maiden’s ear the lips of the youth. Shaggy-haired goats leaped from ledge to ledge of the rocks, while the young goatherd, wearing perched on his brown curls a little hat with the brim turned up behind, stood watching them from a height, one hand on his hip, the other holding the long staff on which he leaned.

"Oh, lovely, lovely," Hans Castorp breathed. "How joyous and winning they are, how fresh and healthy, happy and clever they look! It is not alone the outward form, they seem to be wise and gentle through and through. That is what makes me in love with them, the spirit that speaks out of them, the sense, I might almost say, in which they live and play together." By which he meant the friendliness, the mutual courteous regard these children of the sun showed to each other, a calm, reciprocal reverence veiled in smiles, manifested almost imperceptibly, and yet possessing them all by the power of sense association and ingrained idea. A dignity, even a gravity, was held, as it were, in solution in their lightest mood, perceptible only as an ineffable spiritual influence, a high seriousness without austerity, a reasoned goodness conditioning every act. All this, indeed, was not without its ceremonial side. A young mother, in a brown robe loose at the shoulder, sat on a rounded mossy stone and suckled her child, saluted by all who passed with a characteristic gesture which seemed to comprehend all that lay implicit in their general bearing. The young men, as they approached, lightly and formally crossed their arms on their breasts, and smilingly bowed; the maidens shaped the suggestion of a curtsy, as the worshipper does when he passes the high altar, at the same time nodding repeatedly, blithely and heartily. This mixture of formal homage with lively friendliness, and the slow, mild mien of the mother as well, where she sat pressing her breast with her forefinger to ease the flow of milk to her babe, glancing up from it to acknowledge with a smile the reverence paid her—this sight thrilled Hans Castorp’s heart with something very close akin to ecstasy. He could not get his fill of looking, yet asked himself in concern whether he had a right, whether it was not perhaps punishable, for him, an outsider, to be a party to the sunshine and gracious loveliness of all these happy folk. He felt common, clumsy-booted. It seemed unscrupulous.

A lovely boy, with full hair drawn sideways across his brow and falling on his temples, sat directly beneath him, apart from his companions, with arms folded on his breast—not sadly, not ill-naturedly, quite tranquilly on one side. This lad looked up, turned his gaze upward and looked at him, Hans Castorp, and his eyes went between the watcher and the scenes upon the strand, watching his watching, to and fro. But suddenly he looked past Hans Castorp into space, and that smile, common to them all, of polite and brotherly regard, disappeared in a moment from his lovely, purely cut, half-childish face. His brows did not darken, but in his gaze there came a solemnity that looked as though carven out of stone, inexpressive, unfathomable, a deathlike re-serve, which gave the scarcely reassured Hans Castorp a thorough fright, not unaccompanied by a vague apprehension of its meaning.

He too looked in the same direction. Behind him rose towering columns, built of cylindrical blocks without bases, in the joinings of which moss had grown. They formed the façade of a temple gate, on whose foundations he was sitting, at the top of a double flight of steps with space between. Heavy of heart he rose, and, descending the stair on one side, passed through the high gate below, and along a flagged street, which soon brought him before other propylæa. He passed through these as well, and now stood facing the temple that lay before him, massy, weathered to a grey-green tone, on a foundation reached by a steep flight of steps. The broad brow of the temple rested on the capitals of powerful, almost stunted columns, tapering toward the top—sometimes a fluted block had been shoved out of line and projected a little in profile. Painfully, helping himself on with his hands, and sighing for the growing oppression of his heart, Hans Castorp mounted the high steps and gained the grove of columns, it was very deep, he moved in it as among the trunks in a forest of beeches by the pale northern sea. He purposely avoided the centre, yet for all that slanted back again, and presently stood before a group of statuary, two female figures carved in stone, on a high base: mother and daughter, it seemed; one of them sitting, older than the other, more dignified, right goddesslike and mild, yet with mourning brows above the lightless empty eye-sockets; clad in a flowing tunic and a mantle of many folds, her matronly brow with its waves of hair covered with a veil. The other figure stood in the protecting embrace of the first, with round, youthful face, and arms and hands wound and hidden in the folds of the mantle.

Hans Castorp stood looking at the group, and from some dark cause his laden heart grew heavier still, and more oppressed with its weight of dread and anguish. Scarcely daring to venture, but following an inner compulsion, he passed behind the statuary, and through the double row of columns beyond. The bronze door of the sanctuary stood open, and the poor soul’s knees all but gave way beneath him at the sight within. Two grey old women, witchlike, with hanging breasts and dugs of finger-length, were busy there, between flaming braziers, most horribly. They were dismembering a child. In dreadful silence they tore it apart with their bare hands—Hans Castorp saw the bright hair blood-smeared—and cracked the tender bones between their jaws, their dreadful lips dripped blood. An icy coldness held him. He would have covered his eyes and fled, but could not. They at their gory business had already seen him, they shook their reeking fists and uttered curses—soundlessly, most vilely, with the last obscenity, and in the dialect of Hans Castorp’s native Hamburg. It made him sick, sick as never before. He tried desperately to escape; knocked into a column with his shoulder—and found himself, with the sound of that dreadful whispered brawling still in his ears, still wrapped in the cold horror of it, lying by his hut, in the snow, leaning against one arm, with his head upon it, his legs in their skis stretched out before him.

It was no true awakening. He blinked his relief at being free from those execrable hags, but was not very clear, nor even greatly concerned, whether this was a hay-hut, or the column of a temple, against which he lay; and after a fashion continued to dream, no longer in pictures, but in thoughts hardly less involved and fantastic.

"I felt it was a dream, all along," he rambled. "A lovely and horrible dream. I knew all the time that I was making it myself—the park with the trees, the delicious moisture in the air, and all the rest, both dreadful and dear. In a way, I knew it all beforehand. But how is it a man can know all that and call it up to bring him bliss and terror both at once? Where did I get the beautiful bay with the islands, where the temple precincts, whither the eyes of that charming boy pointed me, as he stood there alone? Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace—and its blood-sacrifice. Here I lie at my column and still feel in my body the actual remnant of my dream—the icy horror of the human sacrifice, but also the joy that had filled my heart to its very depths, born of the happiness and brave bearing of those human creatures in white. It is meet and proper, I hereby declare that I have a prescriptive right to lie here and dream these dreams. For in my life up here I have known reason and recklessness. I have wandered lost with Settembrini and Naphta in high and mortal places. I know all of man. I have known mankind’s flesh and blood. I gave back to the ailing Clavdia Chauchat Pribislav Hippe’s lead-pencil. But he who knows the body, life, knows death. And that is not all; it is, pedagogically speaking, only the beginning. One must have the other half of the story, the other side. For all interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life, as is proven by the humanistic faculty of medi-cine, that addresses life and its ails always so politely in Latin, and is only a division of the great and pressing concern which, in all sympathy, I now name by its name: the human being, the delicate child of life, man, his state and standing in the universe. I understand no little about him, I have learned much from ‘those up here,’ I have been driven up from the valley, so that the breath almost left my poor body. Yet now from the base of my column I have no meagre view. I have dreamed of man’s state, of his courteous and enlightened social state; behind which, in the temple, the horrible blood-sacrifice was consummated. Were they, those children of the sun, so sweetly courteous to each other, in silent recognition of that horror? It would be a fine and right conclusion they drew. I will hold to them, in my soul, I will hold with them and not with Naphta, neither with Settembrini. They are both talkers; the one luxurious and spiteful, the other for ever blowing on his penny pipe of reason, even vainly imagining he can bring the mad to their senses. It is all Philistinism and morality, most certainly it is irreligious. Nor am I for little Naphta either, or his religion, that is only a guazzabuglio of God and the Devil, good and evil, to the end that the individual soul shall plump into it head first, for the sake of mystic immersion in the universal. Pedagogues both! Their quarrels and counter-positions are just a guazzabuglio too, and a confused noise of battle, which need trouble nobody who keeps a little clear in his head and pious in his heart. Their aristocratic question!

Disease, health! Spirit, nature! Are those contradictions? I ask, are they problems? No, they are no problems, neither is the problem of their aristocracy. The recklessness of death is in life, it would not be life without it—and in the centre is the position of the Homo Dei, between recklessness and reason, as his state is between mystic community and windy individualism. I, from my column, perceive all this. In this state he must live gallantly, associate in friendly reverence with himself, for only he is aristocratic, and the counter-positions are not at all. Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. More so than death, too aristocratic for death—that is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart. There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else. Death is a great power. One takes off one’s hat before him, and goes weavingly on tiptoe. He wears the stately ruff of the departed and we do him honour in solemn black. Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse—always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice. Ah, yes, it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock. I will remember. I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to humankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.—And with this—I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, in the place where Hippe appeared to me, in my loggia, everywhere. Deep into the snow mountains my search has led me. Now I have it fast. My dream has given it me, in utter clearness, that I may know it for ever. Yes, I am in simple raptures, my body is warm, my heart beats high and knows why. It beats not solely on physical grounds, as finger-nails grow on a corpse; but humanly, on grounds of my joyful spirits. My dream word was a draught, better than port or ale, it streams through my veins like love and life, I tear myself from my dream and sleep, knowing as I do, perfectly well, that they are highly dangerous to my young life. Up, up! Open your eyes! These are your limbs, your legs here in the snow! Pull yourself together, and up! Look—fair weather!"

The bonds held fast that kept his limbs involved. He had a hard struggle to free himself—but the inner compulsion proved stronger. With a jerk he raised himself on his elbows, briskly drew up his knees, shoved, rolled, wrestled to his feet; stamped with his skis in the snow, flung his arms about his ribs and worked his shoulders violently, all the while casting strained, alert glances about him and above, where now a pale blue sky showed itself between grey-bluish clouds, and these presently drew away to discover a thin sickle of a moon. Early twilight reigned: no snowfall, no storm. The wall of the opposite mountain with its shaggy, tree-clad ridge stretched out before him plain and peaceful. Shadow lay on half its height, but the upper half was bathed in palest rosy light. How were things in the world? Was it morning? Had he, despite what the books said, lain all night in the snow and not frozen? Not a member was frost-bitten, nothing snapped when he stamped, shook and struck himself, as he did vigorously, all the time seeking to establish the facts of his situation. Ears, toes, finger-tips, were of course numb, but not more so than they had often been at night in his loggia. He could take his watch from his pocket—it was still going, it had not stopped, as it did if he forgot to wind it. It said not yet five—it was in fact considerably earlier, twelve, thirteen minutes. Preposterous! Could it be he had lain here in the snow only ten minutes or so, while all these scenes of horror and delight and those presumptuous thoughts had spun themselves in his brain, and the hexagonal hurly vanished as it came? If that were true, then he must be grateful for his good fortune; that is, from the point of view of a safe home-coming. For twice such a turn had come, in his dream and fantasy, as had made him start up—once from horror, and again for rapture. It seemed, indeed, that life meant well by her lone-wandering delicate child.

Be all that as it might, and whether it was morning or afternoon—there could in fact be no doubt that it was still late afternoon—in any case, there was nothing in the circumstances or in his own condition to prevent his going home, which he accord-ingly did: descending in a fine sweep, as the crow flies, to the valley, where, as he reached it, lights were showing, though his way had been well enough lighted by reflection from the snow. He came down the Brehmenbühl, along the edge of the forest, and was in the Dorf by half past five. He left his skis at the grocer’s, rested a little in Herr Settembrini’s attic cell, and told him how the storm had overtaken him in the mountains. The horrified humanist scolded him roundly, and straightway lighted his spirit-kettle to brew coffee for the exhausted one—the strength of which did not prevent Hans Castorp from falling asleep as he sat.

An hour later the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof caressed him. He ate enormously at dinner. What he had dreamed was already fading from his mind. What he had thought—even that selfsame evening it was no longer so clear as it had been at first.

A Soldier, and Brave

HANS CASTORP had had frequent word from his cousin, short messages, at first full of good news and high spirits, then less so, then at length communications that sought to hide something truly sad to hear. The succession of postcards began with the joyous announcement that Joachim was with the colours, and a description of the fanatical ceremony in which, as Hans Castorp ironically couched it in his reply, he had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. One after another Joachim passed easily through the stages of his chosen vocation, whose difficulties were smoothed away by the interest of his superiors and his own passionate love for the service. All this he described to his cousin in his brief messages. He was dispensed from the duty of going to the military academy, as he had already studied some semesters, and from the cornetcy. By the New Year he would be promoted to a subalternship—and sent a photograph of himself in the uniform of an officer. His utter devotion to the spirit of the hierarchy he served, that straitly honourable hierarchy, the bonds of whose organization were like iron, and which yet in its crabbedly humorous way knew how to yield something to the weakness of the flesh, was plain in every hasty line. He related anecdotes illustrating the quaintly complex attitude of his cranky, fanatical sergeant-major toward him, the blundering young subordinate, in whom he yet envisaged the ordained superior of to-morrow, who already had the right to enter the officers’ casino. It was all very fantastic and droll. Then he told of being admitted to prepare for the officers’ examination. By the beginning of April he was a lieutenant.

Manifestly there was no happier man, none with more single-minded devotion of his whole being to the chosen career. With a sort of shamefaced beatitude he told of going past the Rathaus for the first time, in full uniform, how the sentry had saluted, and he nodded to him from a distance. He spoke of the small vexations and rewards of the service, of the wonderfully satisfying comradeship, of the sheepish loyalty of his Bursch, of funny occurrences on the parade-ground and in instruction; of inspection, of love-feasts. Also he occasionally mentioned social affairs, visits, dinners, balls. Not a word of his health.

Until toward summer. Then he wrote that he was in bed, on sick-leave, a catarrh, a matter of a few days. By the beginning of June he was back. But at the middle of the month he had crocked up again, and complained bitterly of his luck. He could not conceal his worry lest he should miss the August general manoeuvres, toward which he was already eagerly looking. Rubbish! in July he was as sound as a berry, weeks long. But then an examination, made advisable by his accursed fluctuations of temperature, suddenly appeared on the horizon. As to the result of this examination, Hans Castorp for long weeks heard nothing; and when he heard, perhaps out of mortification, perhaps because of his physical state, it was not Joachim who wrote. His mother, Louisa Ziemssen, telegraphed. She said the physicians thought it necessary for Joachim to go on sick-leave for some weeks: high mountains indicated immediate departure advised reserve two rooms reply prepaid signed Aunt Louisa.

It was at the end of July when Hans Castorp, lying in his balcony, ran through this dispatch, then read it, and read it again. He nodded as he did so, not with his head but with his whole torso, and said between his teeth: "Si, si, si," like Herr Settembrini. "Joachim is coming back!" ran through him like tidings of great joy. But he grew subdued at once, on the thought "H’m, this is bad news! One might almost call it a mess. The deuce! That went fast. Ripe for ‘home’ again. The mother coming with him"—Hans Castorp said the mother, not Aunt Louisa, his family feeling having grown unconsciously very faded. "That is serious. And directly before the manoeuvres he has been so on fire to go to. H’m, it’s certainly a skin game, it’s playing it low down on poor Joachim, it’s the very opposite of the ideal. By which I mean that the body triumphs, it wants something different from the soul, and puts it through—a slap in the face of all those lofty-minded people who teach that the body is subordinate to the soul. Seems to me they don’t know what they are talking about, because if they were right, a case like this would put the soul in a pretty equivocal light. Verbum sap.—I know what I mean. The question I raise is how far they are right when they set the two over against each other; and whether they aren’t rather in collusion, playing the same game. That’s something that never occurs to the lofty-minded gentry. Not that I am for a moment saying anything against Joachim and his ‘doggedness.’ He is the soul of honour—but what is honour, is what I want to know, when body and soul act together? Is it possible you have not been able to forget a certain refreshing per-fume, a tendency to giggle, a swelling bosom, all waiting for you at Frau Stöhr’s table?—He is coming back!" he returned to the thought with the same joyous sensation. "He comes in bad shape, it is true, but we shall be together again, I shan’t live up here all by myself. And that’s a good thing. It won’t be quite as it was before, his room is taken. That Mrs. Macdonald sits there and coughs, a voiceless sort of cough, and keeps looking at the picture of her little son, on her table or in her hand. But she is at the last stage. If nobody else has engaged it, why—but for the present it must be another one. Twenty-eight is free, so far as I know. I’ll go down to the office—and to Behrens too. This is news. On the one hand it is bad news, on the other grand news—and in any case a change. I’d like to wait for the ‘Comrade’ though, he’ll be coming along presently, and just ask him if he is still of the opinion, in a case like this, that the physical is to be regarded as secondary."

He went to the office before tea. The room he had in mind, on the same corridor as his own, was free, and there would be a place for Frau Ziemssen. He hastened to Behrens, and found him in the "lab," a cigar in one hand, and in the other a test-tube of dull-coloured fluid.

"Herr Hofrat, what do you think?" he began.

"That there’s always the devil to pay," responded the pneumotomist. "Here we have Rosenheim, from Utrecht," said he, and waved his cigar at the test-tube. "Gaffky ten. And Schmitz the manufacturer comes along and tells me he’s been spitting on the pavement—with Gaffky ten, if you please. I’m supposed to blow him up. Well, if I blow him up, it will be the deuce and all, because he’s as touchy as a bear with a sore head, and he and his family occupy three rooms in the establishment. If I give him what for, the management gives me the same—pressed down and running over. You see what kind of trouble I get into every minute—and me so anxious to go my own simple way, unspotted from the world."

"Silly business," Hans Castorp said, with the ready understanding of the old inhabitant. "I know them both. Schmitz is immensely proper and pushful, and Rosenheim is plenty smeary. But there may be other sore spots, besides the hygienic. They are both friendly with Doña Perez from Barcelona, at the Kleefeld’s table—that’s the basic trouble, I should think. If I were you I’d just call attention to the rule in general, and then shut my eye to the rest."

"Don’t I just? I’ve got functional blepharospasm already from doing nothing else. But what are you about down here?"

Hans Castorp came out with the sad yet thrilling news.

Not that the Hofrat was surprised, nor would have been in any case. But he had also been kept informed of Joachim’s progress; Hans Castorp told him, whether asked or unasked, and he knew that Joachim had been in bed in May.

[admin]

Part 8 of 9

"Aha," said he. "And what did I tell you? What did I tell both of you, not once but a hundred times, in so many words? So now you have it. Nine months he’s had his heart’s desire, and been living in a fool’s paradise. Well, it wasn’t a snakeless paradise—it was infected, more’s the pity. But he wouldn’t believe what his little ole Behrens told him, and so he’s had bad luck, like the rest of them, when they don’t believe what their little ole Behrens says, and come too late to their senses. He’s got as far as lieutenant, anyhow, there’s that to say. But what’s the use of it? The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket, before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike. . ." He rambled on, rubbed his eyes with his huge hands, still holding the cigar between his fingers; then he said Hans Castorp must excuse him for this time. A berth for Joachim would of course be found, when he came his cousin should stick him into bed, without delay. So far as he, Behrens, was concerned he bore nobody any grudge, he would be ready to welcome home the prodigal and like a fond parent kill the fatted calf.

Hans Castorp telegraphed. He spread the news of his cousin’s return, and all those who had been the young man’s friends were glad and sorry and both quite sincerely; for his clean and chivalrous personality had been universally approved, and there was a sort of unspoken feeling that Joachim had been the best of the lot up here. We mention no one in particular; but incline to think that in some quarters a certain satisfaction was felt in the knowledge that Joachim must give up the soldier’s career and return to the horizontal, and in all his immaculateness become one of them up here again. Frau Stöhr, of course, had had her ideas all along; time had now justified the rather unfeeling hints she threw out when Joachim went down, and she was not above saying I told you so. "Pretty rotten," she called it. She had known it for that from the first, and only hoped that Ziemssen by his pigheadedness had not made it putrid. Her choice of words was conditioned by sheer innate vulgarity. How much better it was to stop at one’s post, as she did; she too had her life down below, in Cannstadt, a husband and two children, but she could contain herself. . . No reply came to the telegram. Hans Castorp remained in ignorance of the hour or day of his cousin’s coming, and thus could not receive him at the station when, three days later, he and his mother simply arrived. Lieutenant Joachim, laughing and excited, burst upon his cousin in the evening rest-cure.

It had just begun. The same train brought them as had Hans Castorp, when years ago, years that had been neither long nor short, but timeless, very eventful yet ‘the sum of nothing,’ he had first come to this place. The time of year was the same too—one of the very first days of August. Joachim, as we said, went gaily into Hans Castorp’s room, or rather out of it into the loggia, with a rapid tread, and laughing, breathless, incoherent, greeted his cousin. He had put all that long way behind him, those miles of territory and that lake that was like a sea, and then wound high up the narrow passes—and there he stood, as though he had never been away. His cousin started up from the horizontal and greeted him with a shout and "Well, well, well!" His colour was fresh, thanks to his open-air life, or perhaps to the flush of travel. He had hurried directly to his cousin’s room without going first to his own, in order to greet his old-time companion, while his mother was putting herself to rights in the chamber assigned her. They were to eat in ten minutes, of course in the restaurant. Hans Castorp could surely have a little something more with them, or at least take a glass of wine. And Joachim pulled him over to number twenty-eight, where the scene was reminiscent of that long-ago evening when Hans Castorp arrived. Now it was Joachim, who, feverishly talking, washed up at the shining wash-hand-basin, while Hans Castorp looked on, surprised and in a way disappointed to see his cousin in mufti. He had always pictured him as an officer; but here he was in grey "uni," looking like everybody else. Joachim laughed, and said he was naïve. He had left his uniform at home, of course. It was not such a simple matter with a uniform—you couldn’t wear it just any place. "Oh, thanks awfully," said Hans Castorp. But Joachim seemed unaware of any offence in his own remark and went on, asking about matters and things in the Berghof, not only without the least touch of condescension, but even rather moved by the home-coming. Then Frau Ziemssen appeared through the door connecting their two rooms, and greeted her nephew in a way some people have on these occasions; namely, as though pleasurably surprised to find him here. She spoke with subdued melancholy, in part caused by fatigue, in part with reference to Joachim’s state—and they went down to dinner.

Louisa Ziemssen had the same gentle and beautiful dark eyes as Joachim. Her hair, that was quite as black, but mingled now with many threads of grey, was confined by a nearly invisible net; an arrangement characteristic of the mild and measured composure of her personality, which was simple, and at the same time dignified and pleasing. Hans Castorp felt no surprise to see that she was puzzled, even a little put out, by Joachim’s liveliness, his rapid breathing and headlong talk, which were probably foreign to his manner either at home or on the journey, besides giving the lie to his actual condition. For herself she was impressed with the sadness of this return, and would have found a subdued bearing more suitable. How could she enter into Joachim’s turbulent emotions, due in part to the sensation that he was come home, which for the moment outweighed all else, and in part to the stimulus of the incomparably light, empty, yet kindling air he was once breathing? All that was totally dark to her. "My poor lad," she thought, as she watched him and his cousin abandoned to mirth, telling each other a hundred anecdotes, asking each other a hundred questions, throwing themselves back in their chairs with peals of laughter. "Children, children!" she protested more than once; and finally levelled a mild reproof at behaviour which might rather have gladdened her heart: "Why, Joachim, I have not seen you like this for many a long day. It seems as though you needed to come back here to be as you were on the day of your promotion." No more was needed to quench Joachim’s lively mood. He turned completely round, fell silent and ate none of the sweet, though it was most toothsome, a chocolate soufflé with whipped cream. Hans Castorp did what he could in his cousin’s stead, though his own hearty dinner was only an hour behind him. Joachim looked up no more—obviously because his eyes were full of tears.

Such a result was as far as possible from Frau Ziemssen’s intention. It was really more for decorum’s sake that she had tried to introduce a little sobriety into the mood of her son, not realizing that precisely the middle course, the golden mean, was impossible up here, and only a choice of extremes offered. When she saw him break down, she seemed not far from tears herself, and most grateful to her nephew for his gallant efforts to redress the balance of the situation. Yes, he said, Joachim would find there had been changes in the population of the Berghof, there were new people, but on the other hand, some that had gone away were come back again. For instance, the great-aunt and her charges sat once more at Frau Stöhr’s table, and Marusja laughed as much as ever.

Joachim said nothing. But Frau Ziemssen was thereby reminded that they had chanced to meet someone who sent greetings, which she must deliver while she thought of it. It was in a restaurant in Munich, where they had spent a day between two night journeys. A lady—a not unsympathetic person, though unaccompanied, and with rather too level brows—had come up to their table to greet Joachim. She had been a patient up here, Joachim would know—

"Frau Chauchat," Joachim said, in a low voice. She was spending some time in a cure in the Allgäu, and intended to go to Spain in the winter. She sent greetings.

Hans Castorp was no raw youth, he had control over the nerves that might have made the blood rush to or leave his face. He said: "Oh, so she has emerged from behind the Caucasus again, has she? And she is going to Spain?"

The lady had mentioned a place in the Pyrenees. A pretty, or at least a charming woman. Pleasant voice, pretty gestures. But free manners, slack, Frau Ziemssen thought. "She spoke to us as though we were old friends, told about herself, asked questions, though it seems Joachim had never actually known her. I thought it rather odd."

"That is the East—and the illness," replied Hans Castorp. "One mustn’t try to measure her by humanistic standards." He thought he remembered that she had intended to make a journey into Spain. H’m, Spain. That country too lay remote from the humanistic mean, though on the side of austerity rather than of softness. There it was not lack but excess of form that obtained; death itself was in the guise of form, not dissolution—black, refined, sanguinary, Inquisition, stiff ruff, Loyola, the Escurial, et cetera—h’m, yes, it was interesting; he wondered what Frau Chauchat would say to Spain. She’d probably get over banging doors—and perhaps a combination of the two extremes would bring her closer to the humane mean. Yet something pretty awful, terroristic, might come to pass if the East went to Spain. . .

No, he neither paled nor flushed; but the impression the news had made upon him betrayed itself none the less; on such talk as this nothing but perplexed silence could supervene. Joachim, of course, was less taken aback than his mother, being acquainted from aforetime with his cousin’s mental volatility up here. But a great perturbation showed in Frau Ziemssen’s eyes, as though her nephew had uttered some gross impropriety; and after a painful pause she broke up the gathering by rising from table, with a phrase or so intended to gloze over the situation. Before they separated, Hans Castorp told them that Behrens’s order was for Joachim to remain in bed at least on the morrow, or until he had come to examine him. The rest would be decided later. Soon the three relatives lay each in his room, with the door open to the freshness of the summer night in this altitude, and each with his thoughts: Hans Castorp’s were chiefly concerned with Frau Chauchat’s return, to be expected within six months’ time.

So this was young Joachim’s home-coming—for a little after-cure. That way of putting it had obviously been the one given out down below, and it passed current here too, even Hofrat Behrens taking it up, though the first thing he did was to sentence Joachim to four weeks in the "caboose" by way of repairing the most obvious damage, acclimatizing him anew, and putting his house in order as far as temperature was concerned. He was careful to avoid setting any limit for the "after-cure." Frau Ziemssen, sensible, discerning, never very sanguine save at Joachim’s bedside, mentioned the autumn, perhaps October, as the terminus, and Behrens acquiesced, at least to the extent of saying that anyhow they would be further on then than they were now. Frau Ziemssen liked him immensely. His bearing toward her was courtly; he called her "my dearest lady," looking deferentially down upon her with his bloodshot eyes; and he talked such extravagant corps-student jargon that despite her depression she always had to laugh. "I know he is in the best of hands," she said; and after a week’s stay went back to Hamburg, as Joachim had no need of care, and his cousin was always with him.

"Set your heart at rest," Hans Castorp said to Joachim, sitting by his bed in number twenty-eight. "You’ll get off by the autumn, the old ‘un has more or less committed himself to that. You can look forward to it as a terminus—October. In that month some people go to Spain, and you can go back to your bandera, to distinguish yourself ex supererogatione. . ."

It became his daily task to console his cousin for the disappointment of missing the manoeuvres, which were beginning in these August days. Joachim could think of nothing else, and expressed the greatest self-contempt at this cursed slackness that had come over him in the last minute.

"Rebellio carnis," Hans Castorp said. "What can you do about it? The bravest officer can do nothing—even St. Anthony had his little experiences. Good Lord, don’t the manoeuvres come every year—and surely you know how time flies up here. You haven’t been gone long enough not to get back into step quite easily, and before you can turn round your little after-cure will be over."

But the refreshment of his sense of time, caused by Joachim’s stay in the valley, had been so considerable that he could not help looking forward with dread to the next four weeks. Everybody, it is true, did his best to make time light for him; the sympathy felt on all hands for the clean personality of the young officer expressed itself in many visits. Settembrini came, was very affectionate and charming, and called Joachim Capitana, instead of Lieutenant as before. Naphta too visited him, and all the old acquaintances in the house availed themselves of a free quarter-hour to sit by his bed, repeat the phrase about the little after-cure, and hear his news. The ladies were Stöhr, Levi, Iltis and Kleefeld, the gentlemen Ferge, Wehsal, and others. They even brought him flowers. When the four weeks were up he left his bed, the fever being so far brought under control that it would not harm him to move about. He began taking his meals in the dining-room, at his cousin’s table, sitting between him and the brewer’s wife, Frau Magnus, opposite Herr Magnus, the place that had once been Uncle James’s, and for a few days Frau Ziemssen’s as well.

Thus the young people began to live once more side by side. Yes, to make it all even more as it had been, Mrs. Macdonald breathed her last, with the picture of her little son in her hand, and her room, next his cousin’s, reverted to Joachim, after it had been thoroughly freed of bacteria by means of H2CO. More exact, indeed, it was to say that Joachim now lived next door to Hans Castorp, instead of the reverse: the latter was now the old inhabitant, and his cousin shared his existence only provisionally and temporarily. Joachim stuck stiffly by the October terminus—though his nervous system refused to some extent to lend itself to the humanistic norm, and prevented a compensatory radiation of heat.

The cousins resumed their visits to Settembrini and Naphta and their walks with those two devoted opponents. When they were joined by A. K. Ferge and Wehsal, which often happened, they formed a group of six, and before this considerable audience the two opposed spirits carried on an endless duel, which we could not reproduce in any fullness without losing ourselves, as it did daily, in an infinitude of despair. Hans Castorp chose to regard his own poor soul as the object of their dialectic rivalry. He had learned from Naphta that Settembrini was a Freemason, which fact impressed him as much as Settembrini’s earlier statement that Naphta was a Jesuit. He was quite absurdly surprised to hear that there still existed such things as Freemasons; and diligently plied the terrorist with questions about the origin and significance of this curious body, which in a few years would celebrate its two-hundredth birthday. When Settembrini spoke behind his back of Naphta and his intellectual tendencies, it was always on an appealing note of warning, with a hint that the subject had more than a little of the diabolic about it. But when Naphta did the same, he made unaffectedly merry over the sphere which the other represented, and gave Hans Castorp to understand that the things for which Settembrini fought were all of them dead issues; free-thought and bourgeois enlightenment were the pathetic delusions of yesterday, though prone to the self-deception which made them a laughing-stock: namely, that they were still full of revolutionary life. Said Naphta: "Dear me, his grandfather was a carbonaro—in other words a charcoal-burner. From him he gets the charcoal-burner’s faith in reason, freedom, human progress, the whole box of tricks belonging to the classicistic-humanistic virtue-ideology. You see, what perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, permanence of matter. We must admit that this disparity would be enough to excuse the spirit’s lack of interest in reality, for the rule is that it has sickened long before of the ferments that bring revolution in their train. In very truth, dead spirit is more repulsive to the living than dead matter, than granite for example, which makes no claim to be alive. Such granite, the relic of an ancient reality left so far behind by the spirit that it refuses any longer to associate with it the conception of reality, continues a sluggish existence, and by its bald and dull continuance prevents futility from becoming aware that it is futile. I am speaking in general terms, but you will know how to apply my words to that humanistic free-thought which imagines itself to be still in a heroic attitude of resistance to authority and domination. Ah, and the catastrophes, by virtue of which it thinks to manifest its vitality, the ever-delayed spectacular triumphs at which it is preparing to assist, and thinks one day to celebrate! The living spirit would die of ennui at the bare thought of these, were it not aware that from such catastrophes it alone can emerge as the victor, welding as it does the elements of the old and the new to create the true revolution.—How is your cousin to-day, Hans Castorp? You know what profound sympathy I feel for him."

"Thanks, Herr Naphta. Everyone seems to feel the same, such a good lad as he is. Even Herr Settembrini admits him very much into his good graces, despite his dislike of a sort of terrorism there is in Joachim’s profession. And now I hear Herr Settembrini is a Mason! Imagine! I must say that gives me to think. It sets his personality in a new light, and clarifies certain things for me. Does he go about putting his foot at the right angle and shaking hands with a particular grip? I have never seen anything—"

"Our worthy third-degree friend has probably got beyond such childishness," Naphta thought. "I imagine the lodges have curtailed their rites a good deal, in response to the lamentable arid Philistinism of our time. They would probably blush for the ceremonial of former periods as an extravagant mummery, and not without reason, for it would be absurd to present their atheistic republicanism in the guise of a mystery. I don’t know with what species of horrors they may have tested Herr Settembrini’s constancy; they may have led him blindfold through dark passages, and made him wait in gloomy vaults before the hall of the conclave, full of mirrored lights, burst upon his eyes. They may have solemnly catechized him, menaced his bare breast with swords to the accompaniment of a death’s-head and three tapers. You must ask himself; but I fear you will get small satisfaction, for even if the procedure was much tamer than this, in any case he will have been sworn to silence."

"Sworn? To silence? They do that too, then?"

"Certainly. Silence and obedience."

"Obedience too. But listen, Professor, it seems to me then, he has no occasion to stick at the terrorism in my cousin’s profession. Silence, and obedience! I could never have believed a free-thinker like Herr Settembrini would submit to such out-and-out Spanish conditions and vows. I perceive that Freemasonry has something quite military and Jesuitical about it."

"And your perceptions are perfectly correct," Naphta responded. "Your divining-rod twitches, and knocks. The idea of the society is rooted in and inseparably bound up with the absolute. By consequence, it is terroristic; that is to say, anti-liberal. It lifts the burden from the individual conscience, and consecrates in the name of the Absolute every means even to bloodshed, even to crime. There is some support for the view that the vows of the brotherhood were once symbolically sealed in blood. A brotherhood can never be purely contemplative. By its very nature it must be executive, must organize. You probably do not know that the founder of the Illuminati, a society which for a long time was nearly identified with Freemasonry, was a former member of the Society of Jesus?"

"No, that is certainly news to me."

"Adam Weishaupt formed his secret benevolent order entirely upon the model of the Society of Jesus. He himself was a Mason, and the most reputable lodge members of the time were Illuminati. I am speaking of the second half of the eighteenth century, which Settembrini would not hesitate to characterize as the period of the degeneration of his fraternity. Actually it was the period of its highest flower, as of all secret societies in general, a time when Masonry attained to a higher life, of which it was later ‘purged’ by men of the stamp of our friend of humanity here. In that time he would certainly have belonged to those who reproached it with Jesuitry and obscurantism."

"Were there grounds for the reproach?"

"Yes—if you choose to call it that. The shallow free-thinking of the day was of that opinion. It was the period when the Fathers of our faith sought to animate the society by breathing into it Catholic-hierarchical ideas—at that time there was actually a Jesuit lodge of Freemasonry at Clermont, in France. And it was the time when Rosicrucianism made its entrance into the lodges, that remarkable brotherhood, which, you will note, was a peculiar union of purely rational ideas of political and social improvement and a millennial programme, with elements distinctly oriental, Indian and Arabic philosophy and magical nature-lore. The reform and revision of the lodges which then took place was in the direction of strict observance in a definitely irrational and mystical, magical-alchemical sense, to which the Scottish Rite owes its existence. These are degrees of knighthood which were added to the old military ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master; upper ranks which issued in the hieratical, and were full of Rosicrucian mysticism. There ensued a sort of casting-back to certain spiritual and knightly orders which existed in the Middle Ages, for instance the Templars, you know, who took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Even to-day there is an upper degree in Freemasonry which bears the title ‘Grand Duke of Jerusalem.’ "

"It’s all news to me, Herr Naphta. But I’m getting to know Herr Settembrini’s tricks. ‘Grand Duke of Jerusalem’—that’s not bad, not bad at all. You ought to call him that some time, by way of a joke. The other day he called you ‘doctor angelicus.’ Why not take your revenge?"

"Oh, there are a host more such titles in the upper reaches of the Knights Templars. There are a Past Grand Master, a Knight of the East, a Grand High-priest—the thirty-first degree is called Noble Prince of the Royal Mysteries. You observe that all these names have reference to oriental mysticism. The reappearance of the Templars, indeed, means nothing else than the entrance of such conceptions, the presence of irrational ferments in a world given over to rational-utilitarian ideas of social improvement. This it was which lent Freemasonry a new brilliance and charm, and explains the great number of recruits to it at that period of its history. It drew to itself all the elements which were weary of the rationalistic twaddle of the century, and thirsting for a stronger draught of life. The success of the order was such that the Philistine complained of it for estranging men from domestic happiness and destroying their reverence for women."

"Then it is not surprising that Herr Settembrini does not love to be reminded of the golden age of his order."

"No, he does not love to be reminded that there was a time when it drew upon its head all the hatred felt by free-thinkers, atheists, and encyclopædists for the whole complex of Church, Catholicism, monk, Middle Ages—you heard that the Masons were accused of obscurantism—"

"Why? I should be glad to hear why, more precisely."

"I will tell you. The Strict Observance meant the broadening and deepening of the traditions of the order, it meant referring its historical origin back to the cabalistic world, the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages. The higher degrees of Freemasonry were initiates of the ‘physica et mystica,’ the representatives of a magic natural science, they were in the main great alchemists."

"I shall have to put on my thinking-cap and try to recall what alchemy is—generally speaking, I mean. Alchemy: transmuting into gold, the philosopher’s stone, aurum potabile."

"In the popular mind, yes. More informedly put, it was purification, refinement, metamorphosis, transubstantiation, into a higher state, of course; the lapis philosophorum, the male-female product of suiphur and mercury, the res bina, the double-sexed prima materia, was no more, and no less, than the principle of levitation, of the upward impulse due to the working of influences from without. Instruction in magic, if you like."

Hans Castorp was silent. He glanced slantwise upward, and blinked.

"The primary symbol of alchemic transmutation," Naphta said, "was par excellence the sepulchre."

"The grave?"

"Yes, the place of corruption. It comprehends all hermetics, all alchemy, it is nothing else than the receptacle, the well-guarded crystal retort wherein the material is compressed to its final transformation and purification."

"Hermetics—what a lovely word, Herr Naphta! I’ve always liked the word hermetic. It sounds like magicking, and has all sorts of vague and extended associations. You must excuse my speaking of such a thing, but it reminds me of the conserve jars that our housekeeper in Hamburg—Schalleen, we call her, without any Miss or Mrs.—keeps in her larder. She has rows of them on her shelves, air-tight glasses full of fruit and meat and all sorts of things. They stand there maybe a whole year—you open them as you need them and the contents are as fresh as on the day they were put up, you can eat them just as they are. To be sure, that isn’t alchemy or purification, it is simple conserving, hence the word conserve. The magic part of it lies in the fact that the stuff that is conserved is withdrawn from the effects of time, it is hermetically sealed from time, time passes it by, it stands there on its shelf shut away from time. Well, that’s enough about the conserve jars. It hasn’t much to do with the subject. Pardon me, you were going to enlighten me further."

"Only if you wish me to do so. The learner must be of dauntless courage and athirst for knowledge, to speak in the style of our theme. The grave, the sepulchre, has always been the emblem of initiation into the society. The neophyte coveting admission to the mysteries must always preserve undaunted courage in the face of their terrors; it is the purpose of the Order that he should be tested in them, led down into and made to linger among them, and later fetched up from them by the hand of an unknown Brother. Hence the winding passages, the dark vaults, through which the novice is made to wander; the black cloth with which the Hall of the Strict Observance was hung, the cult of the sarcophagus, which played so important a rôle in the ceremonial of meetings and initiations. The path of mysteries and purification was encompassed by dangers, it led through the pangs of death, through the kingdom of dissolution; and the learner, the neophyte, is youth itself, thirsting after the miracles of life, clamouring to be quickened to a demonic capacity of experience, and led by shrouded forms which are the shadowing-forth of the mystery."

"Thank you so much, Professor Naphta. That is splendid. That is what the teaching of hermetics is like, then; it can’t hurt me to have heard something about it too."

"The less so that it is a guide to the ultimate; to the absolute recognition of the transcendental, and therewith to our end and aim. The alchemistic ritual of the lodges, in later centuries, led many a noble and inquiring spirit to that end—to which I need give no name, for it cannot have escaped you that the successive degrees of the Scottish Rite were only a surrogate, a substitute of the Hierarchy, that the alchemistic learning of the Master-Mason fulfilled itself in the mystery of transubstantiation, and that the hidden guidance which the lodge vouchsafed to its pupils has its prototype just as plainly in the means of grace, as the symbolic mummeries of lodge ceremonial have theirs in the liturgical and architectural symbolism of our Holy Catholic Church."

"Ah, indeed!"

"But even that is not all. I have already suggested that the derivation of the lodge from that craftsmanly and honourable masonic guild is only a historical extension. The Strict Observance invested it with a much deeper human basis. The secrets of the lodge have, in common with certain mysteries of our Church, the clearest connexion with the ceremonial mysteries and ritual excesses of primitive man. I refer, so far as the Church is concerned, to the love-feast, the sacramental enjoyment of body and blood; as for the lodge—"

"One moment. One moment for a marginal note. Even in the strict communion to which my cousin belongs, they have so-called love-feasts. He has often written to me about them. I suppose they are very respectable affairs—except possibly they get a little drunk, but nothing like what it is at the corps-students’—"

"As for the lodge, however, I am thinking of the cult of the sepulchre, to whom I referred you before. In both cases it has to do with a symbolism of the ultimate, with elements of orgiastic primitive religion, with wild sacrificial rites by night, to the honour of dying and transforming, death, metamorphosis, resurrection. You will recall that the mysteries of Isis, and the Eleusinian mysteries too, were served by night, and in caverns. In Freemasonry there are present a host of Egyptian survivals, and there were, among the secret societies, some that called themselves Eleusinian. There were lodges that held feasts of Eleusinian mysteries and aphrodistic rites which finally did introduce the female element; feasts of roses, to which reference is made in the three blue roses on the Masonic apron, and which often passed over into the bacchantic."

"What’s this, what’s this I hear, Professor Naphta? All this Freemasonry? And I must reconcile with it all my ideas of our enlightened Herr Settembrini?"

"You would do him very great injustice if you imagined he knew anything about it. I told you that he, or his like, purified the lodge of all the elements of higher life. They humanized it, they modernized it. God save the mark! They rescued it from false gods and restored it to usefulness, reason and progress, for making war upon princes and priests, in short for social amelioration. In it they once more discuss nature, virtue, moderation, the fatherland. In a word, it is a god-forsaken bourgeoisiedom, in the form of a club."

"What a pity! Too bad about the feasts of roses! I mean to ask Settembrini if he hears anything about them nowadays."

"The noble knight of the T-square!" scoffed Naphta. "You must remember that it has been no easy matter for him to get admitted inside the gates of the temple of humanity. He is as poor as a church-mouse, and they not only demand the higher, the humanistic culture—save the mark—but also one must belong to the possessing classes, to be able to stand the dues and entrance fees. Culture and possessions—there is the bourgeoisie for you! There you have the pillars of the liberal world-republic."

"In any case," laughed Hans Castorp, "we have it all right before our eyes."

"And yet," Naphta added, after a pause, "I would counsel you not to take this man and what he stands for as altogether a laughing matter; since we are on the subject, let me warn you to be on your guard. The insipid is not synonymous with the harmless. Stupidity is not necessarily free from suspicion. These people have watered their wine, that was once such a fiery draught, but the idea of the brotherhood itself remains strong enough to stand a good deal of water. It preserves the remnant of a fruitful mystery, and there is as little doubt that the lodge mixes in politics, as that there is more to see in our amiable Herr Settembrini than just his simple self, and that powers stand behind him, whose representative and emissary he is."

"An emissary?"

"That is, a proselyter, a seeker of souls."

"And what kind of emissary are you, may I ask?" Hans Castorp thought. Aloud he said: "Thank you, Professor Naphta. I am genuinely grateful for your advice and warning. What do you think? Suppose I go a storey higher—in so far as one can speak of a storey—and touch up our disguised lodge-brother a bit? The learner must be of dauntless courage, athirst for knowledge. But cautious too, of course. It’s well to take precautions when one deals with emissaries."

He might with impunity seek further information from Herr Settembrini, for that gentleman could not reproach Naphta with any lack of discretion; indeed, he had never made any secret of his membership in the harmonious band of brothers. The Rivista della Massoneria lay open upon his table; Hans Castorp had simply never noticed it. Enlightened by Naphta, he led the conversation round to the subject of the "kingly art," as though Settembrini’s connexion with it had never been a matter of doubt, and he met with very little reticence. True, there were points upon which the literary man was silent. When they were touched upon he closed his lips with ostentation, being obviously bound by those terroristic vows of which Naphta had spoken; this when Hans Castorp encroached on trade secrets, as it were, outward forms of the organization, and his own position within it. But otherwise he was almost too expansive; and held forth at length, giving the seeker after information a considerable picture of the extent of the society, which spread almost all over the world, with twenty thousand lodges and a hundred and fifty grand lodges, in round numbers, and had penetrated civilizations like Haiti and the Negro republic of Liberia. Also he had much to tell of the great names whose bearers had been Masons: Voltaire, Lafayette and Napoleon, Franklin and Washington, Mazzini and Garibaldi; among the living, the King of England, and besides him, a large group of people in whose hands lay the conduct of the nations of Europe, members of governments and parliaments.

Hans Castorp expressed respect, but no surprise. It was the same with the student corps, he said. The members of these held together in after life, and they looked after their people well, so that it was hard to get into any important official hierarchy if you had not been a corps-student. For that reason it was perhaps not so logical of Herr Settembrini to argue that the membership of those important personages in the society was flattering to it; since on the other hand it might be assumed that the occupation of so many important posts by Freemasons gave evidence of the power of the society, which certainly mixed in politics, perhaps more than Herr Settembrini was willing to admit.

Settembrini smiled, fanning himself with the magazine, which he still held in his hand. Did Hans Castorp intend to put him a case? Had he in mind to betray him into incautious utterances upon the political character, the essentially political spirit of the lodge? "Useless furberia, Engineer. We admit that we are political, admit it openly, unreservedly. We care nothing for the odium that is bound up with the word in the eyes of certain fools—they are at home in your own country, Engineer, and almost nowhere else. The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics."

"That’s flat."

"I know there are people who think well to refer to the originally unpolitical nature of Masonic thought. But these people play with words, and set limits which have long since become imaginary and without significance. In the first place, the Spanish lodges, at least, have had a political coloration from the very first."

"I should imagine so."

"You can imagine very little, Engineer. Do not fancy that you are inclined to profound thought; the best you can do is to be receptive and to take to heart—I say this in your own interest, as well as in the interest of your country and of Europe—

what I am about to impress upon you: namely, that in the second place, Masonic thought was never unpolitical, at any time—could not be. If it believed itself to be so, it was in error as to its own essential characteristics. What are we? Master-builders and builders on a building. The purpose of all is one, the good of the whole the fundamental tenet of the brotherhood. What is this good, what is this building? It is the true social structure, the perfecting of humanity, the new Jerusalem. But tell me which that is, political or non-political? The social problem, the problem of our common existence, is in itself politics, politics through and through, and nothing else than politics. Whoever devotes himself to the cause—and he does not deserve the name of man that would withhold himself from that devotion—belongs to politics, foreign and domestic; he understands that the art of the Freemason is the art of government—"

"Art of—"

"That Illuminist Freemasonry had the regent degree—"

"That is fine, Herr Settembrini: art of government, degree of regent—I like all that very much. But tell me something: are you Christians, you Masons?"

"Perché?"

"I beg your pardon, I will ask another question; I’ll put it more simply and generally. Do you believe in God?"

"I will reply to you. But why do you ask?"

"I was not trying to draw you, just now. But there is a story in the Bible of the Pharisees testing our Lord with a Roman coin, and he tells them to render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. It seemed to me this distinction is the distinction between the political and the non-political. If there is a God, then there is also this distinction. Do Freemasons believe in God?"

"I bound myself to answer. You are speaking of a unity which we seek to bring about, but which to-day, alas, does not exist. If it comes to exist—and I repeat that we labour with silent assiduity upon this great task—then indeed the religious creed of the Freemason will be unanimous, and it will be ‘Écrasez l’infame!’ "

"Will that be obligatory? It would hardly be tolerant."

"The problem of tolerance, my dear Engineer, is rather too large for you to tackle. Do not forget that tolerance becomes crime, if extended to evil."

"God would be the evil?"

"Metaphysics is the evil. It is for no purpose but to put to sleep the energy which we should apply to the building of the temple of society. An example is afforded by the action of the Grand Orient of France a generation ago. He struck the name of God out of his writings. We Italians followed him."

"How Catholic!"

"In what sense do you—"

"I mean I find it enormously Catholic, to strike out God."

"What you wish to express is—"

"Nothing worth listening to, Herr Settembrini. Don’t pay too much attention to my prattle. It just struck me that atheism may be enormously Catholic, and as though one might strike out God merely the better to be Catholic."

Herr Settembrini allowed a pause to ensue; but it was clear that he only did so out of pedagogic deliberation. He answered, after a measured silence: "Engineer, I am far from wishing to wound or mortify you in your adhesion to Protestantism. We were speaking of tolerance; it is surely superfluous for me to emphasize that far from mere toleration, I feel for Protestantism, as the historical opponent of the enslavement of knowledge, the most profound admiration. The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity. Without question. But after what you have just said I do not doubt you will understand me when I reply that after all it is only one side of the question, and there is another. Protestantism conceals elements—the very personality of your reformer concealed elements.—I am thinking of elements of quiescent beatitude, hypnotic abstraction, which are not European, but foreign to the laws of life that govern our busy continent. Look at him, this Luther! Observe the portraits we have, in early and later life. What sort of cranial formation is that, what cheek-bones, what a singular emplacement of the eye! My friend, that is Asia! I should be surprised, I should be greatly surprised, if there were not Wendish, Slavic, Sarmatic elements in play there. And if the mighty apparition of this man—for who would deny that it was mighty?—had not flung a fatal preponderance into one of the two scales which in your country hang so dangerously even, into the scale of the East, so that the other even to-day is still outweighed and flies up in the air—"

Herr Settembrini walked from the humanistic folding-desk in the little window, where he had been standing, up to the table, nearer his pupil, who was sitting on the cot against the wall, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

"Caro!" Herr Settembrini said. "Caro amico! There will be decisions to make, decisions of unspeakable importance for the happiness and the future of Europe; it will fall to your country to decide, in her soul the decision will be consummated. Placed as she is between East and West, she will have to choose, she will have to decide finally and consciously between the two spheres. You are young, you will have a share in this decision, it is your duty to influence it. And therefore let us thank the fates that brought you up here to this horrible region, thus giving me opportunity to work upon your plastic youth with my not unpractised, not wholly flagging eloquence, and make you feel the responsibility which—which your country has in the face of civilization—"

Hans Castorp sat, his chin in his hand. He looked out of the mansard window, and in his simple blue eyes there was a certain obstinacy. He was silent.

"You are silent," Herr Settembrini said, moved. "You and your native land, you preserve a silence which seems to cover a reservation—and which gives one no hint of what goes on in your depths. You do not love the Word, or you have it not, or you are chary with it to unfriendliness. The articulate world does not know where it is with you. My friend, that is perilous. Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates. The suspicion lies to hand that you will seek to break your silence with deeds. You will ask Cousin Giacomo" (Settembrini had taken to calling Joachim Giacomo, for convenience sake) "to step out in front of your silence,

‘And thrice he smites, and thrice his blows
Deal death, before him fly his foes. . .’ "

Hans Castorp began to laugh, and Herr Settembrini smiled too, satisfied for the moment with the effect of his plastic words.

"Good," he said. "Very good, let us laugh, you will always find me ready to do that. Laughter, says the classic, is a sunbeam of the soul. We have wandered from the point, we have taken up questions which, I admit, have much to do with the difficulties encountered by us in our preparatory efforts to establish a Masonic world-federation." Herr Settembrini went on to speak of the idea of this world-federation, which had originated in Hungary, the hoped-for realization of which was destined to consummate the world-power of Freemasonry. Casually he displayed letters from foreign potentates of the society: one from the very hand of the Swiss Grand Master, Brother Quartier la Tente, of the thirty-third degree; and discussed the proposal to make Esperanto the official language of the body. His zeal elevated him to the sphere of policy; he directed his gaze hither and yon, estimated the prospects of revolutionary thought in his own country, in Spain, in Portugal. He was in contact by letter, it appeared, with persons who were at the head of the Portuguese lodge, and there, without much doubt, things were ripening to a decisive event. Hans Castorp would think of him when, before very long, it came to an upset in that country. Hans Castorp promised to do so.

It should be remarked that these Masonic conferences between the pupil and the two mentors took place separated in time, before Joachim’s return. The following conversation, however, occurred during his second stay up here, and in his presence, nine weeks after he arrived, at the beginning of October. Hans Castorp retained a clear memory of this gathering in the autumn sunshine, before the Kurhaus in the Platz, where they sat sipping cooling drinks; for it was just at that time he began to feel a secret concern about Joachim—though its ground was not one usually thought very important, being merely a sore throat and hoarseness, quite harmless afflictions, which yet appeared to Hans Castorp in a somewhat peculiar light—the same light, one might say, that he saw in the depths of Joachim’s eyes. Those eyes had always, we know, been large and mild, but to-day, precisely on this very day, had seemed to grow larger and deeper, with a musing, yes, we must even say an ominous expression, together with the above-mentioned light. It would have been false to say that Hans Castorp did not like the look of them; he did, only that it disquieted him. And, in short, one cannot, by their very nature, speak of these impressions otherwise than vaguely and confusedly. As for the talk—a controversy, of course, between Settembrini and Naphta—it was an affair of itself, only slightly connected with those earlier and private utterances on the subject of Freemasonry. Ferge and Wehsal were there, and the interest was general, although not all the parties were equal to the situation. Herr Ferge, for instance, was quite definitely not. But a dispute carried on as though it were a matter of life and death, yet with all the polished elegance of a full-dress debate—as were, indeed, all engagements between Settembrini and Naphta—such a dispute is in itself highly diverting to hear, even for those who understand but little of it or its bearing. Strangers sitting near them listened in amaze to the exchange of words and were chained to the spot by the passion and brilliance displayed.

All this took place, as we said, in front of the Kurhaus, after tea. The four guests from the Berghof had met Settembrini there, and by chance Naphta also. They sat together about a little metal table, with various drinks and soda, or anise and vermouth. Naphta, who regularly took his tea here, had ordered wine and cake, obviously a reminiscence from his student days. Joachim moistened his aching throat with a lemonade made of fresh lemons, very strong and sour; it had an astringent effect which soothed the ache. Settembrini was drinking sugar-and-water through a straw, with a gusto that made it the rarest of beverages.

He jested: "What do I hear, Engineer? What are these rumours that fly about? Your Beatrice is returning? Your guide through all the nine circles of Paradise? I must hope that you will not entirely scorn the friendly hand of your Virgil. Our ecclesiastic here will tell you that the world of the medio evo is not complete when Franciscan mysticism is not counterbalanced by the opposite pole of Thomistic cognition." They laughed over these erudite jests, and looked at Hans Castorp, who laughed back, raising his glass to his "Virgil." But it is unbelievable what endless academic strife arose in the next hour out of Herr Settembrini’s high-sounding but harmless remark. Naphta, having been in a manner challenged, straightway girded up his loins, and fell foul of the Latin poet, whom Settembrini was known to admire to the point of idolatry, even placing him higher than Homer, while Naphta had more than once expressed contempt for him and for the whole of Latin poetry, and did not fail to seize this opportunity to do so again. It was a complaisant limitation of the great Dante, due to his period, that he took so seriously this mediocre versifier and in his poem assigned him so high a rôle—even though Herr Ludovico did ascribe rather too freemasonly a meaning to it. But what was there to this courtly laureate and lickspittle of the Julian house, this urban litterateur and eulogist, who was without a spark of creative genius, whose soul, if he had one, was second-hand, and who was certainly no poet, but a Frenchman in an Augustan full-bottomed wig!

Herr Settembrini had no doubt that the speaker would find ways and means of reconciling his scorn of the golden age of Rome with his office as teacher of Latin. Yet he, Settembrini, could not avoid calling attention to the serious conflict in which such judgments involved Herr Naphta with his own favourite centuries, when Virgil was not only not despised, but his greatness was recognized in the most naïve way; namely, by making a seer and magician of him.

It was vain, Naphta responded, for Herr Settembrini to invoke the simplicity of those primitive times, the victorious element which preserved its creative vitality even while endowing that which it conquered with a demonic quality. But in truth, the Fathers of the early Church were never weary of warning the faithful against the lies of the old philosophers and poets, in particular of cautioning them not to be corrupted by the voluptuous eloquence of Virgil; and to-day, at a time when again an age is declining to its fall, and we see the approaching dawn of another proletarian morn, the time is ripe to feel with them. Finally, in order to leave nothing unanswered, Herr Ludovico might be assured that he, the speaker, did his duty by the small civilian task which Herr Settembrini had been so kind as to mention, with all due reservatio mentalis; though there was indeed a certain irony in his conforming to the standards of a classic and rhetorical educational system, whose survival the most optimistic observer could not predicate for more than a few decades.

[admin]

Part 9 of 9

"You studied them," Settembrini cried out, "you studied them till you sweated, those old poets and philosophers; you have sought to make their priceless heritage your own, as you used the building-stones of their monuments to erect your churches. For well you knew that your proletarian soul could of its own strength bring no art form to birth; and you hoped to defeat antiquity with its own weapons. So it will ever be, history will repeat itself. Your crude immaturity must go to school to the power which you would like to persuade yourself and others to despise; for without discipline you could not endure in the sight of man, and there is but one kind, that which you call the bourgeois, but which is in reality the human." Herr Settembrini went on. A matter of decades? The end of the humanistic principles of education? Only politeness prevented him from a burst of laughter both unaffected and mocking. A Europe that knew how to preserve its immortal treasures would serenely pass over any proletarian apocalypse of which it here and there pleased people to dream and resume its ordered programme of the reign of classic reason.

It was, Naphta rejoined bitingly, just this ordered programme about which Herr Settembrini seemed not to be very well informed. That which he took for granted was precisely that which was being called in question: namely, whether the Mediterranean, classic, humanistic tradition was bound up with humanity and so coexistent with it, or whether it was but the intellectual garb and appurtenance of a bourgeois liberal age, with which it would perish. History would decide this; he would recommend Hen Settembrini not to lull himself in the secure triumph of his Latin conservatism.

All his hearers, but with especial bitterness Herr Settembrini himself, listened to this brazen characterization on the part of little Naphta. He, Herr Settembrini, the avowed servant of progress, a conservative! He twisted violently his flowing mous-taches, and seeking for a return blow left the enemy time for a further onslaught upon the classical ideal in education, the rhetorical and literary spirit which characterized the whole of the European educational system, and its splenetic partisanship of the formal and grammatical, which was nothing else than an accessory to the interests of bourgeois class supremacy, and had long been an object of ridicule to the people. They had no idea what an utter joke our doctors’ degrees and the whole system fostered by our educational mandarins had become in the minds of the proletariat; as also the public school system, which was the instrument of the domination of the middle classes, maintained in the delusion that popular education is merely watered scholarship. The sort of training and education required by the people in their struggle against the crumbling bourgeois kingdom they had long known how to find elsewhere than in these governmental establishments for compulsory training; one day all the world would realize that our system, which had developed out of the cloister school of the Middle Ages, was a ridiculous bureaucracy and anachronism, that nobody in the world any longer owes his education to his schooling, and that a free and public instruction through lectures, exhibitions, cinematographs, and so forth was vastly to be preferred to any school course.

Herr Settembrini said that Naphta had served up to their audience a mixture of revolution and obscurantism, in which, however, the obscurantist element outweighed the other, to an unsavoury extent. Herr Settembrini was pleased to see his concern for the enlightenment of the people, but his pleasure was marred by the fear that what really actuated Herr Naphta was an instinctive tendency to involve both people and world in analphabetic darkness.

Naphta smiled. "That bogy!" he said. Herr Settembrini believed himself to have uttered a word of terror, to have displayed the head of the gorgon, quite convinced that everybody would promptly pale at the sight. He, Naphta, regretted to disappoint his partner in the dialogue, but the fact was, the sight of the humanistic horror of illiteracy simply made him laugh. Verily, one must be a classical literary man, a précieux, a seicentist, a Marinist, a Jack-of-all-trades of the estilo culto, to attach such exaggerated educational value to knowing how to write, as to imagine that where that knowledge was lacking a night of the spirit must reign. Did Herr Settembrini remember that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, could neither read nor write? It had been thought blameworthy, in the Germany of that time, to send a boy to school unless he was to be a priest; and this popular-aristocratic scorn of the literary arts was always the sign of fundamental nobility of soul; the literary person, true son of humanism and bourgeoisiedom, could always, certainly, read and write—whereas the noble, the soldier, and the people never could, or barely—but he could do and understand nothing else in all the wide world, being nothing but a Latinistic windbag, who had power over language, but left life to people who were fit for it. Which was the reason why the literary person always conceived of politics as an empty bag of wind; that is, of rhetoric and "literature," which in political jargon were called radicalism and democracy—and so on, and so on.

But now Herr Settembrini sprang into the breach. His opponent, he cried, was rash to expose his preference for the intense barbarism of certain epochs, and to pour scorn upon a love of literary form—without which no human nature was possible or thinkable, never had been and never would be! Fundamental nobility? Only misanthropy could so characterize the absence of letters, a rude and tongue-tied materialism. Rather you could only rightly so characterize a certain lordly luxuriance, the generosità which displayed itself in ascribing to form a human value independent of its content—the cult of speech as an art for art’s sake, the inheritance bequeathed by the Græco-Roman culture, which the humanists, the uomini letterati, had restored, restored at least to the Romance nations, and which was the source of every later significant idealism, even political. "Yes, my dear sir! That which you would disparage as a divorce between literature and life is nothing but a higher unity in the diadem of the beautiful; I am under no apprehension as to the side on which high-hearted youth will choose to fight, in a struggle where the opposing camps are literature and barbarism."

Hans Castorp had been only half listening to the dialogue, being preoccupied by the fundamental nobility of the soldierly representative then present—or rather by the strange new expression in his eyes. He started slightly as he felt himself challenged by Herr Settembrini’s last words, and made such a face as he had the time the humanist would have solemnly constrained him to a choice between East and West: a face full of reserve and obstinacy. He said nothing. They forced everything to an issue, these two—as perhaps one must when one differed—and wrangled bitterly over extremes, whereas it seemed to him, Hans Castorp, as though somewhere between two intolerable positions, between bombastic humanism and analphabetic barbarism, must be something which one might personally call the human. He did not express his thought, for fear of irritating one or other of them; but, wrapped in his reserve, listened to one goading the other on, each leading the other from hundredthly to thousandthly, and all because of Herr Settembrini’s original little joke about Virgil.

The Italian would not give over; he brandished the word, he made it prevail. He threw himself into the fray as the defender of literary genius, celebrated the history of the written word, from the moment when man, yearning to give permanency to his knowledge or emotions, engraved word-symbols upon stone. He spoke of the Egyptian god Thoth, identical with the thrice-renowned Hermes of Hellenism; who was honoured as the inventor of writing, protector of libraries, and inciter to all literary efforts. He bent the knee metaphorically before that Trismegistus, the humanistic Hermes, master of the palæstra, to whom humanity owed the great gift of the literary word and agonistic rhetoric—which incited Hans Castorp to the remark that this Egyptian person had apparently been a politician, playing in the grand style the same rôle as that Herr Brunetto Latini who had sharpened the wits of the Florentines, taught them the art of language and how to guide their State according to the rules of politics. Naphta put in that Herr Settembrini was slightly disingenuous: his picture of Thoth-Trismegistus had a good deal of the reality smoothed away. He had been, in fact, an ape, moon and soul deity, a peacock with a crescent moon on his head, and in his Hermes aspect, a god of death and of the dead, a soul-compeller and tutelary soul-guide, of whom late antiquity made an arch-enchanter, and the cabalistic Middle Ages the Father of hermetic alchemy.

Hans Castorp’s brain reeled. Here was blue-mantled death masquerading as a humanistic orator; and when one sought to gaze at closer range upon this pedagogic and literary god, benevolent to man, one discovered a squatting ape-faced figure, with the sign of night and magic on its brow. He waved it away with one hand, which he laid over his eyes. But upon that darkness wherein he sought refuge from complete bewilderment, there broke the voice of Herr Settembrini, continuing to chant the praises of literature. All greatness, both contemplative and active, he said, had been bound up with it from all time; and mentioned Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, named the Prussian Frederick and other heroes, even Lasalle and Moltke. It disturbed him not a whit that Naphta referred him to China, where such a witless idolatry of the alphabet obtained as had never been the case in any other land, and where one might become a field-marshal if one could draw the forty thousand word-symbols of the language—a standard, one would think, directly after a humanistic heart!—Ah, Naphta well knew—pitiable scoffer though he was!—that it was a matter not of drawing symbols but of literature as a human impulse, of its spirit, which was Spirit itself, the miraculous conjunction of analysis and form. This it was that awakened the understanding of all things human, that operated to weaken and dissolve silly prejudices and convictions, that brought about the civilizing, elevating, and betterment of the human race. While it developed extreme ethical sensitiveness and refinement, far from being fanatical, it preached honest doubt, fairness, tolerance. The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint—in this high key was Herr Settembnni’s apologetic pitched. But alas, his antagonist was not struck dumb—on the contrary, he straightway set about with malicious, brilliant criticism to undermine the humanist’s panegyric. He declared himself to the party of conservation and of life, and struck out against the decadent spirit which hid itself behind all that seraphic cant. The marvellous conjunction to which Herr Settembrini referred, in a voice all quavering with emotion, was nothing but a deception and juggling, for the form which the literary spirit prided itself on uniting with the principle of examination and division was only an apparent, a lying form, no true, adequate, natural, living form. These so-called reformers of humanity did indeed take the words purification and sanctification in their mouths, but what they really meant and intended was the emasculation, the phlebotomy of life. Yes, their theory and moving spirit were in violation of life; and he who would destroy passion, that man desired nothing less than pure nothingness—pure, at least, in the sense that pure was the only adjective which could be applied to nothingness. It was just here that Herr Settembrini showed himself for that which he was: namely, the man of progress, liberalism, and middle-class revolution. For the progress was pure nihilism, the liberal citizen was quite precisely the advocate of nothingness and the Devil; yes, he denied God, the conservatively and positively Absolute, by swearing to the devilish anti-Absolute. And yet with his deadly pacificism thought himself monstrously pious. But he was anything else than pious, he was a traitor to life, before whose stern inquisition and Vehmgericht he deserved to be put to the question—and so forth.

Thus did Naphta astutely go about to turn Herr Settembrini’s pæan the wrong way and represent himself as the incarnation of the cherishing severity of love—so that it was again impossible to distinguish which side was in the right, where God stood and where the Devil, where death and where life. Our readers will believe us that his antagonist insisted on giving him tit for tat, paying in the newest-minted coin, receiving in his turn another just as good; thus the conversation proceeded, on the lines laid down. But Hans Castorp attended no longer. Joachim had remarked that he believed he had a feverish cold, and did not quite know what to do about it, as colds were not "reçus" up here. The duellists had paid him no heed, but Hans Castorp kept, as we have said, an eye on his cousin, and so got up, in the midst of a speech, relying on Ferge and Wehsal to display adequate thirst for further pedagogic disputation.

On the way home he and Joachim agreed that it was best to invoke the official channels in matters like colds and sore throats. In other words, they would ask the bathing-master to see the Oberin, in order that something might be done to relieve the sufferer. It was well done. That very evening, directly after dinner, Adriatica knocked at Joachim’s door, Hans Castorp being present, and asked what were the wishes of the young officer.

"Sore throat? Hoarseness?" she repeated; "what sort of antics are these, young ‘un?" and undertook to pierce him with her eye. It was not Joachim’s fault that their glances failed to meet, hers swerved aside. Yet she would continue to try, though experience must have taught her it was not given her to succeed in the undertaking. With the help of a sort of metal shoehorn from her pocket, she looked at the patient’s tonsils, Hans Castorp standing by with the lamp. Rising on tiptoes to peer into Joachim’s throat, she asked: "Tell me, young ‘un, do you ever swallow the wrong way?"

What could he answer? For the moment, while she peered into his throat, nothing; but even after she was done, he was at a loss. Naturally, in the course of his life, when eating or drinking he had swallowed the wrong way; but everybody did the same, and surely that could not be what she meant. He asked why: he could not remember the last time.

It was no matter, she said. It had merely occurred to her. He had taken a cold, she added, to the astonishment of the cousins, for colds were in the ordinary way taboo. In any case, it would be necessary to have the Hofrat’s laryngeal mirror for further examination of the throat. She left some formamint, and a bandage with a gutta-percha sheath, to be used for a moist compress during the night. Joachim availed himself of both, finding they gave relief. He continued to use them; but his hoarseness persisted, it even grew worse in the next few days, though the sore throat largely disappeared.

His fever proved imaginary—at least the thermometer gave no more than the usual result, that, namely, which together with the results of the Hofrat’s examinations kept our ambitious Joachim here for his little after-cure, instead of letting him return to the colours. The October terminus had slipped by and no man named it, neither the Hofrat nor the cousins between themselves. They let it pass, in silence, with downcast eyes. From the diagnosis which Behrens dictated at the monthly examinations to the psychically expert assistant sitting at his table, and from the results shown by the photographic plate, it was all too clear that though there had once been a departure, of which the best that could be said was that it had been decidedly risky, this time there was nothing for it but iron self-discipline, until such a day as entire immunity might be won, for the fulfilment of the oath and the service of the flat-land.

Such was the decree with which, one and all, they silently pretended to be in agreement. But the truth was, neither of the cousins was sure the other believed it; if they did not meet each other’s eyes, it was because of the doubt both pairs of eyes sought to hide, and because the eyes had met before. That, of course, often happened, after the colloquy on the subject of literature, during which Hans Castorp had first remarked the strange new light and ominous expression in the depths of his cousin’s eyes. And happened once at table. Joachim suddenly choked violently, and could scarcely get his breath. While he gasped behind his serviette, and his neighbour, Frau Magnus, performed the time-honoured service of slapping him on the back, the cousins’ eyes met, in a way more alarming to Hans Castorp than the incident itself, that being something that might happen to anyone. Then Joachim closed his eyes and left the table, his face covered with his serviette, to cough himself out in the garden.

Ten minutes later he came back, smiling, if rather pale, and with excuses on his lips for the disturbance. He went on again with his hearty meal, and no one thought afterwards even of wasting a word on so trifling an episode. But some days later, at second breakfast, the thing occurred again; this time there was no meeting of eyes, at least on the part of the cousins, for Hans Castorp bent over his plate and went on eating without seeming to notice. But after the meal they spoke of it, and Joachim freed his mind on the subject of that damned female who had put the thing in his head with her silly question and somehow or other set a spell on him. Yes, it was obviously a case of suggestion, Hans Castorp agreed, and as such rather amusing, despite its annoying side. And Joachim, having named it, seemed able to counteract the spell; he was careful at table, and did not choke any more frequently than persons not bewitched. Not until nine or ten days later did it occur again—where there was simply nothing to be said.

But he was summoned out of his order to Rhadamanthus. The Oberin had so arranged it, probably with good sense; since there was a laryngeal mirror at hand, it was well to make use of that clever little device for the relief of the obstinate hoarseness or even total lack of voice from which he suffered for hours at a time, and the sore throat, which recurred whenever he omitted to keep his throat passages soft by various salivating medicaments. Not to mention, indeed, that though he choked as other people do, and no more frequently, this was only by dint of the very greatest care, which hindered him at his meals, and made him late in finishing.

The Hofrat, then, mirrored, reflected, peered deep into Joachim’s throat, and when he had done, Joachim went straight to his cousin’s balcony to give him the result. He said, half whispering, as it was the hour for the afternoon cure, that it had been bothersome, and tickled a good deal. Behrens had rambled on about an inflamed condition, and said the throat must be painted every day; they were to begin to-morrow, as the medicament had to be put up. An inflamed condition, then, and it was to be painted. Hans Castorp, his head full of far-reaching associations, having to do for instance with the lame concierge, and that lady who had gone about for a week holding her ear, and need not have troubled herself, would have liked to put more questions. But he refrained, inwardly resolving to see the Hofrat privately, and said to Joachim he was glad the trouble was being treated, and that the Hofrat had taken it personally in hand. He was top-hole in his line, he would soon put it right. Joachim nodded without looking at him, turned and went into his balcony.

What troubled our honour-loving Joachim? In these last days his eyes had grown so shy, so uncertain in their glance. Fräulein von Mylendonk’s efforts had suffered shipwreck only the other day against his mild dark gaze; but now had she tried, she might even have succeeded. For Joachim avoided meeting people’s eyes; and even when he met them, as he sometimes must notwithstanding, for his cousin looked at him a good deal, Hans Castorp was not greatly the wiser. He sat now in his balcony much cast down, and tempted to see the chief upon the spot, but refrained, for Joachim must have heard him get up; it was better to wait, and see Behrens later in the afternoon.

That proved impossible. It seemed he simply could not lay eyes on the Hofrat; either that evening, or in the course of the two following days. It was difficult to prevent Joachim from noticing; but that could not fully account for the fact that Rhadamanthus was not to be brought to bay. Hans Castorp sought and asked for him through the house; was sent here or there where he would be certain to find him, and found only that he had gone. Behrens was present at a meal, indeed, but sat far off Hans Castorp, at the "bad" Russian table, and disappeared before the sweet. Once or twice, seeing him stand in talk with Krokowski, with the Oberin, with a patient, on the stairs or in the passage, Hans Castorp thought he had him, and only needed to wait. But chancing to turn away his eyes a minute, he looked back to find him vanished.

On the fourth day he succeeded. From his balcony he saw his prey below, giving directions to the gardener; slipped forth of his covers and ran down. He saw the Hofrat’s back, as he was paddling in the direction of his own house, set off at a smart pace after him, even took the liberty of calling, but the Hofrat paid no heed. At last, breathless, he caught up his quarry and brought him to a stand.

"What are you doing here?" demanded the Hofrat, and goggled his eyes. "Shall I get an extra-special copy of the house rules printed for you? Seems to me this is the rest period. Your curve and your x-ray don’t justify you in playing the independent gentleman, so far as I know. I ought to set up a scarecrow to gobble up people who have the cheek to come down and walk about in the garden at this hour."

"Herr Hofrat, I absolutely must speak to you for a moment."

"I’ve been observing for some days that you thought you had. You’ve been laying traps for me, as though I were a female and the object of your passion. What do you want?"

"It is on account of my cousin, Herr Hofrat. Pardon me—he is coming to you to have his throat painted.—I feel sure the thing is all right—it is quite harmless, isn’t it, if you will pardon my asking?"

"You are always for having everything harmless, Castorp—that is the nature of you. You rather like mixing in matters that are not harmless, but you treat them as though they were and think to find favour in the eyes of God and man. You’re a bit of a hypocrite, Castorp, and a bit of a coward; your cousin puts it very euphemistically when he calls you a civilian."

"That may all be, Herr Hofrat. The weaknesses of my character are beyond question. But that is just the point—at the moment they are not in question: what I’ve been trying for three days to ask you is—"

"That I’ll wrap up the dose in jelly for you—isn’t that it? You want to badger me into abetting your damned hypocrisy, so that you can sleep in comfort, while other people have to wake and watch and grin and bear it."

"But, Herr Hofrat, why are you so hard on me? I actually want to—"

"Yes, yes, hardness isn’t your line, I know. Your cousin’s a different sort, quite another pair of shoes. He knows. He knows—and keeps quiet. Understand? He doesn’t go about hanging on to people’s coat-tails and asking them to help him pull the wool over his eyes! He knows what he did, and what he risked, and he is the kind to bite his teeth together on it. That’s the kind of thing a man, that is a man, can do: unfortunately it isn’t in the line of a fascinating biped like yourself. But I warn you, Castorp, if you are going to give way to your civilian feelings and set up a howl, I’ll simply show you the door. What we need now is a man. You understand?"

Hans Castorp was silent. Nowadays he too turned mottled when he changed colour, being too copper-tinted to grow really pale. At last, with twitching lips, he said: "Thank you, Herr Hofrat. I understand now—at least, I feel sure you would not speak to me so—so solemnly if it weren’t serious with Joachim. But I dislike scenes very much—you do me injustice there. If the thing requires judgment and discretion, I think I can promise you I shall not be wanting."

"You set great store by your cousin, Hans Castorp?" asked the Hofrat, as suddenly he gripped the young man’s hand, and looked at him with his blue, blood-veined, protruding eyes, under their white eyelashes.

"What is there to say, Herr Hofrat? A near relation, and—and my good friend and only companion up here"—Hans Castorp gulped and turned one foot about on its toes as he stood.

The Hofrat hastened to let go his hand.

"Well, then be as good to him as you can, these next six or eight weeks," he said. "Just turn yourself loose and give free rein to your native harmlessness. That will help him the most. I’ll be here too, to help make things comfortable, and befitting the officer and gentleman he is."

"It’s the larynx, isn’t it?" Hans Castorp asked, inclining his head in answer.

"Laryngea," Behrens assented. "Breaking down fast. The mucous membrane of the trachea looks bad too. Maybe yelling commands in the service set up a locus minoris resistentiæ there. But we must always be ready for such little diversions. Not much hope, my lad; really none at all, I suppose. Of course, we’ll try everything that’s good and costs money."

"The mother," began Hans Castorp.

"Later on, later on. No hurry. Use your discretion, and see that she comes into the picture at the right time. And now get back where you belong. He will miss you—it can’t be pleasant for him to feel himself discussed behind his back."

Daily Joachim went to be painted, in the fine autumn weather. In white flannel trousers and blue blazer, he would come back late from his treatment, neat and military; would enter the dining-room, make his little bow, courteous and composed, in excuse of his tardiness, and sit down to his meal, which was specially prepared, for he no longer ate the regular food, on account of the danger of choking; he received minces and broths. His table-mates grasped quickly the state of affairs. They returned his greetings with unusual warmth, and addressed him as Lieutenant. When he was not there they asked after him of Hans Castorp; and even people from the other tables came up to inquire. Frau Stöhr wrung her hands, and exhausted herself in vulgar lamentations. But Hans Castorp replied only in monosyllables, admitted the seriousness of the affair, yet to a certain extent made light of it, in the honourable design not to betray his cousin untimely.

Daily they took their walks together, thrice covering the prescribed distance, to which the Hofrat had now strictly limited Joachim, in order to husband his strength. Hans Castorp walked at his cousin’s left. They had been used to walk as chance had it, but now he held consistently to the left. They did not talk much; uttered the phrases proper to the daily routine, and little else. On the subject that lay between them there is nothing to say, especially between people of traditional reserve, who could scarcely bring themselves to utter each other’s first names. Sometimes it did well up insistently in Hans Castorp’s civilian breast, as though it must out. But it could not: the painful, rebellious feeling sank away again, and he was still.

With bowed head Joachim walked beside him. He gazed earthwards—as though looking at the earth. How strange! He walked so comme il faut, so much as he had always been; he greeted people with his wonted courtliness, he set store, as always, by his outward appearance and bienséance—and he belonged to the earth. Well, thither we all belong, soon or late. But so young; with such joyous goodwill to his chosen service—to belong to the earth so young, is bitter. Bitterer, harder to understand, for him who knew and walked beside him than for the devoted one himself, whose knowledge, even though he knew and kept silent, was academic in its nature, was in a way less his own concern than his companion’s. It is a fact that a man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Whether he realizes it or not, he illustrates the pertinence of the adage: So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not. In other words, between death and us there is no rapport; it is something with which we have nothing to do—and only incidentally the world and nature. And that is why all living creatures can contemplate it with composure, with indifference, unconcern, with egoistic irresponsibility. Of this state of mind Hans Castorp observed much in his cousin, in these weeks; and comprehended that Joachim, knowing, yet did not know; that it was not hard for him to preserve a decorous silence on the subject, for the reason that his inward relation to it was, so to speak, merely theoretic. So far as it came into practical consideration with him, it was regulated by a healthy sense of the fitness of things, which made him as little likely to discuss it as he was to talk about other functional indecencies of which we are all aware, by which our life is conditioned, but on the subject of which we yet preserve bienséance.

So they walked and kept silence between them upon all such unseemly natural concerns. Even the complaints which at first Joachim had so frequently and loudly voiced at missing the manoeuvres, and neglecting the service in general, he voiced no more. Yet why, despite all his unconscious bearing, did that sad, shrinking look creep back into his gentle eyes? And that flickering glance—over which the Frau Directress, had she tried, might now have triumphed? Was it because he saw how big-eyed and hollow-cheeked he was grown?—for so he was, in these few weeks, much more than during his whole stay down below, and his bronze skin turned from day to day more brown and leathery. As though circumstances which to Herr Albin were but an op-portunity to enjoy the boundless advantages of shame, were to the young officer a source of chagrin and self-contempt. Before what, before whom, did his once frank and open glance seek to swerve aside? How strange is this shame of the living creature that slips away into a corner to die, convinced that he may not expect from outward nature any reverence or regard for his suffering and death! Convinced, and rightly: a troop of swallows on exultant wing will give no heed to a maimed comrade, nay, they will even peck him with their beaks. But the example is from the lower reaches of nature. Hans Castorp’s heart indeed, his humanly pitying and loving heart, swelled in his breast to see this dark, instinctive shame rise in Joachim’s eyes. He walked on his left side expressly; and when there came a little rise to surmount, would help his cousin, who had grown by now unsteady on his feet; would put his arm across his shoulder; overcoming his shyness, would even leave it there a while, until Joachim shook it off pettishly and said: "Don’t, it looks silly—as if we were drunk, coming along like that."

But there came a moment when Hans Castorp saw in a different light the sadness in Joachim’s eyes. It was when the latter received the order to keep his bed, at the beginning of November. The snow lay deep. By then he found it too difficult to eat even the minces and porridge they prepared for him, as every second mouthful went the wrong way. The change to liquid nourishment was indicated, and Behrens sent him to bed, in order to conserve his strength. The evening before, the last evening he was about, Hans Castorp saw him talking to Marusja, Marusja of the ready laugh, the orange-scented handkerchief, the bosom fair to outward eye. After dinner, during the social half-hour, Hans Castorp came out of the music-room to look for his cousin, and saw him by the tiled stove, near Marusja’s rocking-chair, which Joachim held tipped back with his left arm, so that she looked up in his face from a half-lying posture, with her round brown eyes, and he bent over her, talking softly and disjointedly. She smiled every now and then, and shrugged her shoulders, nervously, deprecatingly.

The onlooker hastened to withdraw; though he saw that he was not the only one to watch the little scene, unobserved or at least unheeded by Joachim. The sight shook Hans Castorp more than any sign of failing strength he had seen all these weeks in his cousin: Joachim in conversation, sunk in conversation, with Marusja, at whose table he had sat so long without exchanging a syllable with her, but in reason and honour kept his eyes cast down, and sternly refused to be aware of her person or existence, though he went all mottled whenever she was mentioned in his presence—"Ah, yes, he is a lost man," thought Hans Castorp, and sat down on a chair in the music-room, to give Joachim time for this one farewell indulgence.

From now on, Joachim took up the horizontal. Hans Castorp sitting in his excellent chair wrote to Louisa Ziemssen. To his earlier reports he added that Joachim had now taken to his bed; that he had said nothing, but the wish to have his mother by him could be read in his eyes, and Hofrat Behrens agreed that it would be well. He put it all with great delicacy. And Louisa Ziemssen, as was not surprising, took the earliest possible train and came to her son. Three days after the humanely worded letter went off she arrived, and Hans Castorp engaged a sleigh and fetched her from the station in a snow-storm. As the train drew in, he took care to compose his features, that the mother might not receive a shock, nor on the other hand be lulled by false hopes.

How often had such meetings taken place on this platform, how often this arrival in haste, this anguished searching of features as the traveller descended from the train! Frau Ziemssen gave the impression that she had run all the way from Hamburg on foot. Flushed of face, she drew Hans Castorp’s hand between hers to her breast, and looking at him as though she feared to hear, put her hurried, almost shamefaced queries. He parried them by thanking her for having come so quickly, saying it was splendid to have her, and how delighted Joachim would be. Yes, he was in bed now; it was too bad, but had to be, on account of the liquid diet, which must naturally weaken him to some extent. If necessary, of course, there were other expedients—for instance, artificial nourishment. But she would see for herself.

She saw; and beside her, Hans Castorp saw too. Up to that moment he had not been fully aware of the changes the last weeks had made in Joachim—the young have not much eye for such things. But now he looked with the eyes of the newly arrived mother, as though he had not seen Joachim for weeks; and realized clearly and distinctly, as doubtless she did too, and beyond a doubt Joachim himself clearest of all, that he was a moribundus. He took Frau Ziemssen’s hand and held it—his own was as yellow and wasted as his face. And his ears, because of the emaciation, stood out almost disfiguringly. Yet despite this blemish, the one affliction of his young days, and despite the austere expression illness set upon his features, their manly beauty seemed intensified—the lips, perhaps, beneath the small black moustache, looked a shade too full by contrast with the hollow cheek. Two lengthwise folds had graven themselves in the yellow surface of his brow; his eyes, deep in their bony sockets, were larger and more beautiful than ever, Hans Castorp never tired of looking at them. For all the distressed and wavering look was gone, now Joachim lay in bed; there was only that earlier light in their dark, quiet depths—yes, there was the "ominous" look as well. He did not smile, he took his mother’s hand and whispered her a welcome. He had not even smiled on her entrance; and this immobility of his mien said all.

Louisa Ziemssen was a brave soul. She did not dissolve in grief at sight of her dear son. The almost invisible net that confined and kept in order her hair was symbolic of her composed and self-controlled bearing. Phlegmatic, energetic, as they all were on her native heath, she took in hand the care of Joachim, spurred on by his appearance to engage all her maternal powers in the struggle, and persuaded that if anything could save him, it must be her watchful and devoted care. Not to spare herself, but only from a sense of style, did she consent to call in a nurse. It was Sister Berta, Alfreda Schildknecht, who came with her little black bag. Frau Ziemssen’s zeal left her little to do, by day or night, and she had plenty of time to stand in the corridor, with her eye-glass ribbon behind her ear, and keep an eye to all that went on. She was a prosaic soul, this Protestant sister. Once, when she was alone in the room with Hans Castorp and the patient, who was not asleep but lay on his back with open eyes, she actually made the remark: "Who would have dreamed I should ever come to tend the last illness of either of you?"

Hans Castorp, horrified, shook his fist at her, but she scarcely grasped his meaning; she was far from any thought of sparing Joachim’s feelings, and too matter-of-fact to dream that anyone, least of all the next of kin, could be in any doubt as to the character and issue of this illness. "There," she said, and held a handkerchief wet with cologne to Joachim’s nose, "take a little comfort, Herr Leutnant, do!" And after all, she was right: there could be little sense, at this hour, in keeping up the pretence. It was more for the sake of the tonic effect that Frau Ziemssen still spoke to her son, in a brisk, encouraging voice, of his recovery. For two things were unmistakable: first, that Joachim was approaching death in full consciousness, and second, that he consented to his state, and was in harmony with himself. Only in the last week—the end of November—did cardiac weakness show itself. There were hours when he grew confused, no longer realized his condition, and spoke of an early return to the colours, spoke even of the autumn manoeuvres, which he imagined were still going on. Then it was Hofrat Behrens ceased to hold out any hope, and told the relatives the end was a matter of hours. The condition is as regular as it is pathetic, this forgetful, credulous self-deception, that attacks even masculine spirits at the hour when the lethal process nears its culmination. As impersonal, as true to type, as independent of the individual consciousness as the temptation to slumber that overpowers the man benumbed by cold, or the walking in circles of one who has lost his way. Hans Castorp’s grief and concern did not prevent him from objective observation of these phenonema, nor from making shrewd if baldly expressed remarks upon them in conversation with Naphta and Settembrini, when he reported to them on his cousin’s condition. He even drew upon himself a rebuke from Settembrini, for saying he thought the current conception in error which would have it that a philosophical credulity and belief that all is for the best is the mark of a sound nature, as pessimism and cynicism are of morbidity. For if this were true, it would not be precisely the hopeless final stage that displayed an optimism so abnormally rosy as to make the preceding depression seem by comparison a crassly healthy manifestation of life. He was glad at the same time to be able to tell his friends that though Rhadamanthus gave them no hope, yet the hopelessness was not of the most painful character, for he prophesied a gentle, painless end, despite Joachim’s blooming youth.

"Idyllic—affair of the heart, my dear lady," Behrens said, and held Louisa Ziemssen’s hand in his own two, the size of shovels, looking down at her with his goggling, watery, blood-shot eyes. "I’m tremendously glad it is taking such a gratifying course, and he doesn’t need to go through with oedema of the glottis or any indignity of that sort, he will be spared a lot of messing about. The heart is giving out rapidly, lucky for him and for us; we can do our duty with camphor injections and the like, without much chance of drawing things out. He will sleep a good deal at the end, and his dreams will be pleasant, I think I can promise you that; even if he shouldn’t go off in his sleep, still it will be a short crossing, he’ll scarcely notice, you may rely upon it. It’s so in the majority of cases, at bottom—I know what death is, I am an old retainer of his; and believe me, he’s overrated. Almost nothing to him. Of course, all kinds of beastliness can happen beforehand—but it isn’t fair to count those in, they are as living as life itself, and can just as well lead up to a cure. But about death—no one who came back from it could tell you anything, because we don’t realize it. We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and the end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that’s that."

Which was the Hofrat’s way of administering consolation. We may hope that the reasonable Frau Ziemssen drew comfort therefrom; his assurances, at least, were in a very large degree justified by the event. Joachim, in these days, slept many hours, out of weakness, and probably dreamed of the flat-land and the service and whatever else was pleasant to him to dream. When he roused, and they asked how he felt, he would answer a little incoherently, yet always that he felt well and happy. This though he had scarcely any pulse, and at the end could no longer feel the hypodermic needle. His body was insensitive, you might have burned or pinched the flesh, he was past feeling.

Great physical changes had taken place since the mother’s coming. Shaving had grown burdensome to him, for some eight or ten days it had not been done, and he had now a strong growth of beard, setting off with a black frame his waxen face and gentle eyes. It was the warrior’s beard, the beard of the soldier in the field; they all found it manly and becoming. But because of this beard Joachim had suddenly grown from a stripling to a ripe man—though perhaps not because of it alone. He was living fast, his life whirred away like the mechanism of a watch; he passed at a gallop through stages not granted him in time to reach; and in the last four-and-twenty hours became a grey old man. The cardiac weakness caused a facial swelling that gave the effect of strain, and made upon Hans Castorp the impression that dying must at the very least be a great effort, though of course Joachim, thanks to various sensory adjustments and a merciful narcosis of the system, was not aware of it. The puffing of the features was mostly about the lips; the inside of the mouth also seemed dry or semi-paralysed, making Joachim mumble like an old man—which annoyed him excessively. If he could only, he said thickly, get rid of it he would be quite all right, but it was a cursed nuisance.

In what sense he meant the "quite all right" was not clear—in fact, he showed the typical tendency to ambiguousness, made more than one remark of doubtful or double sense, seemed to know and yet not to; once, when it was very evident that a wave of the oncoming dissolution broke over him, he shook his head and said self-pityingly that he felt very bad, he had never felt so bad before.

After that he became austere, forbidding, even gruff; would not listen to any soothing fictions or pretence, but stared before him and made no reply. Louisa Ziemssen had sent for a young clergyman, who, to Hans Castorp’s regret, did not appear in a starched ruff, but wore bands instead. After he had prayed with Joachim, the patient assumed an official tone and air, and uttered his wishes in the form of short commands.

At six o’clock in the afternoon he began making a strange continuous movement with his right hand, with the chain bangle on the wrist: passing it across the bed-cover, at about the hips, lifting it as he drew it back and toward him, with a raking motion, as though he were gathering something in.

At seven o’clock he died; Alfreda Schildknecht was in the corridor, the mother and cousin were alone with him. He had sunk down in the bed, and curtly ordered them to prop him up. While Frau Ziemssen, with her arm about his shoulders, tried to do so, he said hurriedly that he must write out an application for an extension of his leave and hand it in at once; and even while he said this, the "short crossing" came to pass, as Hans Castorp, reverently watching in the light of the red-shaded table-lamp, quickly perceived. His gaze grew dim, the unconscious tension of the features relaxed, the strained and swollen look about the lips notably diminished; the beauty of early manhood visited once more our Joachim’s quiet brow, and all was over.

Louisa Ziemssen turned sobbing away; it was Hans Castorp who bent over the moveless, breathless form, closed the eyes with the tip of his ring-finger, and laid the hands together on the coverlet. Then he too stood and wept, tears ran down his cheeks, like those that had smarted the skin of the English officer of marines: those clear drops flowing in such bitter abundance every hour of our day all over our world, till in sheer poetic justice we have named the earth we live in after them; that alkaline, salty gland-secretion, which is pressed from our system by the nervous stress of acute pain, whether physical or mental. It contained, as Hans Castorp knew, a certain amount of mucin and albumen as well.

The Hofrat came, summoned by Sister Berta. He had been there a half-hour earlier, and given a camphor injection; had scarcely been absent for more than the moment of the "short crossing." "Ay," said he simply, "he has it behind him now," and lifted the stethoscope from Joachim’s breast. And he pressed both their hands, nodding his head; standing with them awhile by the bed, and looking into Joachim’s moveless visage, with the warrior beard. "Crazy young one," he said: jerking his head towards the recumbent form. "Crazy chap. Would force it, you know—of course, that’s the way of the service down there, all force, all compulsion—he joined the service while he was febrile, he took a life-and-death chance. Field of honour, you know—slipped away from us, and now he’s dead on the field. Honour was the death of him, and death—well, you might put it the other way round too. At any rate, he’s gone—‘had the honour to take his leave.’ A madman, a crazy chap." And he left, tall and stooped, his neck-bone very prominent.

It had been decided to take Joachim home; and House Berghof assumed the arrangements, doing all that was necessary or that could add to the dignity or stateliness of the occasion. Mother and cousin needed not to lift a finger. By next day Joachim lay in his silk dress-shirt, with flowers about him on the coverlet, looking, in the midst of all this white, more beautiful than immediately after death. Every trace of strain was gone from the features, they had composed themselves, growing cold, into a silent purity of form. Curling dark locks fell upon the yellowish brow, that seemed to be of some fine brittle stuff between wax and marble; through the crisp hair of the beard, the lips showed full and curling. An antique helmet would have become this head—as many of the guests remarked, who came to take last leave of Joachim.

Frau Stöhr, as she looked, wept with abandon. "A hero, he was a hero," cried she, and demanded that the Erotica be played at his grave.

"Be quiet," hissed Settembrini, at her side. He and Naphta were with her in the room. Greatly moved, with both hands he waved the onlookers toward the bed and summoned them to mourn with him. "Un giovanotto tanto simpatico, tanto stimabile," said he repeatedly.

And Naphta, without looking at him, or relaxing his contained manner, apparently could not refrain from saying, low and bitingly: "I am glad to see that despite your enthusiasm for freedom and progress, you have some feeling for serious things."

Settembrini pocketed the affront. Perhaps he felt conscious, under the circumstances of the moment, of the superiority of Naphta’s position over his own; may even have sought to balance this by the lively expression of his grief, especially when Leo Naphta further presumed on his advantage, while he had it, and sententiously added: "The mistake you literary men make is in thinking that only the spirit makes for virtue. It is nearer the truth to say that only where there is no spirit is there true virtue."

"Goodness," thought Hans Castorp, "but that was a Pythian remark! Made like that with the lips snapped together afterwards, it quite staggers one—for the moment, that is." In the afternoon the metallic coffin arrived. The removal of Joachim to this stately receptacle, decorated with lions’ heads and rings, was the sole affair of the man who came along with it, a black-clad functionary of the undertaking establishment which had the arrangements in hand. He wore a sort of short dress-coat, and the wedding-ring on his plebian hand had almost grown into the flesh. One inclined to feel that he exhaled an odour of death from his garments—pure prejudice, of course, and groundless. This specialist let it be known that all his spiriting had to be done behind the scenes, and a proper and dress-parade appearance presented to the surviving relatives. Hans Castorp felt fairly suspicious of the fellow and all his works. He assented to Frau Ziemssen’s withdrawal, but was not minded to be bowed from the scene himself. He stood by and lent a hand, grasping the figure under the shoulders and helping carry it over to the coffin, upon whose coverlet and tasselled cushions Joachim presently lay ensconced high and solemnly, among candelabra provided by the house.

On the next day but one appeared a phenomenon which determined Hans Castorp to take inward leave of that quiet form, to void the field and leave it to the professional guardian of the amenities: Joachim, whose expression had been so noble and serious, began now to smile in his warrior beard. Hans Castorp did not conceal from himself that this smile had in it the seeds of corruption; he knew in his heart that time was pressing. It was good that the coffin was now to be closed, the lid screwed on; that the hour for removal was at hand. Hans Castorp, laying aside traditional reserve, lightly touched with his lips the icy forehead of that which once was Joachim; and though conscious still of mistrustful sentiments toward the man behind the scenes, yet submissively followed Louisa Ziemssen from the room.

We let the curtain fall, for the last time but one. While it rustles down, let us take our stand in spirit with Hans Castorp on his lonely height, and gaze down with him upon a damp burial-ground in the flat-land; see the flash of a sword as it rises and falls, hear the word of command rapped out, and three salvoes, three fanatical salutes reverberating over Joachim Ziemssen’s root-pierced grave.