Chapter V: Soup-Everlasting (Part 5 of 7)
What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed —a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil — and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself. What was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point whence it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the domain of life seemed uncausated, or insufficiently causated, from that point on; but life itself seemed without antecedent. If there was anything that might be said about it, it was this: it must be so highly developed, structurally, that nothing even distantly related to it was present in the inorganic world. Between the protean amoeba and the vertebrate the difference was slight, unessential, as compared to that between the simplest living organism and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was inorganic. For death was only the logical negation of life; but between fife and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. They tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any the less deep or broad. Seeking for a connecting link, they had condescended to the
H osterous assumption of structureless living matter, unorganorganisms, which darted together of themselves in the albumen solution, like crystals in the mother-liquor; yet organic differentiation still remained at once condition and expression of all life. One could point to no form of life that did not owe its existence to procreation by parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of the depth of the sea, and great had been the jubilation — but the end of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for protoplasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a miracle — for life that built itself up out of, and fell in decay into, the same sort of matter as inorganic nature, would have been, happening of itself, miraculous — they were driven to believe in a spontaneous generation — that is, in the emergence of the organic from the inorganic — which was just as much of a miracle. Thus they went on, devising intermediate stages and transitions, assuming the existence of organisms which stood lower down than any yet known, but themselves had as forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to achieve life: primitive forms of which no one would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic size, and previous to whose hypothetic existence the synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place.
What then was fife? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-toexist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material — it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.
As he lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the bodily warmth preserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty night illumined by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its homy, scalelike regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation. Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its weight on one leg, the hip-bone stood out sharply under the flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent knee against the inside of the supporting leg, and poised the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired symmetry of its limbs and trunk. The acrid, steaming shadows of the arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic dark2 77
ness, just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly below. Under the impulsion of a central organ and of the motor nerves originating in the spinal marrow, chest and abdomen functioned, the peritoneal cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membrane of the respiratory canal, saturated with secretions, streamed out between the lips, after it had joined its oxygen to the haemoglobin of the blood in the air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework of bones — marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones, vertebrae — which with the addition of lime had developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong enough to support the body weight, with the capsules and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, its more than two hundred muscles, its central organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secretions; with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly complicated interior surface, communicating through the body-openings with the outer world — he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built up out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses and functions, separated, differentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth.
This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and selfnourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent with their essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic elements that the functions of some had become limited to sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others only understood how to change their shape or produce digestive secretions through contraction; others, again, were developed and functional to no other end than protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or reproduction. There were modifications of this organic plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the multitude of subordinate entities were only grouped in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living unit. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell colonies; he read about half-organisms, algae, whose single cells, enveloped in a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, which, if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to procreation. The act or fructification, the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding of every multiple-celled individual, as it did at the beginning of every row of generations of single elementary forms, and led back to itself. For this act was carried through many species which had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation; until a moment came when the non-sexually produced offspring found themselves once more constrained to a renewal of the copulative function, and the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent cells, the association of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle came full again when sex-cells, specially developed elements for the purpose of reproduction, had established themselves and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on afresh.
Our young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the organism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of conception, which the protoplasm of the outside of the ovum arched against its approach. There was no conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In some animals, the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within her; after which, bitten ofif and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who fol long had given it Greek and Latin names as an independent form 2 79
of life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and animalculists: the first of whom asserted that the egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human being, the male element being only the incitement to its growth; while the second saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed forth, to which the egg performed only the office of “ nourisher in life’s feast.” In the end they agreed to concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of which, after all, sprang from originally indistinguishable procreative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructined egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellae of the mucous membrane; saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close itself in to form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin the functions of receiving and digesting food. That was the gastrula, the protozoon, primeval form of all animal life, primeval form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and the inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved to be primitive organs out of whose foldings-in and -out, were developed the glands, the tissues, the sensory organs, the body processes. A strip of the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm, thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself into a nerve canal, became a spinal column, became the brain. And as the foetal slime condensed into fibrous connective tissue, into cartilage, the colloidal cells beginning to show gelatinous substance instead of mucin, he saw in certain places the connective tissue take lime and fat to itself out of the sera that washed it, and begin to form bone. Embryonic man squatted in a stooping posture, tailed, indistinguishable from embryonic pig; with enormous abdomen and stumpy, formless extremities, the facial mask bowed over the swollen paunch; the story of his growth seemed a grim, unflattering science, like the cursory record of a zoological family tree. For a while he had gillpockets like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable, contemplating the various stages of development through which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous development of the mucous membrane of the olfactory organs; his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part in the play of the features, and were much better adapted than ours for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a third, nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting the third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary trace, and
J which was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers from the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine, many molars, and sound-pouches on the lamyx the better to roar with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of the intestinal cavity.
Anatomy presented our investigator with charts of human limbs, skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons: those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm, the upper and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with which medicine, that subdivision of the humanities, had gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the development of which presented new points of view — among them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself reminded of his own field — or shall we say his former field? — the scientific calling which he had announced himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr. Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his arrival up here. In order to leam something — it had not much mattered what — he had learned in his technical school about statics, about supports capable of flexion, about loads, about construction as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature; but just as little might one say that they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in such a way that the static demands were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the demands made by draught and pressure upon it, can withstand the same weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible that, step for step with the formation of the solid exterior, the inner parts, which were mechanically superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The thigh-bone was a crane, in the construction of which organic nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic 28l
nature generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.
But with all this the achievements of the protoplasm remained unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it should understand itself. Most of the bio-chemical processes were not only unknown, it lay in their very nature that they should escape attention. Almost nothing was known of the structure or composition of the living unit called the “ cell.” What use was there in establishing the components of lifeless muscle, when the living did not let itself be chemically examined? The changes that took place when the rigor mortis set in were enough to make worthless all investigation. Nobody understood metabolism, nobody understood the true inwardness of the functioning of the nervous system. To what properties did the taste corpuscles owe their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of excitation of certain sensory nerves by odour-possessing substances? In what, indeed, the property of smell itself? The specific odours of man and beast consisted in the vaporization of certain unknown substances. The composition of the secretion called sweat was little understood. The glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals undoubtedly played an important role, but whose significance for the human species we were not in a position to explain. The physiological significance of important regions of the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to mention the vermiform appendix, which was a mystery; in rabbits it was regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of which there was nothing to say as to how it got in or renewed itself. But what about the white and grey substance which composed the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and the grey inlay of the pons V arolii? The substance composing the brain and marrow was so subject to disintegration, there was no hope whatever of determining its structure. What was it relieved the cortex of activity during slumber? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself — as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened oxidization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there not an increased expenditure of warmth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But such contraction took place only in the case of “ chills and fever,” for otherwise, in fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the central nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did not know how to define it.
But what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter helplessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as memory, or of that other more prolonged and astounding memory which we called the inheritance of acquired characteristics? Out of the question to get even a glimpse of any mechanical possibility of explication of such performances on the part of the cell-substance. The spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father was visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served together the next higher order of existence.
Those were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores — lying there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to make acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked himself excitedly, even after more light on the subject was forthcoming, how could their elementary nature be established? If they were living, they must be organic, since life depended upon organization. But if they were organized, then they could not be elementary, since an organism is not single but multiple. They were units within the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they were, then, however impossibly small they were, they must themselves be built up, organically built up, as a law of their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant by definition that it was built up out of smaller units which were subordinate; that is, organized with reference to a higher form. As long as division yielded organic units possessing the properties of life — assimilation and reproduction — no limits were set to it. As long as one spoke of living units, one could not correctly speak of elementary units, for the concept of unity carried with it in perpetuity the concept of subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no such thing as elementary life, in the sense of something that was already life, and yet elementary.
And still, though without logical existence, something of the kind must be eventually the case; for it was not possible to brush aside like that the idea of the original procreation, the rise of life out of what was not life. That gap which in exterior nature we vainly sought to close, that between living and dead matter, had its counterpart in nature’s organic existence, and must somehow either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late, division must yield “ units ” which, even though in composition, were not organized, and which mediated between life and absence of life; molecular groups, which represented the transition between vitalized organization and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the molecule, one stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic nature: the gulf between the material and the immaterial. For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was nowhere near large enough even to be spoken of as extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early, transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of energy, that it was scarcely possible yet — or, if it had been, was now no longer possible — to think of it as material, but rather as mean and border-line between material and immaterial. The problem of another original procreation arose, far more wild and mysterious than the organic: the primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the abyss between material and immaterial yawned as widely, pressed as importunately — yes, more importunately — to be closed, as that between organic and inorganic nature. There must be a chemistry of the immaterial, there must be combinations of the insubstantial, out of which sprang the material — the atoms might represent protozoa of material, by their nature substance and still not yet quite substance. Yet arrived at the ” not even small,” the measure slipped out of the hands; for ” not even small ” meant much the same as ” enormously large ”; and the step to the atom proved to be without exaggeration portentous in the highest degree. For at the very moment when one had assisted at the final division of matter, when one had divided it into the impossibly small, at that moment there suddenly appeared upon the norizon the astronomical cosmos!
The atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun; through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of light years, kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of the central body. And that was as little a mere comparison as it would be were one to call the body of any multiple-celled organism a “ cell state.” The city, the state, the social community regulated according to the principle of division of labour, not only might be compared to organic life, it actually reproduced its conditions. Thus in the inmost recesses of nature, as in an endless succession of mirrors, was reflected the macrocosm of the heavens, whose clusters, throngs, groups, and figures, paled by the brilliant moon, hung over the dazzling, frost-bound valley, above the head of our muffled adept. Was it too bold a thought that among the planets of the atomic solar system — those myriads and milky ways of solar systems which constituted matter — one or other of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies might find itself in a condition corresponding to that which made it possible for our earth to become the abode of life? For a young man already rather befuddled inwardly, suffering from abnormal skin-conditions, who was not without all and any experience in the realm of the illicit, it was a speculation which, far from being absurd, appeared so obvious as to leap to the eyes, highly evident, and bearing the stamp of logical truth. The “ smallness ” of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies would have been an objection irrelevant to the hypothesis; since the conception of large or small had ceased to be pertinent at the moment when the cosmic character of the “ smallest ” particle of matter had been revealed; while at the same time, the conceptions of “ outside ” and “ inside ” had also been shaken. The atom-world was an “ outside,” as, very probably, the earthly star on which we dwelt was, organically regarded, deeply “ inside.” Had not a researcher once, audaciously fanciful, referred to the “ beasts of the Milky Way,” cosmic monsters whose flesh, bone, and brain were built up out of solar systems? But in that case, Hans Castorp mused, then in the moment when one thought to have come to the end, it all began over again from the beginning! For then, in the very innermost of his nature, and in the inmost of that innermost, perhaps there was just himself, just Hans Castorp, again and a hundred times Hans Castorp, with burning face and stiffening fingers, lying muffled on a balcony, with a view across the moonlit, frost-nighted high valley, and probing, with an interest both humanistic and medical, into the life of the body!
He held a volume of pathological anatomy in the red ray from his table-lamp, and conned its text and numerous reproductions. He read of the existence of parasitic cell-juncture and of infectious tumours. These were forms of tissue — and very luxuriant forms too — produced by foreign cell-bodies in an organism which had proved receptive to them, and in some way or other — one must probably say perversely — had offered them peculiarly favourable conditions. It was not so much that the parasite took away nourishment from the surrounding tissues, as that, in the process of building up and breaking down which went on in it as in every other cell, it produced organic combinations which were extraordinarily toxic — undeniably destructive — to the cells where it had been entertained. They had found out how to isolate the toxin from a number of micro-organisms and produce it in concentrated form; and it was amazing to see what small doses of this substance, which simply belonged to a group of protein combinations, could, when introduced into the circulation of an animal, produce symptoms of acute poisoning and rapid degeneration. The outward sign of this inward decay was a growth of tissue, the pathological tumour, which was the reaction of the cells to the stimulus of the foreign bacilli. Tubercles developed, the size of a millet-seed, composed of cells resembling mucous membrane, among or within which the bacilli lodged; some of these were extraordinarily rich in protoplasm, very large, and full of nuclei. However, all this good living soon led to ruin; for the nuclei of these monster cells began to break down, the protoplasm they contained to be destroyed by coagulation, and further areas of tissue to be involved. They were attacked by inflammation, the neighbouring blood-vessels suffered by contagion. White blood-corpuscles were attracted to the seat of the evil; the breaking-down proceeded apace; and meanwhile the soluble toxins released by the bacteria had already poisoned the nerve-centres, the entire organization was in a state of high fever, and staggered — ■ so to speak with heaving bosom — toward dissolution.
Thus far pathology, the theory of disease, the accentuation of the physical through pain; yet, in so far as it was the accentuation of the physical, at the same time accentuation through desire. Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the recldess path of the spirit dishonoured; nothing but the automatic blush of matte? roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.
The books lay piled upon the table, one lay on the matting next his chair; that which he had latest read rested upon Hans Castorp’s stomach and oppressed his breath; yet no order went from the cortex to the muscles in charge to take it away. He had read down the page, his chin had sunk upon his chest, over his innocent blue eyes the lids had fallen. He beheld the image of life in flower, its structure, its flesh-borne loveliness. She had lifted her hands from behind her head, she opened her arms. On their inner side, particularly beneath the tender skin of the elbow-points, he saw the blue branchings of the larger veins. These arms were of unspeakable sweetness. She leaned above him, she inclined unto him and bent down over him, he was conscious of her organic fragrance and the mild pulsation of her heart. Something warm and tender clasped him round the neck; melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh of her upper arms, where the fine-grained skin over the triceps came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his lips he felt the moist clinging of her kiss.
The Dance of Death
Not long after Christmas, the gentleman rider died. — But before that event the Christmas holidays came and went, the two, or if you reckoned Holy Night the three feast-days, to which Hans Castorp had looked forward with some alarm and head-shaking dubiety, as to what they would really be like, up here. In the event, they came on and passed like other days, with a morning, an afternoon, and an evening; only moderately unreasonable in respect of weather — it thawed a little — and not greatly different from others of their kind. Outwardly, they had been somewhat garnished and set off; inwardly they had held sway in the heads and hearts of men for their appointed time; then, leaving behind them some deposit of impressions out of the common run, they slipped away into the recent, then into the distant past.
The Hofrat’s son, Knut by name, came for the holidays and lived with his father in the wing of the building; a good-looking young man, save that his cervical vertebra was already too prominent. The presence of young Behrens could be felt in the air: the ladies showed a proneness to laugh, to bicker, and to adorn their persons. They boasted in conversation of having met Knut in the garden, the wood, or the English quarter. He himself had guests: a number of his fellow students came up to the valley, six or seven young men who lodged in the village but ate at the Hofrat’s table, and with others of their corps scoured the region in a body. Hans Castorp avoided them. He gave them a wide berth with Joachim whenever necessary; he felt no least desire to meet them. A whole world divided those up here from these singing, roving, staffbrandishing youths — he wished neither to see nor to hear anything of them. They looked, most of them, like northerners, there might be Hamburgers among them; and Hans Castorp felt very shy of meeting his fellow townsmen. He had often uncomfortably considered the possibility that somebody or other from home might arrive at the Berghof — had not the Hofrat said that Hamburg always furnished a handsome contingent to the establishment? There might be some among the bedridden and moribund; but the only one visible was a hollow-cheeked business man, said to come from Cuxhaven, who had been sitting for two weeks at Frau Iltis’s table. Hans Castorp, seeing him, rejoiced in the knowledge that one came little into touch with guests at other tables than one’s own; and further, that his native sphere was an extended one. He saw that the presence of the man from Cuxhaven made no difference to his happiness, and this went far to relieve his fears about the arrival of other Hamburgers.
Christmas eve came on apace, one day it was at hand, the next it was here. When first it had been talked of at table — to Hans Castorp’s great surprise — it had been yet a good six weeks away, as much time as his original term up here, plus the three weeks in bed. But those first six weeks, as he thought of them in retrospect, seemed a very long time, while the six just passed had been insignificant. His fellow-guests were right to make light of them. Six weeks, why, that was not so many as the week had days; little indeed, when one considered what a small affair a week was, from Monday to Sunday and then Monday again. One needed only to see how valueless the next smaller time-unit was to realize that not much could come even of a whole row of them put together. Rather the total effect was to intensify the process of contraction, shrinkage, blurring, and effacement. What was one day, taken for instance from the moment one sat down to the midday meal to the same moment four-and-twenty hours afterwards? It was, to be sure, four-and-twenty hours — but equally it was the simple sum of nothings. Or take an hour spent in the rest-cure, at the dinnertable, or on the daily walk — and these ways of employing the timeunit practically exhausted its possibilities — what was an hour? Again, nothing. And nothing were all these nothings, they were not serious in the nature of them, taken together. The only unit it was possible to regard with seriousness was the smallest one of all: those seven times sixty seconds during which one held the thermometer between one’s lips and continued one’s curve — they, indeed, were full of matter and tenacious of life; they could expand into a little eternity; they formed small concretions of high density within the scurrying shadows of time’s general course.
The holidays disturbed but little the even tenor of the Berghof ways. A well-grown fir-tree had been set up a few days beforehand on the right-hand wall of the dining-room, the side wall next the “ bad ” Russian table; a waft of its fragrance came to the noses of the diners now and then, above the heavy odours of the food, and wakened something like pensiveness in the eyes of a few among the guests seated at the seven tables. When they came to supper on the twenty-fourth, they found the tree gaily decked with tinsel, little glass balls, gilded pine-cones, tiny apples in nets, and varied confections. The coloured wax tapers burned throughout the meal and afterwards. And a tiny, taper-decked tree burned likewise, it was said, in the rooms of the bedridden and moribund — each had his own. The parcel post in the last few days had been very heavy. Joachim Ziemssen and Hans Castorp received carefully packed remembrances from their far-away home, and spread them out in their rooms: judicious gifts of cravats and other articles of clothing, expensive trifles in leather and nickel, and quantities of Christmas cakes, nuts, apples and marzipan — the cousins looked doubtfully at these last supplies, wondering whenever they should have occasion to consume them. Schalleen, as Hans Castorp knew, had not only packed his presents, but bought them, after consultation with the uncles. There was a letter too from James Tienappel, typescript to be sure, but upon heavy paper with his private letterhead, commurJ eating his own and his father’s best wishes for the holidays and f oi : >peedy recovery, and including at once greetings for the oncoming New Year as well — a sensible and practical procedure, which followed Hans Castorp’s own: he having sent his Christmas messages betimes, under cover with the monthly clinical report.
The tree in the dining-room burned, crackled, and dispensed its fragrance, waking the minds and hearts of the guests to a realization of the day. People had dressed for dinner, the men wore evening clothes and the women jewels, mayhap presents from loving husbands down below. Clavdia Chauchat had exchanged the customary sweater for a frock with a hint of the fanciful about it, suggesting a national costume — Russian peasant, or Balkan, perhaps Bulgarian; a light-coloured, flowing, and girdled arrangement, embroidered, and set with tiny tinsel ornaments. Such a garment gave her figure an unwonted softness and fullness, and suited what Settembrini called her “ Tartar physiognomy,” particularly the “ prairie-wolfs eyes.” They were gay at the “ good ” Russian table; there the first champagne cork was heard to pop. It set the example, which was followed by nearly all the others. At the cousins’ table it was the great-aunt who dispensed champagne for her niece and Marusja, and treated the others as well. The menu was choice. It finished with cheese straws and bon-bons, to which the guests added coffee and liqueurs. Now and then a twig would flare up on the Christmas-tree; there would be work to put it out, and shrill, immoderate panic among the ladies. Toward the end of the meal Settembrini came to sit for a while at the end of the cousins’ table; he wore his everyday clothes, and sported his toothpick. He quizzed Frau Stohr with spirit, and made a few remarks about the carpenter’s son and rabbi of humanity, whose birthday they fancied they were celebrating to-day. Whether he had actually lived, Settembrini said, was uncertain; yet his time had given birth to an idea, which had continued its triumphant course even up to to-day: the idea of the dignity of the human spirit, the idea of equality — in a word, they were celebrating the birth of individualistic democracy, and to it he would empty the glass they gave him. Frau Stohr found his remarks equivoque and unfeeling: she rose under protest to the toast, and as the other tables were being emptied, they followed the general movement toward the drawing-rooms.
Hof rat Behrens, with Knut and Fraulein von Mylendonk, attended the social evening for half an hour. The occasion was to be signalized by the presentation of the gift to the head of the establishment, which accordingly took place, in the room with the optical apparatus. The Russians presented their gift, a large round silver plate, with the Hofraf s monogram engraved in the middle; its utter inutility was plain to every eye. He might at least lie on the chaise-longue which was the gift of the rest of the guests — though it was at present without cover or cushions, having merely a cloth drawn over it. The head end was adjustable; Behrens stretched out full length, with his silver plate under his arm, closed his eyes, and began to snore like a saw-mill, giving out that he was Fafnir with the treasure hoard. Much laughter and applause ensued; Frau Chauchat laughed so hard that her eyes became two cracks, and her mouth stood open — precisely, Hans Castorp remarked, as had been the case with Pribislav Hippe when he laughed.
Directly the head went out, the guests sat down to cards, the Russians occupying, as usual, the small salon. Some of the patients still stood about the room where the Christmas-tree was, watching the candle stumps die down in their sockets, and munching the goodies hanging from the boughs. Here and there at the tables, which were already laid for breakfast, sat a solitary person, with his head on his hand, silently brooding.
Christmas-day was damp and misty. These were clouds they were among, Behrens asserted; mist there was none, up here. But mist or clouds, the damp was perceptible. The surface of the lying snow began to thaw, grew soft and porous. In the rest-cure, one’s face and hands were stiff and red — one suffered far more than in colder, sunny weather.
The feast-day was marked by an evening concert, a real concert with rows of chairs and printed programmes, offered to the guests by House Berghof; consisting of songs by a professional singer who lived up here and gave lessons. She wore two medals pinned side by side on her corsage, had arms like sticks, and a voice whose peculiar toneless quality cast a saddening light upon the grounds for her stay in these regions. She sang:
lch trage meine Mirme
Mit rmr heriwt.
Her accompanist was likewise a resident. Frau Chauchat sat in the first row, but took advantage of the intermission to go out, leaving Hans Castorp free to enjoy the music in peace — after all, it was music — and to read the text of the songs, as printed upon the programme. Herr Settembrini sat awhile beside him, and made a few plastic and resilient phrases upon the dull quality of the singer’s bel canto , expressing also ironic satisfaction over the home talent displayed in the entertainment. It was so charming, he said, that they were just among themselves. Then he too went away — to tell truth, Hans Castorp was not sorry to see the backs of them both, the narrow-eyed one and the pedagogue; he could the better devote himself to the singing, and draw comfort from the reflection that all over the world, even in the most extraordinary places, music was made — very likely even on polar expeditions.
One had a slight differentiating consciousness of the day after Christmas, something that just made it not quite the same as an ordinary Sunday or week-day. Then it was over, and the whole holiday lay in the past — or, equally, it lav in the distant future, a year away: twelve months would bring it round again, seven more than the time Hans Castorp had spent up here.
But just after the Christmas season, and before the New Year broke, the gentleman rider died. The cousins learnt of the death from Fritz Rotbein’s nurse, Alfreda Schildknecht, called Sister Berta, who met them in the corridor and discreetly communicated the sad event. Hans Castorp felt a profound interest; partly because the signs of life he had heard from the gentleman rider were among the earliest impressions of his stay up here, those which had first, or so it seemed to him, called up the flush to his face which since had never left it; but partly also upon moral, one might almost say upon spiritual grounds. He detained Joachim long in talk with the deaconess, who hung with the extreme of pleasure upon their conversation. It was a wonder, she said, that the gentleman rider had lived over the holidays. He had long since shown himself a doughty cavalier, but what it was he breathed with, at the end, nobody could tell. For days and days he had lived only by the aid of enormous quantities of oxygen. Yesterday alone he had consumed forty containers, at six francs apiece — that mounted up, the gentlemen could reckon the cost themselves; and his wife, in whose arms he had died, was left wholly penniless. Joachim expressed disapproval of the expenditure. Why delay by these torturing and costly artificial expedients a death absolutely certain to supervene? One could not blame the man for blindly consuming the precious gas they urged upon him. But those in charge should have behaved with more reason, they should have let him go his way, in God’s name, quite aside from the circumstances, more so when taking them into consideration. The living, after all, had their rights — and so on. Hans Castorp disagreed emphatically. His cousin, he said, talked almost like Settembrini, without any regard or reverence for suffering. The man had died in the end, that finished it; there was no more to be done to show one’s concern, and it had been due to the dying to spend what one could. Thus Hans Castorp. He only hoped the Hofrat had not showed a lack of decent feeling by railing at the 2 9 2
poor man at the end. There had been no need, Fraulein Schildknecht said. Only one little thoughtless effort he had made to escape, to spring out of bed; but the merest hint of the futility of such a proceeding had been enough to make him desist once and for all.
Hans Castorp went to view the gentleman rider’s mortal remains. He did this of set purpose, to show his contempt for the prevailing system of secrecy, to protest against the egotistic policy of seeing and hearing nothing of such events; to register by his act his disapproval of the others’ practice. He had tried to introduce the subject of the death at table, but was met with such a flat and callous rebuff on all sides as both to anger and embarrass him. Frau Stohr had been downright gruff. What did he mean by introducing such a subject — what kind of upbringing had he had? The house regulations protected the patients from having such things come to their knowledge; and now here was a young whippersnapper bringing it up at table, and even in the presence of Dr. Blumenkohl, whom the same fate might any day overtake (this behind her hand). If it happened again, she would complain. Then it was that, thus reproved, Hans Castorp had taken — and expressed – a resolve: he would visit their departed comrade, and discharge the last duty of silent respect toward his remains. He persuaded Joachim to do the same.
Sister Berta arranged that they be admitted to the gentleman rider’s room, which lay in the first storey beneath their own. The widow received them — a small, distracted blonde, much reduced by night watching, with a red nose, her handkerchief before her mouth, and wearing a plaid cloak, with the collar turned up, as it was very cold in the room. The heat was turned off, the balcony door stood open. The young people said what was fitting to say, in voices respectfully subdued; then, upon a woeful gesture from the widow, they passed through the room to the bed, walking on their tiptoes and weaving reverently forward. They stood by the dead, each after his fashion: Joachim with heels together, half inclined in a salute, Hans Castorp relaxed and pensive, with hands clasped before him and head on one side, much as he often stood to listen to music. The gentleman rider lay with his head pillowed high, so that his body, that elongated structure, the outgrowth of life’s manifold processes, with the elevation of the feet at the end beneath the sheet, looked very flat, almost like a board. A garland of flowers lay at about the knees; a palm-leaf outstanding from it touched the great, yellow, bony hands resting crossed upon the sunken breast. Yellow and bony was the face too, with its bald skull and hooked nose, its angular cheek-bones and bushy, reddishyellow moustaches, whose full curve gave the grey and stubbly hollows of the cheeks a yet hollower look. The eyes were closed, with a certain unnatural definiteness — pressed down, not shut, thought Hans Castorp. That was what they called the last service of love; but it happened rather as a service to the survivors than to the dead. And it must be done betimes too, soon after death; for if the myosin process went far in the muscles, it would be too late, he would lie there and stare and one could no longer sustain the illusion of his slumber.
Perfectly at home, in more than one respect in his element, Hans Castorp stood at the bier, expertly reverential. “ He seems to sleep,” said he, humanely; though such was far from being the case. Then, in a voice appropriately subdued, he began a conversation with the widow, eliciting information about the sufferings, the last days and moments of her departed husband, and the arrangements for transporting the body to Carinthia; displaying a sympathy and conversance that was in part physicianly, in part priestly and moralizing. The widow, speaking in her drawling, nasal, Austrian accent, with now and then a sob, found it remarkable that young folk should so occupy themselves with a stranger’s pain. Hans Castorp answered that he and his cousin were themselves ill; that he, when still very young, had stood at the deathbed of near relatives; he was a double orphan, and, if he might say so, long familiar with the sight of death. She asked what profession he had chosen; he replied that he “ had been ” an engineer.
“ Had been 5 ” she queried.
“ Had been,” he replied, in the sense that his illness and a stay up here of still undetermined length had come between him and his work; that might mean a considerable interruption, even a turning-point in his career, he could not tell. Joachim, at this, searched his face in some alarm. And his cousin 5 He was a soldier, was at present in training for an officer.
“ Ah,” she said, “ the trade of a soldier is another serious calling, one must be prepared to come into close touch with death, it is well to accustom oneself to the sight beforehand.” She dismissed the cousins with thanks and expressions of friendliness, which could not but touch them, considering her distressed state, and the bill for oxygen her departed husband had left behind him.
They returned to their own storey, Hans Castorp greatly pleased and edified by the visit.
“ Requiescat in pace” he said. “ Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem cetemam dona ei, Domine. You see, when death is in question, when one speaks to or of the dead, then the Latin comes in force; it is, so to say, the official language. So then you see that death is a thing apart. But it isn’t a humanistic gesture, speaking Latin in honour of death; and the Latin isn’t what you learn at school, either — the spirit of it is quite different, one might almost say hostile. It is ecclesiastical Latin, monkish Latin, mediaeval dialect, a sort of dull, monotonous, underground chanting. Settembrini has no use for it, it is nothing for humanists and republicans and suchlike pedagogues, it comes from quite another point of the compass. I find one ought to be clear about these two intellectual trends, or perhaps it would be better to say states of mind: I mean the devout and the free-thinking. They both have their good sides; what I have against Settembrini’s — the free-thinking line — is that he seems to imagine it has a corner in human dignity. That’s exaggerated, I consider, because the other has its own kind of dignity too, and makes for a tremendous lot of decorum and correct bearing and uplifting ceremony; more, in fact, than the free-thinking, when you remember it has our human infirmity and proneness to err directly in mind, and thoughts of death and decay play such an important role in it. Have you seen Don Carlos given at the theatre? Do you remember at the Spanish court, when King Philip comes in, all in black, with the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and takes off his hat — it looks pretty much like one of our melons — he lifts it from the top, and says: ‘ Cover, my lords,’ or something like that? That is the last degree of formality, I should think; no talk of any free-and-easy manners there! The Queen herself says: ‘ In my own France how different! ’ Of course it is too precise for her, too fussy, she would like it a little gayer and more human. But what is human? Everything is human. I find all that strict punctilio and God-fearing solemnity of the Spanish is a very dignified kind of humanity; while on the other hand the word human can be used to cover up God knows what loose and slovenly ways — you know that yourself.”
“ I do indeed,” Joachim said. “ Naturally, I can’t abide any kind of looseness or slovenliness. There must be discipline.”
“ Yes, you say that as a soldier; and I must admit the military has an understanding of these matters. The widow was right when she said your trade is a solemn one, that has to reckon on coming to grips with death. You have your tight-fitting, immaculate uniform, with a stiff collar — there’s your bienseance for you; then your regulations of rank, and military obedience, and all the forms you preserve toward each other — quite in the Spanish spirit, there is something reverent about it, I can do with it very well, at bot2 95
tom. We civilians ought to show more of the same spirit in our customs and manners, I should really like it, and find it fitting. I think the world, and life generally, is such as to make it appropriate for us all to wear black, with a starched ruff instead of your standup collar; and for all our intercourse with each other to be subdued and ceremonial, and mindful of death. That would seem right and moral to me. There is another of Settembrini’s arrogant ideas; I may tell him so, some time: he thinks he has a monopoly of morals as well as of human dignity — with his talk about ‘ practical life-work ’ and Sunday services in the name of ‘ progress ’ — as though one hadn’t something else to think about, on Sundays, besides progress! — and his ‘ systematic elimination of suffering ’; you have not heard anything about that, but he has instructed me on the subject, and it is to be systematically eliminated by means of a lexicon. I may find all that positively immoral — but what of it? I don’t tell him so, naturally. He fairly goes for me, you know, of course in his plastic way, and says: * I warn you, Engineer.’ But a person can take leave to think what he pleases, at least: ‘ Sire, grant freedom of thought.’ Let me tell you something,” he went on — they had by now arrived in Joachim’s room, and Joachim was making ready for the rest-cure — “ let me tell you something I propose to do. We live up here, next door to the dying, close to misery and suffering; and not only we act as though we had nothing to do with it, but it is all carefully arranged in order to spare us and prevent our coming into contact with it, or seeing anything at all — they will take away the gentleman rider while we are at breakfast or tea — and that I find immoral. The Stohr woman was furious, simply because I mentioned his death. That’s too absurd for words. She is ignorant, to be sure, and thinks that ‘ Leise , leise , fromme W else 5 comes out of Tannhauser , she said so the other day. But even so, she might have a little human feeling, and the rest of them too. Well, I have made up my mind to concern myself a bit in future with the severe cases and the moribund. It will do me good — I feel our visit just now has done me good already. That poor chap Reuter in number twenty-five, whom I saw through the door when I first came, he has most likely long ago been gathered to his fathers, and been spirited away on the quiet. His eyes were so enormous even then. But there are more of them, the house is full, and they keep coming. Sister Alfreda or the Directress, or even Behrens himself, would most likely be glad to put us in the way of it. Say that one of the moribund was having a birthday, and we hear of it — that could easily be brought about. Good. We send him, or her, whichever it is, a pot of flowers, an attention from two fellow-guests, who prefer to remain anonymous, with best wishes for recovery; it is always polite to say that. Then afterwards, of course, it is found out who sent it, and he — or she — in her infirmity, lets us greet her, in a friendly way, through the doorway; she may even ask us in for a minute, and we have a little human intercourse with him, before he sinks away. That’s how I imagine it. Are you agreed? For my part, my mind is made up.”
Joachim had not much to bring up against the plan. “ It is against the rules of the house,” he said. “ In a certain way you would be transgressing them. But Behrens would probably be willing to make an exception, and give permission, if you wanted it, I should think. You might refer to your interest in the medical side.”
“Yes, among other things,” Hans Castorp answered: for in truth somewhat involved motives lay at the bottom of his desire. His protest against the prevailing egotism was only one of these: there was also and in particular a spiritual craving to take suffering and death seriously, and pay them the respect that was their due. Contact with the suffering and dying would, or so he hoped, feed and strengthen this craving of the spirit, by counteracting the manifold woundings to which it was daily and hourly subjected, and which he felt the more keenly on account of the Settembrinian critique. Instances there were only too many: if one had asked Hans Castorp for them, he would probably have mentioned certain persons who were admittedly not much ailing, and not under the smallest compulsion, but who made a pretext of slight illness to live up here, for their own pleasure, and because the life suited them. Such was the Widow Hessenfeld, whom we have mentioned in passing. Her passion was betting; she staked against the gentlemen every conceivable object upon every conceivable subject: the weather, the dishes at dinner, the result of the monthly examination, the prescribed length of stay of this or that person, the champions in the skating, sleighing, bob-racing, and skiing competitions, the duration of this or that amour among the guests of the cure, and a hundred other, often quite indifferent or trifling subjects. Staked chocolate, champagne, and caviar, which were then ceremonially partaken of in the restaurant; or money, or cinematograph tickets, or even kisses, given and received — in brief, she brought with her passion for betting much life and excitement into the dining-room; though her proceedings were not such as could be taken seriously by Hans Castorp, who even felt that her mere presence was prejudicial to the dignity of a serious cure.
For he was inwardly concerned to protect that dignity and uphold it in his own eyes — though now, after nearly half a year 2 97
among those up here, it cost him something to do so. The insight he gradually won into their lives and activities, their practices and points of view, was not encouraging. We have mentioned the two slim young elegants, seventeen and eighteen years old, nicknamed Max and Moritz, whose exploits were the talk of the cure, and who were in the habit of climbing out of the window at night in order to play poker and dissipate down below in female society. Only lately — that is to say, perhaps a week after the New Year, for we must bear in mind that while we tell the story, time streams silently and ceaselessly on — it had been spread abroad at breakfast that the bathing-master had just caught the pair, in crumpled evening clothes, lying on their beds. Even Hans Castorp laughed; but this, however humiliating it was to his better feelings, was nothing compared to the tales that circulated about a certain lawyer from Jiiterbog, Einhuf by name; a man perhaps forty years old, with a pointed beard and very hairy hands, who had taken the Swede’s place at Herr Settembrini’s table. It was reported of him not only that he came home drunk every night, but that recently he had failed to do even that, having been discovered lying in the meadow. He passed for a Don Juan: Frau Stohr could point out the damsel — of whom it was also known that she had an affianced lover down in the flat-land — who was seen at a certain hour coming out of Lawyer Einhuf s room, clad in a fur coat with combinations underneath, and nothing more. That was a scandal; not only to the general, but even more to Hans Castorp’s private sense, and derogatory to his spiritual endeavours. It even came to this: that the thought of Lawyer Einhuf could not enter his mind without calling up there, by an association of ideas, the thought of Franzchen Oberdank, the little creature with the sleek blond head, whose mamma, a worthy dame from the provinces, had brought her up to the Berghof a few weeks before. Franzchen’s case, on her arrival, and even after the examination, had been thought a light one. But perhaps she had failed in the service of the cure, perhaps hers was one of those cases in which the air proved in the first instance to be good not against but for the disease. Or perhaps the child may have become involved in some intrigue, the excitement of which was seriously bad for her. Four weeks after her arrival she entered the dining-room fresh from a second examination, tossing her little hand-bag in the air, and crying out in her fresh young voice: “ Hurrah, hurrah! I shall have to stop a year! ” — at which the whole room resounded with Homeric laughter. But two weeks later the whisper went round that Lawyer Einhuf had behaved like a blackguard to Franzchen Oberdank. The expression is ours, or, rather, Hans Castorp’s; for those who spread the news found it too old a story to be moved to the use of strong language. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it out as their view that it took two to play at such games, and that it was unlikely anything had happened against the will of either participant. This, at least, was Frau Stohr’s demeanour, her ethical reaction to the affair in question.
Caroline Stohr was dreadful. If anything had power to distract our young Hans Castorp, in the course of his sincerely felt spiritual strivings, it was the personality, the very existence of this woman. Her perpetual malapropisms were quite enough. She said insolvent when she meant insolent, and uttered the most amazing rubbish by way of explaining the astronomical phenomena involved in an eclipse of the sun. One day she almost reduced Herr Settembrini to permanent stupefaction by telling him that she was reading a book from the library which would interest him; namely, “ Schiller’s translation of Benedetto Cenelli.” She adored expressions of a cheap and common stamp, worn threadbare by over-use, which got on Hans Castorp’s nerves — as, for example, “ you haven’t the faintest idea! ” or “ how utterly too-too! ” It had for long been the fashionable jargon to say “ simply gorgeous ” to express the idea of brilliant, or excellent; this phrase now proved to have outlived its usefulness. It was entirely prostituted, the juice quite sucked out of it; and Frau Stohr clutched eagerly at the newest currency: everything, whether in jest or earnest, was “ devastating,” the bobrun, the sweet for dinner, her own temperature — and this sounded equally offensive in her mouth. She had a boundless appetite for gossip. One day she might relate that Frau Salomon was wearing the most costly lace underwear in preparation for her examination, and prided herself very much upon her appearance before the physicians on these occasions. There was probably more truth than poetry in the statement. Hans Castorp himself had the impression that the examinations, quite aside from their result, had their pleasurable side for the ladies, and that they adorned themselves accordingly. But what should one say to Frau Stohr’s assertion that Frau Redisch, from Posen, who, it was feared, suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, had to walk up and down entirely naked before Hofrat Behrens, for ten minutes once a week? This statement was almost as improbable as it was objectionable; but Frau Stohr swore to it by all that was holy — though it was hard to understand how the poor creature could expend so much zeal and energy, and be so dogmatic, upon matters like these, when her own personal condition gave so much cause for concern. She was some-
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