Chapter VII: By the Ocean of Time (Part 4 of 7)
Peeperkorn sat with his coat-collar turned up and his hat on the ground beside him, drinking port out of a monogrammed silver cup, which he emptied many times. And suddenly he began to speak. Extraordinary man! It was impossible for him to hear his own voice, still more for the others to catch a syllable of what he let transpire without its in the least transpiring. But with the winecup in his right hand, he raised his forefinger, stretching his left arm palm outwards toward the water. They saw his kingly features move in speech, the mouth form words, which were as soundless as though spoken into empty, etherless space. No one dreamed he would continue; with embarrassed smiles they watched this futile activity, thinking every moment it would cease. But he went on, with tense, compelling gesture, to harangue the clamour that swallowed his words; directing upon this or that one of the company by turns the gaze of his pale little weary eyes, spanned wide beneath the lifted folds of his brow; and whoever felt himself addressed was constrained to nod back again, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, hand to ear, as though any sort of effort to hear could better the utterly hopeless situation. He even stood up! There, in his crumpled ulster, that reached nearly to his heels, the collar turned up; bare-headed, cup in hand, the high brow creased with folds like some heathen idol’s in a shrine, and crowned by the aureole of white hair like flickering flames; there he stood by the rocks and spoke, holding the circle of thumb and forefinger, with the lancelike others above it, before his face. and sealing his mute and incomprehensible toast with that compelling sign of precision. Such words as they were accustomed to hearing from him, they could read on his lips or divine from his gestures: “ Settled ” and “ Absolutely! ” — but that was all. They saw his head sink sideways, the broken bitterness of the lips, they saw the man of sorrows in his guise. But then quite suddenly flashed the dimple, the sybaritic roguishness, the garment snatched up dancewise, the ritual impropriety of the heathen priest. He lifted his beaker, waved it half-circle before the assembled guests, and drank it out in three gulps, so that it stood bottom upwards. Then he handed it with outstretched arm co the Malay, who received it with an obeisance, and gave the sign to break up the feast.
They all bowed and thanked him as they hastened to do his bidding. Those crouching on the ground sprang up, the others jumped down from the railing. The little Javanese in his stiff hat and turned-up collar gathered the remnants of the meal. They went back along the path in the same order as they had come, through the draped, uncanny grove, to the high road and the waiting carriages.
This time Hans Castorp mounted with Mynheer and Madame, and sat opposite the pair with the humble Ferge, to whom all high thoughts were vain. Scarcely a word was spoken on the homeward drive. Mynheer sat with his jaw dropped and his hands palm upward on the carriage rug spread across his and Madame s knees. Settembrini and Naphta dismounted and took their leave before the carriages crossed the track and the watercourse, and Wehsal drove alone as far as the portal of the Berghof, where the party separated.
Was Hans Castorp’s sleep this night rendered light and fitful by portents of which his soul knew naught — so that the slightest variation in the usual nightly peace of the Berghof, the faintest commotion, the barely perceptible sound of running, was enough to fetch him broad awake, to make him sit up in bed 2 He had been, in fact, awake for some time before a knock came on his door, as it did shortly after two o’clock. He answered at once, composed, alert and energetic, and heard the voice of one of the nurses in the house, saying in high, uncertain tones that Frau Chauchat would be glad if he would come at once to the first storey. Briskly he responded, sprang up and flung on some clothing, ran his ngers through his hair, and went down; not slow, not fast, and more in uncertainty as to the how than the what, in the meaning of these summons. The door to Peeperkom’s salon stood open, also that to his bedroom, where all the lights were burning. The two physicians, the Directress, Madame Chauchat, and the Malay were within, the last-named dressed not as usual, but in a sort of national costume, with a striped garment like a shirt, very long wide sleeves, a gaily coloured skirt, and a curious, cone-shaped hat made of yellow cloth on his head. He wore an ornament of amulets on his breast, and stood with folded arms at the head of the bed, wherein Pieter Peeperkom lay on his back, his arms stretched out before him. Hans Castorp, paling, took in the scene. Frau Chauchat sat with her back toward him in a low chair at the foot of the bed. Her elbows rested on the coverlet, her chin was in her hands, whose fingers were buried in her upper lip, and she gazed into the face of her protector.
“Evening, m’ boy,” said Behrens, who stood talking in low tones with Krokowski and the Oberin, and nodded ruefully to Hans Castorp, with his upper lip drawn back. He was in his surgeon’s coat, from the pocket of which a stethoscope stuck out, wore embroidered slippers and no collar. “ It’s all up with him,” he added in a whisper. “ Gone for good, o’er the border and awa’. Come have a look — run your experienced eye over him — you’ll agree there’s nothing for us to do.”
Hans Castorp approached the bed on tiptoe. The Malay without turning his head followed the movement, until his eyeballs showed white. The young man assured himself by a side glance that Frau Chauchat was paying no heed; then stood by the bed in his accustomed posture, his weight on one leg, his head on one side, his hands folded across his stomach, reverently, reflectively gazing. Pieter Peeperkorn lay under the red satin coverlet, in his tricot shirt, as Hans Castorp had so often seen him. His hands were veined a bluish black, likewise parts of his face; a considerable disfigurement, though the kingly features remained unaltered. Beneath the white aureole of hair the masklike folds caived by the habitual gesture of a lifetime ran in a row of four or five, straight across the brow and then in a right angle down the temples; they were more striking than ever, by contrast with the drooping lids and the repose of the features. The cracked lips were slightly parted. The cyanosis indicated abrupt stoppage, a violent apoplectic arrest of the vital functions.
Hans Castorp stood awhile, reverently, observing all this; hesitating to move, expectant of being addressed by the “ wfidow.” As he was not, and could not bring himself to disturb her, he turned toward the little group of other persons present. Behrens jerked his head in the direction of the salon, and Hans Castorp followed him thither.
“ Suicide? ” he asked, subdued but terse.
“ Rather,” said the Hofrat, with a shrug, and added: “ up to the hilt. To the 72th power. Have you ever seen a toy like this before? ” he went on, and drew out of the pocket of his smock an irregularly shaped case, from which he took a small object and presented it to the young man’s notice. “ Nor I either. But it is well worth seeing. We live and learn. It’s a fantastic little gadget, and ingenious. I took it out of his hand. Take care, if it drips on your skin it will blister.”
Hans Castorp turned the puzzling little object in his hands. It was made of steel, gold, ivory, and rubber, wonderful to see. There were two curving prongs of bright steel, extremely sharp-pointed; a slightly spiral centre portion of gold-inlaid ivory, in which the prongs were somewhat movable and could sink up to a point; and a bulb of semi-hard black rubber. The whole thing was only about two inches long.
“ What is it? ” Hans Castorp asked.
“ That,” answered Behrens, “ is an organized hypodermic syringe. Or, if you like, it is a copy of the mechanism of the cobra’s bite. Understand? You don’t seem to,” he went on, as Hans Castorp continued to stare at the bizarre little instrument. “ These are the teeth. They are not solid all the way, there is a canal inside, the thickness of a hair; you can see the issue of it quite plainly, here just above the point. They are also open at the base, of course, and communicate with the excretory duct of the bulb, which runs into the ivory middle part. When the teeth bite, they sink in a little, and the pressure on the reservoir shoots the contents into the canals, so that the poison gets into circulation the moment the fangs sink in the flesh. Perfectly simple, when you see it like that; you just have to get the idea. He probably had it made after his own design.”
“ Surely,” Hans Castorp said.
“ The amount must have been very small,” continued the Hofrat. “ What it lacked in quantity it made up for in — ”
“ Dynamic,” Hans Castorp finished for him.
“ Well, yes. What it was we shall soon find out. It will be worth knowing too, it has something curious to teach us. Shall we wager that the native on duty over there, who dressed himself up like that for the night’s work, could tell us all we want to know? I suspect it is a combination of animal and vegetable poisons, the most powerful known, for it must have worked like lightning. Everything points to its having taken away his breath, paralysed his respiration, you know, quick suffocation, probably easy and painless.”
“ God grant it,” said Hans Castorp piously, handed the uncanny toy back to the Hofrat and returned to the bedchamber.
Madame Chauchat and the Malay were there alone. And this time Clavdia lifted her face toward the young man as he neared the bed.
“ You had a right to be called,” she said.
“ It was kind of you,” he answered, “ and you are right.” He availed himself of the third person plural as used by the peoples of the cultured West. “We were brothers. I feel shamed in the depth of my soul that I tried to hide it, and used circumlocutions before other people. Were you with him at the last? ”
“ The servanr called me when all was over,” she answered.
“ He was built on such a grand scale,” Hans Castorp began again, “ that he considered it a blasphemy, a cosmic catastrophe, to be found wanting in feeling. For you must know, he regarded himself as the instrument of God’s marriage. That was a piece of majestic tomfoolery — when one is moved one can say things that sound crass and irreverent, but are after all more solemn than the conventional religious formulas.”
“ C’est une abdication she said. “ He knew of our folly? ”
“ I was not able to prevent it, Clavdia. He guessed, when I refused to kiss you on the forehead, in his presence. At this moment, his presence is rather symbolic than actual — but will you let me do it now 5 ”
She moved her head toward him, in a little nod, the eyes closed. He pressed his lips on her brow. The brown, doglike eyes of the Malav servant watched the scene, rolling sidewise, until the whites showed.
The Great God Dumps
Once more we hear Herr Hofrat Behren’s voice — let us give it our ear. For we hear it perhaps for the last time. Some day even the story itself will come to an end. Long has it lasted; or, rather, the pace of its contentual time has so increased that there is no more holding it, even its musical time is running out. Perhaps we shall have no further opportunity to hear the lively cadences of the Rhadamanthine tongue. The Hofrat said to Hans Castorp: “ Castorp, old cock, you’re bored. Chap-fallen, I see it every day, disgust and ennui are written on your brow. You’re collapsed like a punctured tire — if some first-class excitement doesn’t come along
every day, you pull a face as though you were saying: ‘ H’m, small potatoes and few in the hill! ’ Am I right, or am I not> ”
Hans Castorp said never a word — a sure sign that his inward man was indeed pervaded with gloom.
“ Right, then, of course, as I always am,” Behrens answered himself. “ Well, I can’t have you spreading the toxin of your disaffection all over my community, you disgruntled citizen, you. I must convince you that you are not forgotten of God and man, that the powers above have an eye, an unchanging eye upon you, and ceaselessly ponder your welfare. Old Behrens hasn’t forsaken you yet, my lad. Well, joking aside, I’ve been thinking about your case, and in the watches of the night something has come to me. I might almost speak of a revelation — in short, I promise great things from my new idea, nothing more nor less than your complete cure and triumphal progress down to the flat-land, before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“ Yes,” he went on, after a pause for effect, “ you may well open your eyes ” — Hans Castorp had done nothing of the sort, merely blinked at him rather sleepy and distraught — “ of course you haven’t an idea how old Behrens can say such a thing. Well, it’s like this: it cannot have escaped your acute apperceptions that there is something about your case that doesn’t hold water. The symptoms of infection have not for a long time corresponded to the local condition, which is undoubtedly very much improved. It’s not only since yesterday that I’ve been thinking about it. Here is your latest photo, take it and hold it up to the light. See there! The sheerest pessimist and cavillar — as the Kaiser says — could not see very much in it to find fault with. Some of the foci are absorbed, the area is smaller and more clearly defined, which you are experienced enough to know is a sign of healing. Nothing here to explain the unreliability of your domestic heater, my man. The doctor finds himself under the necessity of casting about for another cause.” Hans Castorp’s bow conveyed at most a civil interest.
“ You would think old Behrens must admit to having made a mistake in the treatment? Well, if you did, you’ve come a cropper again; sized the thing up wrong, and old Behrens too. The treatment was not wrong, but it was just possibly one-sided. The possibility has occurred to me that your symptoms were not necessarily to be referred to tuberculosis alone — because it is out of the question to refer them to it any longer. There must be some other source of trouble. In my view, you’ve got cocci.”
“ Yes,” he repeated with increase of emphasis, and in acknowledgment of the bow with which Hans Castorp accepted his statement, “ it is my profound conviction that you have streps — which* of course, is not necessarily alarming.”
Of alarm there could be no talk: Hans Castorp’s face expressed at most a sort of ironic recognition, either of his companion’s acuteness, or of the new dignity with which the Hofrat had hypothetically invested him.
“ No call for panic,” he varied his theme. “ Everybody has cocci. Any ass can have streps. You needn’t be puffed up. It is not very long since we have known that one can have streptococci :n the blood without showing any symptoms of infection. And many of my colleagues are as yet unacquainted with the situation which confronts us; namely, that a man can even have tubercular bacilli in his blood without being any the worse for it. We aren’t more than three steps from the conception that tuberculosis is a disease of the blood.”
Hans Castorp politely found that truly remarkable.
“ When I say streps,” Behrens began again, “ you must not picture a well-known or severe type of illness. If this little one has really settled down and made itself at home in you, the bacteriological blood-test will show it. But whether it is really the cause of the fever — supposing it is present — that we can only tell from the effect of the strepto-vaccine treatment. This, my dear friend, is the technique, and I promise myself unheard-of results. Tuberculosis is the most long-winded thing in the world; but affections of this sort can be cured very quickly to-day; if you react to the inoculations, you will be as sound as a bell inside six weeks. Well, what do you say to that? That little ole Behrens has his head on his shoulders, what? ”
“ It is only a hypothesis for the moment, isn’t it? ” Hans Castorp said languidly.
“But a demonstrable hypothesis! A highly fruitful hypothesis! ” the Hofrat responded. “ You’ll see how fruitful it is, when the cocci begin to grow in our culture. To-morrow afternoon we’ll tap you; we’ll let your blood according to the sacred rites of the village barber. It’s diverting in itself, and may have miraculous results.”
Hans Castorp declared himself ready for the diversion, and thanked the Hofrat in due form for his efforts in his behalf. He put his head on one side and watched Behrens paddle off. It was true: the intervention had come at the critical moment, Rhadamanthus had not been far out in the description he gave of Hans Castorp’s face and air. The new undertaking was put forth — quite explicitly, there had been no attempt to wrap it up — in order to tide him over the crisis he was in, which betrayed itself by a bearing very like the departed Joachim’s, when he was mentally working himself up to a certain desperate resolve.
And further. It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he himself had arrived at this point, but that all the world, “ the whole show,” as he said, had arrived there with him; he found it hard to differentiate his particular case from the general. He had experienced the extravagant ending of his connexion with a certain personality. A commotion had ensued in the house. There had been a farewell between Clavdia Chauchat and himself, the surviving member of a severed brotherhood; a farewell, uttered in the shadow of a tragic renunciation, and followed by her second departure from the Berghof. Now all these events had put the young man in a frame of mind to find life itself not precisely canny. Everything appeared to have gone permanently and increasingly awry, as though a demonic power — which had indeed for a long time given hints of its malign influence — had suddenly taken control, in a way to induce secret consternation and almost thoughts of flight. The name of the demon was Dumps.
The reader will accuse the writer of laying it on pretty thick when he associates two such ideas as these, and ascribes to mere staleness a mystical and supernatural character. But we are not indulging in flights of fancy. We are adhering strictly to the personal experience of our simple-minded hero, which in some way defying exact definition it has been given us to know, and which indicates that when all the uses of this world unitedly become flat, stale, and unprofitable, they are actually possessed by a demonk quality capable of giving rise to the feelings we have described. Hans Castorp looked about him. He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew’ what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation; life as dead.
Yet it was occupied too, it had activities of various kinds, pursued simultaneously; now and again one of these would assume the proportions of a craze, and subordinate everything to itself. Old residents experienced the periodic revival of more than one of these fads. So for instance amateur photography, always playing an important role at the Berghof, had twice become a perfect mania, lasting weeks and months on end. Everywhere one saw people absorbedly bent over cameras supported in the pit of their stomachs, focusing and snapping the shutter; and floods of snapshots were handed round at table. It became a point of honour to do the developing oneself. The supply of dark-rooms in the establishment was not sufficient, the bedroom windows and doors were draped with black cloth, and people busied themselves by dim red lights over chemical baths, until something caught fire, the Bulgarian student at the “ good ” Russian table was nearly reduced to ashes, and a prohibitory decree went forth from the management. Next they tired of ordinary photography, the fashion veered to flash-lights and colour photography after Lumiere. They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diapositive, showing him with a copper-coloured visage, a brassy buttercup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poisonously green meadow, with Frau Stohr on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fraulein Levi on the other in a blood-red sweater.
Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Everybody pasted, haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carried on correspondence with special vendors, foreign and domestic, with societies and private owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specimens, even by people whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof.
Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody’s mouth was stained brown, and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to Milka-mit , Chocolat a la creme cTamandes , Marquis-?iapolitains , and gold-besprinkled cats’ tongues.
Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and even the last thoughts and energies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn free-hand without lifting the pen — or, as a further refinement, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.
We know on the authority of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics; we know too the disciplinary grounds of his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more generally applied themselves to the same studv, the necessity for certain recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these dealt with the passage across the balconies, at the end of the white glass partitions that did not quite reach to the balustrade. These were now extended by means of little doors, which the bathing-master had it in charge to lock every night — and did so, to a general accompaniment of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the verandah roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been introduced on Lawyer Paravant’s account. He had long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to challenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of w’hose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his brains, all the sporting pertinacity which once — before the beginning of this prolonged and enforced holiday, that even threatened at times to end in total quiescence — had gone to the convicting of criminals. It was — the squaring of the circle.
In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself that the arguments on which science based the impossibility of the proposition were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living, and brought him here, having selected him to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental into the realms of the earthly and exact. By day and night he measured and calculated; covered enormous quantities of paper wfith figures, letters, computations, algebraic symbols; his face, which was the face of an apparently sound and vigorous man, wore the morose and visionary stare of a monomaniac; while his conversation, with consistent and fearful monotony, dealt with the proportional number pi, that abandoned fraction which the debased genius of a mathematician named Zachariah Dase one day figured out to the two-hundredth decimal place — purely for the joy of it and as a work of supererogation, for if he had figured it out to the two-thousandth, the result, as compared with unattainable mathematical exactitude, would have been practically unchanged. Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant like the plague; for whomever he succeeded in buttonholing, that unhappy wretch had to listen to a torrent of red-hot oratory, as the lawyer strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in the defilement of the mind of man by the hopeless irrationality of this mystic relation. The fruitlessness of for ever multiplying the diameter of the circle by pi to find its circumference, of multiplying the square of the radius by pi to find its area, caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated, since Archimedes’ day; whether the solution were not, in actual fact, a child’s affair for simpleness. Why could not one rectify the circumference, why could one not also convert every straight line into a circle? Lawyer Paravant felt himself, at times, near a revelation. He was often seen, late in the evening, sitting at his table in the forsaken and dimly lighted dining-room, with a piece of string laid out before him, which he carefully arranged in circular shape, and then suddenly, with an abrupt gesture, stretched oul straight; only to fall thereafter, leaning on his elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat sometimes lent him a helping hand at the sorry sport, and generally encouraged him in his freak. And the sufferer turned to Hans Castorp too, again and yet again, with his cherished grievance, finding in the young man much friendly understanding and a sympathetic interest in the mystery of the circle. Lie illustrated his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact drawing, executed with vast pains, showing a circle between two polygons, one inscribed, the other circumscribed, each polygon being of an infinite number of tiny sides, up to the last human possibility of approximation to the circle. The remainder, the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bounding lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp, for all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi than his interlocutor. He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant not to over-heat himself with his cat’s-cradle; spoke of the series of dimensionless points of which the circle consisted, from its beginning — which did not exist — to its end — which did not exist either; and of the overpowering melancholy that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence of direction at any given moment — spoke with such tranquil resignation as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect.
It was a consequence of our good Hans Castorp’s nature that more than one of his fellow-patients made a confidant of him; several of them possessing some idee fixe or other and suffering because they could get no hearing from the callous majority. There was an elderly man from somewhere in the back blocks of Austria, a one-time sculptor, with white moustaches, a hooked nose and blue eyes; who had conceived a project, financial and political in its scope, and drawn it up most meticulously in a calligraphic hand, colouring the important points in sepia. The main feature of the scheme was that every newspaper subscriber should bind himself to contribute a daily quantum of forty grammes of old newspaper, collected on the first of every month; which in one year would amount to a lump quantity of 1400 grammes, and in twenty years to not less than 288 kilogrammes. Reckoning at twenty pfennig the kilo, this would come to fifty-seven marks and sixty pfennig. Five million subscribers, it was calculated, would in the course of twenty years deliver a quantity of old newspaper valued at the enormous sum of 288 million marks; of which two-thirds might be reckoned off to the new subscriptions, which would thus pay for themselves, the other third, amounting to about a million marks, remaining to be devoted to humanitarian projects, such as financing free establishments for tuberculous patients, encouraging struggling talent, and so on. The plan was elaborated even to the design for a centimetre price-column, from which the organization for collecting the old paper could read off each month the value of the paper collected, and the stamped form to be used as a receipt in exchange for payment. It was an excellent plan from every point of view. The wanton waste and destruction of news-print, thrown away or burnt up by the unenlightened, was a betrayal of our forests and of our political economy. To save and conserve paper meant to save cellulose, meant the conservation of our forests, the protection of human material that was used up in the manufacture of cellulose and paper — human material and capital. Furthermore, since newspaper might easily come to have four times the value of wrapping-paper and pasteboard, it would become an economic factor of considerable importance, and the basis of fruitful governmental and communal assessments, and thus lighten for newspaper readers the burden of taxation. In short, the plan was good, it was every way incontrovertible. The uncanny air of futility, or even a sort of sinister crack-brainedness, which hung about it was due to the addled fanaticism with which the former artist pursued and supported an economic idea, about which he was obviously so little serious that he made not the smallest effort to put it into execution. Hans Castorp, nodding, with his head on one side, listened to the man, as with fevered eloquence he made propaganda for his idea; observing at the same time in himself the contempt and repulsion which diminished his partisanship for the inventor against the indifference of the thoughtless world.
Some of the patients studied Esperanto, and knew enough to converse a little in that artificial jargon at their meals. Hans Castorp listened gloomily, but admitted to himself that there were other things even worse. A group of English who had been here for a short time, introduced a parlour game which consisted in the question, asked by the first player of his neighbour: “ Have you ever seen the Devil with a night-cap on ? ” To which the person asked must reply: “ No, I’ve never seen the Devil with a nightcap on,” and then repeat the question in his turn, and so on. It was insufferable. Yet Hans Castorp found the patience-players even worse. They were to be seen all over the house, at every hour of the day, laying out their cards; a passion for that diversion having assumed such proportions at the Berghof as to turn the place into a den of vice. Hans Castorp had the more ground for horror, in that he himself fell a temporary victim to the plague — was, indeed, one of the severest cases. It was the patience called “ elevens ” that proved his undoing, the game in which the cards are laid out in three rows of three deep, and any two cards that together make eleven covered anew as they come uppermost, as well as the three face-cards, until by good luck the pack is dealt out. It seems inconceivable that such a simple procedure could prove fascinating to the point of bewitchment — yet so it was. Hans Castorp, like so many others, experienced it — always with drawn and frowning brows, for this particular form of debauch is never a merry one. He was given over to the whims of the card-goblins, ensnared by the fitful and fickle favour of fortune, which sometimes let the face-cards and elevens pile up so that the game was over before the third tier was laid, when the fleeting triumph would stimulate the nerves to new efforts. But next time perhaps, the ninth and last card would fall without any possibility of covering anything, or else the game, having aroused flattering hopes, would obstinately stick at the last moment. Everywhere, at all hours of the day, he played patience — and at night under the stars, and in the morning in his pyjamas; played at table, played almost in his sleep. He shuddered, but he played. Thus one day Herr Settembrini found him — and disturbed him, as even from the beginning it had been his mission to do.
u Accidente! ” said he. “ What, Engineer, you are playing cards? ”
“ Not precisely playing cards,” Hans Castorp told him. “ I am just laying them out, to have a tussle with abstract chance. The tricks it plays intrigue me, it is as inconsistent as the wind. It fawns on you, and then suddenly puts up its back and won’t budge. This morning, directly I got up, it came three times running, once in two rows, which is a record. But will you believe it, this is the thirty-third time I have played it without once going even halfway through? ”
Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often he had looked in the course of the years, with melancholy black eyes.
“ At all events, you are preoccupied,” he said. “ It does not look as though I could find here the consolation I seek, nor balsam for my inward wound.”
“ Wound 5 ” echoed Hans Castorp, laying afresh.
“ The world situation puzzles me,” the Freemason sighed. “ The Balkan Federation will go through, Engineer, all the information I receive points that way. Russia is working feverishly for it. And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which must fall before any of the Russian programme can be realized. You understand my scruples. Austria, as of course you are aware, I hate with all my strength. But shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent? Yet on the other hand, diplomatic collaboration, to however small an extent, between my own country and Austria, I should regard as dishonourable. These are conscientious scruples which — ”
“ Seven and four,” said Hans Castorp. “ Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out. You have brought me luck, Herr Settembrini.”
The Italian was silent. Hans Castorp felt the black eyes, the eyes of reason and morality, bent in sorrow upon him. He played on for a while; then, resting his cheek in his hand, looked up at his mentor with the innocent, impenitent air of a naughty child.
“ Your eyes,” the master said, “ vainly seek to hide the fact that you are conscious of your state.”
“ Placet experiri ” Hans Castorp was so pert as to reply to him. Herr Settembrini left; and the abandoned one sat long, at his table in the middle of his white room, his chin supported on his hand, and brooded; shuddering in the very core of him at the cross-purposes everything in the world had got into, at the grinning and grimacing of the demons and ape-headed gods into whose hands it had fallen, at their unbridled domination, the name of which was “ The Great God Dumps.” An apocalyptic, evil name, calculated to give rise to mysterious fears. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and his heart with the flat of his hand. He was frightened. It seemed to him “ all this ” could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall; snatch life beyond the “ dead point ” and put an end to the “ small potatoes ” in one terrible Last Day. He longed to flee — as we have seen already. It was fortunate, then, that the heads had their unchanging eyes upon him, that they knew how to read his face, and were ready to tide him over the hard place with new and fruitful diversions.
They had declared, the heads, in the accents of a corps-student, that they were on track of the actual causes of the instability of Hans Castorp’s heating economy. And those causes, according to their scientific pronouncement, were so easy to come at that a veritable cure and legitimate dismissal to the flat-land had leaped into the foreground. The young man’s heart throbbed stormily with manifold emotions, when he stretched out his arm for the blood-letting. Going slightly pale, and blinking, he expressed his admiration for the splendid ruby colour of his life-blood, as it mounted in the glass container. The Hofrat himself, assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, performed the slight but portentous operation. Then passed several days, occupied in Hans Castorp’s mind with the question how this blood of his, this part of himself, would behave out of his control and under the eye of science.
At first, the Hofrat said one could not expect it to grow straight off. Later, he said it was unfortunate nothing had grown, as yet. But there came a day when he approached Hans Castorp at breakfast, where he sat at the upper end of the “ good ” Russian table, in the place once occupied by his great brother-in-blood, and whimsically congratulated him on the fact that the coccus was definitely established in one of the cultures they had prepared. It was now a question of probabilities: whether the symptoms of infection were to be referred to the insignificant amount of tubercle bacillus, or to the streptococci, which, also, were only present in small quantity. He, Behrens, must think it over. They were not finished with the cultures yet. He showed them to Hans Castorp in the “ lab a red, coagulate blood, in which tiny grey points were discernible. Those were the cocci. But any ass might have cocci, and tubercular bacilli too. If not for the symptoms of infection, they were not worth noticing. Outside his body, under the eyes of science, Hans Castorp’s blood went on bearing witness. The morning came when the Hofrat in his sprightly phraseology announced that not only on the first culture, but on all the others as well, cocci had subsequently grown, in large quantities. It was not yet certain that they were all streptococci, but it was more than probable that they were the cause of the existing infection — or such part of it as had not been due to the previously existing and perhaps not quite conquered tubercular infection. And the conclusion the Hof rat drew was — a strepto-vaccine! The prognosis was extraordinarily favourable, there was not the slightest risk about the procedure, so in any case it could do no harm to try it. As the serum was prepared from Hans Castorp’s own blood, the inoculation with it could introduce into his system no deterrent not already present there. At worst, the experiment would have a negative result — which could hardly be called unfavourable, since even without it the patient must stop on in any case!
Hans Castorp could not go quite that far. He submitted to the treatment, though he found it absurd, contemptible. This inoculation of himself with part of himself seemed a singularly cheerless procedure, an incestuous abomination, a self-to-self which could have nothing but a fruitless, hopeless result. Such was his ignorant and hypochondriac judgment, right only as to the unfruitfulness of the result, but there wholly. The diversion lasted for weeks. Sometimes it seemed to do harm — which was of course not the case — sometimes good, which, it followed, must equally not be the case. The result was negative — without being explicitly so called and announced. The whole undertaking died a natural death, and Hans Castorp went on playing patience — and gazing into the eye of the demon, whose unbridled sway he foresaw would come to an end of horror.
Fullness of Harmony
What new acquisition of House Berghof was it which at length released our long-standing friend from his patience-playing mania, and flung him into the arms of another passion, nobler, though at bottom no less strange? We are about to relate, being ourselves much taken by the mysterious object, and eager to communicate our enthusiasm.
The excellent management, in its sleepless concern for the happiness of its guests, had considered matters, there in the bowels of the earth, had resolved, and acted. It acquired, at a cost which we need not go into, but which must surely have been considerable, a new device for the entertainment of the patients, and added it to those already installed in the largest of the reception-rooms of House Berghof. Was it some clever artifice, of the same nature as the stereopticon, the kaleidoscope, or the cinematographic cylinder ? Yes — and yet, again, no, far from it. It was not an optical toy which the guests discovered one evening in the salon, and greeted with applause, some of them flinging their hands above their heads, others stooping over and clapping in their laps. It was an acoustical instrument. Moreover, the simple devices above-mentioned were not to be compared with it — they were outclassed, outvalued, outshone. This was no childish peep-show, like those of which all the guests were sick and tired, at which no one ever looked after the first few weeks. It was an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment, ranging from grave to gay. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.
We are seriously concerned lest the term be understood in an unworthy, outworn sense, and ideas attach to it which are applicable only to the primitive form of the instrument we have in mind, never to the elegant product evolved by a tireless application of technical means to the Muses’ own ends. My dear friends, we implore you to realize that the instrument we describe was not that paltry box with a handle to it, a disk and shaft atop and a shapeless brass funnel attached, which used to be set up on the table outside country inns, to gratify the ears of the rude with its nasal braying. This was a case finished in dull ebony, a little deeper than broad, attached by a cord to an electric switch in the wall, and standing chastely on its special table. With the antediluvian mechanism described above, it had nothing in common. You lifted the prettily bevelled lid, which was automatically supported by a brass rod attached on the inside, and there above a slightly depressed surface was the disk, covered with green cloth, with a nickelled rim, and nickelled peg upon which one fitted the hole in the centre of the hard-rubber record. At the right, in front, was a time-regulating device, with a dial and figures like a watch; at the left, the lever, which set the mechanism going or stopped it; and behind, also on the left, the hollow, curving, club-shaped, nickel-plated arm, with its flexible joints, carrying the flat round sound-box at the end, with a fitment into which the needle was screwed. If you opened the double doors at the front of the box, you saw a set of slanting shelves, rather like a blind, stained black like the case — and that was all.
“ Newest model,” the Hof rat said. “ Latest triumph of art, my children; A-i, copper-bottomed, superfijiissimo, nothing better on the market in this line of goods ” — he managed to give the words the twang of an eager and ignorant salesman. “ This is not just a machine,” he went on, taking a needle out of one of the gay little metal boxes ranged on the table, and fitting it into the holder, “ it’s a Stradivarius, a Guarneri; with a resonance, a vibration — dernier raffinema7ig , Polyhymnia patent, look here in the inside of the lid. German make, you know, we do them far and away better than anybody else. The truly musical, in modern, mechanical form, the German soul up to date. And here’s the libretto,” he said, and gestured with his head toward a little case on the wall, filled with broad-backed albums. “ I turn it all over to you, it is yours. But take care of it; I commend it to the solicitude of the public. Shall we shoot it off once, just for fun? ”
The patients implored him to do so. Behrens drew out a fat magic tome, turned over the heavy leaves, and chose a paper envelope, which showed a coloured title through a round hole on the front. He placed the record on the disk, set it in motion, waited until it was at full speed, and then carefully set the fine steel point upon the edge of the plate. There was a low, whetting sound. He let the lid sink, and at the same moment, from the open doors in front, from between the slats of the blind, or, rather, from the box as a whole, came a burst of music, with a hubbub of instruments, a lively, bustling, insistent melody: the first contagious bars of an Offenbach overture.
They listened, their lips parted in smiles. They could scarcely believe their ears at the purity and faithful reproduction of the colour of the wood-wind. A solo violin preluded whimsically, the bowing, the pizzicato , the sweet gliding from one position to another, were all clearly audible. It struck into the melody of the waltz, u Ach, ich habe sie verloren the orchestral harmony lightly bore the flattering strain — enchanting it was to hear it taken up by the ensemble and repeated as a sounding tutti. Of course, it was scarcely like a real orchestra playing in the room. The volume of sound, though not to any extent distorted, had suffered a diminution of perspective. If we may draw a simile from the visual field, it was as though one were to look at a painting through the wrong end of an opera-glass, seeing it remote and diminutive, though with all its luminous precision of drawing and colour. The vivid, consummate piece of music was reproduced in all the richness of its light-hearted invention. T he finish was abandon itself, a galop with a drolly hesitating beginning, a shameless cancan that called up a vision of top-hats waved in the air, flying skirts and tossing knees, and seemed never to come to the end of its triumphal jollification. But at length the mechanism stopped automatically. It was over. There was cordial applause.
They called for more, and it was forthcoming. A human voice welled out from the casket, a masculine voice at once soft and powerful, with orchestral accompaniment. It was a famous Italian baritone; the marvellous organ swelled out to the full extent of its natural register, there could be no talk here of any diminution or veiling of the sound. If one sat in an adjoining room and did not see the instrument, it seemed not otherwise than as though the artist stood in the salon in his own person, notes in hand, and sang. He sang an aria di bravura in his own tongue — Eh , il barbiere! “ Di qualita y di qualita! Figaro qua , Figaro la y Figaro , Figaro , Figaro! ” The listeners almost died of laughter at his falsetto parlandOy at the contrast between the deep voice and the tonguesplitting facility with which it rendered the words. The musical followed and admired the art of his phrasing, his breathing-technique. He was a master in the irresistible, a virtuoso of the Italian da capo school; he must have come forward to the footlights and flung up his arm, as he held the last tone before the closing tonic, so that the audience involuntarily burst out in shouts of applause before he ceased. It was beyond words.
Followed a French horn, playing, with delicate scrupulosity, variations on a folk-song. A soprano voice, with the loveliest freshness and precision, the most exquisite staccato , trilled and warbled an air from La Traviata. The spirit of a world-famed violinist played as though behind veils a romance by Rubinstein, to a piano accompaniment that sounded thin and cold, like a spinet. The wonder-box seemed to seethe: it poured out the chimes of bells, harp glissandos, the crashing of trumpets, the long rolling of drums. Lastly, dance records were put in. There were specimens of the new imported dance, the tango, in the taste of a water-side dive, calculated to make a Viennese waltz sound sedate and grandfatherly by contrast. Two couples displayed the fashionable steps, Behrens having by now withdrawn with the admonition that a needle should be used no more than once, and the whole instrument handled “ as though it were made of eggs.” Hans Castorp took his place as operator.
But why precisely Hans Castorp? In this wise. With suppressed eagerness he had opposed those who had thought to take over, on the Hofrat’s departure, the changing of plate and needle, the switching on and off of the current. “ Let me do it,” he said to them, gently putting them aside; and they gave way, first because he wore an air of having known all about it for years, and second because they cared little to take their pleasures actively, instead of sitting to be served to as much and such enjoyment as they could comfortably and unbored receive.
Not so Hans Castorp. While the Hofrat was introducing his new toy to the guests, the young man had remained in the background, not laughing or applauding, but following the performance with tense interest, rubbing an eyebrow round with two fingers, as he had on occasion a way of doing. Several times he restlessly shifted his position, even went into the reading-room to listen from there; then took up his stand close to Behrens, with his hands behind his back, and an enigmatic expression on his face, fixing the casket with his eye, and observing the simple operation of it. But within him something was saying: “ Hold on! This is an epoch. This thing was sent to me! ” He was filled with the surest foreknowledge of a new passion, a new enchantment, a new burden of love. The youth in the flat-land, who at first sight of a maiden marvels to find himself pierced to the heart with love’s barbed arrow, feels not greatly different. Jealousy followed hard upon. Public property, was it> Had that feeble curiosity the right, or the strength, to possess anything^ “ Let me do it,” he had said between his teeth, and they were content it should be so. They danced a little more, to the rollicking pieces he ran off, asked for another vocal number, an operatic duet, the barcarole from the Contes d’Hoffmann , which sounded lovely enough. When he closed the lid they all flocked off, chattering in their ephemeral pleasure over the new toy, these to the evening rest-cure, those to bed. He had been waiting for them to go. They left behind all as it was, the boxes of needles open, the plates and albums strewn about. It was like them. He made as though to follow, but then left them on the stairs, turned back to the salon, closed all the doors, and stopped there half the night, busy as a bee.
He made himself acquainted with the new possession, and worked in undisturbed enjoyment through the contents of the heavy albums. There were twelve, in two sizes, with twelve records each; many of the flat, round, black disks were inscribed on both sides, not only with the continuation of a piece of music, but also because many of the plates held two distinct records. Here was a world to conquer, large enough that even to survey it was a difficult task at first, and bewildering; yet a world full of beautiful possibilities. He played some twenty or thirty records; using a kind of needle that moved softly over the plate and lessened the sound, in order that his activity might not offend the silence of the night. But twenty or thirty were scarcely the eighth part of the riches that lay asking to be enjoyed. He must be content tonight with looking over the titles, only choosing one now and again to set upon the disk and give it voice. To the eye one was like another, except for the coloured label in the centre of each hard-rubber plate; each and all were covered to the centre or nearly so with concentric cncles; but it was these fine lines that held all imaginable music, the happiest inspirations from every region of the art, m choicest reproduction.
There were many overtures, and single symphonic movements, played by famous orchestras, the names of whose conductors were given on the record. There was a long list of lieder , sung to piano ■accompaniment by famous prima donnas; some of these were the lofty and conscious creation of individual artists, others simple folk-songs, still others fell between the two categories, in that they were products of an intellectual art, and at the same time sprang from all that was profoundest and most reverent in the feeling and genius of a people — artificial folk-songs, one might call them, if the word artificial need not be taken to cast a slur on the genuineness of their inspiration. One of these Hans Castorp had known from childhood; but from now on began to attach to it a quite special love and clothe it with many associations, as shall be seen hereafter. What else was there — or, simply — what was there not? Operas a-plenty. An international troupe of famous artists, male and female, displayed their highly trained, God-given talent in arias , duos , ensembles illustrating various periods and localities in the history of the opera — to discreet orchestral accompaniment. The opera of the south, a high-hearted, light-hearted ravishment; the German, racy of the people, whimsical, hobgoblinish; and both grand and comic opera in the French style. But was that all? Oh, no. A succession of chamber music followed, quartets and trios, instrumental solo numbers for violin, ’cello, flute; concert numbers with violin or flute obbligato, piano solos — and then there were the light diversions, the “ couplets,” the topical and popular numbers, played in the first instance by some small orchestra or other, and needing a coarse needle to render them suitably.
Hans Castorp, bustling and solitary, sifted and classified it all, and tried a fraction of it upon the instrument. At a late hour, as late as on the occasion of the first carouse with Pieter Peeperkom of majestic memory, he went flushed of cheek to Jbed, where from two to seven he dreamed of the wonder-box. He saw in his sleep the disk circling about the peg, with a swiftness that made it almost invisible and quite soundless. Its motion was not only circular, but also a peculiar, sidling undulation, which communicated itself to the arm that bore the needle, and gave this too an elastic oscillation, almost like breathing, which must have contributed greatly to the vibrato and portamento of the stringed instruments and the voices. Yet it remained unclear, sleeping as waking, how the mere following out of a hair-line above an acoustic cavity, with the sole assistance of the vibrating membrane of the sound-box, could possibly reproduce such a wealth and volume of sound as filled Hans Castorp’s dreaming ear.
Next morning he was early in the salon, even before breakfast; and comfortably sitting with folded hands, listened to a glorious baritone voice, singing to a harp accompaniment: “ Bhck ’ ich mnher in diesem edlen Kreise .” The harp sounded perfectly natural, there was no distortion or diminution of the sound that poured out of the casket accompanying the swelling, breathing, articulating human voice — it was simply amazing! And there could be on earth nothing more tender than the next number he chose, a duet from a modern Italian opera, a simple, heartfelt mingling of emotion between two beings, one part taken by the world-famous tenor who was so well represented in the albums, the other by a crystal-clear and sweet little soprano voice; nothing more lovely than his “ Da rm il braccio , mia pic etna ” and the simple, sweet, succinct little melodic phrase in which she replies.
Hans Castorp started as the door opened in his rear. It was the Hofrat, looking in on him; in his clinical coat, the stethoscope showing in his breast pocket, he stood there a moment, with his hand on the door-knob, and nodded at the distiller of sweet sounds. Hans Castorp, over his shoulder, replied to the nod, and the chief’s blue-cheeked visage, with its one-sided moustache, disappeared as he drew the door to behind him. Hans Castorp returned to his invisible, melodious pair of lovers.
Later in the day, after the noon and evening meals, he had a changing audience for his performance — unless one must reckon him in with the audience, instead of as the dispenser of the entertainment. Personally he inclined to the latter view. And the Berghof population agreed with him, to the extent that from the very first night they silently acquiesced in his self-appointed guardianship of the instrument. They did not care, these people. Aside from their ephemeral idolatry of the tenor, luxuriating in the melting brilliance of his own voice, letting this boon to the human race stream from him in cantilenas and high feats of virtuosity, notwithstanding their loudly proclaimed enthusiasm, they were without real love for the instrument, and content that anyone should operate it who was willing to take the trouble. It was Hans Castorp who kept the records in order, wrote the contents of each album on the inside of the cover, so that each piece might be found at once when it was wanted, and tfc ran ” the instrument. Soon he did it with ease and dexterity. The others would have spoiled the plates by using worn-out needles, would have left them lying about on chairs, would have tried all sorts of imbecile tricks, playing some noble and stately piece of music at breakneck speed and pitch, or setting the indicator at zero, so that nothing but a hysterical trilling or a long expiring groan came from the instrument. They had tried all that already. Of course, they were ill; but they were also pretty crude. After a while, Hans Castorp simply took the key of the little cabinet that held the needles and albums, and kept it in his pocket, so that his permission must needs be asked if anyone desired to play.
Evening, after the social quarter-hour, when the guests were gone, was his best time. He remained in the salon, or returned stealthily thither, and played until deep in the night. He found there was less danger than he had feared of disturbing the nightly rest of the house; for the carrying power of this ghostly music proved relatively small. The vibrations, so surprisingly powerful in the near neighbourhood of the box, soon exhausted themselves, grew weak and eerie with distance, like all magic. Hans Castorp was alone among four walls with his wonder-box; with the florid performance of this truncated little coffin of violin-wood, this small dull-black temple, before the open double doors of which he sat with his hands folded in his lap, his head on one side, his mouth open, and let the harmonies flow over him.
These singers male and female whom he heard, he could not see, their corporeal part abode in America, in Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg. But let them dwell where they might, he had their better part, their voices, and might rejoice in the refining and abstracting process which did away with the disadvantages of closer personal contact, yet left them enough appeal to the sense, to permit of some command over their individualities, especially in the case of German artists. He could distinguish the dialect, the pronunciation, the local origin of these; the character of the voice betrayed something of the soul-stature of individuals, and the level of their intelligence could be guessed by the extent to which they had neglected or taken advantage of their opportunities. Hans Castorp writhed when they failed. He bit his lips in chagrin when the reproduction was technically faulty; he was on pins and needles when the first note of an often-used record gave a shrill or scratching sound — which happened more particularly with the difficult female voice. Still, when these things happened, he bore with them, for love makes us forbearing. Sometimes he bent over the whirring, pulsating mechanism as over a spray of lilac, rapt in a cloud of sweet sound; or stood before the open case, tasting the triumphant joy of the conductor who with raised hand brings the trumpets into place precisely at the right moment. And he had favourites in his treasure-house, certain vocal and instrumental numbers which he never tired of hearing.
One group of records contained the closing scenes of a certain brilliant opera, overflowing with melodic genius, by a great countryman of Herr Settembrini, the doyen of dramatic music in the south, who had written it to the order of an oriental prince, in the second half of the last century, to celebrate the completion of a great technical achievement which should bind the peoples of the earth together. Hans Castorp had learned something of the plot, knew the main lines of the tragic fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida; and when he heard it from his casket could understand well enough what they said. The incomparable tenor, the royal alto with the wonderful sob in her register, and the silver soprano
— he understood perhaps not every word they said, bur enough, with his knowledge of the situation, and his sympathy in general for such situations, to feel a familiar fellow-feeling that increased every time he listened to this set of records, until it amounted to infatuation.
First came the scene of the explanation between Radames and Amneris: the king’s daughter has the captive brought before her, whom she loves, whom she would gladly save for her own, hut that he has just thrown all away for the sake of a barbarian slave
— fatherland and honour and all. Though he insists that in the depth of his soul honour remains untarnished. But this inner unimpairment avails him little, under the weight of all that indisputable guilt and crime, for he has become forfeit to the spiritual ax~m, which is inexorable toward human weakness, and will certainly make short work of him if he does not, at the last moment, abjure the slave, and throw himself into the royal arms of the alto with the sob in her register — who, so far as her voice went, richly deserved him. Amneris wrestles fervidly with the mellifluous but tragically blind and infatuated tenor, who sings nothing at all but “ In vain ” and “ I cannot,” when she addresses him with despairing pleas to renounce the slave, for that his own life is in the balance. “ I cannot ” . . . “ Once more, renounce her ”… “ In vain thou pleadest ” — and deathly obstinacy and anguished love blend together in a duet of extraordinary power and beauty, but absolutely no hope whatever. Then comes the terrifying repetition of the priestly formulas of condemnation, to the accompaniment of Amneris’s despair; they sound hollowly from below, and them the unhappy Radames does not reply to at all.
“ Radames, Radames,” sings the high-priest peremptorily, and points out the treason he has committed.
“ Justify thyself,” all the priests, in chorus, demand.
The high-priest calls attention to his silence, and they all hollowly declare him guilty.
“ Radames, Radames,” sings the high-priest again. “ The camp thou hast left before the battle.”
And again: “ Justify thyself.” “ Lo, he is silent,” the highly prejudiced presiding officer announces once more; and all the priests again unanimously declare him guilty.
“ Radames, Radames,” for the third time comes the inexorable voice. “ To Fatherland, to honour and thy King, thy oath thou hast broken ” — “ Justify thyself,” resounded again. And finally, for the third time, “ Fellonia the priestly chorus proclaims, after noting that Radames has again remained absolutely silent. So then there is nothing for it: the chorus announces the evil-doer for judgment, proclaims that his doom is sealed, that he must die the death of a deserter and be buried alive beneath the temple of the offended deity.
The outraged feelings of Amneris at this priestly severity had to be imagined, for here the record broke off. Hans Castorp changed the plate, with as few movements as possible, his eyes cast down. When he seated himself again, it was to listen to the last scene of the melodrama, the closing duet of Radames and Aida, sung in the underground vaults, while above their heads in the temple the cruel and bigoted priests perform the service of their cult, spreading forth their arms, giving out a dull, murmurous sound. “ Tu — in questa tomba ?” comes the inexpressibly moving, sweet and at the same time heroic voice of Radamej, in mingled horror and rapture. Yes, she has found her way to him, the beloved one for whose sake he has forfeited life and honour, she has awaited him here, to die with him; and the exchange of song between the two, broken at times by the muffled sound of the ceremonies above them, or blending and harmonizing with it, pierced the soul of our solitary night-watcher to its very depth, as much by reason of the circumstances as by the melodic expression of them. They sang of heaven, these two; but truly the <545
songs were heavenly themselves, and heavenly sweet the singing of them. That melodic line resistlessly travelled by the voices, solo and imisono , of Radames and Aida; that simple, rapturous ascent, playing from tonic to dominant, as it mounts from the fundamental to the sustained note a half-tone before the octave, then turning back again to the fifth — it seemed to the listener the most rarefied, the most ecstatic he had ever heard. But he would have been less ravished by the sounds, had not the situation which gave them birth prepared his spirit to yield to the sweetness of the music. It was so beautiful, that Aida should have found her way to the condemned Radames, to share his fate for ever! The condemned one protested, quite properly, against the sacrifice of the precious life; but in his tender, despairing “ No , no , troppo sei bella ” was the intoxication of final union with her whom he had thought never to see again. It needed no effort of imagination to enable Hans Castorp to feel with Radames all this intoxication, all this gratitude. And what, finally, he felt, understood, and enjoyed, sitting there with folded hands, looking into the black slats of the jalousies whence it all issued, was the triumphant idealism of the music, of art, of the human spirit; the high and irrefragable power they had of shrouding with a veil of beauty the vulgar horror of actual fact. What was it, considered with the eye of reason, that was happening here 11 Two human beings, buried alive, their lungs full of pit gas, would here together — or, more horrible still, one after the other — succumb to the pangs of hunger, and thereafter the process of putrefaction would do its unspeakable work, until two skeletons remained, each totally indifferent and insensible to the other’s presence or absence. This was the real, objective fact — but a side, and a state of affairs quite distinct, of which idealism and emotion would have none, which was triumphantly put in the shade by the music and the beauty of the theme. The situation as it stood did not exist for either operatic Radames or operatic Aida. Their voices rose unisono to the blissful sustained note leading into the octave, as they assured each other that now heaven was opening, and the light of its eternity streaming forth before their yearning eyes. The consoling power of this aesthetic palliation did the listener good, and went far to account for the special love he bore this number of his programme.
He was wont to rest from these terrors and ecstasies in another number, brief, yet with a concentrated power of enchantment; peaceful, compared with the other, an idyll, yet r affine, shaped and turned with all the subtlety and economy of the most modern art. It was an orchestral piece, of French origin, purely instrumental, a symphonic prelude, achieved with an instrumentation relatively small for our time, yet with all the apparatus of modern technique and shrewdly calculated to set the spirit a-dreaming.
Here is the dream Hans Castorp dreamed: he lay on his back in a sunny, flower-starred meadow, with his head on a little knoll, one leg drawn up, the other flung over — and those were goat’s legs crossed there before him. His fingers touched the stops of a little wooden pipe, which he played for the pure joy of it, his solitude on the meadow being complete. He held it to his lips, a reed pipe or little clarinet, and coaxed from it soothing headtones, one after the other, just as they came, and yet in a pleasing sequence. The care-free piping rose toward the deep-blue sky, and beneath the sky stretched the branching, wind-tossed boughs of single ash- trees and birches whose leaves twinkled in the sun. But his feckless, day-dreaming, half-melodious pipe was far from being the only voice in the solitude. The hum of insects in the sun-warmed air above the long grass, the sunshine itself, the soft wind, the swaying tree-tops, the twinkling leaves — all these gentle vibrations of the midsummery peace set themselves to his simple piping, to give it a changeful, ever surprisingly choice harmonic meaning. Sometimes the symphonic accompaniment would fade far off and be forgot. Then goat-legged Hans would blow stoutly away, and by the naive monotony of his piping lure back Nature’s subtly colourful, harmonious enchantment; until at length, after repeated intermission, she sweetly acceded. More and higher instruments came in rapidly, one after another, until all the previously lacking richness and volume were reached and sustained in a single fugitive moment that yet held all eternity in its consummate bliss. The young faun was joyous on his summer meadow. No “ Justify thyself,” was here; no challenge, no priestly court-martial upon one who strayed away and was forgotten of honour. Forgetfulness held sway, a blessed hush, the innocence of those places where time is not; “ slackness ” with the best conscience in the world, the very apotheosis of rebuff to the Western world and that world’s insensate ardour for the “ deed.” The soothing effect of all which upon our night-walking music-maker gave this record a special value in his eyes.
There was a third. Or rather there were many, a consecutive group of three or four, a single tenor aria taking up almost half the space of a whole black rubber plate. Again it was French music — an opera Hans Castorp knew well, having seen and heard it repeatedly. Once, at a certain critical juncture now far in the
Part 27 of 30