Part 2 of 39
“I’m perfectly worn out with laughing,” he said, and breathed through his mouth. “You’ve told me such a lot of crazy stuff—that about the psychoanalysis was the last straw. I suppose I am a bit relaxed from the journey. And my feet are cold—are yours? But my face burns so, it is really unpleasant. Do we eat now? I feel hungry. Is the food decent up here?”
They went noiselessly along the coco matting of the narrow corridor, which was lighted by electric lights in white glass shades set in the ceiling. The walls gleamed with hard white enamel paint. They had a glimpse of a nursing sister in a white cap, and eyeglasses on a cord that ran behind her ear. She had the look of a Protestant sister—that is to say, one working without a real vocation and burdened with restlessness and ennui. As they went along the corridor, Hans Castorp saw, beside two of the white-enamelled, numbered doors, certain curious, swollen-looking, balloon-shaped vessels with short necks. He did not think, at the moment, to ask what they were.
“Here you are,” said Joachim. “I am next you on the right. The other side you have a Russian couple, rather loud and offensive, but it couldn’t be helped. Well, how do you like it?”
There were two doors, an outer and an inner, with clothes-hooks in the space between. Joachim had turned on the ceiling light, and in its vibrating brilliance the room looked restful and cheery, with practical white furniture, white washable walls, clean linoleum, and white linen curtains gaily embroidered in modern taste. The door stood open; one saw the lights of the valley and heard distant dance-music. The good Joachim had put a vase of flowers on the chest of drawers—a few bluebells and some yarrow, which he had found himself among the second crop of grass on the slopes.
“Awfully decent of you,” said Hans Castorp. “What a nice room! I can spend a couple of weeks here with pleasure.”
“An American woman died here day before yesterday,” said Joachim. “Behrens told me directly that she would be out before you came, and you might have the room. Her fiancé was with her, an English officer of marines, but he didn’t behave very well. He kept coming out in the corridor to cry, just like a little boy. He rubbed cold cream on his cheeks, because he was close-shaven and the tears smarted. Night before last she had two first-class haemorrhages, and that was the finish. But she has been gone since yesterday morning, and after they took her away of course they fumigated the room thoroughly with formalin, which is the proper thing to use in such cases.”
Hans Castorp took in this information with a sprightly, yet half-distraught air. He was standing with his sleeves pushed back before the roomy wash-hand-basin, the taps of which shone in the electric light, and gave hardly a glance at the white metal bed with its fresh coverlet.
“Fumigated it, eh? That’s ripping,” he said loquaciously and rather absurdly, as he washed and dried his hands. “Methyl aldehyde; yes, that’s too much for the bacteria, no matter how strong they are. H2CO. But it’s a powerful stench. Of course, perfect sanitation is absolutely essential.” He spoke with more of a Hamburg accent than his cousin, who had broken himself of it since his student days. Hans Castorp continued volubly. “But what I was about to say was, probably the officer of marines used a safety-razor; one makes oneself sore with those things easier than with a well-sharpened blade—at least, that is my experience, and I use them both by turns. Well, and salt water would naturally make a tender skin smart, so he got in the way, in the service, of rubbing in cold cream. I don’t see anything strange about that …” He rattled on: said that he had two hundred Maria Mancinis (his cigar) in his trunk, the customs officers had been very courteous; and gave his cousin greetings from various people at home. “Don’t they heat the rooms here?” he broke off to inquire, and ran to put his hands on the radiator.
“No, they keep us pretty cool,” answered Joachim. “The weather would have to be different from this before they put on the heat in August.”
“August, August!” said Hans Castorp. “But I am cold, abominably cold; I mean in my body, for my face burns shockingly—just feel it!”
This demand was entirely foreign to the young man’s nature—so much so that he himself was disagreeably impressed as he heard himself make it. Joachim did not take up the offer, but merely said: “That is the air—it doesn’t mean anything; Behrens himself is purple in the face all day long. Some people never get used to it. Come along now, do, or we shan’t get anything to eat.”
Outside they saw the nursing sister again, peering short-sightedly and inquisitively after them. But in the first storey Hans Castorp suddenly stopped, rooted to the spot by a perfectly ghastly sound coming from a little distance off round a bend in the corridor. It was not a loud sound, but so distinctly horrible that Hans Castorp made a wry face and looked wide-eyed at his cousin. It was coughing, obviously, a man coughing; but coughing like to no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, and compared with which any other had been a magnificent and healthy manifestation of life: a coughing that had no conviction and gave no relief, that did not even come out in paroxysms, but was just a feeble, dreadful welling up of the juices of organic dissolution.
“Yes,” said Joachim. “That’s a bad case. An Austrian aristocrat, you know, very elegant. He’s a born horseman—a gentleman rider. And now he’s come to this. But he still gets about.”
As they went, Hans Castorp discoursed earnestly upon the gentleman rider’s cough.
“You must realize,” he said, “that I’ve never heard anything like it before. It is entirely new to me, and naturally it makes a great impression. There are different kinds of cough, dry and loose, and people always say the loose one is better than the other, the barking kind. When I had croup, in my youth” (he actually said “in my youth”!), “I bayed like a wolf, and I can still remember how glad everybody was when it got looser. But a cough like this—I didn’t know there was such a cough! It isn’t a human cough at all. It isn’t dry and yet isn’t loose either—that is very far from being the right word for it. It is just as if one could look right into him when he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous—”
“Oh,” said Joachim, “I hear it every day, you don’t need to describe it to me.”
But Hans Castorp could not get over the coughing he had heard. He kept repeating that he could see right into the gentleman rider’s vitals; when they reached the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited glitter.
In the Restaurant
It was charming in the restaurant, elegantly appointed and well lighted. The room lay to the right of the hall, opposite the salons, and was, Joachim explained, used chiefly by new arrivals, and by guests eating out of the usual meal hours or entertaining company. But it also served for birthday feasts, farewell parties, even to celebrate a favourable report after a general examination. There were lively times here in the restaurant on occasion, Joachim said, and champagne flowed freely. Now, no one was here but a solitary lady of some thirty years, reading a book and humming; she kept tapping the tablecloth lightly with the middle finger of her left hand. After the young people had taken their places, she changed hers, in order to sit with her back to them. Joachim explained in a low voice that she suffered from shyness as from a disease, and ate all her meals in the restaurant, with a book. It was said that she had entered her first tuberculosis sanatorium as a young girl, and had never lived in the world since.
“So compared with her, you are only a novice, with your five months; and still will be when you have a year on your back,” said Hans Castorp to his cousin; whereat Joachim, with his newly acquired shoulder-shrug, took up the menu.
They had sat down at the raised table in the window, the pleasantest spot in the room, facing each other against the cream-coloured hangings, their faces lighted by the red-shaded table-lamp. Hans Castorp clasped his freshly washed hands and rubbed them together in agreeable anticipation—a habit of his when he sat down to table, perhaps because his ancestors had said grace before meat. They were served by a friendly maid in black frock and white apron. She had a pleasant, throaty voice, and her broad face was indisputably healthy-coloured. To his great amusement, Hans Castorp learned that the waitresses here were called “dining-room girls.” They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose, and Hans Castorp sent it back to have it warmed. The food was excellent: asparagus soup, stuffed tomatoes, a roast with vegetables, an exceedingly well-prepared sweet, cheese, and fruit. Hans Castorp ate heartily, though his appetite did not turn out quite so stout as he had thought. But he always ate a good deal, out of pure self-respect, even when he was not hungry.
Joachim paid scant honour to the meal. He was tired of the cooking, he said; they all were, up here, and it was customary to grumble at the food. If one had to sit up here forever and a day—! But, on the other hand, he partook of the wine with gusto, not to say abandon; and repeatedly, though with careful avoidance of emotional language, expressed his joy at having somebody here with whom one could have a little rational conversation.
“Yes, it’s first-rate you’ve come,” he said, and his gentle voice betrayed some feeling. “I must say it is really an event for me—it is certainly a change, anyhow, a break in the everlasting monotony.”
“But time must go fast, living up here,” was Hans Castorp’s view.
“Fast and slow, as you take it,” answered Joachim. “It doesn’t do at all, I tell you. You can’t call it time—and you can’t call it living either!” he said with a shake of the head, and fell to his glass again.
Hans Castorp drank too, though his face was like fire. Yet he was still cold, and felt a curious restlessness in his limbs, at once pleasurable and troubling. His words fell over each other, he often misspoke and passed it over with a deprecating wave. Joachim too was in a lively humour, and their conversation continued in a still freer and more convivial vein after the humming, tapping lady had got up suddenly and left the room. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, nodded, shrugged their shoulders, talked with their mouths full. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg, and brought the conversation round to the proposed regulation of the Elbe.
“Epoch-making,” said Hans Castorp. “Epoch-making for the development of our shipping. Can’t be overestimated. We’ve budgeted fifty millions for immediate expenditure and you may be sure we know what we’re about.”
But notwithstanding all the importance he attached to the projected improvement, he jumped away from the theme and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life “up here” and about the guests—which the latter straightway did, being only too pleased to be able to unbosom himself. He had to repeat the story of the corpses sent down by bobsleigh, and vouch for its truth. Hans Castorp being taken by another fit of laughing, his cousin laughed too, with hearty enjoyment, and told other funny things to add fuel to their merriment. There was a lady sitting at his table, named Frau Stöhr, the wife of a Cannstadt musician; a rather serious case, she was, and the most ignorant creature he had ever seen. She said “diseased” for “deceased,” quite seriously, and she called Krokowski the “Asst.” And you had to take it all in without cracking a smile. She was a regular gossip—most people were, up here—and published it broadcast that another lady, a certain Frau Iltis, carried a “steriletto” on her person. “That is exactly what she called it, isn’t that priceless?” They lolled in their chairs, they flung themselves back and laughed so hard that they shook; and they began to hiccup at nearly the same time.
Now and then Joachim’s face would cloud over and he would remember his lot.
“Yes, we sit here and laugh,” he said, with a long face, his words interrupted by the heaving of his diaphragm, “we sit here and laugh, but there’s no telling when I shall get away. When Behrens says half a year, you can make up your mind it will be more. It is hard, isn’t it?—you just tell me if you don’t think it is pretty hard on me. I had already been accepted, I could have taken my exams next month. And now I have to drool about with a thermometer stuck in my mouth, and count the howlers of this ignorant Frau Stöhr, and watch the time slipping away. A year is so important at our age. Down below, one goes through so many changes, and makes so much progress, in a single year of life. And I have to stagnate up here—yes, just stagnate like a filthy puddle; it isn’t too crass a comparison.”
Strange to say, Hans Castorp’s only reply to all this was a query as to whether it was possible to get porter up here; when Joachim looked at him, in some astonishment, he perceived that his cousin was overcome with sleep, that in fact he was actually nodding.
“But you are going to sleep!” said Joachim. “Come along, it is time we both went to bed.”
“ ‘You can’t call it time,’ ” quoth Hans Castorp, thick-tongued. He went with his cousin, rather bent and stiff in the knees, like a man bowed to the earth with fatigue. However, in the dimly lighted corridor he pulled himself sharply together on hearing his cousin say: “There’s Krokowski sitting there. I think I’ll just have to present you, as briefly as possible.”
Dr. Krokowski sat in the bright light at the fireplace of one of the reception-rooms, close to the folding doors. He was reading a paper, and got up as the young people approached.
Joachim, in military position, heels together, said: “Herr Doctor, may I present my cousin Castorp from Hamburg? He has just arrived.”
Dr. Krokowski greeted the new inmate with a jovial and robust heartiness, as who should say that with him all formality was superfluous, and only jocund mutual confidence in place. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered and fleshy, much shorter than either of the youths before him, so that he had to tip back his head to look them in the face. He was unusually pale, of a translucent, yes, phosphorescent pallor, that was further accentuated by the dark ardour of his eyes, the blackness of his brows, and his rather long, full whisker, which ended in two points and already showed some white threads. He had on a black double-breasted, somewhat worn sack suit; black, open-worked sandal-like shoes over grey woollen socks, and a soft turndown collar, such as Hans Castorp had previously seen worn only by a photographer in Danzig, which did, in fact, lend a certain stamp of the studio to Dr. Krokowski’s appearance. Smiling warmly and showing his yellow teeth in his beard, he shook the young man by the hand, and said in a baritone voice, with rather a foreign drawl: “Welcome to our midst, Herr Castorp! May you get quickly acclimatized and feel yourself at home among us! Do you come as a patient, may I ask?”
It was touching to see Hans Castorp labour to master his drowsiness and be polite. It annoyed him to be in such bad form, and with the self-consciousness of youth he read signs of indulgent amusement in the warmth of the Assistant’s manner. He replied, mentioning his examinations and his three weeks’ visit, and ended by saying he was, thank God, perfectly healthy.
“Really?” asked Krokowski, putting his head teasingly on one side. His smile grew broader. “Then you are a phenomenon worthy of study. I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being. What were the examinations you have just passed, if I may ask?”
“I am an engineer, Herr Doctor,” said Hans Castorp with modest dignity.
“Ah, an engineer!” Dr. Krokowski’s smile retreated as it were, lost for the moment something of its genial warmth. “A splendid calling. And so you will not require any attention while you are here, either physical or psychical?”
“Oh, no, thank you ever so much,” said Hans Castorp, and almost drew back a step as he spoke.
At that Dr. Krokowski’s smile burst forth triumphant; he shook the young man’s hand afresh and cried briskly: “Well, sleep well, Herr Castorp, and rejoice in the fullness of your perfect health; sleep well, and auf Wiedersehen!” With which he dismissed the cousins and returned to his paper.
The lift had stopped running, so they climbed the stairs; in silence, somewhat taken aback by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim went with his cousin to number thirty-four, where the lame porter had already deposited the luggage of the new arrival. They talked for another quarter-hour while Hans Castorp unpacked his night and toilet things, smoking a large, mild cigarette the while. A cigar would have been too much for him this evening—a fact which impressed him as odd indeed.
“He looks quite a personality,” he said, blowing out the smoke. “He is as pale as wax. But dear me, what hideous footgear he wears! Grey woollen socks, and then those sandals! Was he really offended at the end, do you think?”
“He is rather touchy,” admitted Joachim. “You ought not to have refused the treatment so brusquely, at least not the psychical. He doesn’t like to have people get out of it. He doesn’t take much stock in me because I don’t confide in him enough. But every now and then I tell him a dream I’ve had, so he can have something to analyse.”
“Then I certainly did offend him,” Hans Castorp said fretfully, for it annoyed him to give offence. His weariness rushed over him with renewed force at the thought.
“Good night,” he said; “I’m falling over.”
“At eight o’clock I’ll come fetch you to breakfast,” Joachim said, and went.
Hans Castorp made only a cursory toilet for the night. Hardly had he put out the bedside light when sleep overcame him; but he started up again, remembering that in that bed, the day before yesterday, someone had died. “That wasn’t the first time either,” he said to himself, as though the thought were reassuring. “It is a regular deathbed, a common deathbed.” And he fell asleep.
No sooner had he gone off, however, than he began to dream, and dreamed almost without stopping until next morning. Principally he saw his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in a strange, dislocated attitude on a bobsled, riding down a steep course. He had a phosphorescent pallor like Dr. Krokowski, and in front of him sat the gentleman rider and steered. The gentleman rider was indistinct, like someone one has heard cough, but never seen.
“It’s all the same to us up here,” remarked the dislocated Joachim; and then it was he and not the gentleman rider who was coughing in that horribly pulpy manner. Hans Castorp wept bitterly to hear, and then perceived that he must run to the chemist’s to get some cold cream. But Frau Iltis, with a pointed snout, sat by the roadside with something in her hand, which must be her “steriletto,” but was obviously nothing else than a safety-razor. This made Hans Castorp go from tears to laughing; and thus he was tossed back and forth among varying emotions, until the dawn came through his half-open balcony door and wakened him.
Chapter II
Of the Christening Basin, and of Grandfather in His Twofold Guise
Hans Castorp retained only pale memories of his parental home. His father and mother he had barely known; they had both dropped away in the brief period between his fifth and seventh birthdays; first the mother, quite suddenly, on the eve of a confinement, of an arterial obstruction following neuritis—an embolus, Dr. Heidekind had called it—which caused instantaneous cardiac arrest. She had just been laughing, sitting up in bed, and it looked as though she had fallen back with laughter, but really it was because she had died. The father, Hermann Castorp, could not grasp his loss. He had been deeply attached to his wife, and not being of the strongest himself, never quite recovered from her death. His spirit was troubled; he shrank within himself; his benumbed brain made him blunder in his business, so that the firm of Castorp and Son suffered sensible financial losses; and the next spring, while inspecting warehouses on the windy landing-stage, he got inflammation of the lungs. The fever was too much for his shaken heart, and in five days, notwithstanding all Dr. Heidekind’s care, he died. Attended to his rest by a respectable concourse of citizens, he followed his wife to the Castorp family vault, a charming site in St. Katherine’s churchyard, with a view of the Botanical Gardens.
His father the Senator survived him a short time; then he too passed away, likewise of inflammation of the lungs. His death agony was sore, for unlike his son, Hans Lorenz Castorp had been a man of tough constitution, and firmly rooted in life. Before his death, for the space of a year and a half, the grandfather harboured the orphaned Hans Castorp in his home, a mansion standing in a narrow lot on the Esplanade, built in the early years of the last century, in the northern-classic style of architecture. It was painted a depressing weather-colour, and had pilasters on either side the entrance door, which was approached by a flight of five steps. Besides the parterre, which had windows going down to the floor and furnished with cast-iron grilles, there were two upper storeys.
In the parterre were chiefly reception-rooms, and a very light and cheerful dining-room, with walls decorated in stucco. Its three windows, draped with wine-coloured curtains, looked out on the back garden. In this room, daily, at four o’clock, for the space of eighteen months, grandfather and grandson dined together, served by old Fiete, who had earrings in his ears and silver buttons on his livery, also a batiste neckcloth like his master’s, in which he buried his shaven chin just as Hans Lorenz Castorp did in his. Grandfather said “thou” to him and addressed him in dialect—not with any humorous intent, for he had no bent that way, but in all seriousness, and because it was his custom so to do in his dealings with the common people—the warehouse hands, postmen, coachmen, and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and very much he liked to hear Fiete reply, in dialect too, bending over as he served and speaking into his master’s left ear, for the Senator could hear much better on that side. The old man would listen and nod and go on eating, sitting erect between the table and the high back of his mahogany chair, and scarcely at all bending over his plate. And his grandson, opposite, watched in silence, with deep, unconscious concentration, Grandfather’s beautiful, thin, white old hands, with their pointed nails, and, on the right forefinger, the green seal ring with the crest; watched the small, deft, practised motions with which they arranged a mouthful of meat, vegetable, and potato on the end of his fork, and with a slight inclination of the head conveyed it to his mouth. Then he would look at his own hands, and their still clumsy movements, and see in them the hope foreshadowed of one day holding and using his knife and fork as Grandfather did.
Again, he would wonder whether he should ever bury his chin in such another neckband as that which filled the wide space inside Grandfather’s extraordinary collar, with its sharp points brushing the old man’s cheeks. He doubted it. One would have to be as old as Grandfather for that; in these days, save for him and his old Fiete, nobody, far and wide, wore such collars and neckcloths. It was a pity; little Hans Castorp liked the way Grandfather’s chin nestled in the high, snow-white band. Even after he was grown, he recalled it with pleasure; something in the depth of his being responded to it.
When they had done, they folded their table-napkins and put them in their silver rings—a job at which Hans Castorp never acquitted himself very well, for they were the size of small tablecloths. Then the Senator got up from his chair, which Fiete drew away behind him, and went with shuffling steps into his “office” to get a cigar. Sometimes the grandson followed him in.
This office had come to exist because of a peculiarity in the arrangement of the lower floor—namely, that the dining-room had been planned with three windows instead of two, and ran the whole width of the house; which left space for only two drawing-rooms, instead of the usual three, and gave to one of them, at right angles to the dining-room, with a single window on the street, a quite disproportionate depth. Of this room, therefore, some quarter of the length had been cut off, and turned into a cabinet. It was a strip of a room, with a skylight; twilighted, and not much furnished—there was an étagère, on which stood the Senator’s cigar case; a card-table, the drawer of which held whist cards, counters, little marking-boards with tiny teeth that clapped open and shut, a slate and slate-pencil, paper cigar-holders, and other such attractions; and finally, in the corner, a rococo case in palisander-wood, with yellow silk stretched behind its glass doors.
“Grandpa,” little Hans Castorp might say, standing on tiptoes to reach the old man’s ear, “please show me the christening basin.”
And the grandfather, who had already pulled back the skirts of his long cashmere frock-coat and taken the bunch of keys from his trouser pocket, forthwith opened the door of the glass case, whence floated odours odd and pleasant to the boy’s sense. Inside were all manner of disused and fascinating objects: a pair of silver-branched candlesticks, a broken barometer in a wooden case with allegorical carving, an album of daguerreotypes, a cedarwood case for liqueurs, a funny little Turk in flowing silk robes, under which was a hard body with a mechanism inside. Once, when you wound him up, he had been able to leap about all over the table, but he was long since out of repair. Then there was a quaint old model of a ship; and right at the bottom a rattrap. But from one of the middle shelves Grandfather took a much-tarnished, round silver dish, with a tray likewise of silver, and showed them both to the boy, lifting them separately and turning them about in his hands as he told the story he had so often told before.
Plate and basin, one could see, and as the little one heard once again, had not originally belonged together; but, Grandfather said, they had been in use together for a round hundred years, or since the time when the basin was made. The latter was very beautiful, of simple and elegant form, in the severe taste of the early nineteenth century. It rested, plain and solid, on a round base, and had once been gilt within, but the gilding had faded with time to a yellow shimmer. Its single decoration was a chaste garland of roses and serrated leaves about the brim. As for the plate, its far greater antiquity could be read on the inside: the date 1650 was engraved there in ornamental figures, framed in curly engraved lines executed in the “modern manner” of the period, florid and capricious devices and arabesques that were something between star and flower. On the back, engraved in a variety of scripts, were the names of its successive owners, seven in number, each with the date when it had passed into his hands. The old man named each one to his grandson, pointing with beringed index finger. There was Hans Castorp’s father’s name, there was Grandfather’s own, there was Great-grandfather’s; then the “great” came doubled, tripled, quadrupled, from the old man’s mouth, whilst the little lad listened, his head on one side, the eyes full of thought, yet fixed and dreamy too, the childish lips parted, half with awe, half sleepily. That great-great-great-great—what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past! All that, as his face showed, made a profound impression. As he listened to the great-great-great, he seemed to smell the cool, earthy air of the vault of St. Michael’s or Saint Katherine’s; the breath of regions where one went hat in hand, the head reverently bowed, walking weavingly on the tips of one’s toes; seemed, too, to hear the remote and set-apart hush of those echoing places. Religious feeling mingled in his mind with thoughts of death and a sense of history, as he listened to the sombre syllable; he received therefrom an ineffable gratification—indeed, it may have been for the sake of hearing the sound that he so often begged to see the christening basin.
Grandfather set the vessel back on the tray, and let the boy look into the smooth, faintly golden inside, which caught the light from the window in the ceiling.
“Yes,” he said, “it will soon be eight years since we held you over it, and the water flowed into it from your baptism. Lassen, the sexton of St. Jacob’s, poured it into our good Pastor Bugenhagen’s hand, and it ran out over your little topknot and into the basin. We had warmed it, so it should not frighten you and make you cry, and you did not; you cried beforehand, though, so loud that Bugenhagen could hardly get on with the service, but you stopped when you felt the water—and that, let us hope, was out of respect for the Holy Sacrament. A few days from now it will be forty-four years since your blessed father was a baby at the baptismal font, and it was over his head the water flowed into the basin. That was here in this house, where he was born, in front of the middle dining-room window, and old Pastor Hezekiel was still alive. He was the man the French nearly shot when he was young, because he preached against their burning and looting. He has been with God these many years. Then, five-and-seventy years ago, I was the youngster whose head they held over this selfsame basin; that was in the dining-room too, and the minister spoke the very words that were spoken when you and your father were baptized, and the clear, warm water flowed over my head precisely the same way—there wasn’t much more hair than there is now—and fell into this golden bowl just as it did over yours.”
The little one looked up at Grandfather’s narrow grey head, bending over the basin as it had in the time he described. A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity—these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom was displayed.
As a young man he was aware that the image of his grandfather was more deeply and clearly imprinted on his mind, with greater significance, than those of his own parents. The fact might rest upon sympathy and physical likeness, for the grandson resembled the grandfather, in so far, that is, as a rosy youth with the down on his chin might resemble a bleached, rheumatic septuagenarian. Yet it probably spoke even more for that which was indeed the truth, that the grandfather had been the real personality, the picturesque figure of the family.
Long before Hans Lorenz Castorp’s passing, his person and the things for which he stood had ceased to be representative of his age. He had been a typical Christian gentleman, of the Reformed faith, of a strongly conservative cast of mind, as obstinately convinced of the right of the aristocracy to govern as if he had been born in the fourteenth century, when the labouring classes had begun to make head against the stout resistance of the free patriciate and wrest from it a place and voice in the councils of the ancient city. He had little use for the new. His active years had fallen in a decade of rapid growth and repeated upheavals, a decade of progress by forced marches, which had made continual demands on the public capacity for enterprise and self-sacrifice. Certainly he had no part or lot, old Castorp, in the brilliant triumph of the modern spirit that followed hard upon. It was not his fault; he had held far more with ancestral ways and old institutions than with ruinous schemes for widening the harbour, or godless and rubbishing plans for a great metropolis. He had put on the brakes; he had whittled things down wherever he could; and if matters had gone to his liking, the administration would have continued to wear the same old-fashioned, idyllic guise as, in his time, his own office did.
Such, in his lifetime and afterwards, was the figure the old man presented to the eye of his fellow burghers; and such, in essentials, was he also to the childish gaze of little Hans Castorp, who knew naught of affairs of state, and whose formless, uncritical judgments were rather the fruit of mere lively perceptions. Yet they persisted into later life, as the elements of a perfectly conscious memory-picture, which defied expression or analysis, but was none the less positive for all that. We repeat that natural sympathy was in play here too, the close family tie and essential intimacy which not infrequently leaps over an intervening generation.
Senator Castorp was tall and lean. The years had bent his back and neck, but he tried to counteract the curvature by pressure in another direction; drawing down his mouth with sedulous dignity, though the lips were shrunken against the bare gums, for he had lost all his teeth, and put in the false ones only to eat. It was this posture also which helped to steady an incipient shaking of the head, gave him his look of being sternly reined up, and caused him to support his chin on his neckcloth in the manner so congenial to little Hans Castorp’s taste.
He loved his snuffbox—it was a longish, gold-inlaid tortoiseshell one—and on account of his snuff-taking, used a red pocket-handkerchief, the corner of which always hung out of the back pocket of his coat. If this foible added a quaint touch to his appearance, yet the effect was only of a slight negligence or licence due to age, which length of days either consciously and cheerfully permits itself, or else brings in its train without the victim’s being aware. If weakness it were, it was the only one the sharp eye of the child ever noted in his grandfather’s exterior. But the old man’s everyday appearance was not his real and authentic one, either to the seven-year-old child, or to the memory of the grown man in after years. That was different, far finer and truer; it was Grandfather as he appeared in a life-size portrait which had once hung in the house of Hans Castorp’s own parents, had moved over with him to the Esplanade on their death, and now hung above the great red satin sofa in the reception-room.
The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Councillor: the sober, even godly, civilian habit of a bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to the perpetual continuity of things, and the perfect soundness of its business signature. Senator Castorp stood at full length on a red-tiled floor, in a perspective of column and pointed arch. His chin was dropped, his mouth drawn down, his blue, musing eyes, with the tear ducts plain beneath them, directed toward the distant view. He wore the black coat, cut full like a robe, more than knee-length, with a wide trimming of fur all round the edge; the upper sleeves were wide and puffed and fur-trimmed too, while from beneath them came the narrow under-sleeves of plain cloth, then lace cuffs, which covered the hands to the knuckles. The slender, elderly legs were cased in black silk stockings; the shoes had silver buckles. But about his neck was the broad, starched ruff, pressed down in front and swelling out on the sides, beneath which, for good measure, a fluted jabot came out over the waistcoat. Under his arm he held the old-fashioned, broad-brimmed hat that tapered to a point at the top.
It was a capital painting, by an artist of some note, in an old-masterish style that suited the subject and was reminiscent of much Spanish, Dutch, late Middle Ages work. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it; not, of course, with any knowledge of art, but with a larger, even a fervid comprehension. Only once—and then only for a moment—had he ever seen Grandfather as he was here represented, on the occasion of a procession to the Rathaus. But he could not help feeling that this presentment was the genuine, the authentic grandfather, and the everyday one merely subsidiary, not entirely conformable—a sort of interim grandfather, as it were. For it was clear that the deviations and idiosyncrasies presented by his everyday appearance were due to incomplete, perhaps even unsuccessful adaptation; they were the not quite eradicable vestiges of Grandfather’s pure and genuine form. The choker collar and band, for instance, were old-fashioned; an adjective it would have been impossible to apply to that admirable article of apparel whose interim representative they were: namely, the ruff. The same was true of the outlandish top-hat Grandfather wore, with the bell-shaped crown, to which the broad-brimmed felt in the painting corresponded, only with a higher degree of actuality; and of the voluminous frock-coat, whose archetype and original was for little Hans Castorp the lace- and fur-trimmed ceremonial garment.
Thus he was glad from his heart that it should be the authentic, the perfect grandfather who lay there resplendent on that day when he came to take last leave of him. It was in the room where so often they had sat facing each other at table; and now, in the centre, Hans Lorenz Castorp was lying in a silver-mounted coffin, upon a begarlanded bier. He had fought out the attack on his lungs, fought long and stoutly, despite his air of being at home in the life of the day only by dint of his powers of adaptability. One hardly knew whether he had won or lost in the struggle; but in any case there he lay, with a stern yet satisfied expression, on his bed of state. He had altered with the illness, his nose looked sharp and thin; the lower half of his body was hidden by a coverlet on which lay a palm branch; the head was lifted high by the silken pillow, so that his chin rested beautifully in the front swell of the ruff. Between the hands, half-shrouded in their lace cuffs, their visibly cold, dead fingers artfully arranged to simulate life, was stuck an ivory cross. He seemed to gaze, beneath drooping lids, steadfastly down upon it.
Hans Castorp had probably seen his grandfather several times at the beginning of this last illness, but not toward the end. They had spared him the sight of the struggle, the more easily that it had been mostly at night; he had only felt it through the surcharged atmosphere of the house, old Fiete’s red eyes, the coming and going of the doctors. What he gathered as he stood now by the bier in the dining-room, was that Grandfather had finally and formally surmounted his interim aspect and assumed for all time his true and adequate shape. And that was a gratifying result, even though old Fiete continually wept and shook his head, even though Hans Castorp himself wept, as he had at sight of the mother he had abruptly been bereft of, and the father who, so little time after her, lay in his turn still and strange before the little boy’s eyes.
Part 2 of 39