Part 3 of 39
Thus for the third time in so short a space and in such young years did death play upon the spirit and senses—but chiefly on the senses—of the lad. The sight was no longer strange, it was already right familiar; and as on those earlier occasions, only in still greater degree, he bore himself in the presence of death with a responsible air, quite self-controlled, showing no nervous weakness, if some natural dejection. He was unaware of the practical result the loss would mean to his own life, or else with childlike indifference was instinctively confident that he would be taken care of somehow; thus, at the bier, he displayed both an uncomprehending coolness and a detached alertness of observation, to which were added, on this third occasion, a feeling and expression of connoisseurship. And something more, a peculiar, precocious variation: he seemed no longer to think of tears—either the frequent outburst of grief or the contagion from the grief of others—as a natural reaction. In three or four months after his father’s passing he had forgotten about death; but now he remembered, and all the impressions of that time recurred, precise, immediate, and piercing in their transcendent strangeness.
Reduced to order and put into words, they would have been something like the following. In one aspect death was a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournful beauty. In another it was quite different. It was precisely the opposite, it was very physical, it was material, it could not possibly be called either holy, or pensive, or beautiful—not even mournful. The solemn, spiritual side expressed itself in the ceremonial lying-in-state of the corpse, in the fan-leaved palm and the wealth of flowers, all which symbolized the peace of God and the heavenly kingdom, as did even more explicitly the ivory cross stuck between the dead fingers of what was once Grandfather, and the bust of Christ by Thorwaldsen at the head of the bier, with towering candelabra on either side. It was these last that gave a churchly air to the scene. All such arrangements had their more precise justification in the fact that Grandfather was now clothed forever in his true and proper guise. But over and above that raison d’être they had another, of a more profane kind, of which little Hans Castorp was distinctly aware, though without admitting it in so many words. One and all of them, but expressly the flowers, and of these more expressly the hosts of tuberoses, were there to palliate the other aspect of death, the side which was neither beautiful nor exactly sad, but somehow almost improper—its lowly, physical side—to slur it over and prevent one from being conscious of it.
It was this other aspect of death that made Grandfather himself look so strange; not like Grandfather at all, more like a life-size wax doll, which death had put in his place to be the centre of all this pious and reverent spectacle. He who lay there—or, more correctly, that which lay there—was not Grandfather himself, but a shell, made, as Hans Castorp was aware, not of wax, but of its own substance, and only of that. Therein, precisely, was the impropriety. It was scarcely sad at all—as things are not which have to do with the body and only with it. Little Hans Castorp regarded that substance, waxy yellow, and fine-grained like cheese, of which the life-size figure was made, the face and hands of what had been Grandfather. A fly had settled on the quiet brow, and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete shooed it cautiously away, taking care not to touch the forehead of the dead, putting on a seemly air of absentmindedness—of obscurantism, as it were—as though he neither might nor would take notice of what he was doing. This correctness of demeanour obviously had to do with the fact that Grandfather was now no longer anything but body. But the fly, after a circling flight, came to rest on Grandfather’s fingers, close to the ivory cross. And Hans Castorp, watching, thought he detected, more plainly than ever before, a familiar, strange exhalation, faint, yet oddly clinging—he blushed to find that it made him think of a former schoolfellow, who was avoided by his classmates because he suffered from a certain unpleasant affection—for the drowning out of which the tuberoses were there, and which, with all their lovely luxuriance and the strongness of their scent, they yet failed to overpower.
He stood three times by his Grandfather’s bier. Once alone with old Fiete; once with Great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and his two uncles, James and Peter; the third and last time when a group of harbour hands in their Sunday clothes came to take leave of the head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral. The room was full of people, and Pastor Bugenhagen of St. Michael’s, the same who had baptized little Hans, preached the sermon in a ruff. He was most friendly with the boy as they drove out together to the cemetery, in the first carriage behind the hearse. Thus did another epoch in the life of Hans Castorp come to an end, and again he moved to a new home and new surroundings, for the second time in his young life.
At Tienappels’, and of Young Hans’s Moral State
The change was no loss to him; for he entered the home of his appointed guardian, Consul Tienappel, where he wanted for nothing. Certainly this was true so far as his bodily needs were concerned, and not less in the sense of safeguarding his interests—about which he was still too young to know anything at all. For Consul Tienappel, an uncle of Hans’s deceased mother, was administrator of the Castorp estate; he put up the property for sale, took in hand the business of liquidating the firm of Castorp and Son, Importers and Exporters, and realized from the whole nearly four hundred thousand marks, the inheritance of young Hans. This sum Consul Tienappel invested in trust funds, and took unto himself two percent of the interest every quarter, without impairment of his kinsmanly feeling.
The Tienappel house lay at the foot of a garden in Harvestehuderstrasse; the windows looked out on a plot of lawn in which not the tiniest weed was suffered to flourish, then upon public rose-borders, and then upon the river. The Consul went on foot every morning to his business in the Old Town—although he possessed more than one fine equipage—in order to get a little exercise, for he sometimes suffered from cerebral congestion. He returned in the same way at five in the afternoon, at which time the Tienappels dined, with due and fitting ceremony. He was a weighty man, whose suits were always of the best English cloths; his eyes were watery blue and prominent behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his nose was ruddy, and his square-cut beard was grey; he wore a flashing brilliant on the stubby little finger of his left hand. His wife was long since dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, of whom one was in the navy and seldom at home, the other occupied in the paternal wine trade, and destined heir to the business. The housekeeping, for many years, had been the care of an Altona goldsmith’s daughter, named Schalleen, who wore starched white ruffles at her plump, round wrists. Hers it was to see to it that the table, morning and evening, was richly laden with cold meats, with crabs and salmon, eel and smoked breast of goose, with tomato ketchup for the roast beef. She kept a watchful eye on the hired waiters when Consul Tienappel gave a gentlemen’s dinner; and she it was who, so far as in her lay, took the place of a mother to little Hans Castorp.
So he grew up; in wretched weather, in the teeth of wind and mist, grew up, so to say, in a yellow mackintosh, and, generally speaking, he throve. A little anaemic he had always been, so Dr. Heidekind said, and had him take a good glass of porter after third breakfast every day, when he came home from school. This, as everyone knows, is a hearty drink—Dr. Heidekind considered it a blood-maker—and certainly Hans Castorp found it most soothing to his spirits and encouraging to a propensity of his, which his Uncle Tienappel called “dozing”: namely, sitting staring into space, with his jaw dropped and his thoughts fixed on just nothing at all. But on the whole he was sound and fit, an adequate tennis player and rower; though actually handling the oars was less to his taste than sitting of a summer evening on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst ferry-house, with a good drink before him and the sound of music in his ears, while he watched the lighted boats, and the swans mirrored in the bright water. Hear him talk, sedate and sensible, in a rather low, monotonous voice, just tinged with dialect; observe him in his blond correctness, with his well-shaped head, which had about it some stamp of the classic, and his self-possessed, indolent bearing, the fruit of innate, inherited, perfectly unconscious self-esteem—you would swear that this young Castorp was a legitimate and genuine product of the soil in which he flourished, and strikingly at home in his environment. Nor would he, had he ever put such a question to himself, have been for a single second doubtful of the answer.
Yes, he was thoroughly in his element in the atmosphere of this great seaboard city: this reeking air, compact of good living and a retail trade that embraced the four corners of the earth. It had been the breath of his father’s nostrils, and the son drew it in with profound acquiescence and a sense of well-being. The exhalations from water, coals, and tar, the sharp tang in the nostrils from heaped-up stacks of colonial produce; the huge steam-cranes at the dockside, imitating the quiet, the intelligence, and the giant strength of elephants at work, as they hoisted tons of sacks, bales, chests, vats, and carboys out of the bowels of seagoing ships and conveyed them into waiting trains and scales; the business men, in yellow rubber coats like his own, streaming to the Bourse at midday, where, as he knew, there was oftentimes pretty sharp work, and a man might have to strengthen his credit at short notice by giving out invitations to a big dinner—all this he felt, saw, heard, knew. Besides it all, there was the field in which later was to lie his own particular interest: the confusion of the yards, the mammoth bodies of great ships, Asiatic and African liners, lying in dry-dock, keel and propeller bare, supported by props as thick as tree-trunks, lying there in monstrous helplessness, swarmed over by troops of men like dwarfs, scouring, whitewashing, hammering; there were the roofed-over ways, wrapped in wreaths of smoke-like mist, holding the towering frames of rising ships, among which moved the engineers, blueprint and loading scale in hand, directing the work-people. All these were familiar sights to Hans Castorp from his youth upwards, awaking in him only the agreeable, homely sensations of “belonging,” which were the prerogative of his years. Such sensations would reach their height when he sat of a Sunday forenoon with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemssen—Joachim Ziemssen—in the pavilion at Alster, breakfasting on hot cuts and smoked meat, with a glass of old port; or when, having eaten, he would lean back in his chair and give himself up to his cigar. For therein especially was he true to type, that he liked good living, and notwithstanding his thinbloodedness and look of overrefinement clung to the grosser pleasures of life as a greedy suckling to its mother’s breast.
Comfortably, not without dignity, he carried the weight of culture with which the governing upper class of the commercial city endowed its children. He was as clean as a well-cared-for baby, and dressed by the tailor in whom the young men of his social sphere felt most confidence. Schalleen took beautiful care of his small stock of carefully marked linen, which was bestowed in a dressing-chest on the English plan. When he studied away from home, he regularly sent back his laundry to be washed and mended, for it was a saying of his that outside Hamburg nobody in the kingdom knew how to iron. A rough spot on the cuff of his dainty coloured shirts filled him with acute discomfort. His hands, though not particularly aristocratic in shape, were well tended and fresh-skinned, and he wore a platinum chain ring as well as the seal ring inherited from Grandfather. His teeth were rather soft and defective and he had a number of gold fillings.
Standing and walking, he rather stuck out his abdomen, which hardly made an athletic impression; but his bearing at table was beyond cavil. Sitting very erect, he would turn the whole upper part of his body to speak to his neighbour (with self-possession, of course, and a little platt) and he kept his elbows well in as he dismembered his piece of fowl, or deftly, with the appointed tool, drew the rosy flesh from a lobster’s shell. His first requirement after a meal was the finger-bowl of perfumed water, his second the Russian cigarette—which paid no duty, as he had a convenient way of getting them smuggled in. After the cigarette the cigar; he favoured a Bremen brand called Maria Mancini, of which we shall hear more hereafter; the fragrant narcotic blended so soothingly with the coffee. Hans Castorp protected his supply of tobacco from the injurious effects of steam-heating by keeping it in the cellar, whither he would betake himself every morning to load his case with his stock for the day. It went against his grain to eat butter served in the piece instead of in little fluted balls.
It will be seen that we mean to say everything that may be said in Hans Castorp’s favour, yet without fulsomeness, not making him out as better, or worse, than he was. He was neither genius nor dunderhead; and if, in our description of him, we have avoided the use of the word “mediocre,” it has been for reasons quite unconnected with his intelligence, hardly even with any bearing upon his whole simple personality, but rather out of regard for his lot in life, to which we incline to ascribe a certain importance above and beyond personal considerations. His headpiece sustained without undue strain the demands made upon it by the course at the Realgymnasium—strain, indeed, was something to which he was quite definitely disinclined, whatever the circumstances or the object of his effort; less out of fear of hurting himself than because he positively saw no reason, or, more precisely, saw no positive reason, for exertion. This then, perhaps, is why we may not call him mediocre: that, somehow or other, he was aware of the lack of such a reason.
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude toward them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, ends, hopes, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seem, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognize it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow, puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may even extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of “Why?” “To what end?” a man who is capable of achievement over and above the average and expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither the one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.
All this that we have said has reference to the inward state of the young man not only during his school years, but also in those that followed, after he had made choice of his civil profession. On his way through his forms at school, he had now and again to take one for the second time. But in the main his origin, his good breeding, and also a pretty if unimpassioned gift for mathematics got him forward; and when he received his one-year service certificate, he made up his mind to continue at school, principally, it must be said, because he thus prolonged a situation he was used to, in which no definite decisions had to be taken, and in which he had further time to think matters over and decide what he really wanted to do, which he was far from knowing after he had arrived at the top form. Even when it was finally decided—to say when Hans Castorp finally decided it would be saying too much—he had the feeling that it might quite as well have been decided some other way.
So much, however, was true, that he had always liked ships. As a small boy he had filled the pages of his notebooks with drawings of fishing-barks, five-masters and vegetable-barges. When he was fifteen, he had had a front seat at the christening ceremony of the new double-screw steamer Hansa. He had watched her leave the ways at Blohm and Voss’s, and afterwards made quite a happy watercolour of the graceful ship, done with a good deal of attention to detail, and a loving and not unskillful treatment of the glassy green, rolling waves. Consul Tienappel hung it in his private office, and somebody told him that it showed talent, that the artist might develop into a good marine painter—a remark which the Consul could safely repeat to his ward, for Hans Castorp only laughed good-humouredly, and not for a moment considered letting himself in for a career of being eccentric and not getting enough to eat.
“You haven’t so much, you know,” his Uncle Tienappel would say to him. “James and Peter will get most of what I have; that is to say, it stops in the business, and Peter will draw his interest. What belongs to you is well invested, and brings you in something safe. But it’s no joke living on your interest today, unless one has at least five times what you have; and if you want to be somebody here in this town and live as you have been brought up to, you’ll have to earn a good bit more to put with it, you mark my words, my son.”
Hans Castorp marked them. He looked about for a profession suitable in his own eyes and those of his fellow citizens. And when he had once chosen—it came about at the instance of old Wilms, of the firm of Tunder and Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel at the Saturday whist-table that young Castorp ought to study shipbuilding; it would be a good idea, he could come into his office and he would keep an eye on him—when he had once chosen, he thought very highly of his calling. It was, to be sure, confoundedly complicated and fatiguing, but all the same it was very first-rate, very solid, very important. And certainly, being peaceful in his tastes, he preferred it to that of his cousin Ziemssen, the son of his mother’s half-sister, who was bent on being an officer. But Joachim Ziemssen was rather weak in the chest, and for that reason a calling which would keep him in the open, and in which there was no mental strain or fatigue to speak of, might be quite the right thing for him, Hans Castorp thought with easy condescension. He had the greatest respect for work—though personally he found that he tired easily.
And here we revert to our suggestion of a few pages back: the idea that an unfavourable influence exerted upon a man’s personal life by the times in which he lives may even extend to his physical organism. Hans Castorp respected work—as how should he not have? It would have been unnatural. Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else that was estimable. It was the principle by which one stood or fell, the Absolute of the time; it was, so to speak, its own justification. His regard for it was thus religious in its character, and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter, whether he loved it; and that he could not do, however great his regard, the simple reason being that it did not agree with him. Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighted with the leaden load of effort; lying spacious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one’s teeth and conquer, one after the other. These conflicting sentiments on the subject of work had, strictly speaking, to be reconciled. Is it, perhaps, possible, if he had been able to believe in work as a positive value, a self-justifying principle, believe in it in the very depth of his soul, even without being himself conscious of doing so, that his body as well as his spirit—first the spirit and through it the body as well—would have been able to devote itself to his task with more of joy and constancy, would have been able to find peace therein? Here again is posed the question of Hans Castorp’s mediocrity or more than mediocrity, to which we would give no hard and fast answer. For we do not set up as the young man’s encomiast, and prefer to leave room for the other view: namely, that his work stood somewhat in the way of his unclouded enjoyment of his Maria Mancini.
To military service he was not inclined. His being revolted against it, and found ways of making difficulties. It may be, too, that Staff Medical Officer Dr. Eberding, who visited at Harvestehuderstrasse, heard from Consul Tienappel, in the course of conversation, that young Castorp was leaving home to begin his technical studies, and would find a call to the colours a very sensible interruption to his labours.
Working slowly and deliberately—he kept up his soothing habit of porter breakfasts while he was away—he filled his brain with analytic and descriptive geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, projection, hydrostatic; reckoned full and empty displacement, stability, trim moment, and metacentre; and sometimes he got very sick of it. His technical drawings, the draughts and designs of frames, waterlines and longitudinal projections, were not quite so good as the picturesque representation of the Hansa on the high seas; but wherever it was in place to call in the sense perceptions to help out the intellectual, wherever he could wash in the shadows and lay on the cross-sections in the conventional colours, there Hans Castorp showed more dexterity than most.
When he came home for the holidays, very clean, very well dressed, with a little red-blond moustache that became his sleepy, young patrician face, obviously en route to a considerable position in life, people looked at him, the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community and made it their business to know all about family and social relations—and that, in a self-governing city-state, meant most of the population—they looked him well over, his fellow citizens, and asked themselves what public role young Castorp was destined to fill. He had traditions, his name was old and good, they would certainly have to reckon with him one day, as a political factor. Some day he would sit in the Assembly, or on the Board of Directors, he would help make the laws, he would occupy some honourable office and share the burdens of sovereignty. He would belong to the executive branch, perhaps, or the Finance or Building Commission. His voice would be listened to, his vote would count. It would be interesting to see what party he would choose. Appearances were deceiving, but he did not look as a man does whom the democrats can count on; and his likeness to his grandfather was unmistakable. Would he take after him, and be a drag, a conservative element? It was quite possible—but so was the opposite. He was an engineer, studying shipbuilding; on the technical side, in touch with world commerce. He might turn out to be a radical, a reckless spender, a profane destroyer of old buildings and landscape beauties. He might be as unfettered as a Jew, as irreverent as an American; he might prefer a ruthless break with tradition to a considered development of natural resources; he might incline to plunge the state into foolhardy experimentation. All that was conceivable. Was it in his blood to feel that their Worships in the Senate, before whom the double sentry at the Rathaus presented arms, were likely to know best in all contingencies; or would he side with the opposition in the Assembly? In his blue eyes, under their reddish-brown brows, his fellow citizens read no answer to their curious questioning. And he probably knew none himself, Hans Castorp, this still unwritten page.
When he took the journey upon which we have encountered him, he was in his twenty-third year. He had spent four semesters at the Dantzig Polytechnic, four more at the technical schools of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, and had just previously passed his first final, quite respectably, if without any fanfare of trumpets. And now he was preparing to enter the firm of Tunder and Wilms, as volunteer apprentice, in order to get his practical training in the shipyards.
But at this point his life took the following turn. He had had to work hard and steadily for his examination, and came home looking rather paler than a man of his blond, rosy type should do. Dr. Heidekind scolded, and insisted on a change of air; a complete change, not a stay at Norderney or Wyk on Föhr—that would not mend matters this time, he said; if they wanted his advice, it was that Hans Castorp should go for a few weeks to the high mountains before he took up his work in the yards.
Consul Tienappel told his nephew and foster-son he approved of the plan, only that in that case they would part company for the summer, for wild horses couldn’t drag him into the high mountains. They were not for him; he required a reasonable atmospheric pressure, else he might get an attack. Hans Castorp would be good enough to go by himself—let him pay his cousin Ziemssen a visit.
It was an obvious suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill—not ill like Hans Castorp, but in all seriousness, critically. There had been a great scare, in fact. He had always been subject to feverish catarrh, and one day he actually spat blood; whereupon he had been rushed off to Davos, heels over head, to his great distress and affliction, for he had just then arrived within sight of the goal of all his hopes. Some semesters long, he had complied with the wish of his family and studied law; then, yielding to irresistible inward urging, he had changed over, presented himself as ensign and been accepted. And now, for the past five months, he had been stuck in the International Sanatorium Berghof (directing physician Hofrat Behrens) and was bored half sick, as he wrote home on postcards. If Hans Castorp wanted to do himself a good turn before he entered his post at Tunder and Wilms’s, what more natural than that he should go up to Davos and keep his poor cousin company for a while—it would be agreeable on both sides.
It was midsummer before he made up his mind to go. Already the last week in July.
He left for a stay of three weeks.
Chapter III
Drawing the Veil
He had been so utterly weary, he had feared to oversleep; but he was on his legs rather earlier than usual, and had a superfluity of leisure in which to perform the accustomed ritual of his morning toilet, in which a rubber tub, a wooden bowl of green lavender soap, and the accompanying little brush played the principal parts. He had even time to do some unpacking and moving in. As he covered his cheeks with scented lather and drew over them the blade of his silver-plated “safety,” he recalled his confused dreams and shook his head indulgently over so much nonsense, with the superior feeling a man has when shaving himself in the clear light of reason. He did not feel precisely rested, yet had a sense of morning freshness.
With powdered cheeks, in his Scotch-thread drawers and red morocco slippers, he walked out on the balcony, drying his hands. The balcony ran across the house and was divided into small separate compartments by opaque glass partitions, which did not quite reach to the balustrade. The morning was cool and cloudy. Trails of mist lay motionless in front of the heights on one side and the other, while great cloud-masses, grey and white, hung down over the distant peaks. Patches and bands of blue showed here and there; now and then a gleam of sunshine lighted up the village down in the valley, till it glistened whitely against the dark fir-covered slopes. Somewhere there was music, very likely in the same hotel where there had been a concert the evening before. The subdued chords of a hymn floated up; after a pause came a march. Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him in much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze. He listened well pleased, his head on one side, his eyes a little bloodshot.
He could see below him the winding road up to the sanatorium, by which he had come the night before. Among the dewy grass of the sloping terrace short-stemmed, star-shaped gentians stood out. Part of the level ground had been enclosed for a garden, with flowerbeds, gravel paths, and an artificial grotto under a stately silver fir. A hall, with reclining-chairs and a galvanized roof, opened towards the south; near it stood a flagpole, painted reddish-brown, on which the flag fluttered open now and then on its cord. It was a fancy flag, green and white, with the caduceus, the emblem of healing, in the centre.
A woman was walking in the garden, an elderly lady, of melancholy, even tragic aspect. Dressed all in black, a black veil wound about her dishevelled grey-black hair, with wrinkled brow and coal-black eyes that had hanging pouches of skin beneath them, she moved with rapid, restless step along the garden paths, staring straight before her, her knees a little bent, her arms hanging stiffly down. The ageing face in its southern pallor, with the large, wried mouth drawn down on one side, reminded Hans Castorp of a portrait he had once seen of a famous tragic actress. And strange it was to see how the pale, black-clad woman unconsciously matched her long, woeful pace to the music of the march.
He looked down upon her with pensive sympathy; it seemed to him the sad apparition darkened the morning sunshine. But in the same instant he became aware of something else, something audible: certain noises penetrating to his hearing from the room on the left of his own, which was occupied, Joachim had said, by a Russian couple. Again he felt a discrepancy; these sounds no more suited the blithe freshness of the morning than had the sad sight in the garden below—rather they seemed to befoul the air, make it thick, sticky. Hans Castorp recalled having heard similar sounds the evening before, though his weariness had prevented him from heeding them: a struggling, a panting and giggling, the offensive nature of which could not long remain hidden to the young man, try as he good-naturedly did to put a harmless construction on them. Perhaps something more or other than good nature was in play, something to which we give a variety of names, calling it now purity of soul, which sounds insipid; again by that grave, beautiful name of chastity; and yet again disparaging it as hypocrisy, as “hating to look facts in the face”; even ascribing it to an obscure sense of awe and piety—and, in truth, something of all these was in Hans Castorp’s face and bearing as he listened. He seemed to be practising a seemly obscurantism; to be mentally drawing the veil over these sounds that he heard; to be telling himself that honour forbade his taking any cognizance of them, or even hearing them at all—it gave him an air of propriety which was not quite native, though he knew how to assume it on occasion.
With this mien, then, he drew back from the balcony into his room, in order not to listen further to proceedings which, for all the giggling that went with them, were plainly in dead earnest, even alarming. But from indoors the noise could be heard even more plainly. He seemed to hear a chase about the room; a chair fell over; someone was caught and seized; loud kissing ensued—and the music below had changed to a waltz, a popular air whose hackneyed, melodious phrases accompanied the invisible scene. Hans Castorp stood towel in hand and listened, against his better judgment. And he began to blush through the powder; for what he had all along seen coming was come, and the game had passed quite frankly over into the bestial. “Good Lord!” he thought. He turned away and made as much noise as possible while he concluded his toilet. “Well, at least they are married, as far as that goes,” he said to himself. “But in broad daylight—it’s a bit thick! And last night too, I’m sure. But of course they are ill, or at least one of them, or they wouldn’t be here—that may be some excuse. The scandalous part of it is, the walls are so thin one can’t help hearing everything. Simply intolerable. The place is shamefully jerry-built, of course. What if I should see them, or even be introduced? I simply couldn’t endure it!” Here Hans Castorp remarked with surprise that the flush which had mounted in his freshly shaven cheek did not subside, nor its accompanying warmth: his face glowed with the same dry heat as on the evening before. He had got free of it in sleep, but the blush had made it set in again. He did not feel the friendlier for this discovery towards the wretched pair next door; in fact he stuck out his lips and muttered a derogatory word in their direction, as he tried to cool his hot face by bathing it in cold water—and only made it glow the more. He felt put out; his voice vibrated with ill humour as he answered to his cousin’s knock on the wall; and he appeared to Joachim on his entrance like anything but a man refreshed and invigorated by a good night’s sleep.
Breakfast
“Morning,” Joachim said. “Well, that was your first night up here. How did you find it?”
He was dressed for out-of-doors, in sports clothes and stout boots, and carried his ulster over his arm. The outline of the flat bottle could be seen on the side pocket. As yesterday, he wore no hat.
“Thanks,” responded Hans Castorp, “it was well enough, I won’t try to judge yet. I’ve had all sorts of mixed-up dreams, and this building seems to possess the disadvantage of being porous—the sound goes straight through it. It’s annoying.—Who is that dark woman down in the garden?”
Joachim knew at once whom he meant.
“Oh,” he said, “that’s Tous-les-deux. We all call her that up here, because it’s the only thing she says. Mexican, you know; doesn’t know a word of German and hardly any French, just a few scraps. She has been here for five weeks with her eldest son, a hopeless case, without much longer to go. He has it all over, tubercular through and through, you might say. Behrens says it is much like typhus, at the end—horrible for all concerned. Well, two weeks ago the second son came up, to see his brother before the end—handsome as a picture; both of them were that, with eyes like live coals—they fluttered the dovecots, I can tell you. He had been coughing a bit down below, but otherwise quite lively. Well, he no sooner gets up here than he begins to run a temperature, high fever, you know, 103.1°. They put him to bed—and if he gets up again, Behrens says, it will be more good luck than good management. But it was high time he came, in any case, Behrens says.—Well, and since then the mother goes about—whenever she is not sitting with them—and if you speak to her, she just says: ‘Tous les deux!’ She can’t say any more, and for the moment there is no one up here who understands Spanish.”
“So that’s it,” Hans Castorp said. “Will she say it to me, when I get to know her, do you think? That will be queer—funny and weird at the same time, I mean.” His eyes looked as they had yesterday, they felt hot and heavy, as if tired with weeping, and yet brilliant too, with the gleam that had been kindled in them yesterday at the sound of that strange, new cough on the part of the gentleman rider. He had the feeling that he had been out of touch with yesterday since waking, and had only now picked up the threads again where he laid them down. He told his cousin he was ready, sprinkling a few drops of lavender-water on his handkerchief as he spoke and dabbing his face with it, on the brow and under the eyes. “If you like, we can go to breakfast, tous les deux,” he recklessly joked. Joachim looked with mildness at him, then smiled his enigmatic smile of mingled melancholy and mockery—or so it seemed, for he did not express himself otherwise.
After looking to his supply of cigars Hans Castorp took coat and stick, also, rather defiantly, his hat—he was far too sure of himself and his station in life to alter his ways and acquire new ones for a mere three weeks’ visit—and they went out and down the steps. In the corridor Joachim pointed to this and that door and gave the names of the occupants—there were German names, but also all sorts of foreign ones—with brief comments on them and the seriousness of their cases.
They met people already coming back from breakfast, and when Joachim said good morning, Hans Castorp courteously lifted his hat. He was tense and nervous, as a young man is when about to present himself before strangers—when, that is, he is conscious that his eyes are heavy and his face red. The last, however, was only true in part, for he was rather pale than otherwise.
“Before I forget it,” he said abruptly, “you may introduce me to the lady in the garden if you like, I mean if it happens that way, I have no objection. She would just say: ‘Tous les deux’ to me, and I shouldn’t mind it, being prepared, and knowing what it means—I should know how to look. But I don’t wish to know the Russian pair, do you hear? I expressly don’t wish it. They are a very ill-behaved lot. If I must live for three weeks next door to them, and nothing else could be arranged, at least I needn’t know them. I am justified in that, and I simply and explicitly decline.”
“Very good,” Joachim said. “Did they disturb you? Yes, they are barbarians, more or less; uncivilized, I told you so before. He comes to the table in a leather jacket, very shabby, I always wonder Behrens doesn’t make a row. And she isn’t the cleanest in this world, with her feather hat. You may make yourself quite easy, they sit at the ‘bad’ Russian table, a long way off us—there is a ‘good’ Russian table, too, you see, where the nicer Russians sit—and there is not much chance of you coming into contact with them, even if you wanted to. It is not very easy to make acquaintance here, partly from the fact that there are so many foreigners. Personally, as long as I’ve been here, I know very few.”
“Which of the two is ill?” Hans Castrop asked. “He or she?”
“The man I think. Yes, only the man,” Joachim answered, absently. They passed among the hat- and coat-racks and entered the light, low-vaulted hall, where there was a buzzing of voices, a clattering of dishes, and a running to and fro of waitresses with steaming jugs.
There were seven tables, all but two of them standing lengthwise of the room. They were good-sized, seating each ten persons, though not all of them were at present full. A few steps diagonally into the room, and they stood at their places; Hans Castorp’s was at the end of a table placed between the two crosswise ones. Erect behind his chair, he bowed stiffly but amiably to each tablemate in turn, as Joachim formally presented him; hardly seeing them, much less having their names penetrate his mind. He caught but a single name and person—Frau Stöhr, whom he perceived to have a red face and greasy ash-blond hair. Looking at her he could quite credit the malapropisms Joachim told of. Her face expressed nothing but ill-nature and ignorance. He sat down, observing as he did so that early breakfast was taken seriously up here.
There were pots of marmalade and honey, basins of rice and oatmeal porridge, dishes of cold meat and scrambled eggs; a plenitude of butter, a Gruyère cheese dropping moisture under a glass bell. A bowl of fresh and dried fruits stood in the centre of the table. A waitress in black and white asked Hans Castorp whether he would drink coffee, cocoa or tea. She was small as a child, with a long, oldish face—a dwarf, he realized with a start. He looked at his cousin, who only shrugged indifferently with brows and shoulders, as though to say: “Well, what of it?” So he adjusted himself as speedily as possible to the fact that he was being served by a dwarf, and put special consideration into his voice as he asked for tea. Then he began eating rice with cinnamon and sugar, his eyes roving over the table full of other inviting viands, and over the guests at the six remaining tables, Joachim’s companions and fellow victims, who were all inwardly infected, and now sat there breakfasting.
The hall was done in that modern style which knows how to give just the right touch of individuality to something in reality very simple. It was rather shallow in proportion to its length, and opened in great arched bays into a sort of lobby surrounding it, in which serving-tables were placed. The pillars were faced halfway up with wood finished to look like sandalwood, the upper part white-enamelled, like the ceiling and upper half of the walls. They were stencilled in gay-coloured bands of simple and lively designs which were repeated on the girders of the vaulted ceiling. The room was further enlivened by several electric chandeliers in bright brass, consisting of three rings placed horizontally one over the other and held together by delicate woven work, the lowest ring set with globes of milky glass like little moons. There were four glass doors, two on the opposite wall, opening on the verandah, a third at the bottom of the room on the left, leading into the front hall, and a fourth, by which Hans Castorp had entered through a vestibule, as Joachim had brought him down a different stair from the one they had used yesterday evening.
He had on his right a plain-looking woman in black, with a dull flush on her cheeks, the skin of which was downy-looking, as an older person’s often is. She looked to him like a seamstress or home dressmaker, the idea being suggested by the fact that she took only coffee and buttered rolls for breakfast; since his childhood he had always somehow associated dressmakers with coffee and buttered rolls. On his left sat an English spinster, also well on in years, very ugly, with frozen, withered-looking fingers. She sat reading her home letters, which were written in round hand, and drinking tea the colour of blood. Next her was Joachim, and then Frau Stöhr, in a woollen blouse of Scotch plaid. She held her left hand doubled up in a fist near her cheek as she ate, and drew her upper lip back from her long, narrow, rodent-like teeth when she spoke, obviously trying to make an impression of culture and refinement. A young man with thin moustaches sat next beyond. His facial expression was of one with something bad-tasting in his mouth, and he ate without a word. He had come in after Hans Castorp was already seated, with his chin sunk on his breast; and sat down so, without even lifting his head in greeting, seeming by his bearing plumply to decline being made acquainted with the new guest. He was, perhaps, too ill to have thought of or care for appearances, or even to take any interest in his surroundings. Opposite him there had sat for a short time a very lean, light-blonde girl who emptied a bottle of yogurt on her plate, ladled it up with a spoon, and took herself off.
The conversation at table was not lively. Joachim talked politely with Frau Stöhr, inquired after her condition and heard with proper solicitude that it was unsatisfactory. She complained of relaxation. “I feel so relaxed,” she said with a drawl and an underbred, affected manner. And she had had 99.1° when she got up that morning—what was she likely to have by afternoon? The dressmaker confessed to the same temperature, but she on the contrary felt excited, tense, and restless, as though some important event were about to happen, which was certainly not the case; the excitation was purely physical, quite without emotional grounds. Hans Castorp thought to himself that she could not be a dressmaker after all; she spoke too correctly, even pedantically. He found her excitation, or rather the expression of it, somehow unsuitable, almost offensive, in so homely and insignificant a creature. He asked her and Frau Stöhr, one after the other, how long they had been up here, and found that one had five, the other seven months to her credit. Then he mustered his English to inquire of his neighbour on the right what sort of tea she was drinking (it was made of rose-hips) and if it tasted good, which she almost passionately affirmed; then he watched people coming and going in the room; the first breakfast, it appeared, was not regarded as a regular meal, in any strict sense.
He had been a little afraid of unpleasant impressions, but found himself agreeably disappointed. The room was lively, one had not the least feeling of being in a place of suffering. Tanned young people of both sexes came in humming, spoke to the waitresses, and fell to upon the viands with robust appetite. There were older people, married couples, a whole family with children, speaking Russian, and half-grown lads. The women wore chiefly close-fitting jackets of wool or silk—the so-called sweater—in white or colours, with turnover collars and side pockets; they would stand with hands thrust deep in these pockets, and talk—it looked very pretty. At some tables photographs were being handed about—amateur photography, no doubt—at another stamps were being exchanged. The talk was of the weather, of how one had slept, of what one had “measured in the mouth” on rising. Nearly everybody seemed in good spirits, probably on no other grounds than that they were in numerous company and had no immediate cares. Here and there, indeed, sat someone who rested his head on his hand and stared before him. They let him stare, and paid no heed.
Hans Castorp gave a sudden angry start. A door was slammed—it was the one on the left, leading into the hall, and someone had let it fall shut, or even banged it, a thing he detested; he had never been able to endure it. Whether from his upbringing, or out of a natural idiosyncrasy, he loathed the slamming of doors, and could have struck the guilty person. In this case, the door was filled in above with small glass panes, which augmented the shock with their ringing and rattling. “Oh, come,” he thought angrily, “what kind of damned carelessness was that?” But at the same time the seamstress addressed him with a remark, and he had no time to see who the transgressor had been. Deep creases furrowed his blond brows, and his face was contorted as he turned to reply to his neighbour.
Joachim asked whether the doctors had come through. Yes, someone answered, they had been there once and left the room just as the cousins entered. Then it would be better not to wait, Joachim thought. An opportunity for introducing his cousin would surely come in the course of the day. But at the door they nearly ran into Hofrat Behrens, as he entered with hasty steps, followed by Dr. Krokowski.
“Hullo-ullo there! Take care, gentlemen! That might have been rough on all of our corns!” He spoke with a strong low-Saxon accent, broad and mouthingly. “Oh, so here you are,” he addressed Hans Castorp, whom Joachim, heels together, presented. “Well, glad to see you.” He reached the young man a hand the size of a shovel. He was some three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski; a bony man, his hair already quite white; his neck stuck out, his large, goggling bloodshot blue eyes were swimming in tears; he had a snub nose, and a close-trimmed little moustache, which made a crooked line because his upper lip was drawn up on one side. What Joachim had said about his cheeks was fully borne out; they were really purple, and set off his head garishly against the white surgeon’s coat he wore, a belted smock of more than knee-length, beneath which showed striped trousers and a pair of enormous feet in rather worn yellow laced boots. Dr. Krokowski too was in professional garb; but his smock was of some shiny black stuff and made like a shirt, with elastic bands at the wrists. It contrasted sharply with the pallor of his skin. His manner suggested that he was present solely in his capacity as assistant; he took no part in the greeting, but a certain expression at the corners of his mouth betrayed the fact that he felt the strain of his subordinate position.
“Cousins?” the Hofrat asked, motioning with his hand from one to the other of the two young men and looking at them with his bloodshot eyes. “Is he going to follow the drums like you?” he addressed Joachim, jerking his head at Hans Castorp. “God forbid, eh? I could tell as soon as I saw you”—he spoke now directly to the young man—“that you were a layman; there’s something civilian and comfortable about you, not like our sabre-rattling corporal here! You’d be a better patient than he is, I’ll wager. I can tell by looking at people, you know, whether they’ll make good patients or not; it takes talent, everything takes talent—and this myrmidon here hasn’t a spark. Maybe he shows up on the parade-ground, for aught I know; but he’s no good a’ being ill. Will you believe it, he’s always wanting to clear out! Badgers me all the time, simply can’t wait to get down there and be skinned alive. There’s doggedness for you! Won’t give us even a measly half-a-year! And yet it’s quite pretty up here; I leave it to you if it isn’t, Ziemssen, what? … Well, your cousin will appreciate us, even if you don’t. He’ll get some fun out of it. There’s no shortage in the lady market here, either; we have the most charming females. At least, some of them are very picturesque on the outside. But you ought to have better colour yourself, you know, if you want to please the sex. ‘The golden tree of life is green,’ as the poet says—but it’s a poor colour for the complexion, all the same. Totally anaemic, of course,” he broke off, and without more ado put up his index and middle fingers and drew down Hans Castorp’s eyelid. “Precisely! Totally anaemic, as I was saying. You know it wasn’t such a bad idea of yours to let your native Hamburg shift for itself awhile. Great institution, Hamburg—simply revels in humidity—sends us a tidy contingent every year. But if I may take the occasion to give you the benefit of my poor opinion—sine pecunia, you understand, quite sine pecunia—I would suggest that you do just as your cousin does, while you are up here. You couldn’t turn a better trick than to behave for the time as though you had a slight tuberculosis pulmonum, and put on a little flesh. It’s curious about the metabolism of protein with us up here. Although the process of combustion is heightened, yet the body at the same time puts on flesh.—Well, Ziemssen, slept pretty well, what? … Splendid! Then get on with the out-of-doors exercise—but not more than half an hour, you hear? And afterwards stick the quicksilver cigar in your face, eh? And be good and write it down, Ziemssen! That’s a conscientious lad! Saturday I’ll look at the curve. Your cousin better measure too. Measuring can’t hurt anybody. Morning, gentlemen. Have a good time—morning—morning—” Krokowski joined him as he sailed off down the hall, swinging his arms palms backward, directing to right and left the question about sleeping well, which was answered on all sides in the affirmative.
Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Mirth
“Very nice man,” Hans Castorp said, as after a friendly nod to the lame concierge, who was sorting letters in his lodge, they passed out into the open air. The main entrance was on the southwest side of the white building, the central portion of which was a storey higher than the wings, and crowned by a turret with a roof of slate-coloured tin. You did not issue from this side into the hedged-in garden, but were immediately in the open, in sight of the steep mountain meadows, dotted with single fir-trees of moderate size, and writhen, stunted pines. The way they took—it was the only one they could take, outside the drive going down to the valley—rose by a gentle ascent to the left, behind the sanatorium, past the kitchen and domestic offices, where huge dustbins stood at the area rails. Thence it led in the same direction for a goodish piece, then made a sharp bend to the right and mounted more rapidly along the thinly wooded slopes. It was a reddish path, firm and yet rather moist underfoot, with boulders here and there along the edge. The cousins were by no means alone upon it: guests who had finished breakfast not long after them followed hard upon their steps, and groups of others, already returning, approached with the stalking gait of people descending a steep incline.
“Very nice man,” repeated Hans Castorp. “He has such a flow of words I enjoyed listening to him. ‘Quicksilver cigar’ was capital, I got it at once.—But I’ll just light up a real one,” he said, pausing, “I can’t hold out any longer. I haven’t had a proper smoke since yesterday after luncheon. Excuse me a minute.” He opened his automobile-leather case, with its silver monogram, and drew out a Maria Mancini, a beautiful specimen of the first layer, flattened on one side as he particularly liked it; he cut off the tip slantingly with a sharp little tool he wore on his watch-chain, then, striking a tiny flame with his pocket apparatus, puffed with concentration at the long, blunt-ended cigar until it was alight. “There!” he said. “Now, as far as I’m concerned, we can get on with the exercise. You don’t smoke—out of sheer doggedness, of course.”
“I never do smoke,” answered Joachim; “why should I begin up here?”
“I don’t understand it,” Hans Castorp said. “I never can understand how anybody can not smoke—it deprives a man of the best part of life, so to speak—or at least of a first-class pleasure. When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I only eat for the sake of being able to smoke—though of course that is more or less of an exaggeration. But a day without tobacco would be flat, stale, and unprofitable, as far as I am concerned. If I had to say to myself tomorrow: ‘No smoke today’—I believe I shouldn’t find the courage to get up—on my honour, I’d stop in bed. But when a man has a good cigar in his mouth—of course it mustn’t have a side draught or not draw well, that is extremely irritating—but with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him—literally. It’s just like lying on the beach: when you lie on the beach, why, you lie on the beach, don’t you?—you don’t require anything else, in the line of work or amusement either.—People smoke all over the world, thank goodness; there is nowhere one could get to, so far as I know, where the habit hasn’t penetrated. Even polar expeditions fit themselves out with supplies of tobacco to help them carry on. I’ve always felt a thrill of sympathy when I read that. You can be very miserable: I might be feeling perfectly wretched, for instance; but I could always stand it if I had my smoke.”
“But after all,” Joachim said, “it is rather flabby-minded of you to be so dependent on it. Behrens is right, you are certainly a civilian. He meant it for a sort of compliment, I dare say; but the truth is, you are a civilian—incurable. But then, you are healthy, you can do what you like,” he added, and his eyes took on their tired look.
“Yes, healthy except for the anaemia,” said Hans Castorp. “That was certainly straight from the shoulder, his telling me I look green. But it is true—I’ve noticed myself that I look green in comparison with the rest of you up here, though it never struck me down home. And it was nice of him to give me advice gratis like that—‘sine pecunia,’ as he put it. I’ll gladly undertake to do as he says, and live just as you do. After all, how else should I do while I’m up here? And it can’t do me any harm; suppose I do put on a little flesh, then, in God’s name—though it sounds a bit disgusting, you will admit.”
Joachim coughed slightly now and then as they walked, it seemed to strain him to go uphill. When he did so for the third time, he paused and stood still with a frown. “Go on ahead,” he said. Hans Castorp hastened to do so, without looking round. Then he slackened his pace, and finally almost stopped, as it seemed to him he must have got a good distance ahead of Joachim. But he did not look round.
A troop of guests of both sexes approached him. He had seen them coming along the level path halfway up the slope; now they were stalking downhill directly towards him; he heard their voices. They were six or seven persons of various ages: some in the bloom of youth, others rather older. He took a good look at them, from the side, as he walked with bent head, thinking about Joachim. They were tanned and bareheaded, the women in sweaters, the men mostly without overcoats or even walking-sticks, all of them like people who have just gone casually out for a turn in the open. Going downhill involves no sustained muscular effort, only an agreeable process of putting on the brakes in order not to finish by running and tripping head over heels; it is really nothing more than just letting yourself go; and thus the gait of these people had something loose-jointed and flighty about it, which communicated itself to the appearance of the whole group and made one almost wish to be of their lively party.
They came close up to him, he saw their faces clearly. No, they were not all brown: two of the ladies were, on the contrary, distinctly pale; one of them thin as a lath, and ivory-white of complexion, the other shorter and plump, disfigured by freckles. They all looked at him, smiling rather boldly. A tall young girl in a green sweater, with untidy hair and foolish, half-open eyes, brushed past Hans Castorp, nearly touching him with her arm. And as she did so she whistled—oh, impossible! Yes, she did though; not with her mouth, indeed, for she did not pucker the lips, but held them firmly closed. She whistled from somewhere inside, and looked at him with her silly, half-shut eyes—it was an extraordinarily unpleasant whistle, harsh and penetrating, yet hollow-sounding; a long-drawn-out note, falling at the end, like the sound made by those rubber pigs one buys at fairs, that give out the air in a wailing key as they collapse. The sound issued, inexplicably, from her breast—and then, with her troop, she had passed on.
Hans Castorp stood and stared. In a moment he turned round, understanding at least so much, that the atrocious thing must have been a joke, a put-up job; for he saw over his shoulder that they were laughing as they went, that a stodgy, thick-lipped youth, whose coat was turned up in an unseemly way about him so that he could put both hands in his trouser pockets, turned his head and laughed quite openly. Joachim approached. He had greeted the group with his usual punctiliousness, almost pausing, and bowing with heels together; now he came mildly up to his cousin.
Part 3 of 39