Part 28 of 39
On he pressed; higher and higher toward the sky. Walking, he thrust the end of his stick in the snow and watched the blue light follow it out of the hole it made. That he liked; and stood for long at a time to test the little optical phenomenon. It was a strange, a subtle colour, this greenish-blue; colour of the heights and deeps, ice-clear, yet holding shadow in its depths, mysteriously exquisite. It reminded him of the colour of certain eyes, whose shape and glance had spelled his destiny; eyes to which Herr Settembrini, from his humanistic height, had referred with contempt as “Tartar slits” and “wolf’s eyes”—eyes seen long ago and then found again, the eyes of Pribislav Hippe and Clavdia Chauchat. “With pleasure,” he said aloud, in the profound stillness. “But don’t break it—c’est à visser, tu sais.” And his spirit heard behind him words of warning in a mellifluous tongue.
A wood loomed, misty, far off to the right. He turned that way, to the end of having some goal before his eyes, instead of sheer white transcendence; and made toward it with a dash, not remarking an intervening depression of the ground. He could not have seen it, in fact; everything swam before his eyes in the white mist, obliterating all contours. When he perceived it, he gave himself to the decline, unable to measure its steepness with his eye.
The grove that had attracted him lay the other side of the gully into which he had unintentionally steered. The trough, covered with fluffy snow, fell away on the side next the mountains, as he observed when he pursued it a little distance. It went downhill, the steep sides grew higher, this fold of the earth’s surface seemed like a narrow passage leading into the mountain. Then the points of his skis turned up again, there began an incline, soon there were no more side walls; Hans Castorp’s trackless course ran once more uphill along the mountainside.
He saw the pine grove behind and below him, on his right, turned again toward it, and with a quick descent reached the laden trees; they stood in a wedge-shaped group, a vanguard thrust out from the mist-screened forests above. He rested beneath their boughs, and smoked a cigarette. The unnatural stillness, the monstrous solitude, still oppressed his spirit; yet he felt proud to have conquered them, brave in the pride of having measured to the height of surroundings such as these.
It was three in the afternoon. He had set out soon after luncheon, with the idea of cutting part of the long rest-cure, and tea as well, in order to be back before dark. He had brought some chocolate in his breeches pocket, and a small flask of wine; and told himself exultantly that he had still several hours to revel in all this grandeur.
The position of the sun was hard to recognize, veiled as it was in haze. Behind him, at the mouth of the valley, above that part of the mountains that was shut off from view, the clouds and mist seemed to thicken and move forward. They looked like snow—more snow—as though there were pressing demand for it! Like a good hard storm. Indeed, the little soundless flakes were coming down more quickly as he stood.
Hans Castorp put out his arm and let some of them come to rest on his sleeve; he viewed them with the knowing eye of the nature-lover. They looked mere shapeless morsels; but he had more than once had their like under his good lens, and was aware of the exquisite precision of form displayed by these little jewels, insignia, orders, agraffes—no jeweller, however skilled, could do finer, more minute work. Yes, he thought, there was a difference, after all, between this light, soft, white powder he trod with his skis, that weighed down the trees, and covered the open spaces, a difference between it and the sand on the beaches at home, to which he had likened it. For this powder was not made of tiny grains of stone; but of myriads of tiniest drops of water, which in freezing had darted together in symmetrical variation—parts, then, of the same anorganic substance which was the source of protoplasm, of plant life, of the human body. And among these myriads of enchanting little stars, in their hidden splendour that was too small for man’s naked eye to see, there was not one like unto another; an endless inventiveness governed the development and unthinkable differentiation of one and the same basic scheme, the equilateral, equiangled hexagon. Yet each, in itself—this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all—each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree—the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death—Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why the builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures.
He pushed off again, shuffling through the deep snow on his flexible runners, along the edge of the wood, down the slope, up again at random, to his heart’s content, about and into this lifeless land. Its empty, rolling spaces, its dried vegetation of single dwarf firs sticking up through the snow, bore a striking resemblance to a scene on the dunes. Hans Castorp nodded as he stood and fixed the likeness in his mind. Even his burning face, his trembling limbs, the peculiar and half-intoxicated mingled sensations of excitement and fatigue were pleasurable, reminding him as they did of that familiar feeling induced by the sea air, which could sting one like whips, and yet was so laden with sleepy essences. He rejoiced in his freedom of motion, his feet were like wings. He was bound to no path, none lay behind him to take him back whence he had come. At first there had been posts, staves set up as guides through the snow—but he had soon cut free from their tutelage, which recalled the coastguard with his horn, and seemed inconsistent with the attitude he had taken up toward the wild.
He pressed on, turning right and left among rocky, snow-clad elevations, and came behind them on an incline, then a level spot, then on the mountains themselves—how alluring and accessible seemed their softly covered gorges and defiles! His blood leaped at the strong allurement of the distance and the height, the ever profounder solitude. At risk of a late return he pressed on, deeper into the wild silence, the monstrous and the menacing, despite that gathering darkness was sinking down over the region like a veil, and heightening his inner apprehension until it presently passed into actual fear. It was this fear which first made him conscious that he had deliberately set out to lose his way and the direction in which valley and settlement lay—and had been as successful as heart could wish. Yet he knew that if he were to turn in his tracks and go downhill, he would reach the valley bottom—even if some distance from the Berghof—and that sooner than he had planned. He would come home too early, not have made full use of his time. On the other hand, if he were overtaken unawares by the storm, he would probably in any case not find his way home. But however genuine his fear of the elements, he refused to take premature flight; his being scarcely the sportman’s attitude, who only meddles with the elements so long as he knows himself their master, takes all precautions, and prudently yields when he must—whereas what went on in Hans Castorp’s soul can only be described by the one word “challenge.” It was perhaps a blameworthy, presumptuous attitude, even united to such genuine awe. Yet this much is clear, to any human understanding: that when a young man has lived years long in the way this one had, something may gather—may accumulate, as our engineer might put it—in the depths of his soul, until one day it suddenly discharges itself, with a primitive exclamation of disgust, a mental “Oh, go to the devil!” a repudiation of all caution whatsoever, in short with a challenge. So on he went, in his seven-league slippers, glided down this slope too and pressed up the incline beyond, where stood a wooden hut that might be a hayrick or shepherd’s shelter, its roof weighted with flat stones. On past this to the nearest mountain ridge, bristling with forest, behind whose back the giant peaks towered upward in the mist. The wall before him, studded with single groups of trees, was steep, but looked as though one might wind to the right and get round it by climbing a little way up the slope. Once on the other side, he could see what lay beyond. Accordingly Hans Castorp set out on this tour of investigation, which began by descending from the meadow with the hut into another and rather deep gully that dropped off from right to left.
He had just begun to mount again when the expected happened, and the storm burst, the storm that had threatened so long. Or may one say “threatened” of the action of blind, nonsentient forces, which have no purpose to destroy us—that would be comforting by comparison—but are merely horribly indifferent to our fate should we become involved with them. “Hullo!” Hans Castorp thought, and stood still, as the first blast whirled through the densely falling snow and caught him. “That’s a gentle zephyr—tells you what’s coming.” And truly this wind was savage. The air was in reality frightfully cold, probably some degrees below zero; but so long as it remained dry and still one almost found it balmy. It was when a wind came up that the cold began to cut into the flesh; and in a wind like the one that blew now, of which that first gust had been a forerunner, the furs were not bought that could protect the limbs from its icy rigours. And Hans Castorp wore no fur, only a woollen waistcoat, which he had found quite enough, or even, with the faintest gleam of sunshine, a burden. But the wind was at his back, a little sidewise; there was small inducement to turn and receive it in the face; so the mad youth, letting that fact reinforce the fundamental challenge of his attitude, pressed on among the single tree-trunks, and tried to outflank the mountain he had attacked.
It was no joke. There was almost nothing to be seen for swimming snowflakes, that seemed without falling to fill the air to suffocation by their whirling dance. The icy gusts made his ears burn painfully, his limbs felt half paralysed, his hands were so numb he hardly knew if they held the staff. The snow blew inside his collar and melted down his back. It drifted on his shoulders and right side; he thought he should freeze as he stood into a snowman, with his staff stiff in his hands. And all this under relatively favouring circumstances; for let him turn his face to the storm and his situation would be still worse. Getting home would be no easy task—the harder, the longer he put it off.
At last he stopped, gave an angry shrug, and turned his skis the other way. Then the wind he faced took his breath on the spot, so that he was forced to go through the awkward process of turning round again to get it back, and collect his resolution to advance in the teeth of his ruthless foe. With bent head and cautious breathing he managed to get under way; but even thus forearmed, the slowness of his progress and the difficulty of seeing and breathing dismayed him. Every few minutes he had to stop, first to get his breath in the lee of the wind, and then because he saw next to nothing in the blinding whiteness, and moving as he did with head down, had to take care not to run against trees, or be flung headlong by unevennesses in the ground. Hosts of flakes flew into his face, melted there, and he anguished with the cold of them. They flew into his mouth, and died away with a weak, watery taste; flew against his eyelids so that he winked, overflowed his eyes and made seeing as difficult as it was now almost impossible for other reasons: namely, the dazzling effect of all that whiteness, and the veiling of his field of vision, so that his sense of sight was almost put out of action. It was nothingness, white, whirling nothingness, into which he looked when he forced himself to do so. Only at intervals did ghostly-seeming forms from the world of reality loom up before him: a stunted fir, a group of pines, even the pale silhouette of the hay-hut he had lately passed.
He left it behind, and sought his way back over the slope on which it stood. But there was no path. To keep direction, relatively speaking, into his own valley would be a question far more of luck than management; for while he could see his hand before his face, he could not see the ends of his skis. And even with better visibility, the host of difficulties must have combined to hinder his progress: the snow in his face, his adversary the storm, which hampered his breathing, made him fight both to take a breath and to exhale it, and constantly forced him to turn his head away to gasp. How could anyone—either Hans Castorp or another and much stronger than he—make head? He stopped, he blinked his lashes free of water drops, knocked off the snow that like a coat of mail was sheathing his body in front—and it struck him that progress, under the circumstances, was more than anyone could expect.
And yet Hans Castorp did progress. That is to say, he moved on. But whether in the right direction, whether it might not have been better to stand still, remained to be seen. Theoretically the chances were against it; and in practice he soon began to suspect something was wrong. This was not familiar ground beneath his feet, not the easy slope he had gained on mounting with such difficulty from the ravine, which had of course to be retraversed. The level distance was too short, he was already mounting again. It was plain that the storm, which came from the southwest, from the mouth of the valley, had with its violence driven him from his course. He had been exhausting himself, all this time, with a false start. Blindly, enveloped in white, whirling night, he laboured deeper and deeper into this grim and callous sphere.
“No, you don’t,” said he, suddenly, between his teeth, and halted. The words were not emotional, yet he felt for a second as though his heart had been clutched by an icy hand; it winced, and then knocked rapidly against his ribs, as it had the time Rhadamanthus found the moist cavity. Pathos in the grand manner was not in place, he knew, in one who had chosen defiance as his role, and was indebted to himself alone for all his present plight. “Not bad,” he said, and discovered that his facial muscles were not his to command, that he could not express in his face any of his soul’s emotions, for that it was stiff with cold. “What next? Down this slope; follow your nose home, I suppose, and keep your face to the wind—though that is a good deal easier said than done,” he went on, panting with his efforts, yet actually speaking half aloud, as he tried to move on again: “but something has to happen, I can’t sit down and wait, I should simply be buried in six-sided crystalline symmetricality, and Settembrini, when he came with his little horn to find me, would see me squatting here with a snowcap over one ear.” He realized that he was talking to himself, and not too sensibly—for which he took himself to task, and then continued on purpose, though his lips were so stiff he could not shape the labials, and so did without them, as he had on a certain other occasion that came to his mind. “Keep quiet, and get along with you out of here,” he admonished himself, adding: “You seem to be woolgathering, not quite right in your head, and that looks bad for you.”
But this he only said with his reason—to some extent detached from the rest of him, though after all nearly concerned. As for his natural part, it felt only too much inclined to yield to the confusion which laid hold upon him with his growing fatigue. He even remarked this tendency and took thought to comment upon it. “Here,” said he, “we have the typical reaction of a man who loses himself in the mountains in a snowstorm and never finds his way home.” He gasped out other fragments of the same thought as he went, though he avoided giving it more specific expression. “Whoever hears about it afterwards, imagines it as horrible; but he forgets that disease—and the state I am in is, in a way of speaking, disease—so adjusts its man that it and he can come to terms; there are sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis—yes, oh yes, yes. But one must fight against them, after all, for they are two-faced, they are in the highest degree equivocal, everything depends upon the point of view. If you are not meant to get home, they are a benefaction, they are merciful; but if you mean to get home, they become sinister. I believe I still do. Certainly I don’t intend—in this heart of mine so stormily beating it doesn’t appeal to me in the least—to let myself be snowed under by this idiotically symmetrical crystallometry.”
In truth, he was already affected, and his struggle against oncoming sensory confusion was feverish and abnormal. He should have been more alarmed on discovering that he had already declined from the level course—this time apparently on the other slope. For he had pushed off with the wind coming slantwise at him, which was ill-advised, though more convenient for the moment. “Never mind,” he thought, “I’ll get my direction again down below.” Which he did, or thought he did—or, truth to tell, scarcely even thought so; worst of all, began to be indifferent whether he had done or no. Such was the effect of an insidious double attack, which he but weakly combated. Fatigue and excitement combined were a familiar state to our young man—whose acclimatization, as we know, still consisted in getting used to not getting used; and both fatigue and excitement were now present in such strength as to make impossible any thought of asserting his reason against them. He felt as often after a colloquy with Settembrini and Naphta, only to a far greater degree: dazed and tipsy, giddy, a-tremble with excitement. This was probably why he began to colour his lack of resistance to the stealing narcosis with half-maudlin references to the latest-aired complex of theories. Despite his scornful repudiation of the idea that he might lie down and be covered up with hexagonal symmetricality, something within him maundered on, sense or no sense: told him that the feeling of duty which bade him fight against insidious sensory appeasements was a purely ethical reaction, representing the sordid bourgeois view of life, irreligion, Philistinism; while the desire, nay, craving, to lie down and rest, whispered him in the guise of a comparison between this storm and a sandstorm on the desert, before which the Arab flings himself down and draws his burnous over his head. Only his lack of a burnous, the unfeasibility of drawing his woollen waistcoat over his head, prevented him from following suit—this although he was no longer a child, and pretty well aware of the conditions under which a man freezes to death.
There had been a rather steep declivity, then level ground, then again an ascent, a stiff one. This was not necessarily wrong; one must of course, on the way to the valley, traverse rising ground at times. The wind had turned capriciously round, for it was now at Hans Castorp’s back, and that, taken by itself, was a blessing. Owing, perhaps, to the storm, or the soft whiteness of the incline before him, dim in the whirling air, drawing him toward it, he bent as he walked. Only a little further—supposing one were to give way to the temptation, and his temptation was great; it was so strong that it quite lived up to the many descriptions he had read of the “typical danger-state.” It asserted itself, it refused to be classified with the general order of things, it insisted on being an exception, its very exigence challenged comparison—yet at the same time it never disguised its origin or aura, never denied that it was, so to speak, garbed in Spanish black, with snow-white, fluted ruff, and stood for ideas and fundamental conceptions that were characteristically gloomy, strongly Jesuitical and anti-human, for the rack-and-knout discipline which was the particular horror of Herr Settembrini, though he never opposed it without making himself ridiculous, like a hand-organ man forever grinding out “ragione” to the same old tune.
And yet Hans Castorp did hold himself upright and resist his craving to lie down. He could see nothing, but he struggled, he came forward. Whether to the purpose or not, he could not tell; but he did his part, and moved on despite the weight the cold more and more laid upon his limbs. The present slope was too steep to ascend directly, so he slanted a little, and went on thus awhile without much heed whither. Even to lift his stiffened lids to peer before him was so great and so nearly useless an effort as to offer him small incentive. He merely caught glimpses: here clumps of pines that merged together; there a ditch or stream, a black line marked out between overhanging banks of snow. Now, for a change, he was going downhill, with the wind in his face, when, at some distance before him, and seeming to hang in the driving wind and mist, he saw the faint outline of a human habitation.
Ah, sweet and blessed sight! Verily he had done well, to march stoutly on despite all obstacles, until now human dwellings appeared, in sign that the inhabited valley was at hand. Perhaps there were even human beings, perhaps he might enter and abide the end of the storm under shelter, then get directions, or a guide if the dark should have fallen. He held toward this chimerical goal, that often quite vanished in mist, and took an exhausting climb against the wind before it was reached; finally drew near it—to discover, with what staggering astonishment and horror may be imagined, that it was only the hay-hut with the weighted roof, to which, after all his striving, by all his devious paths, he had come back.
That was the very devil. Hans Castorp gave vent to several heartfelt curses—of which his lips were too stiff to pronounce the labials. He examined the hut, to get his bearings, and came to the conclusion that he had approached it from the same direction as before—namely, from the rear; and therefore, what he had accomplished for the past hour—as he reckoned it—had been sheer waste of time and effort. But there it was, just as the books said. You went in a circle, gave yourself endless trouble under the delusion that you were accomplishing something, and all the time you were simply describing some great silly arc that would turn back to where it had its beginning, like the riddling year itself. You wandered about, without getting home. Hans Castorp recognized the traditional phenomenon with a certain grim satisfaction—and even slapped his thigh in astonishment at this punctual general law fulfilling itself in his particular case.
The lonely hut was barred, the door locked fast, no entrance possible. But Hans Castorp decided to stop for the present. The projecting roof gave the illusion of shelter, and the hut itself, on the side turned toward the mountains, afforded, he found, some little protection against the storm. He leaned his shoulder against the rough-hewn timber, since his long skis prevented him from leaning his back. And so he stood, obliquely to the wall, having thrust his staff in the snow; hands in pockets, his collar turned up as high as it would go, bracing himself on his outside leg, and leaning his dizzy head against the wood, his eyes closed, but opening them every now and then to look down his shoulder and across the gully to where the high mountain wall palely appeared and disappeared in mist.
His situation was comparatively comfortable. “I can stick it like this all night, if I have to,” he thought, “if I change legs from time to time, lie on the other side, so to speak, and move about a bit between whiles, as of course I must. I’m rather stiff, naturally, but the effort I made has accumulated some inner warmth, so after all it was not quite in vain, that I have come round all this way. Come round—not coming round—that’s the regular expression they use, of people drowned or frozen to death.—I suppose I used it because I am not quite so clear in the head as I might be. But it is a good thing I can stick it out here; for this frantic nuisance of a snowstorm can carry on until morning without a qualm, and if it only keeps up until dark it will be quite bad enough, for in the dark the danger of going round and round and not coming round is as great as in a storm. It must be toward evening already, about six o’clock, I should say, after all the time I wasted on my circular tour. Let’s see, how late is it?” He felt for his watch; his numbed fingers could scarcely find and draw it from his pocket. Here it was, his gold hunting-watch, with his monogram on the lid, ticking faithfully away in this lonely waste, like Hans Castorp’s own heart, that touching human heart that beat in the organic warmth of his interior man.
It was half past four. But deuce take it, it had been nearly as much before the storm burst. Was it possible his whole bewildered circuit had lasted scarcely a quarter of an hour? “ ‘Coming round’ makes time seem long,” he noted. “And when you don’t ‘come round’—does it seem longer? But the fact remains that at five or half past it will be regularly dark. Will the storm hold up in time to keep me from running in circles again? Suppose I take a sip of port—it might strengthen me.”
He had brought with him a bottle of that amateurish drink, simply because it was always kept ready in flat bottles at the Berghof, for excursions—though not, of course, excursions like this unlawful escapade. It was not meant for people who went out in the snow and got lost and night-bound in the mountains. Had his senses been less befogged, he must have said to himself that if he were bent on getting home, it was almost the worst thing he could have done. He did say so, after he had drunk several swallows, for they took effect at once, and it was an effect much like that of the Kulmbacher beer on the evening of his arrival at the Berghof, when he had angered Settembrini by his ungoverned prattle anent fish-sauces and the like—Herr Ludovico, the pedagogue, the same who held madmen to their senses when they would give themselves rein. Hans Castorp heard through thin air the mellifluous sound of his horn; the orator and schoolmaster was nearing by forced marches, to rescue his troublesome nursling, life’s delicate child, from his present desperate pass and lead him home.—All which was of course sheer rubbish, due to the Kulmbacher he had so foolishly drunk. For of course Herr Settembrini had no horn, how could he have? He had a hand-organ, propped by a sort of wooden leg against the pavement, and as he played a sprightly air, he flung his humanistic eyes up to the people in the houses. And furthermore he knew nothing whatever of what had happened, as he no longer lived in House Berghof, but with Lukaçek the tailor, in his little attic room with the water-bottle, above Naphta’s silken cell. Moreover, he would have no right nor reason to interfere—no more than upon that carnival night on which Hans Castorp had found himself in a position quite as mad and bad as this one, when he gave the ailing Clavdia Chauchat back son crayon—his, Pribislav Hippe’s, pencil. What position was that? What position could it be but the horizontal, literally and not metaphorically the position of all long-termers up here? Was not he himself used to lie long hours out of doors, in snow and frost, by night as well as day? And he was making ready to sink down when the idea seized him, took him as it were by the collar and fetched him up standing, that all this nonsense he was uttering was still inspired by the Kulmbacher beer and the impersonal, quite typical and traditional longing to lie down and sleep, of which he had always heard, and which would by quibbling and sophistry now betray him.
“That was the wrong way to go to work,” he acknowledged to himself. “The port was not at all the right thing; just the few sips of it have made my head so heavy I cannot hold it up, and my thoughts are all just confused, stupid quibbling with words. I can’t depend on them—not only the first thought that comes into my head, but even the second one, the correction which my reason tries to make upon the first—more’s the pity. ‘Son crayon!’ That means ‘her pencil,’ not ‘his pencil,’ in this case; you only say son because crayon is masculine. The rest is just a pretty feeble play on words. Imagine stopping to talk about that when there is a much more important fact; namely, that my left leg, which I am using as a support, reminds me of the wooden leg on Settembrini’s hand-organ, that he keeps jolting over the pavement with his knee, to get up close to the window and hold out his velvet hat for the girl up there to throw something into. And at the same time, I seem to be pulled, as though with hands, to lie down in the snow. The only thing to do is to move about. I must pay for the Kulmbacher, and limber up my wooden leg.”
He pushed himself away from the wall with his shoulder. But one single pace forward, and the wind sliced at him like a scythe, and drove him back to the shelter of the wall. It was unquestionably the position indicated for the time; he might change it by turning his left shoulder to the wall and propping himself on the right leg, with sundry shakings of the left, to restore the circulation as much as might be. “Who leaves the house in weather like this?” he said. “Moderate activity is all right; but not too much craving for adventure, no coying with the bride of the storm. Quiet, quiet—if the head be heavy, let it droop. The wall is good, a certain warmth seems to come from the logs—probably the feeling is entirely subjective.—Ah, the trees, the trees! Oh, living climate of the living—how sweet it smells!”
It was a park. It lay beneath the terrace on which he seemed to stand—a spreading park of luxuriant green shade-trees, elms, planes, beeches, birches, oaks, all in the dappled light and shade of their fresh, full, shimmering foliage, and gently rustling tips. They breathed a deliciously moist, balsamic breath into the air. A warm shower passed over them, but the rain was sunlit. One could see high up in the sky the whole air filled with the bright ripple of raindrops. How lovely it was! Oh, breath of the homeland, oh, fragrance and abundance of the plain, so long foregone! The air was full of bird song—dainty, sweet, blithe fluting, piping, twittering, cooing, trilling, warbling, though not a single little creature could be seen. Hans Castorp smiled, breathing gratitude. But still more beauties were preparing. A rainbow flung its arc slanting across the scene, most bright and perfect, a sheer delight, all its rich glossy, banded colours moistly shimmering down into the thick, lustrous green. It was like music, like the sound of harps commingled with flutes and violins. The blue and the violet were transcendent. And they descended and magically blended, were transmuted and re-unfolded more lovely than before. Once, some years earlier, our young Hans Castorp had been privileged to hear a world-famous Italian tenor, from whose throat had gushed a glorious stream to witch the world with gracious art. The singer took a high note, exquisitely; then held it, while the passionate harmony swelled, unfolded, glowed from moment to moment with new radiance. Unsuspected veils dropped from before it one by one; the last one sank away, revealing what must surely be the ultimate tonal purity—yet no, for still another fell, and then a well-nigh incredible third and last, shaking into the air such an extravagance of tear-glistening splendour, that confused murmurs of protest rose from the audience, as though it could bear no more; and our young friend found that he was sobbing.—So now with the scene before him, constantly transformed and transfigured as it was before his eyes. The bright, rainy veil fell away; behind it stretched the sea, a southern sea of deep, deepest blue shot with silver lights, and a beautiful bay, on one side mistily open, on the other enclosed by mountains whose outline paled away into blue space. In the middle distance lay islands, where palms rose tall and small white houses gleamed among cypress groves. Ah, it was all too much, too blest for sinful mortals, that glory of light, that deep purity of the sky, that sunny freshness on the water! Such a scene Hans Castorp had never beheld, nor anything like it. On his holidays he had barely sipped at the south, the sea for him meant the colourless, tempestuous northern tides, to which he clung with inarticulate, childish love. Of the Mediterranean, Naples, Sicily, he knew nothing. And yet—he remembered. Yes, strangely enough, that was recognition which so moved him. “Yes, yes, its very image,” he was crying out, as though in his heart he had always cherished a picture of this spacious, sunny bliss. Always—and that always went far, far, unthinkably far back, as far as the open sea there on the left where it ran out to the violet sky bent down to meet it.
The skyline was high, the distance seemed to mount to Hans Castorp’s view, looking down as he did from his elevation onto the spreading gulf beneath. The mountains held it embraced, their tree-clad foothills running down to the sea; they reached in half-circle from the middle distance to the point where he sat, and beyond. This was a mountainous littoral, at one point of which he was crouching upon a sun-warmed stone terrace, while before him the ground, descending among undergrowth, by moss-covered rocky steps, ran down to a level shore, where the reedy shingle formed little blue-dyed bays, minute archipelagoes and harbours. And all the sunny region, these open coastal heights and laughing rocky basins, even the sea itself out to the islands, where boats plied to and fro, was peopled far and wide. On every hand human beings, children of sun and sea, were stirring or sitting. Beautiful young human creatures, so blithe, so good and gay, so pleasing to see—at sight of them Hans Castorp’s whole heart opened in a responsive love, keen almost to pain.
Youths were at work with horses, running hand on halter alongside their whinnying, head-tossing charges; pulling the refractory ones on a long rein, or else, seated bareback, striking the flanks of their mounts with naked heels, to drive them into the sea. The muscles of the riders’ backs played beneath the sun-bronzed skin, and their voices were enchanting beyond words as they shouted to each other or to their steeds. A little bay ran deep into the coast line, mirroring the shore as does a mountain lake; about it girls were dancing. One of them sat with her back toward him, so that her neck, and the hair drawn to a knot above it smote him with loveliness. She sat with her feet in a depression of the rock, and played on a shepherd’s pipe, her eyes roving above the stops to her companions, as in long, wide garments, smiling, with outstretched arms, alone, or in pairs swaying gently toward each other, they moved in the paces of the dance. Behind the flute-player—she too was white-clad, and her back was long and slender, laterally rounded by the movement of her arms—other maidens were sitting, or standing entwined to watch the dance, and quietly talking. Beyond them still, young men were practising archery. Lovely and pleasant it was to see the older ones show the younger, curly-locked novices, how to span the bow and take aim; draw with them, and laughing support them staggering back from the push of the arrow as it leaped from the bow. Others were fishing, lying prone on a jut of rock, waggling one leg in the air, holding the line out over the water, approaching their heads in talk. Others sat straining forward to fling the bait far out. A ship, with mast and yards, lying high out of the tide, was being eased, shoved, and steadied into the sea. Children played and exulted among the breaking waves. A young female, lying outstretched, drawing with one hand her flowered robe high between her breasts, reached with the other in the air after a twig bearing fruit and leaves, which a second, a slender-hipped creature, erect at her head, was playfully withholding. Young folk were sitting in nooks or the rocks, or hesitating at the water’s edge, with crossed arms clutching either shoulder, as they tested the chill with their toes. Pairs strolled along the beach, close and confiding, at the maiden’s ear the lips of the youth. Shaggy-haired goats leaped from ledge to ledge of the rocks, while the young goatherd, wearing perched on his brown curls a little hat with the brim turned up behind, stood watching them from a height, one hand on his hip, the other holding the long staff on which he leaned.
“Oh, lovely, lovely,” Hans Castorp breathed. “How joyous and winning they are, how fresh and healthy, happy and clever they look! It is not alone the outward form, they seem to be wise and gentle through and through. That is what makes me in love with them, the spirit that speaks out of them, the sense, I might almost say, in which they live and play together.” By which he meant the friendliness, the mutual courteous regard these children of the sun showed to each other, a calm, reciprocal reverence veiled in smiles, manifested almost imperceptibly, and yet possessing them all by the power of sense association and ingrained idea. A dignity, even a gravity, was held, as it were, in solution in their lightest mood, perceptible only as an ineffable spiritual influence, a high seriousness without austerity, a reasoned goodness conditioning every act. All this, indeed, was not without its ceremonial side. A young mother, in a brown robe loose at the shoulder, sat on a rounded mossy stone and suckled her child, saluted by all who passed with a characteristic gesture which seemed to comprehend all that lay implicit in their general bearing. The young men, as they approached, lightly and formally crossed their arms on their breasts, and smilingly bowed; the maidens shaped the suggestion of a curtsy, as the worshipper does when he passes the high altar, at the same time nodding repeatedly, blithely and heartily. This mixture of formal homage with lively friendliness, and the slow, mild mien of the mother as well, where she sat pressing her breast with her forefinger to ease the flow of milk to her babe, glancing up from it to acknowledge with a smile the reverence paid her—this sight thrilled Hans Castorp’s heart with something very close akin to ecstasy. He could not get his fill of looking, yet asked himself in concern whether he had a right, whether it was not perhaps punishable, for him, an outsider, to be a party to the sunshine and gracious loveliness of all these happy folk. He felt common, clumsy-booted. It seemed unscrupulous.
A lovely boy, with full hair drawn sideways across his brow and falling on his temples, sat directly beneath him, apart from his companions, with arms folded on his breast—not sadly, not ill-naturedly, quite tranquilly on one side. This lad looked up, turned his gaze upward and looked at him, Hans Castorp, and his eyes went between the watcher and the scenes upon the strand, watching his watching, to and fro. But suddenly he looked past Hans Castorp into space, and that smile, common to them all, of polite and brotherly regard, disappeared in a moment from his lovely, purely cut, half-childish face. His brows did not darken, but in his gaze there came a solemnity that looked as though carven out of stone, inexpressive, unfathomable, a deathlike reserve, which gave the scarcely reassured Hans Castorp a thorough fright, not unaccompanied by a vague apprehension of its meaning.
He too looked in the same direction. Behind him rose towering columns, built of cylindrical blocks without bases, in the joinings of which moss had grown. They formed the façade of a temple gate, on whose foundations he was sitting, at the top of a double flight of steps with space between. Heavy of heart he rose, and, descending the stair on one side, passed through the high gate below, and along a flagged street, which soon brought him before other propylaea. He passed through these as well, and now stood facing the temple that lay before him, massy, weathered to a grey-green tone, on a foundation reached by a steep flight of steps. The broad brow of the temple rested on the capitals of powerful, almost stunted columns, tapering toward the top—sometimes a fluted block had been shoved out of line and projected a little in profile. Painfully, helping himself on with his hands, and sighing for the growing oppression of his heart, Hans Castorp mounted the high steps and gained the grove of columns. It was very deep, he moved in it as among the trunks in a forest of beeches by the pale northern sea. He purposely avoided the centre, yet for all that slanted back again, and presently stood before a group of statuary, two female figures carved in stone, on a high base: mother and daughter, it seemed; one of them sitting, older than the other, more dignified, right goddess-like and mild, yet with mourning brows above the lightless empty eye-sockets; clad in a flowing tunic and a mantle of many folds, her matronly brow with its waves of hair covered with a veil. The other figure stood in the protecting embrace of the first, with round, youthful face, and arms and hands wound and hidden in the folds of the mantle.
Hans Castorp stood looking at the group, and from some dark cause his laden heart grew heavier still, and more oppressed with its weight of dread and anguish. Scarcely daring to venture, but following an inner compulsion, he passed behind the statuary, and through the double row of columns beyond. The bronze door of the sanctuary stood open, and the poor soul’s knees all but gave way beneath him at the sight within. Two grey old women, witchlike, with hanging breasts and dugs of finger-length, were busy there, between flaming braziers, most horribly. They were dismembering a child. In dreadful silence they tore it apart with their bare hands—Hans Castorp saw the bright hair blood-smeared—and cracked the tender bones between their jaws, their dreadful lips dripped blood. An icy coldness held him. He would have covered his eyes and fled, but could not. They at their gory business had already seen him, they shook their reeking fists and uttered curses—soundlessly, most vilely, with the last obscenity, and in the dialect of Hans Castorp’s native Hamburg. It made him sick, sick as never before. He tried desperately to escape; knocked into a column with his shoulder—and found himself, with the sound of that dreadful whispered brawling still in his ears, still wrapped in the cold horror of it, lying by his hut, in the snow, leaning against one arm, with his head upon it, his legs in their skis stretched out before him.
It was no true awakening. He blinked his relief at being free from those execrable hags, but was not very clear, nor even greatly concerned, whether this was a hay-hut, or the column of a temple, against which he lay; and after a fashion continued to dream, no longer in pictures, but in thoughts hardly less involved and fantastic.
“I felt it was a dream, all along,” he rambled. “A lovely and horrible dream. I knew all the time that I was making it myself—the park with the trees, the delicious moisture in the air, and all the rest, both dreadful and dear. In a way, I knew it all beforehand. But how is it a man can know all that and call it up to bring him bliss and terror both at once? Where did I get the beautiful bay with the islands, where the temple precincts, whither the eyes of that charming boy pointed me, as he stood there alone? Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace—and its blood-sacrifice. Here I lie at my column and still feel in my body the actual remnant of my dream—the icy horror of the human sacrifice, but also the joy that had filled my heart to its very depths, born of the happiness and brave bearing of those human creatures in white. It is meet and proper, I hereby declare that I have a prescriptive right to lie here and dream these dreams. For in my life up here I have known reason and recklessness. I have wandered lost with Settembrini and Naphta in high and mortal places. I know all of man. I have known mankind’s flesh and blood. I gave back to the ailing Clavdia Chauchat Pribislav Hippe’s lead-pencil. But he who knows the body, life, knows death. And that is not all; it is, pedagogically speaking, only the beginning. One must have the other half of the story, the other side. For all interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life, as is proven by the humanistic faculty of medicine, that addresses life and its ails always so politely in Latin, and is only a division of the great and pressing concern which, in all sympathy, I now name by its name: the human being, the delicate child of life, man, his state and standing in the universe. I understand no little about him, I have learned much from ‘those up here,’ I have been driven up from the valley, so that the breath almost left my poor body. Yet now from the base of my column I have no meagre view. I have dreamed of man’s state, of his courteous and enlightened social state; behind which, in the temple, the horrible blood-sacrifice was consummated. Were they, those children of the sun, so sweetly courteous to each other, in silent recognition of that horror? It would be a fine and right conclusion they drew. I will hold to them, in my soul, I will hold with them and not with Naphta, neither with Settembrini. They are both talkers; the one luxurious and spiteful, the other forever blowing on his penny pipe of reason, even vainly imagining he can bring the mad to their senses. It is all Philistinism and morality, most certainly it is irreligious. Nor am I for little Naphta either, or his religion, that is only a guazzabuglio of God and the Devil, good and evil, to the end that the individual soul shall plump into it head first, for the sake of mystic immersion in the universal. Pedagogues both! Their quarrels and counter-positions are just a guazzabuglio too, and a confused noise of battle, which need trouble nobody who keeps a little clear in his head and pious in his heart. Their aristocratic question! Disease, health! Spirit, nature! Are those contradictions? I ask, are they problems? No, they are no problems, neither is the problem of their aristocracy. The recklessness of death is in life, it would not be life without it—and in the centre is the position of the Homo Dei, between recklessness and reason, as his state is between mystic community and windy individualism. I, from my column, perceive all this. In this state he must live gallantly, associate in friendly reverence with himself, for only he is aristocratic, and the counter-positions are not at all. Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. More so than death, too aristocratic for death—that is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart. There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else. Death is a great power. One takes off one’s hat before him, and goes weavingly on tiptoe. He wears the stately ruff of the departed and we do him honour in solemn black. Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse—always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice. Ah, yes, it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock. I will remember. I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to humankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.—And with this—I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, in the place where Hippe appeared to me, in my loggia, everywhere. Deep into the snow mountains my search has led me. Now I have it fast. My dream has given it me, in utter clearness, that I may know it forever. Yes, I am in simple raptures, my body is warm, my heart beats high and knows why. It beats not solely on physical grounds, as fingernails grow on a corpse; but humanly, on grounds of my joyful spirits. My dream word was a draught, better than port or ale, it streams through my veins like love and life, I tear myself from my dream and sleep, knowing as I do, perfectly well, that they are highly dangerous to my young life. Up, up! Open your eyes! These are your limbs, your legs here in the snow! Pull yourself together, and up! Look—fair weather!”
The bonds held fast that kept his limbs involved. He had a hard struggle to free himself—but the inner compulsion proved stronger. With a jerk he raised himself on his elbows, briskly drew up his knees, shoved, rolled, wrestled to his feet; stamped with his skis in the snow, flung his arms about his ribs and worked his shoulders violently, all the while casting strained, alert glances about him and above, where now a pale blue sky showed itself between grey-bluish clouds, and these presently drew away to discover a thin sickle of a moon. Early twilight reigned: no snowfall, no storm. The wall of the opposite mountain with its shaggy, tree-clad ridge stretched out before him plain and peaceful. Shadow lay on half its height, but the upper half was bathed in palest rosy light. How were things in the world? Was it morning? Had he, despite what the books said, lain all night in the snow and not frozen? Not a member was frostbitten, nothing snapped when he stamped, shook and struck himself, as he did vigorously, all the time seeking to establish the facts of his situation. Ears, toes, fingertips, were of course numb, but not more so than they had often been at night in his loggia. He could take his watch from his pocket—it was still going, it had not stopped, as it did if he forgot to wind it. It said not yet five—it was in fact considerably earlier, twelve, thirteen minutes. Preposterous! Could it be he had lain here in the snow only ten minutes or so, while all these scenes of horror and delight and those presumptuous thoughts had spun themselves in his brain, and the hexagonal hurly vanished as it came? If that were true, then he must be grateful for his good fortune; that is, from the point of view of a safe homecoming. For twice such a turn had come, in his dream and fantasy, as had made him start up—once from horror, and again for rapture. It seemed, indeed, that life meant well by her lone-wandering delicate child.
Be all that as it might, and whether it was morning or afternoon—there could in fact be no doubt that it was still late afternoon—in any case, there was nothing in the circumstances or in his own condition to prevent his going home, which he accordingly did: descending in a fine sweep, as the crow flies, to the valley, where, as he reached it, lights were showing, though his way had been well enough lighted by reflection from the snow. He came down the Brehmenbühl, along the edge of the forest, and was in the Dorf by half past five. He left his skis at the grocer’s, rested a little in Herr Settembrini’s attic cell, and told him how the storm had overtaken him in the mountains. The horrified humanist scolded him roundly, and straightway lighted his spirit-kettle to brew coffee for the exhausted one—the strength of which did not prevent Hans Castorp from falling asleep as he sat.
An hour later the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof caressed him. He ate enormously at dinner. What he had dreamed was already fading from his mind. What he had thought—even that selfsame evening it was no longer so clear as it had been at first.
A Soldier, and Brave
Hans Castorp had had frequent word from his cousin, short messages, at first full of good news and high spirits, then less so, then at length communications that sought to hide something truly sad to hear. The succession of postcards began with the joyous announcement that Joachim was with the colours, and a description of the fanatical ceremony in which, as Hans Castorp ironically couched it in his reply, he had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. One after another Joachim passed easily through the stages of his chosen vocation, whose difficulties were smoothed away by the interest of his superiors and his own passionate love for the service. All this he described to his cousin in his brief messages. He was dispensed from the duty of going to the military academy, as he had already studied some semesters, and from the cornetcy. By the New Year he would be promoted to a subalternship—and sent a photograph of himself in the uniform of an officer. His utter devotion to the spirit of the hierarchy he served, that straitly honourable hierarchy, the bonds of whose organization were like iron, and which yet in its crabbedly humorous way knew how to yield something to the weakness of the flesh, was plain in every hasty line. He related anecdotes illustrating the quaintly complex attitude of his cranky, fanatical sergeant-major toward him, the blundering young subordinate, in whom he yet envisaged the ordained superior of tomorrow, who already had the right to enter the officers’ casino. It was all very fantastic and droll. Then he told of being admitted to prepare for the officers’ examination. By the beginning of April he was a lieutenant.
Manifestly there was no happier man, none with more single-minded devotion of his whole being to the chosen career. With a sort of shamefaced beatitude he told of going past the Rathaus for the first time, in full uniform, how the sentry had saluted, and he nodded to him from a distance. He spoke of the small vexations and rewards of the service, of the wonderfully satisfying comradeship, of the sheepish loyalty of his Bursch, of funny occurrences on the parade-ground and in instruction; of inspection, of love-feasts. Also he occasionally mentioned social affairs, visits, dinners, balls. Not a word of his health.
Until toward summer. Then he wrote that he was in bed, on sick-leave, a catarrh, a matter of a few days. By the beginning of June he was back. But at the middle of the month he had crocked up again, and complained bitterly of his luck. He could not conceal his worry lest he should miss the August general manoeuvres, toward which he was already eagerly looking. Rubbish! in July he was as sound as a berry, weeks long. But then an examination, made advisable by his accursed fluctuations of temperature, suddenly appeared on the horizon. As to the result of this examination, Hans Castorp for long weeks heard nothing; and when he heard, perhaps out of mortification, perhaps because of his physical state, it was not Joachim who wrote. His mother, Louisa Ziemssen, telegraphed. She said the physicians thought it necessary for Joachim to go on sick-leave for some weeks: high mountains indicated immediate departure advised reserve two rooms reply prepaid signed Aunt Louisa.
It was at the end of July when Hans Castorp, lying in his balcony, ran through this dispatch, then read it, and read it again. He nodded as he did so, not with his head but with his whole torso, and said between his teeth: “Si, si, si,” like Herr Settembrini. “Joachim is coming back!” ran through him like tidings of great joy. But he grew subdued at once, on the thought “H’m, this is bad news! One might almost call it a mess. The deuce! That went fast. Ripe for ‘home’ again. The mother coming with him”—Hans Castorp said the mother, not Aunt Louisa, his family feeling having grown unconsciously very faded. “That is serious. And directly before the manoeuvres he has been so on fire to go to. H’m, it’s certainly a skin game, it’s playing it low down on poor Joachim, it’s the very opposite of the ideal. By which I mean that the body triumphs, it wants something different from the soul, and puts it through—a slap in the face of all those lofty-minded people who teach that the body is subordinate to the soul. Seems to me they don’t know what they are talking about, because if they were right, a case like this would put the soul in a pretty equivocal light. Verbum sap.—I know what I mean. The question I raise is how far they are right when they set the two over against each other; and whether they aren’t rather in collusion, playing the same game. That’s something that never occurs to the lofty-minded gentry. Not that I am for a moment saying anything against Joachim and his ‘doggedness.’ He is the soul of honour—but what is honour, is what I want to know, when body and soul act together? Is it possible you have not been able to forget a certain refreshing perfume, a tendency to giggle, a swelling bosom, all waiting for you at Frau Stöhr’s table?—He is coming back!” he returned to the thought with the same joyous sensation. “He comes in bad shape, it is true, but we shall be together again, I shan’t live up here all by myself. And that’s a good thing. It won’t be quite as it was before, his room is taken. That Mrs. Macdonald sits there and coughs, a voiceless sort of cough, and keeps looking at the picture of her little son, on her table or in her hand. But she is at the last stage. If nobody else has engaged it, why—but for the present it must be another one. Twenty-eight is free, so far as I know. I’ll go down to the office—and to Behrens too. This is news. On the one hand it is bad news, on the other grand news—and in any case a change. I’d like to wait for the ‘Comrade’ though, he’ll be coming along presently, and just ask him if he is still of the opinion, in a case like this, that the physical is to be regarded as secondary.”
He went to the office before tea. The room he had in mind, on the same corridor as his own, was free, and there would be a place for Frau Ziemssen. He hastened to Behrens, and found him in the “lab,” a cigar in one hand, and in the other a test-tube of dull-coloured fluid.
“Herr Hofrat, what do you think?” he began.
“That there’s always the devil to pay,” responded the pneumotomist. “Here we have Rosenheim, from Utrecht,” said he, and waved his cigar at the test-tube. “Gaffky ten. And Schmitz the manufacturer comes along and tells me he’s been spitting on the pavement—with Gaffky ten, if you please. I’m supposed to blow him up. Well, if I blow him up, it will be the deuce and all, because he’s as touchy as a bear with a sore head, and he and his family occupy three rooms in the establishment. If I give him what for, the management gives me the same—pressed down and running over. You see what kind of trouble I get into every minute—and me so anxious to go my own simple way, unspotted from the world.”
“Silly business,” Hans Castorp said, with the ready understanding of the old inhabitant. “I know them both. Schmitz is immensely proper and pushful, and Rosenheim is plenty smeary. But there may be other sore spots, besides the hygienic. They are both friendly with Doña Perez from Barcelona, at the Kleefeld’s table—that’s the basic trouble, I should think. If I were you I’d just call attention to the rule in general, and then shut my eye to the rest.”
“Don’t I just? I’ve got functional blepharospasm already from doing nothing else. But what are you about down here?”
Hans Castorp came out with the sad yet thrilling news.
Not that the Hofrat was surprised, nor would have been in any case. But he had also been kept informed of Joachim’s progress; Hans Castorp told him, whether asked or unasked, and he knew that Joachim had been in bed in May.
“Aha,” said he. “And what did I tell you? What did I tell both of you, not once but a hundred times, in so many words? So now you have it. Nine months he’s had his heart’s desire, and been living in a fool’s paradise. Well, it wasn’t a snakeless paradise—it was infected, more’s the pity. But he wouldn’t believe what his little ole Behrens told him, and so he’s had bad luck, like the rest of them, when they don’t believe what their little ole Behrens says, and come too late to their senses. He’s got as far as lieutenant, anyhow, there’s that to say. But what’s the use of it? The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket, before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike …” He rambled on, rubbed his eyes with his huge hands, still holding the cigar between his fingers; then he said Hans Castorp must excuse him for this time. A berth for Joachim would of course be found, when he came his cousin should stick him into bed, without delay. So far as he, Behrens, was concerned he bore nobody any grudge, he would be ready to welcome home the prodigal and like a fond parent kill the fatted calf.
Hans Castorp telegraphed. He spread the news of his cousin’s return, and all those who had been the young man’s friends were glad and sorry and both quite sincerely; for his clean and chivalrous personality had been universally approved, and there was a sort of unspoken feeling that Joachim had been the best of the lot up here. We mention no one in particular; but incline to think that in some quarters a certain satisfaction was felt in the knowledge that Joachim must give up the soldier’s career and return to the horizontal, and in all his immaculateness become one of them up here again. Frau Stöhr, of course, had had her ideas all along; time had now justified the rather unfeeling hints she threw out when Joachim went down, and she was not above saying I told you so. “Pretty rotten,” she called it. She had known it for that from the first, and only hoped that Ziemssen by his pigheadedness had not made it putrid. Her choice of words was conditioned by sheer innate vulgarity. How much better it was to stop at one’s post, as she did; she too had her life down below, in Cannstadt, a husband and two children, but she could contain herself … No reply came to the telegram. Hans Castorp remained in ignorance of the hour or day of his cousin’s coming, and thus could not receive him at the station when, three days later, he and his mother simply arrived. Lieutenant Joachim, laughing and excited, burst upon his cousin in the evening rest-cure.
It had just begun. The same train brought them as had Hans Castorp, when years ago, years that had been neither long nor short, but timeless, very eventful yet “the sum of nothing,” he had first come to this place. The time of year was the same too—one of the very first days of August. Joachim, as we said, went gaily into Hans Castorp’s room, or rather out of it into the loggia, with a rapid tread, and laughing, breathless, incoherent, greeted his cousin. He had put all that long way behind him, those miles of territory and that lake that was like a sea, and then wound high up the narrow passes—and there he stood, as though he had never been away. His cousin started up from the horizontal and greeted him with a shout and “Well, well, well!” His colour was fresh, thanks to his open-air life, or perhaps to the flush of travel. He had hurried directly to his cousin’s room without going first to his own, in order to greet his old-time companion, while his mother was putting herself to rights in the chamber assigned her. They were to eat in ten minutes, of course in the restaurant. Hans Castorp could surely have a little something more with them, or at least take a glass of wine. And Joachim pulled him over to number twenty-eight, where the scene was reminiscent of that long-ago evening when Hans Castorp arrived. Now it was Joachim, who, feverishly talking, washed up at the shining wash-hand-basin, while Hans Castorp looked on, surprised and in a way disappointed to see his cousin in mufti. He had always pictured him as an officer; but here he was in grey “uni,” looking like everybody else. Joachim laughed, and said he was naive. He had left his uniform at home, of course. It was not such a simple matter with a uniform—you couldn’t wear it just any place. “Oh, thanks awfully,” said Hans Castorp. But Joachim seemed unaware of any offence in his own remark and went on, asking about matters and things in the Berghof, not only without the least touch of condescension, but even rather moved by the homecoming. Then Frau Ziemssen appeared through the door connecting their two rooms, and greeted her nephew in a way some people have on these occasions; namely, as though pleasurably surprised to find him here. She spoke with subdued melancholy, in part caused by fatigue, in part with reference to Joachim’s state—and they went down to dinner.
Louisa Ziemssen had the same gentle and beautiful dark eyes as Joachim. Her hair, that was quite as black, but mingled now with many threads of grey, was confined by a nearly invisible net; an arrangement characteristic of the mild and measured composure of her personality, which was simple, and at the same time dignified and pleasing. Hans Castorp felt no surprise to see that she was puzzled, even a little put out, by Joachim’s liveliness, his rapid breathing and headlong talk, which were probably foreign to his manner either at home or on the journey, besides giving the lie to his actual condition. For herself she was impressed with the sadness of this return, and would have found a subdued bearing more suitable. How could she enter into Joachim’s turbulent emotions, due in part to the sensation that he was come home, which for the moment outweighed all else, and in part to the stimulus of the incomparably light, empty, yet kindling air he was once more breathing? All that was totally dark to her. “My poor lad,” she thought, as she watched him and his cousin abandoned to mirth, telling each other a hundred anecdotes, asking each other a hundred questions, throwing themselves back in their chairs with peals of laughter. “Children, children!” she protested more than once; and finally levelled a mild reproof at behaviour which might rather have gladdened her heart: “Why, Joachim, I have not seen you like this for many a long day. It seems as though you needed to come back here to be as you were on the day of your promotion.” No more was needed to quench Joachim’s lively mood. He turned completely round, fell silent and ate none of the sweet, though it was most toothsome, a chocolate soufflé with whipped cream. Hans Castorp did what he could in his cousin’s stead, though his own hearty dinner was only an hour behind him. Joachim looked up no more—obviously because his eyes were full of tears.
Such a result was as far as possible from Frau Ziemssen’s intention. It was really more for decorum’s sake that she had tried to introduce a little sobriety into the mood of her son, not realizing that precisely the middle course, the golden mean, was impossible up here, and only a choice of extremes offered. When she saw him break down, she seemed not far from tears herself, and most grateful to her nephew for his gallant efforts to redress the balance of the situation. Yes, he said, Joachim would find there had been changes in the population of the Berghof, there were new people, but on the other hand, some that had gone away were come back again. For instance, the great-aunt and her charges sat once more at Frau Stöhr’s table, and Marusja laughed as much as ever.
Joachim said nothing. But Frau Ziemssen was thereby reminded that they had chanced to meet someone who sent greetings, which she must deliver while she thought of it. It was in a restaurant in Munich, where they had spent a day between two night journeys. A lady—a not unsympathetic person, though unaccompanied, and with rather too level brows—had come up to their table to greet Joachim. She had been a patient up here, Joachim would know—
“Frau Chauchat,” Joachim said, in a low voice. She was spending some time in a cure in the Allgäu, and intended to go to Spain in the winter. She sent greetings.
Hans Castorp was no raw youth, he had control over the nerves that might have made the blood rush to or leave his face. He said: “Oh, so she has emerged from behind the Caucasus again, has she? And she is going to Spain?”
The lady had mentioned a place in the Pyrenees. A pretty, or at least a charming woman. Pleasant voice, pretty gestures. But free manners, slack, Frau Ziemssen thought. “She spoke to us as though we were old friends, told about herself, asked questions, though it seems Joachim had never actually known her. I thought it rather odd.”
“That is the East—and the illness,” replied Hans Castorp. “One mustn’t try to measure her by humanistic standards.” He thought he remembered that she had intended to make a journey into Spain. H’m, Spain. That country too lay remote from the humanistic mean, though on the side of austerity rather than of softness. There it was not lack but excess of form that obtained; death itself was in the guise of form, not dissolution—black, refined, sanguinary, Inquisition, stiff ruff, Loyola, the Escurial, et cetera—h’m, yes, it was interesting; he wondered what Frau Chauchat would say to Spain. She’d probably get over banging doors—and perhaps a combination of the two extremes would bring her closer to the humane mean. Yet something pretty awful, terroristic, might come to pass if the East went to Spain …
No, he neither paled nor flushed; but the impression the news had made upon him betrayed itself none the less; on such talk as this nothing but perplexed silence could supervene. Joachim, of course, was less taken aback than his mother, being acquainted from aforetime with his cousin’s mental volatility up here. But a great perturbation showed in Frau Ziemssen’s eyes, as though her nephew had uttered some gross impropriety; and after a painful pause she broke up the gathering by rising from table, with a phrase or so intended to gloze over the situation. Before they separated, Hans Castorp told them that Behrens’s order was for Joachim to remain in bed at least on the morrow, or until he had come to examine him. The rest would be decided later. Soon the three relatives lay each in his room, with the door open to the freshness of the summer night in this altitude, and each with his thoughts: Hans Castorp’s were chiefly concerned with Frau Chauchat’s return, to be expected within six months’ time.
So this was young Joachim’s homecoming—for a little after-cure. That way of putting it had obviously been the one given out down below, and it passed current here too, even Hofrat Behrens taking it up, though the first thing he did was to sentence Joachim to four weeks in the “caboose” by way of repairing the most obvious damage, acclimatizing him anew, and putting his house in order as far as temperature was concerned. He was careful to avoid setting any limit for the “after-cure.” Frau Ziemssen, sensible, discerning, never very sanguine save at Joachim’s bedside, mentioned the autumn, perhaps October, as the terminus, and Behrens acquiesced, at least to the extent of saying that anyhow they would be further on then than they were now. Frau Ziemssen liked him immensely. His bearing toward her was courtly; he called her “my dearest lady,” looking deferentially down upon her with his bloodshot eyes; and he talked such extravagant corps-student jargon that despite her depression she always had to laugh. “I know he is in the best of hands,” she said; and after a week’s stay went back to Hamburg, as Joachim had no need of care, and his cousin was always with him.
“Set your heart at rest,” Hans Castorp said to Joachim, sitting by his bed in number twenty-eight. “You’ll get off by the autumn, the old ’un has more or less committed himself to that. You can look forward to it as a terminus—October. In that month some people go to Spain, and you can go back to your bandera, to distinguish yourself ex supererogatione …”
It became his daily task to console his cousin for the disappointment of missing the manoeuvres, which were beginning in these August days. Joachim could think of nothing else, and expressed the greatest self-contempt at this cursed slackness that had come over him in the last minute.
“Rebellio carnis,” Hans Castorp said. “What can you do about it? The bravest officer can do nothing—even St. Anthony had his little experiences. Good Lord, don’t the manoeuvres come every year—and surely you know how time flies up here. You haven’t been gone long enough not to get back into step quite easily, and before you can turn round your little after-cure will be over.”
But the refreshment of his sense of time, caused by Joachim’s stay in the valley, had been so considerable that he could not help looking forward with dread to the next four weeks. Everybody, it is true, did his best to make time light for him; the sympathy felt on all hands for the clean personality of the young officer expressed itself in many visits. Settembrini came, was very affectionate and charming, and called Joachim Capitano, instead of Lieutenant as before. Naphta too visited him, and all the old acquaintances in the house availed themselves of a free quarter-hour to sit by his bed, repeat the phrase about the little after-cure, and hear his news. The ladies were Stöhr, Levi, Iltis and Kleefeld, the gentlemen Ferge, Wehsal, and others. They even brought him flowers. When the four weeks were up he left his bed, the fever being so far brought under control that it would not harm him to move about. He began taking his meals in the dining-room, at his cousin’s table, sitting between him and the brewer’s wife, Frau Magnus, opposite Herr Magnus, the place that had once been Uncle James’s, and for a few days Frau Ziemssen’s as well.
Thus the young people began to live once more side by side. Yes, to make it all even more as it had been, Mrs. Macdonald breathed her last, with the picture of her little son in her hand, and her room, next his cousin’s, reverted to Joachim, after it had been thoroughly freed of bacteria by means of H2CO. More exact, indeed, it was to say that Joachim now lived next door to Hans Castorp, instead of the reverse: the latter was now the old inhabitant, and his cousin shared his existence only provisionally and temporarily. Joachim stuck stiffly by the October terminus—though his nervous system refused to some extent to lend itself to the humanistic norm, and prevented a compensatory radiation of heat.
The cousins resumed their visits to Settembrini and Naphta and their walks with those two devoted opponents. When they were joined by A. K. Ferge and Wehsal, which often happened, they formed a group of six, and before this considerable audience the two opposed spirits carried on an endless duel, which we could not reproduce in any fullness without losing ourselves, as it did daily, in an infinitude of despair. Hans Castorp chose to regard his own poor soul as the object of their dialectic rivalry. He had learned from Naphta that Settembrini was a Freemason, which fact impressed him as much as Settembrini’s earlier statement that Naphta was a Jesuit. He was quite absurdly surprised to hear that there still existed such things as Freemasons; and diligently plied the terrorist with questions about the origin and significance of this curious body, which in a few years would celebrate its two-hundredth birthday. When Settembrini spoke behind his back of Naphta and his intellectual tendencies, it was always on an appealing note of warning, with a hint that the subject had more than a little of the diabolic about it. But when Naphta did the same, he made unaffectedly merry over the sphere which the other represented, and gave Hans Castorp to understand that the things for which Settembrini fought were all of them dead issues; free-thought and bourgeois enlightenment were the pathetic delusions of yesterday, though prone to the self-deception which made them a laughingstock: namely, that they were still full of revolutionary life. Said Naphta: “Dear me, his grandfather was a carbonaro—in other words a charcoal-burner. From him he gets the charcoal-burner’s faith in reason, freedom, human progress, the whole box of tricks belonging to the classicistic-humanistic virtue-ideology. You see, what perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, permanence of matter. We must admit that this disparity would be enough to excuse the spirit’s lack of interest in reality, for the rule is that it has sickened long before of the ferments that bring revolution in their train. In very truth, dead spirit is more repulsive to the living than dead matter, than granite for example, which makes no claim to be alive. Such granite, the relic of an ancient reality left so far behind by the spirit that it refuses any longer to associate with it the conception of reality, continues a sluggish existence, and by its bald and dull continuance prevents futility from becoming aware that it is futile. I am speaking in general terms, but you will know how to apply my words to that humanistic free-thought which imagines itself to be still in a heroic attitude of resistance to authority and domination. Ah, and the catastrophes, by virtue of which it thinks to manifest its vitality, the ever-delayed spectacular triumphs at which it is preparing to assist, and thinks one day to celebrate! The living spirit would die of ennui at the bare thought of these, were it not aware that from such catastrophes it alone can emerge as the victor, welding as it does the elements of the old and the new to create the true revolution.—How is your cousin today, Hans Castorp? You know what profound sympathy I feel for him.”
“Thanks, Herr Naphta. Everyone seems to feel the same, such a good lad as he is. Even Herr Settembrini admits him very much into his good graces, despite his dislike of a sort of terrorism there is in Joachim’s profession. And now I hear Herr Settembrini is a Mason! Imagine! I must say that gives me to think. It sets his personality in a new light, and clarifies certain things for me. Does he go about putting his foot at the right angle and shaking hands with a particular grip? I have never seen anything—”
“Our worthy third-degree friend has probably got beyond such childishness,” Naphta thought. “I imagine the lodges have curtailed their rites a good deal, in response to the lamentable arid Philistinism of our time. They would probably blush for the ceremonial of former periods as an extravagant mummery, and not without reason, for it would be absurd to present their atheistic republicanism in the guise of a mystery. I don’t know with what species of horrors they may have tested Herr Settembrini’s constancy; they may have led him blindfold through dark passages, and made him wait in gloomy vaults before the hall of the conclave, full of mirrored lights, burst upon his eyes. They may have solemnly catechized him, menaced his bare breast with swords to the accompaniment of a death’s-head and three tapers. You must ask himself; but I fear you will get small satisfaction, for even if the procedure was much tamer than this, in any case he will have been sworn to silence.”
“Sworn? To silence? They do that too, then?”
“Certainly. Silence and obedience.”
“Obedience too. But listen, Professor, it seems to me then, he has no occasion to stick at the terrorism in my cousin’s profession. Silence, and obedience! I could never have believed a freethinker like Herr Settembrini would submit to such out-and-out Spanish conditions and vows. I perceive that Freemasonry has something quite military and Jesuitical about it.”
“And your perceptions are perfectly correct,” Naphta responded. “Your divining-rod twitches, and knocks. The idea of the society is rooted in and inseparably bound up with the absolute. By consequence, it is terroristic; that is to say, anti-liberal. It lifts the burden from the individual conscience, and consecrates in the name of the Absolute every means even to bloodshed, even to crime. There is some support for the view that the vows of the brotherhood were once symbolically sealed in blood. A brotherhood can never be purely contemplative. By its very nature it must be executive, must organize. You probably do not know that the founder of the Illuminati, a society which for a long time was nearly identified with Freemasonry, was a former member of the Society of Jesus?”
“No, that is certainly news to me.”
“Adam Weishaupt formed his secret benevolent order entirely upon the model of the Society of Jesus. He himself was a Mason, and the most reputable lodge members of the time were Illuminati. I am speaking of the second half of the eighteenth century, which Settembrini would not hesitate to characterize as the period of the degeneration of his fraternity. Actually it was the period of its highest flower, as of all secret societies in general, a time when Masonry attained to a higher life, of which it was later ‘purged’ by men of the stamp of our friend of humanity here. In that time he would certainly have belonged to those who reproached it with Jesuitry and obscurantism.”
“Were there grounds for the reproach?”
“Yes—if you choose to call it that. The shallow freethinking of the day was of that opinion. It was the period when the Fathers of our faith sought to animate the society by breathing into it Catholic-hierarchical ideas—at that time there was actually a Jesuit lodge of Freemasonry at Clermont, in France. And it was the time when Rosicrucianism made its entrance into the lodges, that remarkable brotherhood, which, you will note, was a peculiar union of purely rational ideas of political and social improvement and a millennial programme, with elements distinctly oriental, Indian and Arabic philosophy and magical nature-lore. The reform and revision of the lodges which then took place was in the direction of strict observance in a definitely irrational and mystical, magical-alchemical sense, to which the Scottish Rite owes its existence. These are degrees of knighthood which were added to the old military ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master; upper ranks which issued in the hieratical, and were full of Rosicrucian mysticism. There ensued a sort of casting-back to certain spiritual and knightly orders which existed in the Middle Ages, for instance the Templars, you know, who took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Even today there is an upper degree in Freemasonry which bears the title ‘Grand Duke of Jerusalem.’ ”
Part 28 of 39