Part 36 of 39
One group of records contained the closing scenes of a certain brilliant opera, overflowing with melodic genius, by a great countryman of Herr Settembrini, the doyen of dramatic music in the south, who had written it to the order of an oriental prince, in the second half of the last century, to celebrate the completion of a great technical achievement which should bind the peoples of the earth together. Hans Castorp had learned something of the plot, knew the main lines of the tragic fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida; and when he heard it from his casket could understand well enough what they said. The incomparable tenor, the royal alto with the wonderful sob in her register, and the silver soprano he understood perhaps not every word they said, but enough, with his knowledge of the situation, and his sympathy in general for such situations, to feel a familiar fellow-feeling that increased every time he listened to this set of records, until it amounted to infatuation.
First came the scene of the explanation between Radames and Amneris: the king’s daughter has the captive brought before her, whom she loves, whom she would gladly save for her own, but that he has just thrown all away for the sake of a barbarian slave—fatherland and honour and all. Though he insists that in the depth of his soul honour remains untarnished. But this inner unimpairment avails him little, under the weight of all that indisputable guilt and crime, for he has become forfeit to the spiritual arm, which is inexorable toward human weakness, and will certainly make short work of him if he does not, at the last moment, abjure the slave, and throw himself into the royal arms of the alto with the sob in her register—who, so far as her voice went, richly deserved him. Amneris wrestles fervidly with the mellifluous but tragically blind and infatuated tenor, who sings nothing at all but “In vain” and “I cannot,” when she addresses him with despairing pleas to renounce the slave, for that his own life is in the balance. “I cannot” … “Once more, renounce her” … “In vain thou pleadest”—and deathly obstinacy and anguished love blend together in a duet of extraordinary power and beauty, but absolutely no hope whatever. Then comes the terrifying repetition of the priestly formulas of condemnation, to the accompaniment of Amneris’s despair; they sound hollowly from below, and them the unhappy Radames does not reply to at all.
“Radames, Radames,” sings the high-priest peremptorily, and points out the treason he has committed.
“Justify thyself,” all the priests, in chorus, demand.
The high-priest calls attention to his silence, and they all hollowly declare him guilty.
“Radames, Radames,” sings the high-priest again. “The camp thou hast left before the battle.”
And again: “Justify thyself.” “Lo, he is silent,” the highly prejudiced presiding officer announces once more; and all the priests again unanimously declare him guilty.
“Radames, Radames,” for the third time comes the inexorable voice. “To Fatherland, to honour and thy King, thy oath thou hast broken”—“Justify thyself,” resounded again. And finally, for the third time, “Fellonia,” the priestly chorus proclaims, after noting that Radames has again remained absolutely silent. So then there is nothing for it: the chorus announces the evildoer for judgment, proclaims that his doom is sealed, that he must die the death of a deserter and be buried alive beneath the temple of the offended deity.
The outraged feelings of Amneris at this priestly severity had to be imagined, for here the record broke off. Hans Castorp changed the plate, with as few movements as possible, his eyes cast down. When he seated himself again, it was to listen to the last scene of the melodrama, the closing duet of Radames and Aida, sung in the underground vaults, while above their heads in the temple the cruel and bigoted priests perform the service of their cult, spreading forth their arms, giving out a dull, murmurous sound. “Tu—in qitesta tomba?” comes the inexpressibly moving, sweet and at the same time heroic voice of Radames, in mingled horror and rapture. Yes, she has found her way to him, the beloved one for whose sake he has forfeited life and honour, she has awaited him here, to die with him; and the exchange of song between the two, broken at times by the muffled sound of the ceremonies above them, or blending and harmonizing with it, pierced the soul of our solitary night-watcher to its very depth, as much by reason of the circumstances as by the melodic expression of them. They sang of heaven, these two; but truly the songs were heavenly themselves, and heavenly sweet the singing of them. That melodic line resistlessly travelled by the voices, solo and unisono, of Radames and Aida; that simple, rapturous ascent, playing from tonic to dominant, as it mounts from the fundamental to the sustained note a halftone before the octave, then turning back again to the fifth—it seemed to the listener the most rarefied, the most ecstatic he had ever heard. But he would have been less ravished by the sounds, had not the situation which gave them birth prepared his spirit to yield to the sweetness of the music. It was so beautiful, that Aida should have found her way to the condemned Radames, to share his fate forever! The condemned one protested, quite properly, against the sacrifice of the precious life; but in his tender, despairing “No, no, troppo sei bella” was the intoxication of final union with her whom he had thought never to see again. It needed no effort of imagination to enable Hans Castorp to feel with Radames all this intoxication, all this gratitude. And what, finally, he felt, understood, and enjoyed, sitting there with folded hands, looking into the black slats of the jalousies whence it all issued, was the triumphant idealism of the music, of art, of the human spirit; the high and irrefragable power they had of shrouding with a veil of beauty the vulgar horror of actual fact. What was it, considered with the eye of reason, that was happening here? Two human beings, buried alive, their lungs full of pit gas, would here together—or, more horrible still, one after the other—succumb to the pangs of hunger, and thereafter the process of putrefaction would do its unspeakable work, until two skeletons remained, each totally indifferent and insensible to the other’s presence or absence. This was the real, objective fact—but a side, and a state of affairs quite distinct, of which idealism and emotion would have none, which was triumphantly put in the shade by the music and the beauty of the theme. The situation as it stood did not exist for either operatic Radames or operatic Aida. Their voices rose unisono to the blissful sustained note leading into the octave, as they assured each other that now heaven was opening, and the light of its eternity streaming forth before their yearning eyes. The consoling power of this aesthetic palliation did the listener good, and went far to account for the special love he bore this number of his programme.
He was wont to rest from these terrors and ecstasies in another number, brief, yet with a concentrated power of enchantment; peaceful, compared with the other, an idyll, yet raffiné, shaped and turned with all the subtlety and economy of the most modern art. It was an orchestral piece, of French origin, purely instrumental, a symphonic prelude, achieved with an instrumentation relatively small for our time, yet with all the apparatus of modern technique and shrewdly calculated to set the spirit adreaming.
Here is the dream Hans Castorp dreamed: he lay on his back in a sunny, flower-starred meadow, with his head on a little knoll, one leg drawn up, the other flung over—and those were goat’s legs crossed there before him. His fingers touched the stops of a little wooden pipe, which he played for the pure joy of it, his solitude on the meadow being complete. He held it to his lips, a reed pipe or little clarinet, and coaxed from it soothing head-tones, one after the other, just as they came, and yet in a pleasing sequence. The carefree piping rose toward the deep-blue sky, and beneath the sky stretched the branching, wind-tossed boughs of single ash-trees and birches whose leaves twinkled in the sun. But his feckless, daydreaming, half-melodious pipe was far from being the only voice in the solitude. The hum of insects in the sun-warmed air above the long grass, the sunshine itself, the soft wind, the swaying treetops, the twinkling leaves—all these gentle vibrations of the midsummery peace set themselves to his simple piping, to give it a changeful, ever surprisingly choice harmonic meaning. Sometimes the symphonic accompaniment would fade far off and be forgot. Then goat-legged Hans would blow stoutly away, and by the naive monotony of his piping lure back Nature’s subtly colourful, harmonious enchantment; until at length, after repeated intermission, she sweetly acceded. More and higher instruments came in rapidly, one after another, until all the previously lacking richness and volume were reached and sustained in a single fugitive moment that yet held all eternity in its consummate bliss. The young faun was joyous on his summer meadow. No “Justify thyself,” was here; no challenge, no priestly court-martial upon one who strayed away and was forgotten of honour. Forgetfulness held sway, a blessed hush, the innocence of those places where time is not; “slackness” with the best conscience in the world, the very apotheosis of rebuff to the Western world and that world’s insensate ardour for the “deed.” The soothing effect of all which upon our nightwalking music-maker gave this record a special value in his eyes.
There was a third. Or rather there were many, a consecutive group of three or four, a single tenor aria taking up almost half the space of a whole black rubber plate. Again it was French music—an opera Hans Castorp knew well, having seen and heard it repeatedly. Once, at a certain critical juncture now far in the past, he had made its action serve him for an allegory. The record took up the play at the second act, in the Spanish tavern, in crude Moorish architecture, a shawl-draped, roomy cellar like the floor of a barn. One heard Carmen’s voice, a little brusque, yet warm, and very infectious in its folk-quality, saying she would dance before the sergeant; one heard the rattle of castanets. But in the same moment, from a distance, the blare of trumpets swelled out, bugles giving a military signal, at which sound the little sergeant starts up. “One moment, stop!” he cries, and pricks up his ears like a horse. Why? What was it then, Carmen asked; and he: “Dost thou not hear?” astonished that the signal did not enter into her soul as into his. “Carmen, ’tis the retreat!” It is the trumpets from the garrison, giving the summons. “The hour draws nigh for our return,” says he, in operatic language. But the gipsy girl cannot understand, nor does she wish to. So much the better, she says, half stupidly, half pertly; she needs no castanets, for here is music dropped from the sky. Music to dance by, tra-la, tra-la! He is beside himself. His own disappointment retreats before his need to make clear to her how matters stand, and how no love-affair in the world can prevent obedience to this summons. How is it she cannot understand anything so fixed, so fundamental? “I must away, the signal summons me, to quarters!” he cries, in despair over a lack of understanding that doubly burdens his heavy heart. And now, hear Carmen! She is furious. Outraged to the depths of her soul, her voice is sheer betrayed and injured love—or she makes it sound so. “To quarters? The signal?” And her heart? Her faithful, loving heart, just then, in its weakness, yes, she admitted, in its weakness, about to while away an hour with him in dance and song? “Tan-ta-ra!” And in a fury of scorn she sets her curled hand to her lips and imitates the horns: “Taran-tara!” And that was enough to make the fool leap up, on fire to be off! Good, then, let him be off, away with him! Here are helmet, sabre, and hanger—away, away, away with him, let him be off, let him be off, off to the barracks! He pleads for mercy. But she goes on, scorching him with her scorn, mocking him, taking his place and showing in pantomime how at the sound of the horn he lost what little sense he had. Tan-tara! The signal! O heaven! he will come too late! Let him go, let him be off, for the summons sounds, and he, like a fool, makes to go, at the very moment when she would dance for him. From this time, so she will account his love!
He is in torments. She cannot understand. The woman, the gipsy girl, cannot, will not understand. Will not—for in her rage and scorn speaks something more and larger than the moment and the personal: a hatred, a primeval hostility against that principle, which in the accents of these Spanish bugles—or French horns—called to the lovelorn little soldier. Over that it was her deepest, her inborn, her more than personal ambition to triumph. And she possesses a very simple means: she says that if he goes he does not love her—precisely that which José cannot bear to hear. He beseeches her to let him speak. She will not. Then he compels her—it is a deucedly serious moment, dull notes of fatality rise from the orchestra, a gloomy, ominous motif, which, as Hans Castorp knew, recurred throughout the opera, up to its fatal climax, and formed also the first phrase of the soldier’s aria, on the next plate, which had now to be inserted. “See here thy flow’ret treasured well”—how exquisitely José sang that! Hans Castorp played this single record over and over, and listened with the deepest participation. As far as its contents went, it did not fetch the action much further; but its imploring emotion was moving in the highest degree. The young soldier sang of the flower Carmen had tossed him at the beginning of their acquaintance, which had been everything to him, in the arrest he had suffered for love of her. He confesses: “Sometimes I cursed the hour I met thee, and tried all vainly to forget thee”—only next moment to rue his blasphemy, and pray on his knees to see her once more. And as he prayed—striking the same high note as just before on the “To see thee, Carmen,” but now the orchestration lends all the resources of its enchantment to paint the anguish, the longing, the desperate tenderness, sweet despair, in the little soldier’s heart—ah, there she stood before his eyes, in all her fatal charm; and clearly, unmistakably, he felt that he was undone, forever lost—on the word “undone” came a sobbing whole-tone grace-note to the first syllable—lost and forever undone. “Then would an ecstasy steal o’er me,” he despairingly asseverated in a recurrent melody repeated wailingly by the orchestra, rising two tones from the tonic and thence returning ardently to the fifth: “Carmen, my own,” he repeats, with infinite tenderness but rather tasteless redundancy, going all the way up the scale to the sixth, in order to add: “My life, my soul belongs to thee”—after which he let his voice fall ten whole tones and in deepest emotion gave out the “Carmen, I love thee!” shuddering forth the words in anguish from a note sustained above changing harmonies, until the “thee” with the syllable before it was resolved in the full accord.
“Yes, ah, yes,” said Hans Castorp, with mournful satisfaction, and put on the finale: where they are all congratulating young José because the meeting with the officer has cut off his retreat, and now it only remains open to him to desert, as Carmen, to his horror, had before now demanded he should.
“Away to the mountains, away, away,
Share in our life, careless and gay,”
they sang in chorus—one could understand the words quite well:
“Freely to roam, the world our home,
Gaily to pass o’er land and sea
And enjoy, all else excelling,
Sweet liberty!”
“Yes, yes,” he said, as before; and passed on to a fourth record, something very dear and good.
It is not our fault that it was French again, nor are we responsible for its once more striking the military note. It was an intermezzo, a solo number, the Prayer from Gounod’s Faust. The singer, a character warmly sympathetic to our young man’s heart, was called in the opera Valentine; but Hans Castorp named him by another and dearly familiar, sadness-evoking name; whose onetime bearer he had come largely to identify with the operatic character whom the wonder-box was making vocal—though the latter to be sure had a much more beautiful voice, a warm and powerful baritone. His song was in three parts: the first consisting of two closely related “corner”-strophes, religious in character, almost in the style of the Protestant chorale, and a middle-strophe, bold and chevaleresque, warlike, lighthearted, yet God-fearing too, and essentially French and military. The invisible character sang:
“Now the parting hour has come
I must leave my lovèd home”
and turned under these circumstances to God, imploring Him to take under His special care and protection his beloved sister. He was going to the wars: the rhythm changed, grew brisk and lively, dull care and sorrow might go hang! He, the invisible singer, longed to be in the field, to stand in the thickest of the fray, where danger was hottest, and fling himself upon the foe—gallant, God-fearing, altogether French. But if, he sang, God should call him to Himself, then would He look down protectingly on “thee”—meaning the singer’s sister, as Hans Castorp was perfectly aware, yet the word thrilled him to the depths, and his emotion prolonged itself as the hero sang, to a mighty choral accompaniment:
“O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer!
Guard Marguerite within Thy shelt’ring care!”
There the record ceased. We have dwelt upon it because of Hans Castorp’s especial penchant; but also because it played a certain role on a later and most strange occasion. And now we come back to the fifth and last piece in his group of high favourites: this time not French, but something especially and exemplarily German; not opera either, but a lied, one of those which are folksong and masterpiece together, and from the combination receive their peculiar stamp as spiritual epitomes. Why should we beat about the bush? It was Schubert’s “Linden-Tree,” it was none other than the old, old favourite, “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.”
It was sung to piano accompaniment by a tenor voice; and the singer was a lad of parts and discernment, who knew how to render with great skill, fine musical feeling and finesse in recitative his simple yet consummate theme. We all know that the noble lied sounds rather differently when given as a concert-number from its rendition in the childish or the popular mouth. In its simplified form the melody is sung straight through; whereas in the original art-song, the key changes to minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, changes back again with beautiful effect to major in the fifth line; is dramatically resolved in the following “bitter blasts” and “facing the tempest”; and returns again only with the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated to finish out the melody. The truly compelling turn in the melody occurs three times, in its modulated second half, the third time in the repetition of the last half-strophe “Ay, onward, ever onward.” The enchanting turn, which we would not touch too nearly in bold words, comes on the phrases “Upon its branches fair,” “A message in my ear,” “Yet ever in my breast”; and each time the tenor rendered them, in his clear, warm voice, with his excellent breathing-technique, with the suggestion of a sob, amid so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fashion; with an effect the singer knew how to heighten by head-tones of extraordinary ardour on the lines “I found my solace there,” and “For rest and peace are here.” In the repetition of the last line, “Here shouldst thou find thy rest,” he sang the “shouldst thou” the first time yearningly, at full strength, but the second in the tenderest flute-tones.
So much for the song, and the rendering of it. For the earlier selections, we may flatter ourselves, perhaps, that we have been able to communicate to the reader some understanding, more or less precise, of Hans Castorp’s intimate emotional participation in the chosen numbers of his nightly programme. But to make clear what this last one, the old “Linden-Tree,” meant to him, is truly a ticklish endeavour; requiring great delicacy of emphasis if more harm than good is not to come of the undertaking.
Let us put it thus: a conception which is of the spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expression and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which, whether more or less completely, is mirrored in the first, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself “significant”: betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth—which, consciously or unconsciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.
May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of the “meaningfulness” of his love and the object of it? We assert, we record, that he has. To him the song meant a whole world, a world which he must have loved, else he could not have so desperately loved that which it represented and symbolized to him. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps rather darkly—that he might have had a different fate if his temperament had been less accessible to the charms of the sphere of feeling, the general attitude of mind, which the lied so profoundly, so mystically epitomized. The truth was that his very destiny had been marked by stages, adventures, insights, and these flung up in his mind suitable themes for his “stocktaking” activities, and these, in their turn, ripened him into an intuitional critic of this sphere, of this its absolutely exquisite image, and his love of it. To the point even that he was quite capable of bringing up all three as objects of his conscientious scruples!
Only one totally ignorant of the tender passion will suppose that such scruples can detract from the object of love. On the contrary, they but give it spice. It is they which lend love the spur of passion, so that one might almost define passion as misgiving love. But wherein lay Hans Castorp’s conscientious and stocktaking misgiving, as to the ultimate propriety of his love for the enchanting lied and the world whose image it was? What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love?
It was death.
What utter and explicit madness! That glorious song! An indisputable masterpiece, sprung from the profoundest and holiest depths of racial feeling; a precious possession, the archetype of the genuine; embodied loveliness. What vile detraction!
Yes. Ah, yes! All very fine. Thus must every upright man speak. But for all that, behind this so lovely and pleasant artistic production stood—death. It had with death certain relations, which one might love, yet not without consciously, and in a “stocktaking” sense, acknowledging a certain illicit element in one’s love. Perhaps in its original form it was not sympathy with death; perhaps it was something very much of the people and racy of life; but spiritual sympathy with it was none the less sympathy with death. At first blush proper and pious enough, indisputably. But the issues of it were sinister.
What was all this he was thinking? He would not have listened to it from one of you. Sinister issues. Fantastical, dark-corner, misanthropic, torture-chamber thoughts, Spanish black and the ruff, lust not love—and these the issues of pure-eyed loveliness!
Unquestioning confidence, Hans Castorp knew, he had never placed in Herr Settembrini. But he remembered now an admonition the enlightened mentor had given him in past time, at the beginning of his hermetic career, on the subject of “spiritual backsliding” to darker ages. Perhaps it would be well to make cautious application of that wisdom to the present case. It was the backsliding which Herr Settembrini had characterized as “disease”; the epitome itself, the spiritual phase to which one backslid—that too would appeal to his pedagogic mind as “diseased”? And even so? Hans Castorp’s loved nostalgic lay, and the sphere of feeling to which it belonged—morbid? Nothing of the sort. They were the sanest, the homeliest in the world. And yet—This was a fruit, sound and splendid enough for the instant or so, yet extraordinarily prone to decay; the purest refreshment of the spirit, if enjoyed at the right moment, but the next, capable of spreading decay and corruption among men. It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was a miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of conscienceless beauty; but on cogent grounds regarded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully “taking stock” in its love of the organic; it was a subject for self-conquest at the definite behest of conscience.
Yes, self-conquest—that might well be the essence of triumph over this love, this soul-enchantment that bore such sinister fruit! Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or rather his prophetic half-thoughts soared high, as he sat there in night and silence before his truncated sarcophagus of music. They soared higher than his understanding, they were alchemistically enhanced. Ah, what power had this soul-enchantment! We were all its sons, and could achieve mighty things on earth, in so far as we served it. One need have no more genius, only much more talent, than the author of the “Lindenbaum,” to be such an artist of soul-enchantment as should give to the song a giant volume by which it should subjugate the world. Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly kingdoms, solid, “progressive,” not at all nostalgic—in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity. But its faithful son might still be he who consumed his life in self-conquest, and died, on his lips the new word of love which as yet he knew not how to speak. Ah, it was worth dying for, the enchanted lied! But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart.
These, then, were Hans Castorp’s favourite records.
Highly Questionable
Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had in the swift passage of the years taken an unexpected turn. His researches, which dealt with psychoanalysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character; but now, by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had passed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room—the prime attraction of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling, foreign voice, in frock-coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience—these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion. They had gone on to the extraordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telepathy, “dreaming true,” and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener’s eyes would glitter darkly puzzles like that of the relation of matter to the psychical, yes, even the puzzle of life itself, which, it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health.
We say this because we consider it our duty to confound those flippant spirits who declared that Dr. Krokowski had resorted to mystification for the sake of redeeming his lectures from hopeless monotony; in other words, with purely emotional ends in view. Thus spoke the slanderous tongues which are everywhere to be found. True, the gentlemen at the Monday lectures flicked their ears harder than ever to make them hear; Fräulein Levi looked, if possible, even more like a wax figure wound up by machinery. But these effects were as legitimate as the train of thought pursued by the mind of the learned gentleman, and for that he might claim that it was not only consistent but even inevitable. The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connections and associations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subsconscious, “occult” in the proper sense of the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed thus to characterize. But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recognizes the creative force of the psychical within the material—a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say pathological idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour, can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, proceeding from the principle of creative hysteria, is inclined, and very readily resolved, to answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg—a strife which assumes its extraordinary complexity from the fact that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.
Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon them organically, logically, legitimately—that fact cannot be overemphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.
Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody, at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years, a flaxen-haired Dane, not from Copenhagen but from Odense-on-Fünen, where her father had a butter business. She herself had been in commercial life for a couple of years or so; with a sleeve-protector on her writing-arm she had sat over heavy books, perched on a revolving stool in a provincial branch of a city bank—and developed temperature. It was a trifling case, probably more suspected than real, though Elly was indeed fragile, fragile and obviously chlorotic—distinctly sympathetic too, giving one a yearning to lay one’s hand upon the flaxen head—as the Hofrat regularly did, when he spoke to her in the dining-room. A northern freshness emanated from her, a chaste and glassy, maidenly chaste atmosphere surrounded her, she was entirely lovable, with a pure, open look from childlike blue eyes, and a pointed, fine, High-German speech, slightly broken, with small typical mispronunciations. About her features there was nothing unusual. Her chin was too short. She sat at table with the Kleefeld, who mothered her.
Now this little Fräulein Brand, this little Elly, this friendly-natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop-shouldered young counter-jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed, at first sight of her transparent small personality, but which began to discover themselves after a few weeks; and these it became Dr. Krokowski’s affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.
The learned man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a designated book from the shelves and presenting it to this or that person—and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark that such games had not been the practice among the Berghof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide; certainly it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival.
The participants were nearly all old friends of ours, among them Hans Castorp. They showed themselves apt in greater or less degree—some of them were entirely incapable. But Elly Brand’s talent was soon seen to be surpassing, striking, unseemly. Her power of finding hidden articles was passed over with applause and admiring laughter. But when it came to a concerted series of actions, they were struck dumb. She did whatever they had covenanted she should do, did it directly she entered the room; with a gentle smile, without hesitation, without the help of music. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining-room, sprinkled it over Lawyer Paravant’s head, took him by the hand, led him to the piano and played the beginning of a nursery ditty with his forefinger; then brought him back to his seat, curtseyed, fetched a footstool and finally seated herself at his feet, all of that being precisely what they had cudgelled their brains to set her for a task.
She had been listening.
She reddened. With a sense of relief at her embarrassment they began in chorus to chide her; but she assured them she had not blushed in that sense. She had not listened, not outside, not at the door, truly, truly she had not!
Not outside, not at the door?
“Oh, no”—she begged their pardon. She had listened after she came back, in the room, she could not help it.
How not help it?
Something whispered to her, she said. It whispered and told her what to do, softly, but quite clearly and distinctly.
Obviously that was an admission. In a certain sense she was aware, she had confessed, that she had cheated. She should have said beforehand that she was no good to play such a game, if she had the advantage of being whispered to. A competition loses all sense if one of the competitors has unnatural advantages over the others. In a sporting sense, she was straightway disqualified—but disqualified in a way that made chills run up and down their backs. With one voice they called on Dr. Krokowski, they ran to fetch him, and he came. He was immediately at home in the situation, and stood there, sturdy, heartily smiling, in his very essence inviting confidence. Breathless they told him they had something quite abnormal for him, an omniscient, a girl with voices. Yes, yes? Only let them be calm, they should see. This was his native heath, quagmirish and uncertain footing enough for the rest of them, yet he moved upon it with assured tread. He asked questions, and they told him. Ah, there she was—come, my child, is it true, what they are telling me? And he laid his hand on her head, as scarcely anyone could resist doing. Here was much ground for interest, none at all for consternation. He plunged the gaze of his brown, exotic eyes deep into Ellen Brand’s blue ones, and ran his hand down over her shoulder and arm, stroking her gently. She returned his gaze with increasing submission, her head inclined slowly toward her shoulder and breast. Her eyes were actually beginning to glaze, when the master made a careless outward motion with his hand before her face. Immediately thereafter he expressed his opinion that everything was in perfect order, and sent the overwrought company off to the evening cure, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he said he wished to have a little chat.
A little chat. Quite so. But nobody felt easy at the word, it was just the sort of word Krokowski the merry comrade used by preference, and it gave them cold shivers. Hans Castorp, as he sought his tardy reclining-chair, remembered the feeling with which he had seen Elly’s illicit achievements and heard her shamefaced explanation; as though the ground were shifting under his feet, and giving him a slightly qualmish feeling, a mild seasickness. He had never been in an earthquake; but he said to himself that one must experience a like sensation of unequivocal alarm. But he had also felt great curiosity at these fateful gifts of Ellen Brand; combined, it is true, with the knowledge that their field was with difficulty accessible to the spirit, and the doubt as to whether it was not barren, or even sinful, so far as he was concerned—all which did not prevent his feeling from being what in fact it actually was, curiosity. Like everybody else, Hans Castorp had, at his time of life, heard this and that about the mysteries of nature, or the supernatural. We have mentioned the clairvoyante great-aunt, of whom a melancholy tradition had come down. But the world of the supernatural, though theoretically and objectively he had recognized its existence, had never come close to him, he had never had any practical experience of it. And his aversion from it, a matter of taste, an aesthetic revulsion, a reaction of human pride—if we may use such large words in connection with our modest hero—was almost as great as his curiosity. He felt beforehand, quite clearly, that such experiences, whatever the course of them, could never be anything but in bad taste, unintelligible and humanly valueless. And yet he was on fire to go through them. He was aware that his alternative of “barren” or else “sinful,” bad enough in itself, was in reality not an alternative at all, since the two ideas fell together, and calling a thing spiritually unavailable was only an a-moral way of expressing its forbidden character. But the “placet experiri” planted in Hans Castorp’s mind by one who would surely and resoundingly have reprobated any experimentation at all in this field, was planted firmly enough. By little and little his morality and his curiosity approached and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, which had already brought him pretty close to the forbidden field, what time he tasted the mystery of personality, and for which he had even claimed the justification that it too was almost military in character, in that it did not weakly avoid the forbidden, when it presented itself. Hans Castorp came to the final resolve not to avoid, but to stand his ground if it came to more developments in the case of Ellen Brand.
Dr. Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any further experimentation on the part of the laity upon Fräulein Brand’s mysterious gifts. He had preempted the child for his scientific use, held sittings with her in his analytical oubliette, hypnotized her, it was reported, in an effort to arouse and discipline her slumbering potentialities, to make researches into her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered and patronized the child, tried to do the same; and under the seal of secrecy a certain number of facts were ascertained, which under the same seal she spread throughout the house, even unto the porter’s lodge. She learned, for example, that he who—or that which—whispered the answers into the little one’s ear at games was called Holger. This Holger was the departed and etherealized spirit of a young man, the familiar, something like the guardian angel, of little Elly. So it was he who had told all that about the pinch of salt and the tune played with Lawyer Paravant’s forefinger? Yes, those spirit lips, so close to her ear that they were like a caress, and tickled a little, making her smile, had whispered her what to do. It must have been very nice when she was in school and had not prepared her lesson to have him tell her the answers. Upon this point Elly was silent. Later she said she thought he would not have been allowed. It would be forbidden to him to mix in such serious matters—and moreover, he would probably not have known the answers himself.
It was learned, further, that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visions, visible and invisible. What sort of thing were they, now—invisible visions? Well, for example: when she was a girl of sixteen, she had been sitting one day alone in the living-room of her parents’ house, sewing at a round table, with her father’s dog Freia lying near her on the carpet. The table was covered with a Turkish shawl, of the kind old women wear three-cornered across their shoulders. It covered the table diagonally, with the corners somewhat hanging over. Suddenly Ellen had seen the corner nearest her roll slowly up. Soundlessly, carefully, and evenly it turned itself up, a good distance toward the centre of the table, so that the resultant roll was rather long; and while this was happening, the dog Freia started up wildly, bracing her forefeet, the hair rising on her body. She had stood on her hind legs, then run howling into the next room and taken refuge under a sofa. For a whole year thereafter she could not be persuaded to set foot in the living-room.
Was it Holger, Fräulein Kleefeld asked, who had rolled up the cloth? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about the affair? But since it was absolutely impossible to think anything about it, little Elly had thought nothing at all. Had she told her parents? No. That was odd. Though so sure she had thought nothing about it, Elly had had a distinct impression, in this and similar cases, that she must keep it to herself, make a profound and shamefaced secret of it. Had she taken it much to heart? No, not particularly. What was there about the rolling up of a cloth to take to heart? But other things she had—for example, the following:
A year before, in her parent’s house at Odense, she had risen, as was her custom, in the cool of the early morning and left her room on the ground-floor, to go up to the breakfast-room, in order to brew the morning coffee before her parents rose. She had almost reached the landing, where the stairs turned, when she saw standing there close by the steps her elder sister Sophie, who had married and gone to America to live. There she was, her physical presence, in a white gown, with, curiously enough, a garland of moist water-lilies on her head, her hands folded against one shoulder, and nodded to her sister. Ellen, rooted to the spot, half joyful, half terrified, cried out: “Oh, Sophie, is that you?” Sophie had nodded once again, and dissolved. She became gradually transparent, soon she was only visible as an ascending current of warm air, then not visible at all, so that Ellen’s path was clear. Later, it transpired that Sister Sophie had died of heart trouble in New Jersey, at that very hour.
Hans Castorp, when Fräulein Kleefeld related this to him, expressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the apparition here, the death there—after all, they did hang together. And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting, a table-tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr. Krokowski’s back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.
A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fräulein Kleefeld’s room. Besides the hostess, Fräulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there were only Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel, and Dr. Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium-sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wineglass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink. Fräulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gratefully received, as Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Levi, despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table-lamp, as Fräulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gathering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique. They waited for the glass to move.
That should happen with ease. The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the glass well ground, the pressure of the tremulous fingers, however lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its position in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked counters; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the resultant phenomenon would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act, whether or not they were aware of what they did; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the suppressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew beforehand—Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort, after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies’ palpitation and cold extremities, the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illusory or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form’s sake, and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the spirits of the departed to speak to them through the movement of the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as manifested themselves—he had already had a little experience at séances.
Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was almost dropping off. Ellen Brand rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the table-lamp.
Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked, and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again, and remained quiet.
They were all startled; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stöhr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no, the glass need not run to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.
“Is there an Intelligence present?” Herr Albin asked, severely directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. After some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.
“What is your name?” Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.
The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point to another, executing a zigzag by returning each time a little distance toward the centre of the table. It visited H, O, and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters as the pinch of salt and that, but knew better than to mix into lessons at school. He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them, they took counsel behind their hands, what they were to ask him. Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were a cross-examining counsel.
Part 36 of 39