Chapter VI: Changes (Part 7 of 8)
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 sunbronzed 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 of 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 fagade 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 goddesslike 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 bloodsmeared — 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
snow 495
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 for ever 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 y 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 md love , mm shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts . – And with this — I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, n the place where Hippe appeared to me, in my loggia, everywhere. Deep into the snow mountains my search has led me. Now [ have it fast. My dream has given it me, in utter clearness, that [ may know it for ever. 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 finger-nails 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 7 a pale blue sky showed itself between grey-bluish clouds, and these presently drew away to discover a thin sickle of a moon. Early tw ilight 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 frost-bitten, 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, finger-tips, 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 home-coming. 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 Brehmenbuhl, 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 subaltemship — 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 >f whose organization were like iron, and which yet in its crab>edly humorous way knew how to yield something to the weakless of the flesh, was plain in every 7 hasty line. He related anecdotes llustrating the quaintly complex attitude of his cranky, fanatical ;ergeant-major toward him, the blundering young subordinate, n whom he yet envisaged the ordained superior of to-morrow, who already had the right to enter the officers’ casino. It was all v’ery 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 singleminded 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 fight. V er bum 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 Stohr’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 five 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 dullcoloured 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 Doha 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 Inis 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 Stohr, 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, hile Hans Castorp looked on, surprised and in a way disappointed > see his cousin in mufti. He had always pictured him as an officer; Lit here he was in grey “ uni,” looking like everybody else. Joahim laughed, and said he was naive. He had left his uniform at ome, of course. It was not such a simple matter with a uniform * you couldn’t wear it just any place. “ Oh, thanks awfully,” said Ians Castorp. But Joachim seemed unaware of anv offence in his wn remark and went on, asking about matters and things in the lerghof, not only without the least touch of condescension, but ven rather moved by the home-coming. Then Frau Ziemssen ap)eared through the door connecting their two rooms, and greeted ler nephew in a way some people have on these occasions; namely, is though pleasurably surprised to find him here. She spoke with ;ubdued 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 souffle 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 Scohr’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 Allgau, 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 home-coming — for a little aftercure. 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 bander a, 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 camis 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 Stohr, Levi, litis 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 H 2 CO. 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 heir 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 twohundredth 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; freethought and bourgeois enlightenment were the pathetic delusions of yesterday, though prone to the self-deception which made them a laughing-stock: 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 charcoalburner’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 vh tality, 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 to-day, 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 free-thinker 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. 3y consequence, it is terroristic; that is to say, anti-liberal. It lifts he burden from the individual conscience, and consecrates in the lame of the Absolute every means even to bloodshed, even to :rime. 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 free-thinking 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 Rosicru danism 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, magicalalchemical 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 to-day there is an upper degree in Freemasonry which bears the title ‘ Grand Duke of Jerusalem.’ ”
“ It’s all news to me, Herr Naphta. But I’m getting to know Herr Settembrini’s tricks. ‘ Grand Duke of Jerusalem ’ — that’s not bad, not bad at all. You ought to call him that some time, by way of a joke. The other day he called you ‘ doctor angelicus .’ Why not take your revenge? ”
“ Oh, there are a host more such titles in the upper reaches of the Knights Templars. There are a Past Grand Master, a Knight of the East, a Grand High-priest — the thirty-first degree is called Noble Prince of the Royal Mysteries. You observe that all these names have reference to oriental mysticism. The reappearance of the Templars, indeed, means nothing else than the entrance of such conceptions, the presence of irrational ferments in a world given over to rational-utilitarian ideas of social improvement. This it was which lent Freemasonry a new brilliance and charm, and explains the great number of recruits to it at that period of its history. It drew to itself all the elements which were weary of the rationalistic twaddle of the century, and thirsting for a stronger draught of life. The success of the order was such that the Philistine complained of it for estranging men from domestic happiness and destroying their reverence for women.”
“ Then it is not surprising that Herr Settembrini does not love to be reminded of the golden age of his order.”
“ No, he does not love to be reminded that there was a time when it drew upon its head all the hatred felt by free-thinkers, atheists, and encyclopaedists for the whole complex of Church, Catholicism, monk, Middle Ages — you heard that the Masons were accused of obscurantism — ”
“ Why? I should be glad to hear why, more precisely.”
“ I will tell you. The Strict Observance meant the broadening and deepening of the traditions of the order, it meant referring its historical origin back to the cabalistic world, the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages. The higher degrees of Freemasonry were initiates of the ‘ physica et mystical the representatives of a magic natural science, they were in the main great alchemists.”
“ I shall have to put on my thinking-cap and try to recall what alchemy is — generally speaking, I mean. Alchemy: transmuting into gold, the philosopher’s stone, axtrwn potabile .”
“ In the popular mind, yes. More informedly put, it was purification, refinement, metamorphosis, transubstantiation, into a higher state, of course; the lapis p kilos op horum, the male-female product 5 1 I
of sulphur and mercury, the res bina , the double-sexed prima materia , was no more, and no less, than the principle of levitation, of the upward impulse due to the working of influences from without. Instruction in magic, if you like.”
Hans Castorp was silent. He glanced slantwise upward, and blinked.
“ The primary symbol of alchemic transmutation,” Naphta said, “ was par excellence the sepulchre.”
“ The grave? ”
“ Yes, the place of corruption. It comprehends all hermetics, all alchemy, it is nothing else than the receptacle, the well-guarded crystal retort wherein the material is compressed to its final transformation and purification.”
4 ‘ Hermetics — what a lovely word, Herr Naphta! I’ve always liked the word hermetic. It sounds like magicking, and has all sorts of vague and extended associations. You must excuse my speaking of such a thing, but it reminds me of the conserve jars that our housekeeper in Hamburg — Schalleen, we call her, without any Miss or Mrs. — keeps in her larder. She has rows of them on her shelves, air-tight glasses full of fruit and meat and all sorts of things. They stand there maybe a whole year — you open them as you need them and the contents are as fresh as on the day they were put up, you can eat them just as they are. To be sure, that isn’t alchemy or purification, it is simple conserving, hence the word conserve. The magic part of it lies in the fact that the stuff that is conserved is withdrawn from the effects of time, it is hermetically sealed from time, time passes it by, it stands there on its shelf shut away from time. Well, that’s enough about the conserve jars. It hasn’t much to do with the subject. Pardon me, you were going to enlighten me further.”
“ Only if you wish me to do so. The learner must be of dauntless courage and athirst for knowledge, to speak in the style of our theme. The grave, the sepulchre, has always been the emblem of initiation into the society. The neophyte coveting admission to the mysteries must always preserve undaunted courage in the face of their terrors; it is the purpose of the Order that he should be tested in them, led down into and made to linger among them, and later fetched up from them by the hand of an unknown Brother. Hence the winding passages, the dark vaults, through which the novice is made to wander; the black cloth with which the Hall of the Strict Observance was hung, the cult of the sarcophagus, which played so important a role in the ceremonial of meetings and initiations. The path of mysteries and purification was encompassed by 5* 2
dangers, it led through the pangs of death, through the kingdom of dissolution; and the learner, the neophyte, is youth itself, thirsting after the miracles of life, clamouring to be quickened to a demonic capacity of experience, and led by shrouded forms which are the shadowing-forth of the mystery.”
“ Thank you so much, Professor Naphta. That is splendid. That is what the teaching of hermetics is like, then; it can’t hurt me to have heard something about it too.”
“ The less so that it is a guide to the ultimate; to the absolute recognition of the transcendental, and therewith to our end and aim. The alchemistic ritual of the lodges, in later centuries, led many a noble and inquiring spirit to that end — to which I need give no name, for it cannot have escaped you that the successive degrees of the Scottish Rite were only a surrogate, a substitute of the Hierarchy, that the alchemistic learning of the Master-Mason fulfilled itself in the mystery of transubstantiation, and that the hidden guidance which the lodge vouchsafed to its pupils has its prototype just as plainly in the means of grace, as the symbolic mummeries of lodge ceremonial have theirs in the liturgical and architectural symbolism of our Holy Catholic Church.”
“ Ah, indeed! ”
“ But even that is not all. I have already suggested that the derivation of the lodge from that craftsmanly and honourable masonic guild is only a historical extension. The Strict Observance invested it with a much deeper human basis. The secrets of the lodge have, in common with certain mysteries of our Church, the clearest connexion with the ceremonial mysteries and ritual excesses of primitive man. I refer, so far as the Church is concerned, to the lovefeast, the sacramental enjoyment of body and blood; as for the lodge — ”
“ One moment. One moment for a marginal note. Even in the strict communion to which my cousin belongs, they have so-called love-feasts. He has often written to me about them. I suppose they are very respectable affairs — except possibly they get a little drunk, but nothing like what it is at the corps-students’ — ”
“ As for the lodge, however, I am thinking of the cult of the sepulchre, to whom I referred you before. In both cases it has to do with a symbolism of the ultimate, with elements of orgiastic primitive religion, with wild sacrificial rites by night, to the honour of dying and transforming, death, metamorphosis, resurrection. You will recall that the mysteries of Isis, and the Eleusinian mysteries too, were served by night, and in caverns. In Freemasonry there are present a host of Egyptian survivals, and there were, among the secret societies, some that called themselves Eleusinian. There were lodges that held feasts of Eleusinian mysteries and aphrodistic rites which finally did introduce the female element; feasts of roses, to which reference is made in the three blue roses on the Masonic apron, and which often passed over into the bacchantic.”
“ What’s this, what’s this I hear, Professor Naphta? All this Freemasonry? And I must reconcile with it all my ideas of our enlightened Herr Settembrini? ”
“ You would do him very great injustice if you imagined he knew anything about it. I told you that he, or his like, purified the lodge of all the elements of higher life. They humanized it, they modernized it. God save the mark! They rescued it from false gods and restored it to usefulness, reason and progress, for making war upon princes and priests, in short for social amelioration. In it they once more discuss nature, virtue, moderation, the fatherland. In a word, it is a god-forsaken bourgeoisiedom, in the form of a club.”
“ What a pity! Too bad about the feasts of roses! I mean to ask Settembrini if he hears anything about them nowadays.”
“ The noble knight of the T-square! ” scoffed Naphta. “ You must remember that it has been no easy matter for him to get admitted inside the gates of the temple of humanity. He is as poor as a church-mouse, and they not only demand the higher, the humanistic culture — save the mark — but also one must belong to the possessing classes, to be able to stand the dues and entrance fees. Culture and possessions — there is the bourgeoisie for you! There you have the pillars of the liberal world-republic.”
“ In any case,” laughed Hans Castorp, “ we have it all right before our eyes.”
“ And yet,” Naphta added, after a pause, “ I would counsel you not to take this man and what he stands for as altogether a laughing matter; since we are on the subject, let me warn you to be on your guard. The insipid is not synonymous with the harmless. Stupidity is not necessarily free from suspicion. These people have watered their wine, that was once such a fiery draught, but the idea of the brotherhood itself remains strong enough to stand a good deal of water. It preserves the remnant of a fruitful mystery, and there is as little doubt that the lodge mixes in politics, as that there is more to see in our amiable Herr Settembrini than just his simple self, and that powers stand behind him, whose representative and emissary he is.”
“ An emissary? ”
“ That is, a proselyter, a seeker of souls.” 5H
“ And what kind of emissary are you, may I ask? ” Hans Castorp thought. Aloud he said: “ Thank you, Professor Naphta. I am genuinely grateful for your advice and warning. What do you think? Suppose I go a storey higher — in so far as one can speak of a storey — and touch up our disguised lodge-brother a bit? The learner must be of dauntless courage, athirst for knowledge. But cautious too, of course. It’s well to take precautions when one deals with emissaries.”
He might with impunity seek further information from Herr Settembrini, for that gentleman could not reproach Naphta with any lack of discretion; indeed, he had never made any secret of his membership in the harmonious band of brothers. The Rivista della Massoneria lay open upon his table; Hans Castorp had simply never noticed it. Enlightened by Naphta, he led the conversation round to the subject of the “ kingly art,” as though Settembrini’s connexion with it had never been a matter of doubt, and he met with very little reticence. True, there were points upon which the literary man was silent. When they were touched upon he closed his lips with ostentation, being obviously bound by those terroristic vows of which Naphta had spoken; this when Hans Castorp encroached on trade secrets, as it were, outward forms of the organization, and his own position within it. But otherwise he was almost too expansive; and held forth at length, giving the seeker after information a considerable picture of the extent of the society, which spread almost all over the world, with twenty thousand lodges and a hundred and fifty grand lodges, in round numbers, and had penetrated civilizations like Haiti and the Negro republic of Liberia. Also he had much to tell of the great names whose bearers had been Masons: Voltaire, Lafayette and Napoleon, Franklin and Washington, Mazzini and Garibaldi; among the living, the King of England, and besides him, a large group of people in whose hands lay the conduct of the nations of Europe, members of governments and parliaments.
Hans Castorp expressed respect, but no surprise. It was the same with the student corps, he said. The members of these held together in after life, and they looked after their people well, so that it was hard to get into any important official hierarchy if you had not been a corps-student. For that reason it was perhaps not so logical of Herr Settembrini to argue that the membership of those important personages in the society was flattering to it; since on the other hand it might be assumed that the occupation of so many important posts by Freemasons gave evidence of the power of the society, which certainly mixed in politics, perhaps more than Herr Settembrini was willing to admit.
Settembrini smiled, fanning himself with the magazine, which he still held in his hand. Did Hans Castorp intend to put him a case? Had he in mind to betray him into incautious utterances upon the political character, the essentially political spirit of the lodge? “ Useless furberia , Engineer. We admit that we are political, admit it openly, unreservedly. We care nothing for the odium that is bound up with the word in the eyes of certain fools — they are at home in your own country, Engineer, and almost nowhere else. The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics.”
“ That’s flat.”
“ I know there are people who think well to refer to the originally unpolitical nature of Masonic thought. But these people play with words, and set limits which have long since become imaginary and without significance. In the first place, the Spanish lodges, at least, have had a political coloration from the very first.”
“ I should imagine so.”
“ You can imagine very little, Engineer. Do not fancy that you are inclined to profound thought; the best you can do is to be receptive and to take to heart — I say this in your own interest, as well as in the interest of your country and of Europe — what I am about to impress upon you: namely, that in the second place, Masonic thought was never unpolitical, at any time — could not be. If it believed itself to be so, it was in error as to its own essential characteristics. What are we? Master-builders and builders on a building. The purpose of all is one, the good of the whole the fundamental tenet of the brotherhood. What is this good, what is this building? It is the true social structure, the perfecting of humanity, the new Jerusalem. But tell me which that is, political or non-political? The social problem, the problem of our common existence, is in itself politics, politics through and through, and nothing else than politics. Whoever devotes himself to the cause — and he does not deserve the name of man that would withhold himself from that devotion — belongs to politics, foreign and domestic; he understands that the art of the Freemason is the art of government — ”
“ Art of – ”
“ That Illuminist Freemasonry had the regent degree — ”
“ That is fine, Herr Settembrini: art of government, degree of regent — I like all that very much. But tell me something: are you Christians, you Masons? ”
Part 22 of 30