Part 8 of 39
No, after all, he was by no means, even yet, adjusted to his surroundings. Neither in familiarity with the features peculiar to life as lived up here—a familiarity impossible to achieve in so few days, which, as he was quite aware, and had even said to Joachim, he could hardly hope to acquire in the three weeks of his stay—nor in the adaptation of his physical organism to the prevailing peculiar atmospheric conditions. For this adaptation was bitterly hard; so hard, indeed, that it looked as though it would never be a success.
The daily routine was clearly articulated, carefully organized; one fell quickly into step and, by yielding oneself to the general drift, was soon proficient. After that, indeed, within the weekly round, and also within other larger divisions of time, one discovered the existence of certain regular variations of the programme, which showed themselves, one at a time, a second one sometimes appearing only after the first had repeated itself. But even the phenomena of everyday life held much that Hans Castorp had still to learn: faces and facts already noted had to be conned, new ones to be absorbed with youth’s receptivity.
Those great-bellied vessels, for example, with the short necks, which he had noticed the first evening standing in the corridors before certain doors. They contained oxygen; he had asked, and Joachim informed him. That was pure oxygen, six francs the container. The reviving gas was given the dying in a last effort to kindle or reinforce their strength. They drew it up through a tube. For behind those doors where such vessels were placed lay the dying—the “moribundi,” as Herr Hofrat Behrens called them when Hans Castorp met him one day in the first storey. Purple of cheek, in his white smock-frock, he rowed along the corridor, and they went down the steps together.
“Well, and how are you, you disinterested spectator, you?” said Behrens. “Are we finding favour in your critical eye, what? Thanks so much. Yes, yes, our summer season, it’s not too bad, there’s something to be said for it. I’ve spent a little money myself to push it. But it’s a pity you won’t be here in the winter—you’re stopping only eight weeks, I hear? Ah, three? That’s nothing but a weekend!—won’t pay you to take off your hat. Oh well, just as you think. Only it is a pity you won’t be here for the winter; that’s when the nobs come,” he said comically, “the international nobs, down in the Platz; they don’t come except in winter—you ought to see them, if only for the sake of your education. Regular high-flyers. You ought to see the jumps they make with those skis of theirs. And then the ladies! O Lord, the ladies! Birds of paradise, I tell you, and regularly out for adventure. Well, I must go in here, to my moribundus, number twenty-seven. Last stage, you know—off centre. Five dozen fiascos of oxygen he’s had all together, yesterday and today, the soak! But he will be going to his own place by middle-day. Well, my dear Reuter,” he was saying as he entered, “what do you say—shall we break the neck of another bottle?” The sound of his words died away as he closed the door. But Hans Castorp had had a moment’s glimpse into the background of the room, where on the pillow lay the waxen profile of a young man with a little chin beard, who slowly rolled his great eyeballs toward the open door.
This was the first dying man Hans Castorp had ever seen; for his father and mother, and his grandfather too had died, so to speak, behind his back. How full of dignity the young man’s head, with the little beard thrust upward, had lain upon his pillow! How speaking the glance those unnaturally great eyes had slowly turned upon the door! Hans Castorp, still quite absorbed by that glimpse, instinctively tried to make his own eyes as large, as slowly gazing and meaningful as those of the dying man, walking on as he did so, toward the stairs, and encountering a lady who came out of a room behind him and overtook him at the landing. He did not at once realize that it was Madame Chauchat; she, on her side, smiled at the eyes he was making at her, put her hands to the braids at the back of her head, and passed before him down the stairs, soundless, supple, with her head somewhat thrust out.
* * *
Acquaintances he made scarcely any in these early days, nor for a long time afterwards. The daily routine was not favourable. Hans Castorp, too, was of a retiring disposition, felt himself very much the “disinterested spectator,” as Hofrat Behrens had called him, and was in general content with the society and conversation of his cousin Joachim. The corridor nurse, indeed, continued to crane her neck after them, until Joachim, who had already favoured her with a little converse now and then, introduced his cousin. She wore the ribbon of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, and spoke with excruciating affectation. On closer acquaintance, indeed, one got the impression that her reason had suffered on the rack of continual boredom. It was hard to get away from her, she showed such evident distress whenever the conversation gave signs of languishing; when the cousins seemed about to go on their way, she sought to hold them by a stream of words, by glances and despairing smiles, until, for very pity, they refrained. She spoke at random, of her papa, who was a jurist, and of her cousin, who was a physician—obviously with the idea of presenting herself in a good light and impressing them with her cultured origin. Her present charge, she said, was the son of a Coburg doll-manufacturer, named Rotbein; the disease had attacked young Fritz’s intestinal tract. That was hard for all concerned; the gentlemen could understand how hard it was, for one who came from cultured surroundings and had the delicacy of feeling of the upper classes. And one couldn’t turn one’s back a minute. A little time ago she had just gone out a few minutes—to get some tooth-powder, in fact; when she came back, there sat her patient in bed, with a glass of stout, a salame, a thick wedge of rye bread, and a pickle before him. All these clandestine dainties his family had sent to give him strength. The next day, of course, he was more dead than alive. He was himself hastening his own end. But that would be only a mercy for him, a blessed relief. For her, Sister Berta, however—whose real name was Alfreda Schildknecht—it would mean little or nothing; she would just go on to another case, in a more or less advanced stage, either here or elsewhere; such was the prospect that opened before her—and there was no other.
Yes, Hans Castorp said, her calling was a hard one, but satisfying, he should think.
Of course, she answered, it was. Satisfying, but very hard.
Well, kind regards to the patient—and the cousins tried to take leave.
But she so hung upon them, with words and looks, that it was painful to see, putting forth all her powers to hold them only a little longer—it would have been cruel not to have vouchsafed her another few minutes.
“He is asleep,” she said. “He does not need me. I came out here for a second or so.” She began complaining about Hofrat Behrens, whose manner with her was altogether too free, considering her origin. She much preferred Dr. Krokowski, she found him so full of soul. Then she returned to her papa and her cousin, her mental resources being exhausted. In vain she struggled to hold the young men, letting her voice rise until it was almost a shriek as she saw them moving. They escaped her finally and went; she kept on looking after them awhile, her body bent forward, her gaze so avid it seemed as though she would fairly suck them back with her eyes. Her breast was wrung with a sigh as she turned and went into her patient’s room.
Hans Castorp made but one other acquaintance in these days: the pale, black-clad Mexican lady he had seen in the garden, whose nickname was Tous-les-deux. It came to pass that he heard from her own lips the tragic formula; and being forearmed, preserved a suitable demeanour and was satisfied with himself afterwards. The cousins met her before the front door, as they were setting forth on their prescribed walk after early breakfast. She was restlessly ranging there, with her pacing step, her legs bent at the knee-joints, wrapped in a black cashmere shawl, a black veil wound about her disordered silver hair and tied under her chin, her ageing face, with the large writhen mouth, gleaming dead-white against her mourning. Joachim, bareheaded as usual, greeted her with a bow, which she slowly acknowledged, the furrows deepening in her narrow forehead as she looked at him. Then, seeing a new face, she paused and waited, nodding gently as they came up to her; obviously she found it of importance to learn if the stranger was acquainted with her sad case, and to hear what he would say about it. Joachim presented his cousin. She drew her hand out of her shawl and gave it to him, a veined, emaciated, yellowish hand, with many rings, as she continued to gaze in his face.
Then it came: “Tous les dé, monsieur,” she said. “Tous les dé, vous savez.”
“Je le sais, madame,” Hans Castorp answered gently, “et je le regrette beaucoup.”
The lax pouches of skin under her jet-black eyes were larger and heavier than he had ever seen. She exhaled a faint odour as of fading flowers. A mild and pensive feeling stole about his heart.
“Merci,” she said, with a loose, clacking pronunciation, oddly consonant with her broken appearance. Her large mouth drooped tragically at one corner. She drew her hand back beneath her mantle, inclined her head, and turned away.
But Hans Castorp said as they walked on: “You see, I didn’t mind it at all, I got on with her quite well; I always do with such people; I understand instinctively how to go at them—don’t you think so? I even think, on the whole, I get on better with sad people than with jolly ones—goodness knows why. Perhaps it’s because I’m an orphan, and lost my parents early; but when people are very serious, or down in the mouth, or somebody dies, it doesn’t deject or embarrass me; I feel quite in my element, a good deal more so than when everything is going on greased wheels. I was thinking just lately that it is pretty flat of the women up here to take on as they do about death and things connected with death, so that they take such pains to shield them from contact with it, and bring the Eucharist at mealtimes, and that. I call it very feeble of them. Don’t you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime. Funerals have something very edifying; I always think one ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make a bad joke, the way they do in ordinary life. It’s good for people to be serious, once in a way. I’ve sometimes asked myself if I ought not to have become a clergyman—in a certain way it wouldn’t have suited me so badly.—I hope I didn’t make any mistake in my French?”
“No,” Joachim answered, “ ‘Je le regrette beaucoup’ was perfectly right as far as it went.”
Politically Suspect
Regular variations in the daily routine began to discover themselves. The first was Sunday, Sunday with a band on the terrace, which, it appeared, played there once a fortnight. Hans Castorp had arrived in the latter half of one of these periods. He had come on a Tuesday, and thus the Sunday was his fifth day up here—a day whose springlike character contrasted with the late extraordinary change and relapse into winter. It was mild and fresh, with pure white clouds in a pale blue sky, and gentle sunshine over vale and slopes, which displayed once more the green proper to the season, for the recent snow had been fated to speedy melting.
All hands, it was plain, took pains to observe Sunday and distinguish it from the rest of the week, management and guest seconding each other in their efforts to this end. At early breakfast there was seed-cake, and each guest had before his place a small glass with a few flowers, mountain pinks and even Alpine roses, which the gentlemen stuck in their buttonholes. Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund had put on a black frock-coat with a spotted waistcoat, and the ladies’ toilets were suitably festal and diaphanous. Frau Chauchat appeared in a flowing lace matinée, with open sleeves. As she entered and the glass door crashed into its lock behind her, she paused a second facing the room and gracefully as it were presented herself before she glided to her table. The garment so became her that Hans Castorp’s neighbour, the Danzig schoolmistress, was quite ravished. Even the barbaric pair at the “bad” Russian table had taken notice of the day: he by exchanging his leather jacket for a short coat, and the felt boots for leather shoes; she, though she still wore the soiled feather boa, by putting on a green silk blouse with a neck-ruche. Hans Castorp wrinkled his brows when he saw them, and coloured—he seemed, since he had been up here, to blush so easily.
Directly after second breakfast the concert began on the terrace; there were all kinds of horns and woodwind, and they played by turns sprightly and sostenuto, until nearly luncheon-time. The morning rest, during the concert, was not obligatory. A few guests did regale themselves with this feast for the ears, at the same time lying on their balconies; in the garden rest-hall a few chairs were occupied. But the majority sat at the small, white tables on the covered platform, while the more frivolous spirits, finding it too prim to sit upon chairs, encamped on the stone steps that led down into the garden, where they presently gave evidence of their high spirits. These were youthful patients of both sexes, most of whose names or faces Hans Castorp knew by now. There were Hermine Kleefeld, and Herr Albin—who carried about a great flowered box of chocolates, and offered them to all the guests, he himself eating none, but with a benevolent, paternal air smoking gold-tipped cigarettes; there were the thick-lipped youth who belonged to the Half-Lung Club, the thin and ivory-coloured Fräulein Levi, an ash-blond young man who answered to the name of Rasmussen and carried his hands breast-high, with the wrists relaxed, like a pair of flippers; Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, a woman of full bodily habit, in a red frock, who had attached herself to the group of young folk; the tall, thin-haired young man who could play out of the Midsummer Night’s Dream sat on the step behind her, his arms about his bony knees, and gazed steadfastly down on the tanned back of her neck. There was a red-haired Greek girl, another of unknown origin with a face like a tapir’s; the voracious lad with the thick eyeglasses, and another fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, with a monocle stuck in his eye, who carried his little finger, with its abnormally long nail shaped like a salt-spoon, to his mouth when he coughed, and was manifestly a first-class donkey—these, and numerous others.
The person with the fingernail, Joachim related in a low voice, had been only a light case when he came. He had had no fever and had been sent up merely as a precautionary measure, by his father, who was a physician. The Hofrat had advised a stay of three months. The three months had passed, and now he had 100 to 100.5 degrees of fever and was seriously ill. But he lived so wide of all common sense that he needed his ears boxed.
The cousins sat at a table by themselves, rather apart from the others, for Hans Castorp was smoking with his dark beer, which he had brought out from breakfast. From time to time his cigar gave him a little pleasure. Rendered torpid, as often, by the beer and the music, he sat with his head on one side and his mouth slightly open, watching the gay, resortish scene, feeling, not as a disturbing influence, but rather as heightening the general singularity, and lending it one mental fillip the more, the fact that all these people were inwardly attacked by well-nigh resistless decay, and that most of them were feverish. They sat at the little tables drinking effervescent lemonade; the group on the steps were photographing each other. Postage stamps were exchanged. The red-haired Greek girl sketched Herr Rasmussen’s portrait on a drawing-pad, but would not let him see it. She turned this way and that, laughing with wide-open mouth, showing her broad far-apart teeth—it was long before he could snatch it from her. Hermine Kleefeld perched on her step, eyes half open, beating time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper; she permitted Herr Albin to fasten a bunch of wild flowers on the front of her blouse. The youth with the voluptuous lips, sitting at Frau Salomon’s feet, turned his head upwards to talk with her, while behind them the thin-haired pianist directed his unchanging gaze down the back of her neck.
The physicians came and mingled with the guests of the cure, Hofrat Behrens in his white smock, Krokowski in his black. They passed along the row of tables, the Hofrat letting fall a pleasantry at nearly every one, till a wave of merriment followed in his wake; and so down the steps among the young folk, the female element of which straightway trooped up sidling and becking about Dr. Krokowski, while the Hofrat honoured the sabbath by performing a “stunt” with his bootlaces before the gentlemen’s eyes. He rested one mighty foot upon a step, unfastened the laces, gripped them with practised technique in one hand, and without employing the other, hooked them up again crosswise, with such speed and agility that the beholders marvelled, and many of them tried to emulate him, but in vain.
Somewhat later Settembrini appeared on the terrace. He came out of the dining-room leaning on his cane, dressed as usual in his pilot coat and yellow check trousers, looked about him with his critical, alert, and elegant air, and approached the cousins’ table. “Bravo!” he said, and asked permission to sit with them.
“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland! I rejoice to see you in your element, Engineer—you have a feeling for national atmosphere, it seems. May I bask in the sunshine of your well-being?”
Hans Castorp looked lowering—his features took on that expression directly he set eyes on the Italian. He said: “You are late for the concert, Herr Settembrini; it must be nearly over. You don’t care for music?”
“Not to order,” responded Settembrini. “Not by the calendar week. Not when it reeks of the prescription counter and is doled out to me by the authorities for the good of my health. I cling to my freedom—or rather to such vestiges of freedom and personal dignity as remain to the likes of us. At these affairs I play the guest, as you do up here: I come for a quarter-hour and go away—it gives me the illusion of independence. That it is more than an illusion I do not claim—enough if it please me! It is different with your cousin. For him it all belongs to the service—that is the light, is it not, Lieutenant, in which you regard it? Ah, yes, I know, you have the trick of hugging your pride, even in a state of slavery. A puzzling trick; not everybody in Europe understands it. Music? You were asking if I profess to be an amateur of music? Well, when you say amateur” (Hans Castorp could not recall saying anything of the sort), “the word is perhaps not ill chosen; it has a slight suggestion of superficiality—yes, very well, I am an amateur of music—which is not to say that I set great store by it; not as I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.—Music? It is the half-articulate art, the dubious, the irresponsible, the insensible. Perhaps you will object that she can be clear when she likes. But so can nature, so can a brook—what good is that to us? That is not true clarity, it is a dreamy, inexpressive, irresponsible clarity, without consequences and therefore dangerous, because it betrays one into soft complacence.—Let music play her loftiest role, she will thereby but kindle the emotions, whereas what concerns us is to awaken the reason. Music is to all appearance movement itself—yet, for all that, I suspect her of quietism. Let me state my point by the method of exaggeration: my aversion from music rests on political grounds.”
Hans Castorp could not refrain from slapping his knee as he exclaimed that never in all his life before had he heard the like.
“Pray do not, on that account, refuse to entertain it,” Settembrini said with a smile. “Music, as a final incitement to the spirit of men, is invaluable—as a force which draws onward and upward the spirit she finds prepared for her ministrations. But literature must precede her. By music alone the world would get no further forward. Alone, she is a danger. For you, personally, Engineer, she is beyond all doubt dangerous. I saw it in your face as I came up.”
Hans Castorp laughed.
“Oh, you shouldn’t look at my face, Herr Settembrini. You can’t believe how the air up here sets me on fire. It is harder than I thought to get acclimatized.”
“I fear you deceive yourself.”
“How so? I know, at least, how deucedly hot and tired I am all the time.”
“It seems to me we should be grateful to the management for the concert,” Joachim said reflectively. “I wouldn’t contradict you, Herr Settembrini, because you look at the question from a higher point of view, so to speak, as an author. But I find one ought to be grateful up here for a bit of music. I am far from being particularly musical, and then the pieces they play are not exactly elevating, neither classic nor modern, but just ordinary band-music. Still, it is a pleasant change. It takes up a couple of hours very decently; I mean it breaks them up and fills them in, so there is something to them, by comparison with the other days, hours, and weeks that whisk by like nothing at all. You see an unpretentious concert-number lasts perhaps seven minutes, and those seven minutes amount to something; they have a beginning and an end, they stand out, they don’t so easily slip into the regular humdrum round and get lost. Besides they are again divided up by the figures of the piece that is being played, and these again into beats, so there is always something going on, and every moment has a certain meaning, something you can take hold of, whereas usually—I don’t know whether I am making myself—”
“Bravo!” cried Settembrini. “Bravo, Lieutenant! You are describing very well indeed an aspect of music which has indubitably a moral value: namely, that her peculiarly life-enhancing method of measuring time imparts a spiritual awareness and value to its passage. Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time; she quickens—and in so far she has moral value. Art has moral value, in so far as it quickens. But what if it does the opposite? What if it dulls us, sends us to sleep, works against action and progress? Music can do that too; she is an old hand at using opiates. But the opiate, my dear sirs, is a gift of the Devil; it makes for lethargy, inertia, slavish inaction, stagnation. There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.”
He went on in this vein, and Hans Castorp listened without precisely following; first on account of his fatigue, and second because his attention was distracted by the proceedings of the lightheaded young folk on the steps. Did his eyes deceive him, or was the tapir-faced girl really occupied in sewing on a button for the monocled youth—and, forsooth, on the knee-band of his knickerbockers? She breathed asthmatically as she sewed, and he coughed and carried his little finger, with the salt-spoon-shaped nail, to his mouth. Of course they were ill—but, after all, these young folk up here did have peculiar social standards! The band played a polka.
Hippe
Thus Sunday passed. The afternoon was marked by drives undertaken by various groups; several times after tea a carriage and pair drove up the winding road and halted before the portal to receive its occupants—these being, for the most part, Russian ladies.
“Russians drive a great deal,” Joachim said to Hans Castorp, as they stood before the entrance and amused themselves with watching the carriages move off. “They will be going to Clavadel, or into the valley of the Flüela, or as far as Klosters. Those are the usual objectives. We might have a drive too while you are up here, if you like. But for the present I think you have enough to do to get used to things, and don’t require more diversion.”
To which Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands in his trouser pockets; and stood so to watch the lively little old Russian lady, as she, with her lean grandniece and two other ladies, took their seats in a carriage. The ladies were Madame Chauchat and Marusja. Madame Chauchat had put on a thin dust-cloak belted in at the back, but wore no hat. She sat down beside the old dame in the body of the carriage, while the two girls took their places behind. All four were in lively vein and chattered without stopping in their soft, spineless tongue. They chattered about the top of the carriage, which was hard for them all to get underneath, about the Russian comfits the great-aunt had brought for them to munch, in a little wooden box lined with cotton-wool and lace paper, and was already handing round.—Hans Castorp distinguished with interest Frau Chauchat’s slightly husky voice. As always whenever he set eyes on that heedless creature, the likeness reasserted itself which had puzzled him for a while and then been revealed in a dream. But Marusja’s laugh, the expression of her round, brown eyes, staring childlike above the tiny handkerchief she held over her mouth, the full bosom, which was yet so ailing within, reminded him of something else, something which gave him a sudden thrill and made him glance cautiously at his cousin without turning his head. No, thank goodness, Joachim had not gone mottled, like that other time; his lips were not so painfully compressed. But he was gazing at Marusja, and his bearing, the expression in his eyes, was anything but military. Indeed that absorbed and yearning look could only have been characterized as typically civilian. However, he pulled himself quickly together and stole a glance at Hans Castorp, which the latter had only just time to avoid, by turning his own eyes away and staring up into the sky. He felt his heart give a sudden beat—without rhyme or reason, of its own accord, as it had taken to doing up here.
The Sunday was not further remarkable, except perhaps for the meals, which, since they could not well be more abundant than they already were, displayed greater refinement in the menu. At luncheon there was a chaud-froid of chicken, garnished with crayfish and stoned cherries; with the ices came pastry served in baskets of spun sugar, and fresh pineapple besides. In the evening, after he had drunk his beer, Hans Castorp felt heavier in the limbs and more chilled and exhausted than on the day before; toward nine o’clock he bade his cousin good night, drew his plumeau up to his chin, and slept like the dead.
But next day, the first Monday spent by the guest up here, there came another regularly recurring variation in the daily routine: the lectures, one of which Dr. Krokowski delivered every other Monday morning in the dining-room, before the entire adult population of the sanatorium, with exception of the “moribund” and those who could not understand the language. The course, Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, consisted of a series of popular-scientific lectures, under the general title: “Love as a force contributory to disease.” These instructive entertainments took place after second breakfast; it was not permissible, Joachim reiterated, to absent oneself from them—or, at least, absence was frowned upon. It was thus very daring of Settembrini, who surely must have more command of the language than anyone else, not only never to appear, but to refer to the entertainment in most disparaging terms. For Hans Castorp’s part, he straightway resolved to be present, in the first place out of courtesy, but also with unconcealed curiosity as to what he should hear. Before the appointed hour, however, he did something quite perverse and ill-judged, which proved worse for him than one could possibly have guessed: he went out for a long, solitary walk.
“Now listen to me,” had been his first words, when Joachim entered his room that morning. “I can see that it can’t go on with me like this. I’ve had enough of the horizontal for the present; one’s very blood goes to sleep. Of course it is different with you; you are a patient, and I have no intention of tempting you. But I mean to take a proper walk after breakfast, if you don’t mind, just walking at random for a couple of hours. I’ll stick a little something in my pocket for second breakfast; then I shall be independent. We shall see if I am not quite a different chap when I come back.”
Joachim warmly agreed, as he saw his cousin was in earnest in his desire and his project. “But don’t overdo it,” he said; “that’s my advice. It’s not the same thing up here as at home. And be sure to come back in time for the lecture.”
In reality young Hans Castorp had more ground than the physical for his present resolve. His overheated head, the prevailing bad taste in his mouth, the fitful throbbing of his heart, were, or so he felt, less evil accompaniments to the process of acclimatization than such things as the goings-on of the Russian pair next door, the table-talk of the stupid and afflicted Frau Stöhr, the gentleman rider’s pulpy cough daily heard in the corridor, the utterances of Herr Albin, the impression he received of the manners and morals of the ailing young folk about him, the expression on Joachim’s face when he looked at Marusja—these and a hundred observations more made him feel it would be good to escape awhile from the Berghof circle, to breathe the air deep into his lungs, to get some proper exercise—and then, when he felt tired at night, he would at least know why. He took leave of Joachim in a spirit of enterprise, when his cousin addressed himself, after breakfast, to the usual round as far as the bench by the watercourse; then, swinging his walking-stick, he took his own way down the road.
It was about nine o’clock of a cool morning, with a covered sky. According to programme, Hans Castorp drew in deep draughts of the pure morning air, the fresh, light atmosphere that breathed in so easily, that held no hint of damp, that was without associations, without content. He crossed the stream and the narrow-gauge road to the street, with its scattered buildings; but left this again soon to strike into a meadow path, which went only a short way on the level and then slanted steeply up to the right. The climbing rejoiced Hans Castorp’s heart, his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back on his forehead with the crook of his stick; having gained some little height he looked back, and, seeing in the distance the mirror-like lake he had passed on his journey hither, he began to sing.
He sang what songs he had at his command, all kinds of sentimental folk-ditties, out of collections of national ballads and students’ songbooks; one of them, that went:
Let poets all of love and wine,
Yet oft of virtue sing the praises,
he sang at first softly, in a humming tone, then louder, finally at the top of his voice. His baritone lacked flexibility, yet today he found it good, and sang on with mounting enthusiasm. When he found he had pitched the beginning too high, he shifted into falsetto, and even that pleased him. When his memory left him in the lurch, he helped himself out by setting to the melody whatever words and syllables came to hand, heedless of the sense, giving them out like an operatic singer, with arching lips and strong palatal r. He even began to improvise both words and music, accompanying his performance with theatrical gesturings. It is a good deal of a strain to sing and climb at the same time, and Hans Castorp found his breath growing scant, and scanter. Yet for sheer pleasure in the idea, for the joy of singing, he forced his voice and sang on, with frequent gasps for breath, until he could no more, and sank, quite out of wind, half blind, with coloured sparks before his eyes and racing pulses, beneath a sturdy pine. His exaltation gave way on the sudden to a pervading gloom; he fell a prey to dejection bordering on despair.
When, his nerves being tolerably restored, he got to his feet again to continue his walk, he found his neck trembling; indeed his head shook in precisely the same way now, at his age, in which the head of old Hans Lorenz Castorp once had shaken. The phenomenon so freshly called up to him the memory of his dead grandfather that, far from finding it offensive, he took a certain pleasure in availing himself of that remembered and dignified method of supporting the chin, by means of which his grandfather had been wont to control the shaking of his head, and to which the boy had responded with such inward sympathy.
He mounted still higher on the zigzag path, drawn by the sound of cowbells, and came at length upon the herd, grazing near a hut whose roof was weighted with stones. Two bearded men approached him, with axes on their shoulders. They parted, a little way off him, and “Thank ye kindly, and God be with ye,” said the one to the other, in a deep guttural voice, shifted his axe to the other shoulder, and began breaking a path through crackling pine-boughs to the valley. The words sounded strange in this lonely spot: they came dreamlike to Hans Castorp’s senses, strained and benumbed. He repeated them, softly, trying to reproduce the guttural, rustically formal syllables of the mountain tongue, as he climbed another stretch higher, above the hut. He had in mind to reach the height where the trees left off, but on glancing at his watch resisted.
He took the left-hand path in the direction of the village. It ran level for some way, then led downhill, among tall-trunked pines, where, as he went, he once more began to sing, tentatively, and despite the fact that he felt his knees to tremble more than they had during the ascent. On issuing from the wood he paused, struck by the charm of the small enclosed landscape before him, a scene composed of elements both peaceful and sublime.
A mountain stream came flowing in its shallow, stony bed down the right-hand slope, poured itself foaming over the terraced boulders lying in its path, then coursed more calmly toward the valley, crossed at this point by a picturesque railed wooden footbridge. The ground all about was blue with the bell-like blossoms of a profusely growing, bushy plant. Sombre fir-trees of even, mighty growth stood in the bed of the ravine and climbed its sides to the height. One of them, rooted in the steep bank at the side of the torrent, thrust itself aslant into the picture, with bizarre effect. The whole remote and lovely spot was wrapped in a sounding solitude by the noise of the rushing waters. Hans Castorp remarked a bench that stood on the farther bank of the stream.
He crossed the footbridge and sat down to regale himself with the sight of the foaming, rushing waterfall and the idyllic sound of its monotonous yet modulated prattle. For Hans Castorp loved like music the sound of rushing water—perhaps he loved it even more. But hardly had he settled himself when he was overtaken by a bleeding at the nose, which came on so suddenly he had barely time to save his clothing from soilure. The bleeding was violent and persistent, taking to stanch it nearly half an hour of going to and fro between bench and brook, snuffing water up his nostrils, rinsing his handkerchief and lying flat on his back upon the wooden seat with the damp cloth on his nose. He lay there, after the blood at length was stanched, his knees elevated, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed, and ears full of the noise of water. He felt no unpleasant sensation, the bloodletting had had a soothing effect, but he found himself in a state of extraordinarily reduced vitality, so that when he exhaled the air, he felt no need to draw it in again, and lay there moveless, for the space of several quiet heartbeats, before taking another slow and superficial breath.
Quite suddenly he found himself in the far distant past, transported to a scene which had come back to him in a dream some nights before, summoned by certain impressions of the last few days. But so strongly, so resistlessly, to the annihilation of time and space, was he rapt back into the past, one might have said it was a lifeless body lying here on the bench by the waterside, while the actual Hans Castorp moved in that faraway time and place—in a situation which was for him, despite its childishness, vibrant with daring and adventure.
It happened when he was a lad of thirteen, in knee-breeches, in the lower third form at school. He stood in the school yard in talk with another boy of like years, from a higher form. The conversation had been begun, rather arbitrarily, by himself and, dealing as it did with a narrowly circumscribed subject of a practical nature, could in no case be prolonged; yet it gave him the greatest satisfaction. It took place in the break between the last two periods, a history and a drawing hour for Hans Castorp’s form; the pupils were walking up and down, or standing about in groups, or lounging against the glazed abutments of the school-building wall. A murmur of voices filled the red-tiled courtyard, which was shut off from the street by a wall topped with shingles and provided with two entrance gates. Supervision was exercised by a master in a slouch hat, who munched a ham sandwich the while.
He with whom Hans Castorp spoke was called Hippe, Pribislav Hippe. A peculiarity of this given name was that you were to pronounce it as though it were spelled “Pschibislav”; and the singularity of the appellation suited the lad’s appearance, which did indeed have something exotic about it. Hippe was the son of a scholar and history professor in the gymnasium. He was, by consequence, a notorious model pupil, and, though not much older than Hans Castorp, already a form higher up. He came from Mecklenburg and was in his person obviously the product of an ancient mixture of races, a grafting of Germanic stock with Slavic, or the reverse. True, his close-shorn round pate was blond; but the eyes were a grey-blue, or a blue-grey—an indefinite, ambiguous colour, like the hue of far-distant mountain ranges—and of an odd, narrow shape; were even, to be precise, a little slanting, with strongly marked, prominent cheekbones directly under them. It was a type of face which in this instance, far from seeming an abnormality, was distinctly pleasing, though odd enough to have won for him the nickname of “the Kirghiz” among his schoolmates. Hippe already wore long trousers, and a blue jacket belted in at the back and closed to the throat, the collar of which was usually whitened by a few scales of dandruff.
Now, the thing was that Hans Castorp, for a long time, had had his eye upon this Pribislav; had chosen him out of the whole host, known and unknown, in the courtyard of the school, taken an interest in him, followed him with his eyes—shall we say admired him?—at all events observed him with peculiar sympathy. Even on the way to school he looked forward with pleasure to watching him among his fellows, seeing him speak and laugh, singling out his voice from the others by its pleasantly veiled, husky quality. Granted that there was no sufficient ground for his preference, unless one might refer it to Hippe’s heathenish name, his character as model pupil—this latter was, of course, out of the question—or to the “Kirghiz” eyes, whose grey-blue glance could sometimes melt into a mystery of darkness when one caught it musing sidewise; whichever it might be, or none of these, Hans Castorp troubled not a whit to justify his feelings, or even to question by what name they might suitably be called. For, since he did not “know” Hippe, the relation could hardly be one of friendship. But in the first place there was not the faintest need of calling it anything; it could never be a subject of discussion; that would be out of place, and he had no desire for it; and, in the second, giving a thing a name implies, if not passing judgment on it, at least defining it; that is to say, classifying it among the familiar and habitual; whereas Hans Castorp was penetrated by the unconscious conviction that an inward good of this sort was above all to be guarded from definition and classification.
But whether well or ill founded, and however far from being the subject of conversation, or even from being touched on in Hans Castorp’s own mind, these feelings of his flourished there in great strength, as they had done for almost a year now—or a year as nearly as one could fix the time, for it was hard to be precise about their beginnings. For about a year, then, he had carried them about in secret, which spoke for the loyalty and constancy of his character, when one reflects what a great space of time a year is at that age. But alas, every characterization of this kind involves a moral judgment, whether favourable or unfavourable—though, to be sure, each trait of character has its two sides. Thus Hans Castorp’s “loyalty”—upon which, be it said, he was not prone to plume himself—consisted, baldly, in a certain temperamental heaviness, sluggishness, and quiescence, a fundamental tendency to feel respect for conditions of duration and stability; and the more respect, the longer they lasted. He inclined to believe in the permanence of the particular state or circumstances in which he for the moment found himself; prized it for that very quality, and was not bent on change. Thus he had grown used to his silent and remote relation to Pribislav Hippe, and considered it a regular feature of his life; loved the emotions it brought in its train, the suspense as to whether he was likely to meet him that day, whether Pribislav would pass close by him, even look at him; loved the subtle and wordless satisfaction imparted by his secret, loved even the disappointments inseparable from it—the greatest of which was Pribislav’s absence from school. When this happened, the school yard became a desert, the day lacked all charm, hope alone lingered.
The affair had lasted a year, up to that intrepid and culminating moment; after which, thanks to Hans Castorp’s constancy of spirit, it lasted another. Then it was over. And it is a fact that he marked no more the loosening and dissolving of the bond which united him to Pribislav than he had previously marked its beginnings. Moreover, in consequence of his father’s taking another position, Pribislav left the school and the city; but that was all one to Hans Castorp; he had already forgotten him before he went. One may put it that the figure of the “Kirghiz” had glided out of the mist into Hans Castorp’s life, and slowly grown vivid and tangible there, up to that moment of the greatest nearness and corporeity, in the school court; had stood awhile thus in the foreground, then slowly receded, and, with no pain of parting, dissolved again into the mist.
But that moment, that bold, adventurous situation, into which Hans Castorp found himself transported after all these years, the conversation—an actual conversation with Pribislav Hippe—came about thus. The drawing-lesson was the next period, and Hans Castorp found himself without a pencil. His classmates needed their own, but he had among the other pupils this and that acquaintance, of whom he might have sought a loan. Yet he found it was Pribislav who after all stood nearest to him, with whom, in secret, he had had to do; and with a joyous impulse of his entire being he determined to seize the opportunity—for so he called it—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. It was rather an odd thing to do, since he did not, in reality, “know” Pribislav at all; but this aspect of the affair escaped him in his recklessness, or he chose to disregard it. So there he stood before Pribislav Hippe, among the bustling crowd that filled the tiled courtyard; and he said to him: “Excuse me, can you lend me a pencil?”
And Pribislav looked at him, with his “Kirghiz” eyes above the prominent cheekbones, and spoke, in his pleasantly husky voice, without any surprise, or, at least, without showing any.
“With pleasure,” he said. “But you must be sure to give it me back, after the period.” And drew his pencil out of his pocket, a silver pencil-holder with a ring in the end, which one screwed in order to make the red lead-pencil come out. He displayed the simple mechanism, their two heads bent over it together.
“Only be careful not to break it,” he added.
What made him say that? As if Hans Castorp had been intending to handle it carelessly or keep it after the hour!
They looked at each other, and smiled; then, as there remained nothing more to say, they turned, first their shoulders and then their backs, and went.
That was all. But never in his life had Hans Castorp felt so supremely content as in this drawing hour, drawing with Pribislav Hippe’s pencil, in the immediate prospect of giving it back into the owner’s hand—which followed as a matter of course out of what had gone before. He took the liberty of sharpening the pencil a little, and cherished three of the red shavings nearly a year, in an inner drawer of his desk—no one seeing them there could have guessed what significance they possessed. The return of the pencil was of the simplest formality, quite after Hans Castorp’s heart—indeed, he prided himself on it no little, in the vainglorious state his intimacy with Hippe produced.
Part 8 of 39