The Magic Mountain — Chapter 2

Chapter 3 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

Of the Baptismal Bowl and the Grandfather in a Twofold Aspect

Hans Castorp preserved only pale memories of his proper parental home; he had scarcely ever really known his father and mother. They died away from him within the short span between his fifth and seventh year, first his mother, utterly unexpectedly and while expecting her confinement, of a stoppage of the vessels consequent upon an inflammation of the nerves, an embolism, as Dr. Heidekind termed it, which caused instantaneous paralysis of the heart; she was laughing at that very moment, sitting up in bed, it looked as though she were toppling over with laughter, and yet she did so only because she was dead. That was not easy for Hans Hermann Castorp, the father, to understand; and as he had clung very devotedly to his wife, and was on his own side not one of the strongest, he did not know how to get over it. From that time on his mind was disordered and diminished; in his bewilderment he committed business errors, so that the firm of Castorp & Son suffered serious losses; in the spring after next he caught pneumonia while inspecting a warehouse at the windy harbour, and since his shaken heart could not endure the high fever, he died, despite all the care Dr. Heidekind bestowed upon him, within five days, and followed his wife, with considerable attendance from the citizenry, into the Castorp family vault, which was very beautifully situated in the St. Katharinenkirchhof, overlooking the Botanical Garden.

His father, the Senator, survived him, though only by a little, and the brief interval before he too died, likewise, incidentally, of pneumonia, and indeed after great struggles and torments, for unlike his son Hans Lorenz Castorp was a nature hard to bring down, tenaciously rooted in life, this interval, then, no more than a year and a half, the orphaned Hans Castorp spent in his grandfather's house, a house built at the beginning of the past century on a narrow plot in the taste of northern classicism, painted a dim weather-colour, on the Esplanade, with half-columns on either side of the entrance door in the middle of the ground floor, which was reached by five steps, and with two upper storeys besides the principal floor, where the windows ran down to the floor and were fitted with cast-iron grilles.

Here there were exclusively reception rooms, including the bright, stucco-decorated dining room, whose three wine-red-curtained windows looked out upon the little garden at the back, and where, during those eighteen months, grandfather and grandson dined alone together every day at four o'clock, served by old Fiete with the earrings and the silver buttons on his dress coat, who wore with that coat a cambric neckcloth of the same kind as the master himself, and likewise hid his shaven chin in it in much the same fashion, and whom the grandfather addressed with the familiar pronoun, speaking Low German to him; not in jest, he had no vein of humour, but in all sobriety, and because that was simply his way with people of the common sort, warehouse labourers, postmen, coachmen, and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and he also liked very much to hear Fiete answer, likewise in Low German, bending round from the left behind his master as he served him, so as to speak into his right ear, on which the Senator heard considerably better than on the left. The old man understood, nodded, and went on eating, very upright between the high mahogany back of the chair and the table, scarcely bent over his plate at all; and the grandson, opposite him, silently observed, with deep and unconscious attention, the spare, well-kept movements with which the grandfather's beautiful, white, lean old hands, with their arched, tapering nails and the green signet ring on the right forefinger, arranged a morsel of meat, vegetables, and potatoes on the tip of the fork and brought it to the mouth under a slight inclination of the head to meet it. Hans Castorp looked down at his own still awkward hands and felt in them the prefigured possibility of one day holding and moving knife and fork just as his grandfather did.

Another question was whether he would ever attain to hiding his chin in such a neckcloth as filled the spacious opening of the oddly shaped collar worn by his grandfather, whose sharp points brushed the cheeks. For to do that one had to be as old as he; and already, apart from him and old Fiete, nobody far and wide wore such neckcloths and collars any more. That was a pity, for little Hans Castorp liked exceedingly the way his grandfather rested his chin in the high snow-white band; even in recollection, when he was grown up, it pleased him extraordinarily: there was something in it that he approved from the depths of his being.

When they had finished eating and folded their napkins together, rolled them, and slipped them into the silver rings, an operation with which Hans Castorp in those days did not easily come to terms, because the napkins were as large as little tablecloths, the Senator rose before his chair, which Fiete drew away behind him, and went with shuffling steps into the "cabinet" to fetch his cigar; and now and then the grandson followed him there.

This "cabinet" had come into being because the dining room had been made three-windowed and laid across the entire breadth of the house, so that there was room, not as otherwise in this type of house for three salons, but only for two, one of which, lying at right angles to the dining hall and with only a single window on the street, would however have turned out disproportionately deep. Therefore about a quarter of its length had been cut off from it, namely the "cabinet," a narrow room with a skylight, dim and furnished with only a few objects: an etagere on which stood the Senator's cigar case; a card-table whose drawer contained attractive things, whist cards, gaming counters, little scoring-boards with hinged teeth, a slate together with chalk pencils, paper cigar-tips, and much besides; and finally a Rococo glass cabinet of rosewood in the corner, behind whose panes curtains of yellow silk had been stretched.

"Grandpapa," little Hans Castorp might well say in the cabinet, rising on tiptoe and straining upward toward the old man's ear, "do show me the baptismal bowl, please!"

And the grandfather, who had in any case already drawn back the skirt of his long and soft frock coat from his trousers and pulled his bunch of keys from his pocket, opened with it the glass cabinet, from whose interior there came toward the boy a peculiarly pleasant and curious fragrance. All sorts of disused and precisely for that reason captivating objects were stored there: a pair of curved silver candelabra, a broken barometer with figured wood-carving, an album of daguerreotypes, a liqueur chest of cedarwood, a little Turk, hard to the touch beneath his many-coloured silk costume, with a piece of clockwork in his body that had once enabled him to walk across the table, though it had long since ceased to serve, an old-fashioned model ship, and at the very bottom even a rat-trap. The old man, however, took from a middle shelf a much-tarnished round silver bowl standing on an equally silver plate, and displayed both pieces to the boy, separating them and turning them to and fro singly under explanations often given before.

Basin and plate had not originally belonged together, as one could plainly see, and as the little fellow was once more instructed; but, said the grandfather, they had been united in use for about a hundred years, namely since the acquisition of the basin. The bowl was beautiful, of simple and noble shape, fashioned by the severe taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and substantial, it rested on a round foot and was gilded within; but time had already faded the gold to a yellowish gleam. As its sole ornament there ran round the upper rim a raised wreath of roses and serrated leaves. As for the plate, its far greater age was to be read on the inside. "1650" stood there in flourished figures, and all manner of curling engravings framed the number, executed in the "modern manner" of those days, bombastic and capricious, armorial bearings and arabesques half star and half flower. On the reverse, however, there were pricked in, in changing styles of script, the names of the heads who in the course of time had been possessors of the piece: there were seven of them already, each furnished with the year of accession to the inheritance, and the old man in the neckcloth pointed out each individual one to the grandson with his ringed forefinger. His father's name was there, the grandfather's own, and the great-grandfather's, and then the prefix "great" doubled, trebled, and quadrupled itself in the mouth of the explicator, and the boy listened, head inclined sideways, with eyes fixed in a thoughtful, or perhaps thoughtless-dreaming stare, and with a devoutly drowsy mouth, to the great-great-great-great, this dark burdened sound of the tomb and of burial under time, which yet at the same time expressed a piously cherished connection between the present, his own life, and what had sunk so deep, and affected him in a wholly peculiar manner: namely, just as it showed itself on his face. At that sound he seemed to breathe musty-cool air, the air of St. Katharinen or of the Michaelis crypt, to feel the waft from places where, hat in hand, one falls into a certain respectful, forward-swaying gait without the use of one's boot-heels; he thought too that he could hear the secluded, hallowed stillness of such echoing places; religious sensations mingled with those of death and history at the sound of that muffled syllable, and somehow all this was soothing to the boy; indeed, it may very well have been that for the sake of the sound, to hear it and repeat it, he had asked to be allowed to look at the baptismal bowl once again.

Then the grandfather set the vessel back upon the plate and let the little one look into the smooth, faintly golden hollow, which shone up from the falling skylight.

"Soon it will be eight years," he said, "since we held you over it, and since the water with which you were baptized flowed into it ... Sexton Lassen of St. Jacobi poured it into the hollow of our good Pastor Bugenhagen's hand, and from there it ran over your little head into the bowl. But we had warmed it, so that you should not be startled and should not cry, and cry you did not; on the contrary, you had been crying beforehand, so that Bugenhagen had no easy time of it with his discourse, but when the water came, then you grew quiet, and that was reverence for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in a few days it will be forty-four years since your blessed father was the child baptized, and from his head the water flowed in here. That was here in the house, his parents' house, over there in the hall, before the middle window, and it was still old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the very same whom the French, when he was a young man, nearly shot because he had preached against their robberies and acts of incendiarism, he too has now long, long been with God. But seventy-five years ago it was I myself whom they baptized, there too in the hall, and they held my head over the bowl here, as it stands there on the plate, and the clergyman spoke the same words as over you and your father, and in just the same way the warm clear water flowed from my hair, there was not much more of it then than I now have on my head, down into the golden basin here."

The little one looked up at the grandfather's narrow old man's head, which was once more bent over the bowl, as at the long-vanished hour of which he spoke, and a feeling already familiar came over him, the strange sensation, half dreamy, half alarming, of something at once drawing onward and standing still, of a changing continuance that was recurrence and dizzying sameness, a sensation known to him from earlier occasions, and by which he had expected and wished to be touched again: it was partly for the sake of this that the display of the heirloom, standing still and journeying on, had mattered to him.

When later, as a young man, he examined himself, he found that the image of this ancestor had imprinted itself upon him far more deeply, distinctly, and significantly than that of his parents: which may possibly have rested on sympathy and a special physical affinity, for the grandson resembled the grandfather, so far, that is, as a rosy milk-beard can resemble a bleached and rigid man of seventy. Chiefly, however, it was no doubt characteristic of the old man himself, who beyond question had been the true figure of character, the picturesque personality in the family.

Speaking in the public sense, time had long since passed beyond the nature and convictions of Hans Lorenz Castorp before he departed this life. He had been a profoundly Christian gentleman, of the Reformed congregation, strictly minded in the traditional way, so obstinately bent on an aristocratic narrowing of the social circle within which one was fit to govern as though he lived in the fourteenth century, when the craftsman class had begun, against the tenacious resistance of the old free patriciate, to win seat and voice for itself in the city council, and too hard to win over for anything new. His activity had fallen in decades of a vehement upswing and manifold upheavals, decades of progress by forced marches, which had continually laid such high demands upon the public spirit of sacrifice and daring. Yet, God knew, it was not owing to him, old Castorp, if the spirit of modern times had celebrated its widely renowned and brilliant victories. He had set far more store by ancestral custom and old institutions than by hair-raising harbour extensions and godless metropolitan antics, had put on the brake and minimized things wherever he could, and had it gone according to his mind, the administration would still to this day look as idyllically old-fashioned as in his own time his private counting-house did.

Thus the old man presented himself to the bourgeois eye, both during his lifetime and afterward, and if little Hans Castorp understood nothing of affairs of state, his quiet, observing child's eye nevertheless made in essence precisely the same perceptions, wordless perceptions and therefore uncritical, or rather simply vital perceptions, which, moreover, even later as a conscious image of memory, fully preserved their hostility to words and analysis, their altogether affirmative stamp. As has been said, sympathy was at play here, that nearest bond and kinship of nature which skips a generation, and which is nothing rare. Children and grandchildren look on in order to admire, and they admire in order to learn and to develop what lies prefigured in them by inheritance.

Senator Castorp was lean and tall. The years had bent his back and neck, but he sought to counteract the curvature by pressure in the opposite direction, in the course of which his mouth, whose lips were no longer supported by teeth but rested directly on the empty gums, for he put in his dentures only for eating, drew itself downward in a dignified and laborious way; and precisely from this, as also perhaps as a means against an incipient unsteadiness of the head, there arose that austerely upright carriage and that bracing of the chin which so pleased little Hans Castorp.

He loved the snuffbox, it was an oblong tortoiseshell box inlaid with gold, which he handled constantly, and for this reason he used red handkerchiefs, the corners of which were apt to hang from the back pocket of his frock-coat. If this was a cheerful weakness in his appearance, it acted nonetheless wholly as a license of age, as a negligence such as advancing years either consciously and jovially permit themselves, or bring with them in venerable unconsciousness; and at all events it remained the only one that Hans Castorp's childish sharpness of eye ever perceived in his grandfather's exterior. But for the seven-year-old, and later too in the memory of the grown youth, the old man's everyday appearance was not his proper and real one. In proper reality he looked different still, far handsomer and more correct than usual, namely as he appeared in a painting, a life-size portrait, which had formerly hung in his parents' sitting-room and had then migrated to the Esplanade together with little Hans Castorp, where it had been given its place above the great red-silk sofa in the reception room.

It showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official attire as a councillor of the city, in that grave, indeed pious civic dress of a vanished century, which a commonwealth at once weighty and daring had carried down through the ages and kept in pompous use, in order ceremonially to make the past the present and the present the past, and to attest the unbroken continuity of things, the venerable assurance with which they set their signature to action. Senator Castorp stood there in full figure, upon reddish flagstones, in a perspective of pillars and pointed arches. He stood, his chin lowered, his mouth drawn down, his blue, thoughtful eyes, with the bags beneath them, directed into the distance, in the black overgarment, longer than knee-length and like a robe, which, open in front, showed along edge and hem a broad fur trimming. From wide upper sleeves, puffed high and bordered, there emerged narrower undersleeves of plain cloth, and lace cuffs covered the hands to the knuckles. The slender old legs were sheathed in black silk stockings, the feet in shoes with silver buckles. About his neck, however, there lay the broad, starched, many-folded ruff, pressed down in front and sweeping upward at the sides, from beneath which there hung out in addition a pleated cambric jabot upon the waistcoat. Under his arm he carried the old-fashioned broad-brimmed hat, the crown of which narrowed toward the top.

It was an excellent picture, executed by a distinguished artist's hand, maintained with good taste in the old-master style suggested by the subject, and awakening in the beholder all manner of Spanish-Netherlandish late-medieval associations. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it, not with connoisseurship, of course, but still with a certain more general and even penetrating understanding; and although he had seen his grandfather in person as the canvas represented him only once, on a ceremonial arrival at the town hall, and then only in passing, he could not, as we have said, help feeling this pictorial appearance of his to be the proper and real one, and seeing in the everyday grandfather, so to speak, an interim grandfather, one adapted by expedients and only imperfectly. For what was divergent and strange in this everyday appearance of his plainly rested upon such imperfect, perhaps somewhat awkward adaptation; they were remnants and indications not wholly to be effaced of his pure and true shape. Thus the high white stock, those "father-killers," was old-fashioned; but it was impossible to apply that designation to the admirable article of dress of which they formed only the interim indication, namely to the Spanish ruff. And the same was true of the unusually curved top hat which the grandfather wore in the street, and to which in a higher reality the broad-brimmed felt hat of the painting corresponded; and of the long and wrinkled frock-coat, whose archetype and true reality appeared to little Hans Castorp in the bordered robe trimmed with fur.

Thus he was inwardly in agreement as well that the grandfather should shine forth in his correctness and perfection when one day the word went round that leave must be taken of him. It was in the hall, the same hall where they had so often sat opposite one another at table; in its midst Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay upon the bier within the silver-mounted coffin, surrounded and encircled by wreaths. He had fought through the pneumonia, had fought stubbornly and long, although, as it seemed, he had after all been at home in the present life only by way of adaptation, and now lay, one could not say for certain whether victorious or overcome, in any case with a sternly appeased expression, and greatly altered and sharp-nosed from the struggle, upon his bed of state, the lower part of his body veiled by a coverlet on which a palm branch lay, his head propped high on the silk cushion, so that the chin rested most beautifully in the front hollow of the ceremonial ruff; and between the hands, half covered by the lace cuffs, whose fingers, despite their artificially natural arrangement, did not conceal their coldness and lifelessness, they had placed an ivory cross, at which he seemed, with lowered lids, to gaze fixedly down.

Hans Castorp had certainly seen his grandfather several times at the beginning of that last illness, but toward the end no longer. He had been spared entirely the sight of the struggle, which for its principal part too had taken place by night; only indirectly, through the oppressed atmosphere of the house, the red eyes of old Fiete, the coming and going of the doctors' carriages, had he been touched by it. But the result, before which he found himself standing in the hall, might be summed up in this, that the grandfather had now been solemnly relieved of interim adaptation and had definitively returned into his proper and fitting form, an outcome to be approved, even if old Fiete wept and shook his head without ceasing, and even if Hans Castorp himself wept, as he had wept at the sight of his mother, dead so suddenly, and of his father, who soon afterward likewise lay there silent and strange.

For it was now already the third time within so short a span and at so young an age that death had acted upon the mind and senses, especially indeed upon the senses, of little Hans Castorp; the sight and impression were no longer new to him, but already quite familiar, and as on the first two occasions he had conducted himself with complete composure and reliability, by no means weak-nerved, though with natural sorrow, so too now, and to a still higher degree. Ignorant of the practical significance of the events for his life, or else childishly indifferent to it, in the confidence that the world would somehow or other take care of him, he had displayed at the coffins a certain equally childlike coolness and matter-of-fact attentiveness, which on the third occasion received an additional, old-wise shading from the feeling and expression of experienced connoisseurship, not to speak further of the more frequent tears that sprang from agitation and contagion from others rather than from any self-evident reaction of his own. In the three or four months since his father had died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions from that time re-established themselves exactly, simultaneously, and piercingly in their incomparable peculiarity.

If dissolved and put into words, they would have looked something like this. Death had about it a pious, thoughtful, and sadly beautiful aspect, that is to say a spiritual one, and at the same time quite another, downright opposite one, very bodily, very material, which one could address neither as beautiful nor as thoughtful nor as pious, nor indeed even as sad. The solemn spiritual aspect expressed itself in the pomp of the body laid out, the splendor of the flowers and the palm fronds, which, as is well known, signified heavenly peace; further, and more clearly still, in the cross between the dead fingers of the former grandfather, in the blessing Saviour by Thorwaldsen who stood at the head of the coffin, and in the candelabra rising on either side, which upon this occasion too had assumed an ecclesiastical character. All these arrangements plainly had their more exact and proper meaning in the thought that the grandfather had now entered forever into his proper and true shape. Besides this, however, as little Hans Castorp very well observed, though he did not admit it to himself in words, they all alike, and particularly the profusion of flowers, and among these again especially the much-represented tuberoses, had yet another meaning and sober purpose, namely to gloss over the other aspect death had, neither beautiful nor properly sad, but rather almost indecent, basely corporeal, to consign it to oblivion, or not to let it come into consciousness.

It was connected with this aspect that the dead grandfather appeared so strange, indeed not really as the grandfather at all, but as a life-size wax doll which death had slipped in instead of his person, and with which all this pious and honourable display was now being made. The one who lay there, or rather, _what_ lay there, was therefore not the grandfather himself, but a shell, which, as Hans Castorp knew, consisted not of wax, but of its own substance; _nothing but_ substance: that precisely was the indecent thing, and scarcely even a sad thing, as little sad as things are sad that have to do with the body and _only_ with it. Little Hans Castorp regarded the wax-yellow, smooth, cheese-firm substance out of which the life-size figure of death consisted, the face and hands of the former grandfather. At that moment a fly settled on the motionless forehead and began moving its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete carefully drove it away, taking care not to touch the forehead in doing so, and with an honourably darkened expression, as though he might not and would not know anything of what he was doing, an expression of modesty that plainly related to the fact that the grandfather was now only body and nothing more; but after a wandering flight the fly, briefly alighting, settled again upon the grandfather's fingers near the ivory cross. And while this was happening, Hans Castorp believed more distinctly than before that he perceived that faint yet so peculiarly tenacious exhalation, familiar to him from earlier times, which to his shame reminded him of a schoolfellow afflicted with some troublesome malady and therefore shunned by everyone, and which the fragrance of the tuberoses was plainly intended, under the hand, to overpower, without being able to do so for all its beautiful luxuriance and severity.

He stood repeatedly beside the corpse: once alone with old Fiete, the second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and the two uncles James and Peter, and then a third time, when a group of Sunday-dressed dock workers stood for a few moments by the open coffin to take leave of the former head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral, at which the hall was full of people, and Pastor Bugenhagen of St Michael's Church, the same who had baptized Hans Castorp, wearing the Spanish neck-ruff, delivered the memorial address and afterward, in the cab, the first directly behind the hearse, which was followed by a long, long line, conversed very kindly with little Hans Castorp, and then this phase of life too was at an end, and Hans Castorp changed house and surroundings immediately afterward, for this was already the second time he had done so in his young life.

At the Tienappels'. And of Hans Castorp's moral condition

It did not happen to his detriment, for he came into the house of Consul Tienappel, his appointed guardian, and had nothing to miss there: certainly not as regarded his person, nor any more in respect of the care of his further interests, of which as yet he knew nothing. For Consul Tienappel, an uncle of Hans's late mother, administered the Castorp estate; he brought the real property to sale, undertook as well the liquidation of the firm of Castorp and Son, Import and Export, and what he realized came to roughly four hundred thousand marks, Hans Castorp's inheritance, which Consul Tienappel invested in trustee securities, deducting for himself, without prejudice to his feelings as a kinsman, a commission of two per cent from the interest due at the beginning of each quarter.

The Tienappel house lay at the back of a garden on Harvestehuder Weg and looked out upon a stretch of lawn in which not even the smallest weed was tolerated, then upon public rose-beds, and then upon the river. Every morning the Consul, although he possessed fine carriages, went on foot to his business in the old town in order to get at least a little exercise, for at times he suffered from congestions of blood to the head, and he returned in the same way at five o'clock in the evening, after which at the Tienappels' dinner was eaten with all due cultivation. He was a weighty man, dressed in the best English cloths, with watery blue protruding eyes behind gold spectacles, a florid nose, a grey skipper's beard, and a fiery diamond on the thick little finger of his left hand. His wife had long been dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, one of whom was in the navy and little at home, while the other was active in his father's wine business and the designated heir to the firm. For many years the household had been managed by Schalleen, a goldsmith's daughter from Altona, with white starched ruffles about her cylindrical wrists. She saw to it that the breakfast and supper table was abundantly laid with cold dishes, with shrimps and salmon, eel, goose breast, and tomato catsup for the roast beef; she kept a watchful eye on the hired servants when gentlemen's dinners were given at Consul Tienappel's, and it was she too who, as best she could, took a mother's place with little Hans Castorp.

Hans Castorp grew up in miserable weather, in wind and water-mist, grew up in a yellow mackintosh, if one may put it so, and on the whole felt quite brisk in it. He was perhaps a little anaemic from the start, Dr Heidekind said as much too, and had a good glass of porter given him every day for third breakfast, after school, a substantial drink, as is known, to which Dr Heidekind attributed a blood-forming effect, and which in any case soothed Hans Castorp's vital spirits in a manner he found estimable, furthering beneficially his inclination to "doze," as his uncle Tienappel expressed it, namely to dream into vacancy with slack mouth and without a settled thought. Otherwise, however, he was sound and proper, a passable tennis player and rower, although he preferred, instead of handling the oars himself, to sit on summer evenings with music and a good drink on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst Ferry House and watch the illuminated boats, between which swans glided over the gaily reflecting water; and if one heard him speak, calmly, sensibly, a little hollow and monotonous, with a trace of Low German, indeed if one merely looked at him in his blond correctness, with his well-cut head, somehow stamped with an old-fashioned cast, in which an inherited and unconscious conceit expressed itself in the form of a certain dry sleepiness, no one could doubt that this Hans Castorp was an unadulterated and upright product of this soil and brilliantly in his proper place, and he himself, had he ever examined himself on that score, would not have doubted it for a single moment.

The atmosphere of the great seaport city, that moist atmosphere of commerce and good living which had been the vital air of his fathers, he breathed with deep assent, as a matter of course and with easy contentment. With the exhalations of water, coal, and tar, the sharp smells of heaped colonial wares in his nostrils, he saw on the harbor quays enormous steam cranes imitate the calm, intelligence, and giant strength of serviceable elephants as they discharged ton-weights of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and balloons from the bellies of motionless ocean ships into railway wagons and sheds. He saw the merchant class in yellow rubber coats, such as he himself wore, streaming toward the Exchange at noon, where things went sharply enough, to his knowledge, and where someone might very easily find occasion to send out in all haste invitations to a grand dinner in order to keep his credit alive. He saw, too (and here later lay his own particular field of interest), the swarming shipyards, saw the mammoth hulls of docked Asia- and Africa-runners, towering high, keel and propeller laid bare, supported by struts thick as tree trunks, in their monstrous helplessness on dry land, covered with dwarfish armies of laborers scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing; saw on the roofed slipways, enwreathed in smoky mist, the frame-skeletons of ships in the making rise aloft, and engineers, construction drawings and tables in hand, giving their instructions to the builders - all this familiar to Hans Castorp from his youth on, and awakening in him nothing but feelings of comfortable native belonging, feelings that found their climax perhaps in that condition of life when, on Sunday mornings, with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemssen - Joachim Ziemssen - he breakfasted at the Alster Pavilion on warm rolls with smoked beef and a glass of old port, and afterward, drawing on his cigar with devotion, leaned back in his chair. For in this above all he was genuine, that he liked to live well, yes, despite his refined thin-blooded exterior, clung inwardly and firmly, like a voluptuous infant at the mother's breast, to the coarse enjoyments of life.

Comfortably and not without dignity he bore upon his shoulders the high civilization which the ruling upper stratum of the trading city-democracy bequeaths to its children. He was as well bathed as a baby and had his clothes made by the tailor who enjoyed the confidence of the young men of his set. The little treasure of linen, carefully designed, that the English lines of his wardrobe concealed was tended by Schalleen in the best possible fashion; even when Hans Castorp was studying away from home, he regularly sent it back for cleaning and mending (for his maxim was that nowhere else in the Reich, outside Hamburg, did people understand ironing), and a roughened patch at the cuff of one of his pretty colored shirts would have filled him with violent discomfort. His hands, though not especially aristocratic in shape, were well cared for and fresh of skin, adorned with a platinum chain-ring and his grandfather's inherited signet ring, and his teeth, somewhat soft and several times the worse for wear, were repaired with gold.

In standing and walking he thrust his lower body a little forward, which did not give an exactly brisk impression; but his posture at table was excellent. He turned his upright torso politely toward the neighbor with whom he was chatting - sensibly and a little flatly - and his elbows lay close and easy while he carved his portion of fowl or deftly drew the rosy meat from a lobster-claw with the table implement appointed for that purpose. His first need when the meal was ended was the finger-bowl with perfumed water, the second the Russian cigarette, untaxed, which he procured under the counter by way of amiable smuggling. It came before the cigar, a very savory Bremen brand called Maria Mancini, of which there will be more to say, and whose spicy poisons united so satisfyingly with those of coffee. Hans Castorp shielded his tobacco stores from the harmful influences of steam heat by keeping them in the cellar, whither he went down every morning to incorporate into his case the day's requirement. Only with reluctance would he have eaten butter that had been set before him in a lump instead of in the form of ridged little balls.

It can be seen that we are intent on saying everything that may tell in his favor; but we judge him without exuberance and make him neither better nor worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor a fool, and if we avoid the word "mediocre" in describing him, we do so for reasons that have nothing to do with his intelligence and hardly anything with his simple person at all, namely out of respect for his fate, to which we are inclined to ascribe a certain impersonal significance. His mind met the demands of his secondary school without having to overstrain itself - but to do that he certainly would, under no circumstances and for no subject whatever, have been inclined: less from fear of hurting himself than because he saw absolutely no reason for it, or rather: _no unconditional_ reason; and perhaps precisely for that reason we are reluctant to call him mediocre, because in some manner he felt the absence of such reasons.

Man lives not only his personal life as an individual being, but, consciously or unconsciously, also that of his epoch and his contemporaries; and even if he should regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as absolutely given and self-evident, and be as far removed from the notion of criticizing them as good Hans Castorp in fact was, it is still entirely possible that he vaguely feels his moral well-being impaired by their defects. Before the individual man there may hover all manner of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects, from which he draws the impulse to high exertion and activity; but if the impersonal world about him, time itself, for all its outward bustle, is at bottom devoid of hopes and prospects, if it secretly reveals itself to him as hopeless, prospectless, and at a loss, and opposes to the consciously or unconsciously posed, yet somehow posed, question of a final, more-than-personal, unconditional meaning of all exertion and activity a hollow silence, then in cases of more honest humanity a certain paralyzing effect of such a state of things will be almost unavoidable, an effect that may extend by way of the psychic and moral directly to the physical and organic part of the individual. To be disposed for significant achievement, achievement exceeding the measure of what is simply required, without the age's knowing a satisfying answer to the question What for? demands either a moral solitude and immediacy, rare and of a heroic nature, or a very robust vitality. Hans Castorp was neither the one nor the other, and so after all he was indeed mediocre, though in a highly honorable sense.

We have spoken here not only of the young man's inner attitude during his school years, but also of the years that followed, when he had already chosen his bourgeois profession. As for his progress through the forms, he had even to repeat one or another of them. On the whole, however, his birth, the urbanity of his manners, and finally a pleasing though passionless gift for mathematics helped him forward; and when he had obtained the certificate for one year's service, he decided to stay the course at school - chiefly, to tell the truth, because in that way a habitual, provisional, and undecided condition was prolonged and time gained for reflecting on what Hans Castorp would most like to become, for for a long time he did not really know, did not know it even in the top form, and when at last it was decided (to say that _he_ had decided would almost already be saying too much), he was well aware that it might just as easily have been decided otherwise.

But this much at least was true, that ships had always given him great pleasure. As a little boy he had filled the pages of his copybooks with pencil drawings of fishing cutters, vegetable barges, and five-masted ships, and when at the age of fifteen he had been allowed, from a privileged place, to watch the new twin-screw mail steamer "Hansa" slide from the ways at Blohm & Voß, he executed in watercolors a good likeness of the slender vessel, exact far into the details, which Consul Tienappel hung in his private office, and in which especially the transparent glass-green of the rolling sea was handled so lovingly and skillfully that someone said to Consul Tienappel that there was talent in it, and a good marine painter might come of it - a remark which the Consul could calmly repeat to his ward, since Hans Castorp merely laughed good-naturedly at it and would not for an instant give himself over to extravagances and starveling notions.

"You haven't much," his uncle Tienappel would sometimes say to him. "My money will one day go, in the main, to James and Peter, that is, it stays in the business, and Peter draws his annuity. What belongs to you is invested well enough and brings you in something safe. But to live on interest is no joke nowadays unless one has at least five times as much as you, and if you want to cut a figure here in the city and live as you're used to, then you must earn a proper amount besides, you had better mark that, my son."

Hans Castorp took note of it and looked about for a profession with which he could hold his own before himself and the world. And once he had chosen - it happened at the suggestion of old Wilms, of the firm Tunder & Wilms, who at the Saturday whist-table at Consul Tienappel's said Hans Castorp ought to study shipbuilding, that was an idea, and enter his firm, then he would keep an eye on the boy - he thought very highly of his profession and found that it was indeed a damned complicated and strenuous profession, but for that very reason an excellent, important, and grand one, and for his peaceable person at any rate far preferable to that of his cousin Ziemssen, the son of the step-sister of his blessed mother, who was absolutely determined to become an officer. Yet Joachim Ziemssen was not even entirely sound in the chest; but precisely for that reason an outdoor profession, in which mental work and exertion could scarcely be seriously spoken of, was perhaps just the right thing for him, as Hans Castorp judged with light disdain. For he had the very greatest respect for work, although work itself easily tired him.

Here we return to our earlier hints, which were aimed at the supposition that injuries done to personal life by the age might be capable of influencing the physical organism of man outright. How could Hans Castorp have failed to respect work? It would have been unnatural. Given the state of things, it was bound to appear to him the one thing unconditionally worthy of respect; in truth there was nothing worthy of respect besides it; it was the principle by which one stood or failed to stand, the absolute of the age, it answered, so to speak, for itself. His respect for it was therefore of a religious and, so far as he knew, indubitable nature. But another question was whether he loved it; for that he could not do, much as he respected it, and for the simple reason that it did not agree with him. Strenuous work tugged at his nerves, it soon exhausted him, and he frankly admitted that what he really loved much more was free time, the unburdened time from which the leaden weights of toil did not hang, the time that would have lain open before one, not parcelled out by obstacles to be overcome with clenched teeth. Strictly speaking, this conflict in his relation to work would require resolution. Was it perhaps the case that his body no less than his mind - first the mind, and through it the body as well - would have been more gladly and more lastingly willing to work if, in the depths of his soul, there where he himself had no knowledge, he had been able to believe in work as an unconditional value and a self-answering principle and so to find rest in it? In this way the question of his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity is raised once again, and we do not mean to answer it categorically. For we do not consider ourselves Hans Castorp's panegyrists, and we leave room for the supposition that in his life work simply stood somewhat in the way of the unclouded enjoyment of Maria Mancini. -

For military service, on his side, he was not called up. His inner nature resisted it and knew how to prevent it. It may also well have been that Staff Surgeon Dr. Eberding, who frequented Harvestehuder Weg, had heard from Consul Tienappel in conversation that the young Castorp would see in the compulsion to arm himself a painful disturbance of his studies, just begun away from home.

His mind, which worked slowly and placidly, especially as Hans Castorp kept up away from home as well the soothing habit of a breakfast of port, filled itself with analytic geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, projection theory, and graphic statics; he calculated loaded and unloaded displacement, stability, shift of trim, and metacentre, though at times it cost him an effort. His technical drawings, these frame, waterline, and longitudinal plans, were not quite so good as his painterly rendering of the "Hansa" on the high seas; but wherever it was a matter of supporting intellectual visualization by sensuous means, of washing in shadows and laying out cross-sections in lively material colors, Hans Castorp surpassed most of the others in deftness.

When he came home in the vacations, very clean, very well dressed, with a small reddish-blond moustache in his drowsy young patrician face and plainly on the way to considerable positions in life, people who concerned themselves with municipal matters and were well informed also in questions of family and personal relations - and most people are in a self-governing city-state - looked at him searchingly, asking themselves into what public role the young Castorp would one day grow. He had traditions behind him, his name was old and good, and one day, it could hardly fail, one would have to reckon with his person as a political factor. Then he would sit in the Assembly or the Citizens' Committee and make laws, would share, in an honorary capacity, in the cares of sovereignty, belong to some administrative department, perhaps the finance deputation or that for public works, and his voice would be heard and counted. One might well be curious to know how the young Castorp would one day declare himself. Outward appearances might deceive, but in truth he looked exactly as one _did not_ look when the democrats could count on one, and the resemblance to his grandfather was unmistakable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a drag, a conservative element? That was possible enough - and just as possible its opposite. For after all he was an engineer, an aspiring master shipbuilder, a man of world traffic and technology. In that case Hans Castorp might go over to the radicals, become a daredevil, a profane destroyer of old buildings and landscape beauties, as unbound as a Jew and as irreverent as an American, inclined to prefer a ruthless break with venerable tradition to a deliberate development of the natural conditions of life and to plunge the state into reckless experiments - that too was conceivable. Would he have it in the blood that Their Wisdoms, before whom the double sentry at the town hall presented arms, knew best in all things, or would he be minded to support the opposition in the Assembly? In his blue eyes beneath the reddish-blond brows no answer to such questions of civic curiosity was to be read, and indeed Hans Castorp, this blank page, knew none as yet himself.

When he set out upon the journey on which we came upon him, he was in his twenty-third year. By that time he had behind him four semesters of study at the Danzig Polytechnic and four more, which he had spent at the technical colleges of Brunswick and Karlsruhe; he had recently come through his first principal examination without brilliance or orchestral flourish, but with very decent propriety, and was preparing to enter Tunder & Wilms as an engineering probationer, in order to receive his practical training in the shipyard. At this point, however, his path was for the present to take the following turn.

For the principal examination he had had to work hard and continuously, and when he came home he did after all look more worn than suited his type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him, and prescribed a change of air, that is to say, a thorough one. Norderney or Wyk on Föhr would not do this time, he said, and if one asked him, Hans Castorp ought, before going to the shipyard, to spend a few weeks in the high mountains.

That was all very well, Consul Tienappel said to his nephew and foster-son, but this summer their ways diverged, for not four horses would get him, Consul Tienappel, into the high mountains. They were nothing for him; he required a sensible air pressure, otherwise he had attacks. Hans Castorp might kindly travel alone to the high mountains. He should go and visit Joachim Ziemßen.

That was a natural suggestion. For Joachim Ziemßen was ill, not ill in Hans Castorp's way, but ill in a truly serious fashion; indeed, it had been a great alarm. He had always been prone to catarrh and fever, and then one day there had actually been bloody sputum as well, and Joachim had had to rush off to Davos, to his greatest grief and distress, for he had just reached the goal of his desires. For a few semesters, in obedience to the wishes of his family, he had studied jurisprudence; but from an irresistible inner urge he had changed course and applied as an officer cadet, and had already been accepted. And now for more than five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium "Berghof" (supervising physician: Hofrat Dr. Behrens), bored half to death, as he wrote on postcards. If, then, Hans Castorp meant to do at least this little thing for himself before taking up his post at Tunder & Wilms, nothing could be more obvious than that he too should travel up there to keep his poor cousin company; for both parties it was the pleasantest arrangement.

It had become high summer when he resolved upon the journey. The last days of July were already there.

He went for three weeks.