The Magic Mountain — Chapter 6

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What is time? A mystery, bodiless and almighty. A condition of the phenomenal world, a motion coupled and commingled with the existence of bodies in space and with their motion. But would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion if there were no time? Ask away! Is time a function of space? Or the reverse? Or are the two identical? By all means ask! Time is active, it has a verbal character, it "brings forth." And what does it bring forth? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between the two there lies motion. But since the motion by which one measures time is cyclical, enclosed within itself, that is a motion and a change which one might almost as well call rest and stillness; for the Then perpetually repeats itself in the Now, the There in the Here. Since, moreover, finite time and limited space cannot be imagined even with the most desperate effort, men have resolved to "think" time and space as eternal and infinite, plainly in the opinion that if this cannot be managed very well, it can at least be managed somewhat better. But does not the positing of the eternal and infinite mean the logical and arithmetical annihilation of all that is limited and finite, its relative reduction to zero? Is succession possible in the eternal, coexistence in the infinite? How are such notions as distance, motion, change, or even the mere existence of limited bodies in the universe, to be reconciled with the emergency assumptions of the eternal and the infinite? Do but go on asking that!

Hans Castorp asked himself such and similar questions in his mind, which had shown itself disposed to just such indiscretions and naggings from the very moment of his arrival up here, and had perhaps been specially sharpened for them, and made bold to cavil, by a wicked but mighty delight for which he had since paid. He put such questions to himself, and to good Joachim, and to the valley thickly snow-covered since time immemorial, although from none of these quarters had he anything resembling an answer to expect, hard to say from which least of all. He put them to himself precisely because he knew no answer to them. Joachim, on his part, was hardly to be won at all to share in such matters, since, as Hans Castorp had once said in French of an evening, he thought of nothing save being a soldier in the flatlands, and with the hope of this, now drawing near, now teasingly dwindling away into the distance again, he was engaged in a struggle that had by now grown bitter, a struggle which lately he had shown himself inclined to end by a coup de force. Yes, good, patient, upright Joachim, so wholly framed for service and discipline, was subject to rebellious impulses; he rose against the "Gaffky scale," that system of examination according to which, down in the laboratory, or the "lab," as people generally said, the degree was ascertained and designated in which a patient was afflicted with bacilli: whether these were found only quite singly or in uncountable masses in the material under analysis determined the height of the Gaffky number, and that was the whole point. For with complete infallibility it expressed the chance of recovery on which its bearer had to reckon; the number of months or years a person would still have to remain could readily be determined from it, beginning with the six-month flying visit and rising to the dictum "life sentence," which, taken in terms of time, often enough in turn meant only too little. It was against the Gaffky scale, then, that Joachim rebelled; openly he renounced belief in its authority, not _quite_ openly, not exactly before the superiors, but certainly before his cousin and even at table. "I've had enough; I won't let them make a fool of me any longer," he said aloud, and the blood rose into his deeply browned face. "A fortnight ago I was Gaffky No. 2, a trifle, the best prospects, and today No. 9, positively overpopulated, and no more talk of the flatlands. Let the devil make sense of that, how one stands; it's intolerable. Up on Schatzalp there's a man, a Greek peasant, they sent him there from Arcadia, an agent sent him, a hopeless case, galloping, they may expect the exitus any day, and yet the man has never in his life had bacilli in his sputum. While the fat Belgian captain who left cured when I arrived had been Gaffky No. 10, it fairly swarmed in his case, and all the while he had only a very small cavity. Gaffky may go to the devil! I'm putting an end to it, I'm travelling home, even if it is my death!" So Joachim spoke; and all were painfully dismayed to see the gentle, composed young man in such turmoil. Hans Castorp could not help thinking, at Joachim's threat that he would throw everything up and depart for the flatlands, of certain remarks he had heard in French from a third person. But he kept silent; for was he to hold up his own patience to his cousin as a model, as Frau Stöhr did, who actually admonished Joachim not to rebel so blasphemously, but to submit himself in humility and take an example from the fidelity with which she, Karoline, endured up here and by force of will denied herself the privilege of ruling and managing as housewife in her home at Cannstatt, in order one day to restore to her husband, in her own person, a wife wholly and thoroughly recovered? No, Hans Castorp could not bring himself to do that, the less so as since the carnival feast he had had a bad conscience before Joachim; that is to say, his conscience told him Joachim was bound to see in that matter of which they did not speak, though Joachim undoubtedly knew of it, something like betrayal, desertion, and faithlessness, and that with regard to a pair of round brown eyes, a laughter lightly grounded, and an orange perfume, to whose effects he was exposed five times daily, but before whom he sternly and decently cast down his eyes upon his plate... Yes, even in the quiet resistance with which Joachim met his speculations and aspects concerning "time," Hans Castorp thought he could feel something of that military decorum which contained a reproach for his conscience. As for the valley, however, the thickly snow-covered winter valley, to which Hans Castorp likewise addressed his supersensuous questions from his excellent rest chair, its jagged ridges, domes, wall-lines, and brown-green-reddish woods stood silent in time, enwoven by the softly flowing time of earth, now shining in deep heavenly blue, now veiled in vapour, now glowing reddish aloft beneath the departing sun, now glittering diamond-hard in the enchantment of moonlit night, but always in snow, for six inconceivably long months, though they had flitted by; and all the guests declared they could not bear the sight of the snow any longer, that it disgusted them, that even the summer had sufficiently satisfied their requirements in that direction, but now snow-masses day in, day out, snow-heaps, snow-cushions, snow-slopes, it went beyond human endurance, it was murder for mind and soul. And they put on coloured glasses, green, yellow, and red, partly indeed to spare their eyes, but still more for the sake of their hearts.

Valley and mountains in snow for six months already? For seven! Time advances while we narrate, our time, which we devote to this narrative, but also the deeply bygone time of Hans Castorp and his companions in destiny up there in the snow, and it brings forth changes. Everything was well on the way to coming true, as Hans Castorp had anticipated it in hasty words on Shrovetide, on the homeward way from "Platz," to Herr Settembrini's annoyance: not that the solstice was already in immediate prospect, but Easter had passed through the white valley, April advanced, the view toward Whitsuntide lay open, soon spring would break, the melting of the snow; not all the snow would melt, to be sure, for there was always some lying on the summits in the south, in the rocky clefts of the Rhaetikon chain in the north, not to speak of that which would fall even in the summer months, though it would not remain lying there; yet beyond all doubt the revolution of the year promised decisive novelties within a short time, for since that carnival night on which Hans Castorp had borrowed a pencil from Frau Chauchat, later returned it to her again, and at her wish received something else in exchange, a keepsake which he carried in his pocket, six weeks had now already gone by, twice as many as Hans Castorp had originally intended to remain up here.

Six weeks had in fact elapsed since the evening on which Hans Castorp had made Clawdia Chauchat's acquaintance and then returned to his room so much later than duty-devout Joachim to his; six weeks since the following day, which had brought Frau Chauchat's departure, her departure for this time, her _temporary_ departure for Daghestan, far to the east beyond the Caucasus. That this departure was of a provisional kind, only a departure for the present, that Frau Chauchat intended to return, indefinite when, but that one day she wished, or even must, come back, of that Hans Castorp possessed assurances, direct and oral, which had not fallen within the foreign-language dialogue already related, and thus belonged to that interval, wordless on our side, during which we interrupted the time-bound flow of our narration and let pure time alone hold sway. At all events the young man had received those assurances and consoling promises before he returned to No. 34; for on the following day he exchanged not a word more with Frau Chauchat, scarcely saw her, saw her twice from a distance: at luncheon, when, in a blue cloth skirt and white wool jacket, amid the crash of the glass door and sweetly gliding, she had gone once more to table, while his heart had beaten in his throat and only the sharp surveillance which Fräulein Engelhart directed upon him had prevented him from covering his face with his hands; and then at three in the afternoon, at her departure, which he had not exactly attended, but had watched from a corridor window commanding a view of the drive.

The proceeding had taken place as Hans Castorp had already many times seen it take place during his stay up here: the sledge or carriage stopped at the ramp, coachman and porter unlashed the trunks, sanatorium guests, friends of the person who, cured or not, to live or to die, was setting out on the return journey to the flatlands, or else merely such as shirked duty in order to let the event work upon them, gathered before the portal; a gentleman in a frock coat from the administration, perhaps even the doctors, put in an appearance, and then the departing person came out, generally with radiant face and graciously greeting the curious standers-by and those left behind, powerfully enlivened for the moment by the adventure... This time it had been Frau Chauchat who came out, smiling, her arm full of flowers, in a long rough travelling coat trimmed with fur and a large hat, accompanied by Herr Buligin, her concave compatriot, who was to travel part of the way with her. She too seemed joyfully excited, as every departing guest was, simply by the change in life, quite independently of whether one travelled with the doctors' consent or, out of desperate surfeit, interrupted one's stay at one's own risk and with a bad conscience. Her cheeks were flushed, she chatted incessantly, probably in Russian, while they wrapped her knees in a fur rug... Not only Frau Chauchat's fellow-countrymen and table companions, but many other guests as well had been present; Dr. Krokowski, smiling with hearty solidity, had shown his yellow teeth in his beard; there had been still more flowers; the great-aunt had dispensed sweetmeats, "little confects," as she was wont to say, that is, Russian jam; the schoolmistress had stood there, the man from Mannheim too, the latter at some distance, peering gloomily, and his sorrowful eyes had glided up the house, where they had perceived Hans Castorp at the corridor window and rested gloomily on him... Hofrat Behrens had not shown himself; plainly he had already taken leave of the traveller on some other, private occasion... Then, amid the waving and calling of those standing round, the horses had started, and Frau Chauchat's slanting eyes had now, while the forward motion of the sledge caused her upper body to sink back against the cushion, once more smilingly skimmed over the front of the Berghof house and, for a fraction of a second, rested on Hans Castorp's face... Pale, the one left behind had hurried to his room, to his loggia, in order to see the sledge once again from there, as it glided jingling down the approach road toward "Dorf"; then he had thrown himself into his chair and drawn from his breast pocket the keepsake, the token which this time did not consist of brownish-red wood shavings, but of a thinly framed little plate, a glass slide, which had to be held to the light for one to find anything in it, Clawdia's inner portrait, without a face, but showing the delicate bones of her upper body, surrounded in luminous and ghostly fashion by the soft forms of the flesh, together with the organs of the chest cavity...

How often he had looked at it and pressed it to his lips in the time that had elapsed since then and had brought forth change! It had brought about, for example, a growing accustomed to life up here in the spatially far-removed absence of Clawdia Chauchat, and that more quickly than one might have supposed: time up here was peculiarly constituted for bringing forth habituation, and was in addition organized for that very purpose, even if only the habituation to not becoming habituated. The clattering report at the beginning of the five overmastering meals was no longer to be expected and no longer took place; elsewhere now, at an immense distance, Frau Chauchat was slamming doors, a manifestation of being which was mingled and bound up with her existence, her illness, in somewhat the same way as time is with bodies in space: perhaps _that_ was her illness, and nothing more... But though invisible-absent, she was at the same time invisible-present to Hans Castorp's inward sense, the Genius of the place, whom, in an evil hour sweet with extravagance, in an hour to which no peaceful little song of the flatlands was suited, he had recognized and possessed, and whose inward shadow-image he bore upon his heart, so violently taxed these nine months.

In that hour his twitching mouth, in a foreign language and in his native one, had stammered, half unconsciously and half stifledly, many a transgressive thing: proposals, offers, mad designs and resolves of will, to which all approval had rightly and properly been denied; such as that he wished to accompany the Genius beyond the Caucasus, to follow after it, to await it in the place which the free-ranging caprice of the Genius should choose for its next domicile, in order never again to part from it, and other irresponsibilities besides. What the simple young man had carried away from this hour of deep adventure was simply the shadow-token and the possibility, approaching the rank of the probable, that Frau Chauchat would return hither for a fourth stay, sooner or later, as the illness that gave her freedom should ordain. But whether sooner or later, Hans Castorp, so the words had gone again at parting, would by then in any case be "long since far away"; and the disparaging purport of this prophecy would have been still harder to endure if one could not reflect that certain things are not prophesied in order that they may come to pass, but in order that they may _not_ come to pass, in the nature, as it were, of an incantation. Prophets of this sort mock the future by telling it how it will shape itself, so that it may be ashamed actually to shape itself so. And if the Genius, in the course of the conversation related and outside it, had called him, Hans Castorp, a "_joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide_," which had been something like the translation of Settembrini's phrase about the "problem child of life," then the question simply was which element of that mixture of being would prove the stronger: the bourgeois or the other... Nor had the Genius taken into account that it had itself repeatedly departed and returned, and that Hans Castorp too would be able to return at the right moment, though of course he was in fact still sitting up here only so that he might _not_ need to come back: that, expressly, as with so many others, was the sense of his remaining.

_One_ mocking prophecy from the carnival evening had come true: Hans Castorp had had a bad fever line; in a steep jag, which he had drawn with a feeling of festivity, his curve had then climbed and, after sinking somewhat, had run on as a high plateau which, only lightly undulating, held itself permanently above the level of what had hitherto been usual. It was an elevated temperature whose height and obstinacy, according to the Hofrat's statement, bore no proper relation to the local condition. "You are simply more poisoned than one would have thought possible in your case, my young friend," he said. "Well now, let us take to injections! That will tell on you. In three or four months you'll be like a fish in water, if the undersigned has his way." Thus it came about that Hans Castorp now had twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday immediately after the morning exercise, to present himself down below in the "laboratory" in order to receive his injection.

Both doctors administered this remedy, now one, now the other, but the Hofrat did it like a virtuoso, with a flourish, depressing the plunger at the very instant of the puncture. Besides, he paid no attention to the spot where he stuck the needle, so that the pain was sometimes the very devil and the place remained for a long time burning and hard. The injection also acted with great violence upon the organism as a whole, shook the nervous system like some feat of athletic force, and that testified to the power inherent in it, a power that showed itself likewise in the fact that it even raised the temperature immediately, for the moment: so the Hofrat had foretold, and so it duly happened, according to rule and with nothing to object to in the foretold phenomenon. The procedure was quickly over once one's turn had come; in the twinkling of an eye one had one's antidote under the skin, whether of thigh or arm. Yet a few times, when the Hofrat happened to be in a good humour and not clouded by tobacco, the occasion of the injection did lead to a little conversation with him, which Hans Castorp knew how to steer approximately as follows:

"I still think with pleasure of that cosy coffee hour we had with you, Herr Hofrat, that time last year in the autumn, when it all came about so accidentally. Only yesterday, or is it a little longer ago already, I reminded my cousin of it..."

"Gaffky seven," said the Hofrat. "Latest result. The boy simply won't detoxify himself. And yet he has never worried and plagued me as he has lately, wanting to be off and to have a sabre at his side, the young idiot. He rails to me about his five quarter-years as though they were aeons he had had to knock about his ears. He wants to go, one way or another, does he say the same to you too? You ought to speak to his conscience, from your side, and with emphasis! That fine fellow will go to the dogs on you if he prematurely swallows your cosy little fog up there on the right. A fellow who eats iron need not have much brains, but you, as the steadier one, the civilian, the man of bourgeois cultivation, you ought to set his head straight before he does something foolish."

"I do, Herr Hofrat," answered Hans Castorp, without letting go the lead. "I do it often enough when he turns mutinous, and I think too that he will listen to reason. But the examples one has before one's eyes are not always the best, that is what is harmful. Departures keep occurring, departures to the flatlands, self-authorized and without true permission, but it is a festivity as though it were a genuine departure, and there is something seductive in it for weaker characters. For example, the other day... who was it that left the other day? A lady from the Good Russian table, Madame Chauchat. For Daghestan, as people said. Well, Daghestan, I do not know the climate; in the end it may be less unfavourable than up by the water. But it is still flatland in our sense, even if it may be mountainous, geographically speaking; I am not so well up in such matters. How is one to live there, uncured, where the fundamental notions are lacking and nobody knows anything of our order up here and how things are to be managed with lying down and taking one's temperature? Besides, she means to come back anyway, she told me as much on one occasion, -- how did we come to speak of her at all? -- Yes, that time we met you in the garden, Herr Hofrat, if you remember, that is, you met us, for we were sitting on a bench, I still know exactly which one, I could point it out to you, the bench where we sat and smoked. That is to say, I smoked, for my cousin incomprehensibly does not smoke. And you were smoking too just then, and we exchanged our brands with each other, as only this moment comes back to me again, -- your Brasil pleased me extraordinarily well, but one has to handle it as one does young horses, I think, otherwise something may happen to one, as it did to you then after the two little imports, when with heaving bosom you wanted to dance away, -- since it turned out well, one may laugh. As for Maria Mancini, by the way, I had another few hundred sent up to me from Bremen only the other day; I am very much attached to that product, it is sympathetic to me in every respect. Only to be sure, the rise in price through duty and postage is rather painful, and if next time you lay anything considerable more upon me, Herr Hofrat, I may be driven in the end to convert to one of the local weeds, -- one sees some quite handsome things in the windows. And then we were allowed to see your pictures; I remember it as though it were today and had the greatest enjoyment from it, -- I was positively perplexed by what you venture with oil-paint, I should never dare it. There too we saw Frau Chauchat's portrait with its first-rate painted skin, -- I may surely say that I was enthusiastic. At that time I did not yet know the model personally, only by sight and by name. Since then, shortly before her departure this time, I have made her personal acquaintance."

"What you tell me!" returned the Hofrat, in the same way, if the backward reference be permitted, as he had returned when Hans Castorp, before his first examination, informed him that he too had a bit of fever. And he said nothing further.

"Indeed, yes, I have," Hans Castorp confirmed. "Experience shows that it is not so easy to make acquaintances up here, but with Frau Chauchat and me it did come about and arrange itself at the very last moment; in conversation we became..." Hans Castorp drew in his breath between his teeth. He had received the injection. "Fff!" he went, recoiling. "That was certainly a highly important nerve you happened to hit there, Herr Hofrat. Oh yes, yes, it hurts infernally. Thank you, a little massage improves the matter... In conversation we drew closer together."

"So! -- Well?" said the Hofrat. He asked it with a nod, with the expression of a man who expects a very laudatory answer and in the question itself at the same time places, out of his own experience, the confirmation of the praise to be expected.

"I assume my French was somewhat defective," Hans Castorp evaded. "Where should I have got it from, after all? But at the right moment any number of things fly to one, and so the understanding went fairly passably after all."

"I dare say. Well?" repeated the Hofrat in invitation. On his own part he added: "Pretty, eh?"

Hans Castorp, buttoning his shirt-collar, stood with feet apart and elbows out, his face turned toward the ceiling.

"It is perhaps nothing new," he said. "At a spa two persons, or even families, live for weeks under the same roof, at a distance from one another. One day they make one another's acquaintance, take a sincere liking to one another, and at the same time it appears that one party is on the point of departure. That sort of regret occurs frequently, I can well imagine. And then one would at least like to keep contact in life, to hear of one another, that is, by post. But Frau Chauchat..."

"Well then, she wouldn't hear of it?" laughed the Hofrat good-humouredly.

"No, she would hear nothing of it. Does she never write to you either, in between, from the places where she stays?"

"Lord preserve us," answered Behrens. "Why, that would never occur to her. In the first place not out of laziness, and then, how is she to write? I cannot read Russian, -- I jabber it a bit when necessity compels, but read, I cannot read a word. Nor can you either. Well, and in French or even in Modern High German the little cat mews most charmingly, but write, -- that would throw her into the greatest embarrassment. The orthography, my dear friend! No, there we must console ourselves, my boy. She always comes back again, from time to time. A question of technique, a matter of temperament, as I said. One man stages a departure now and then and has always to come back again, and another simply stays so long at one stretch that he never needs to come back. If your cousin leaves now, you just tell him this from me, then it may very well happen that you are still here to witness his solemn re-entry."

"But Herr Hofrat, how long do you think that I..."

"That you? That he! That he will not stay down below as long as he has been up here. That is what I mean for my own honest-hearted person, and that is my commission to you for him, if you will be so kind."

Something of this sort, shrewdly steered by Hans Castorp, might well such a conversation run, even if the result had been trifling to ambiguous. For so far as the question was concerned how long one must stay in order to live to see the return of someone who had departed before his time, it had been ambiguous, but in regard to the vanished woman it had amounted to precisely zero. Hans Castorp would hear nothing from her so long as the mystery of space and time separated them; she would not write, and no opportunity would be given to him either to do so... Why indeed, moreover, should it have been otherwise, if he considered it properly? Had it not been a downright bourgeois and pedantic notion of his that they must write to one another, when once upon a time he had felt as though it were not even necessary, or only desirable, that they should _speak_ together? And had he, for his own part, in fact _spoken_ with her, in the sense of the cultivated West, at her side on the carnival evening, or had he not rather talked in a foreign tongue as in a dream, in little civilized fashion? Why then write now, on letter-paper or postcards, such as he sometimes addressed home to the flatlands in order to report the fluctuations in the findings of his examinations? Was Clawdia not right to feel absolved from writing, by virtue of the freedom that illness gave her? Speaking, writing, -- an eminently humanistic-republican affair indeed, the affair of Brunetto Latini, who wrote the book on virtues and vices and gave the Florentines polish, teaching them speech and the art of guiding their republic by the rules of politics...

Thereby Hans Castorp's thoughts turned to Lodovico Settembrini, and he blushed as he had blushed then, when the writer had unexpectedly entered his sickroom, suddenly flooding it with light. To Herr Settembrini too Hans Castorp might have addressed his questions concerning those riddles beyond sense, though only in a spirit of challenge and teasing, not in the expectation of receiving from the humanist, whose striving was directed toward the earthly interests of life, an answer to them. But since the carnival sociability and Settembrini's agitated departure from the piano-salon, an estrangement had prevailed between Hans Castorp and the Italian, traceable to the bad conscience of the one and the other's deep pedagogic vexation, and working to the effect that they avoided each other and for weeks exchanged not a word between them. Was Hans Castorp still a "problem child of life" in Herr Settembrini's eyes? No, he was probably one given up, in the eyes of that man who sought morality in reason and virtue... And Hans Castorp hardened himself against Herr Settembrini; he drew his brows together and thrust out his lips when they met, while Herr Settembrini's black, gleaming glance rested on him in silent reproach. Yet this obduracy dissolved at once when the man of letters, after weeks, as has been said, for the first time addressed a word to him again, even if only in passing and in the form of mythological allusions, to understand which belonged to Occidental cultivation. It was after dinner; they met at the glass door which no longer slammed shut. Settembrini said, overtaking the young man and already from the outset minded to detach himself from him again at once:

"Well, engineer, how did the pomegranate taste?"

Hans Castorp smiled, delighted and confused.

"That is... What do you mean, Herr Settembrini? Pomegranate? There wasn't any, was there? Never in my life have I... Yes, once I drank pomegranate juice with Selters. It tasted rather too sweet."

The Italian, already past him, turned his head back and articulated:

"Gods and mortals have at times visited the kingdom of shades and found the way back. But those beneath know that whoever tastes of the fruits of their realm remains forfeit to them."

And he went on in his eternally light-checkered trousers, and left behind him Hans Castorp, who was meant to be "pierced through" by so much significance and in a certain sense indeed was so, although, irritably amused by the demand that he should be, he murmured to himself:

"Latini, Carducci, Ratzi-Mausi-Falli, leave me in peace!"

All the same, he was very happily stirred by this first address; for despite the trophy, the macabre keepsake that he carried upon his heart, he was attached to Herr Settembrini, set great value on his existence, and the thought of being wholly and forever rejected and abandoned by him would after all have been more burdensome and terrible for his soul than that schoolboy feeling of no longer counting at school and enjoying the advantages of disgrace, after Herr Albin's fashion... Yet he did not dare, for his own part, to address a word to the mentor, and the latter again let weeks go by before he once more approached the charge of his concern.

That happened when, on the sea-waves of time rolling shoreward in eternally monotonous rhythm, Easter had been driven up and was celebrated at the Berghof, as there they punctiliously celebrated all stages and divisions, in order to avoid an undifferentiated monotony. At first breakfast every guest found beside his place-setting a little bunch of violets; at second breakfast everyone received a dyed egg, and the festive midday table was adorned with little hares of sugar and chocolate.

“Have you ever made a sea voyage, Tenente, or you, Engineer?” asked Herr Settembrini, when, after dinner, he stepped up to the cousins' little table in the hall with his toothpick … Like the majority of the guests, they were curtailing the principal rest cure today by a quarter of an hour, having settled down here over a coffee with cognac. “These little rabbits, these coloured eggs, remind me of life aboard some great steamer, with an empty horizon for weeks on end, in a salt wilderness, under circumstances whose perfect comfort lets one forget their monstrousness only on the surface, while in the deeper regions of the mind the consciousness of it gnaws softly on as a secret horror … I recognize again the spirit in which, aboard such an ark, one reverently marks the festivals of the _terraferma_. It is the commemoration practised by those outside the world, sentimental recollection according to the calendar … On the mainland it would be Easter today, would it not? On the mainland one keeps the King's birthday today — and we keep it as well, as best we can, we too are human beings … Is it not so?”

The cousins assented. Truly, so it was. Hans Castorp, touched by being addressed and spurred on by a bad conscience, praised the observation in the loftiest terms, found it witty, excellent, and worthy of an author, and echoed Herr Settembrini with all his might. Certainly, only on the surface, precisely as Herr Settembrini had so vividly put it, did the comfort aboard an ocean steamer allow one to forget the circumstances and their hazardousness, and there lay, if he might add so much on his own account, even a certain frivolity and provocation in this consummate comfort, something akin to what the ancients would have called hybris (he even quoted the ancients, out of a desire to please), or something on the order of “I am the King of Babylon!” — in short, something sacrilegious. On the other hand, however, the luxury on board did also involve (“involve”!) a great triumph of the human spirit and of human honour — in carrying this luxury and comfort out upon the salt foam and boldly maintaining it there, man set his foot, as it were, upon the neck of the elements, of the wild powers, and that involved the victory of human civilization over chaos, if he might use that expression on his own account …

Herr Settembrini listened to him attentively, his feet crossed and his arms crossed as well, stroking his curled moustache in a dainty manner with the toothpick.

“It is remarkable,” he said. “A man makes not one even moderately collected utterance of a general nature without betraying himself entirely, without unawares putting his whole self into it, without somehow setting forth in a parable the fundamental theme and primal problem of his life. That is what has just happened to you, Engineer. What you said there came in fact from the very ground of your personality, and it expressed in poetic fashion the temporal condition of that personality as well: it is still the condition of the experiment …”

“_Placet experiri!_” said Hans Castorp, nodding and laughing, with an Italian _c_.

“_Sicuro_ — if what is at issue is the respectable passion for the testing of the world and not dissoluteness. You spoke of ‘hybris’, you availed yourself of that expression. But the hybris of reason against the dark powers is the highest humanity, and if it calls down upon itself the vengeance of envious gods, _per esempio_ in that the ark of luxury founders and goes down perpendicularly into the depths, then that is a going-under with honour. The deed of Prometheus, too, was hybris, and his torment upon the Scythian rock counts with us as the holiest martyrdom. How, on the other hand, does it stand with that other hybris, with the going-under in the wanton experiment with the powers of unreason and of enmity toward the human race? Has that honour? Can that have honour? _Sì o no!_”

Hans Castorp stirred in his little cup, although there was nothing left in it.

“Engineer, Engineer,” said the Italian, nodding his head, and his black eyes had ‘fixed themselves’ in a musing stare, “do you not fear the whirlwind of the second circle of hell, which buffets and flings about the sinners of the flesh, the wretched ones who sacrificed reason to pleasure? _Gran Dio_, when I picture to myself how you will go fluttering about, blown head over heels, I could fall for grief as a dead body falls …”

They laughed, glad that he was jesting and talking poetry. But Settembrini added:

“On the evening of Carnival, over the wine, you remember, Engineer, you took leave of me, in a manner of speaking — yes, it was something of that sort. Well, today it is _my_ turn. As you see me here, gentlemen, I am on the point of bidding you farewell. I am leaving this house.”

Both were astonished in the highest degree.

“Impossible! That is only a joke!” cried Hans Castorp, as he had cried on another occasion too. He was almost as startled as then. But Settembrini likewise replied:

“Not in the least. It is as I tell you. And besides, this news does not take you unprepared. I explained to you that at the moment when my hope of being able to return within any foreseeable time to the world of work should prove untenable, I was resolved to strike my tents here and to establish myself somewhere in the locality for good. Well, what would you — that moment has arrived. I cannot recover, that is settled. I can eke out my life, but only here. The sentence, the definitive sentence, reads: for life — with the good humour peculiar to him, Hofrat Behrens announced it to me. Very well then, I draw the conclusions. A lodging has been rented, I am on the point of conveying thither my scanty earthly goods, my literary tools of the trade … It is not even far from here, in ‘Dorf’; we shall meet, certainly, I shall not lose sight of you, but as a fellow inmate of the house I have the honour to take my leave of you.”

Such was Settembrini's disclosure on Easter Sunday. The cousins had shown themselves extraordinarily moved by it. At length, and repeatedly, they had spoken with the man of letters about his decision: about how he would be able to carry on the cure routine privately as well; about the removal and further prosecution of the extensive encyclopaedic labour he had taken upon himself, that survey of all the masterpieces of belles-lettres from the point of view of the conflicts of suffering and their elimination; and finally about his future quarters in the house of a ‘spice dealer’, as Herr Settembrini expressed it. The spice dealer, he reported, had let the upper part of his property to a Bohemian ladies' tailor, who for his part took in subtenants … These conversations, then, lay behind them. Time moved on, and it had already brought forth more than one change. Settembrini really was no longer living in the international sanatorium ‘Berghof’, but with Lukaček, the ladies' tailor — for some weeks already. His removal had not taken the form of a departure by sleigh; rather, on foot, in a short yellow paletot trimmed a little with fur at the collar and cuffs, and accompanied by a man who conveyed the writer's literary and earthly hand luggage upon a wheelbarrow, he had been seen going off, swinging his stick, after pinching the cheek of a waitress under the portal with the backs of two fingers … April, as we said, already lay for a good part, for three quarters, in the shadow of the past; it was still deep winter, to be sure, in the room one had a bare six degrees of warmth in the morning, outside there were nine degrees of frost, the ink in its glass, if one left it out in the loggia, still froze overnight into a lump of ice, a piece of coal. But spring was approaching, one knew that; by day, when the sun shone, one already sensed here and there a very faint, very delicate intimation of it in the air; the period of the thaw was in near prospect, and with it were bound up the changes that were carrying themselves out unstoppably at ‘Berghof’ — not to be stopped even by the authority, the living word of the Hofrat, who in room and hall, at every examination, every round, every meal, combated the popular prejudice against the thaw.

Was it winter sportsmen he had to do with, he asked, or sick people, patients? What in all the world did they want with snow, with frozen snow? An unfavourable season — the thaw? It was the very most favourable! It was demonstrable that in the whole valley there were at this time relatively fewer bedridden cases than at any other point in the year! Everywhere in the wide world the weather conditions for lung patients were at this period worse than precisely here! Whoever had a spark of sense held out and made use of the hardening effect of the local weather conditions. Thereafter he would be proof against cut and thrust, immune to every climate in the world, provided only that the full accomplishment of the cure had been awaited — and so forth. But the Hofrat might talk as he liked — the prejudice against the thaw sat firm in people's heads; the resort emptied; it might well be that it was the approaching spring that rumbled in people's bodies and made settled folk restless and greedy for change — at any rate the ‘wild’ and ‘irregular’ departures multiplied at the house Berghof too, to an alarming degree. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, for example, despite the pleasure that the examinations and the display of the finest lace underlinen connected with them afforded her, departed in an entirely wild and irregular manner, without any permission, and not because she was better, but because she was steadily getting worse. Her sojourn up here went back far behind Hans Castorp's arrival; more than a year had passed since she had come — with a quite slight affection, for which three months had been dictated to her. After four months she was to be ‘certainly well in four weeks’, but six weeks later there could be no talk of a cure at all: she must, it was said, remain at least four months more. So it had gone on, and after all this was no penal colony and no Siberian mine — Frau Salomon had remained and had brought the finest undergarments to light. But now, when after the last examination, in the face of the thaw, she had received a new addition of five months, on account of a whistling in the upper left and unmistakable discords beneath the left armpit, her patience snapped, and with protest, amid abuse of ‘Dorf’ and ‘Platz’, of the famous air, of the international house Berghof and of the doctors, she departed, home, to Amsterdam, a draughty city of water.

Was that wisely done? Hofrat Behrens raised his shoulders and his arms and let the latter fall back noisily against his thighs. By autumn at the latest, he said, Frau Salomon would be here again — but then for good. Would he prove right? We shall see; we are bound to this pleasure spot for a good stretch of earthly time yet. But the Salomon case was by no means the only one of its kind. Time brought forth changes — it had always done so, of course, but more gradually, less strikingly. The dining hall showed gaps, gaps at all seven tables, at the Good Russian table as at the Bad, at those standing lengthwise as at those standing crosswise. Not exactly that this gave a reliable picture of the frequenting of the house; arrivals too had taken place, as at all times; the rooms might well be occupied, but in that case it was a question of guests whose freedom of movement was restricted by a final condition. In the dining hall, as we said, many a one was missing thanks to freedom of movement still subsisting; but many a one was missing in a particularly deep and hollow way, like Dr. Blumenkohl, who was dead. His face had taken on ever more strongly the expression of a man with something ill-tasting in his mouth; then he had become permanently bedridden, and then he had died — nobody could say exactly when; the matter had been handled with all the customary consideration and discretion. A gap. Frau Stöhr sat beside the gap, and she had a horror of it. She therefore removed to young Ziemßen's other side, to the place of Miss Robinson, who had been discharged as cured, opposite the schoolmistress, Hans Castorp's neighbour on the left, who had remained firmly at her post. She sat quite alone at present on that side of the table; the other three places were free. Student Rasmussen, who had grown duller and slacker by the day, was bedridden and passed for moribund; and the great-aunt had gone away for a while with her niece and the high-bosomed Marusja — we say ‘gone away for a while’, as everyone said, because their return in the near future was a settled thing. By autumn they would arrive again — was that to be called a departure? How near was midsummer, once Whitsuntide, which stood at the door, had passed; and when the longest day came, then it went rapidly downhill, toward winter — in short, the great-aunt and Marusja were as good as back already, and that was well, for the laughter-loving Marusja was by no means cured and cleared of poison; the schoolmistress knew something of tubercular ulcers that brown-eyed Marusja was said to have upon her opulent breast, and which had already had to be operated on several times. Hans Castorp, when the schoolmistress spoke of it, had glanced hastily at Joachim, who had bent his face, gone blotched, over his plate.

The lively great-aunt had given her table companions, that is, the cousins, the schoolmistress and Frau Stöhr, a farewell supper in the restaurant, a banquet with caviar, champagne and liqueurs, at which Joachim had kept very quiet, indeed had uttered only a word here and there in an almost toneless voice, so that the great-aunt in her benevolence had spoken encouragement to him and had in doing so, setting aside the civilized laws of manners, even called him ‘thou’. “It's nothing, little father, don't take it to heart, but drink, eat and talk, we shall soon be back again!” she had said. “Let us all eat, drink and chatter and let grief be grief; God will let autumn come before we have thought of it, judge for yourself whether there is cause for sorrow!” The next morning she had distributed coloured boxes of ‘sweetmeats’ as a keepsake to almost all the frequenters of the dining hall, and had then gone away for a while with her two young girls.

And Joachim, how did it stand with him? Was he set free and relieved since then, or did his soul suffer a heavy privation at the sight of the empty side of the table? Was his unwonted and rebellious impatience, his threat of taking a wild departure if he were led by the nose any longer, connected with Marusja's departure? Or was rather the fact that for the present, after all, he was not yet travelling, but lending his ear to the Hofrat's glorification of the thaw, to be traced back to that other fact, that the high-bosomed Marusja had not seriously departed, but had only gone away for a while, and would arrive again within five of the smallest partial units of the time reckoned here? Ah, all of it was probably the case at once, all of it in equal measure; Hans Castorp could imagine as much, even without ever speaking to Joachim about the matter. For from that he abstained just as strictly as Joachim avoided naming the name of another who had also gone away for a while.

Meanwhile, however, at Settembrini’s table, in the Italian’s place—who had lately been sitting there, in the company of Dutch guests whose appetites were so prodigious that, at the beginning of the daily five-course dinner, even before the soup, each of them had three fried eggs served to him? It was Anton Karlowitsch Ferge, the very man who had undergone the infernal adventure of pleural shock! Yes, Herr Ferge was out of bed; even without a pneumothorax his condition had improved so greatly that he spent the greater part of the day up and dressed, and took part in the meals with his good-natured, billowing moustache and his large Adam’s apple, which likewise produced an impression of good nature. The cousins sometimes chatted with him in the dining-room and hall, and now and again, when chance so arranged it, they joined him on their prescribed walks, with affection in their hearts for this simple sufferer, who declared himself incapable of understanding anything lofty and, having made that clear, discoursed with the utmost ease upon the manufacture of rubber shoes and remote regions of the Russian Empire, Samara and Georgia, while they trudged through the slush of melting snow in the mist.

For the paths were truly scarcely passable now; they were in complete dissolution, and the mists seethed. The Hofrat did indeed say that they were not mists but clouds; yet in Hans Castorp’s judgment this was mere quibbling over words. Spring waged a hard struggle, which, with a hundred relapses into the bitterness of winter, extended through the months and into June. As early as March, when the sun shone, the heat on the balcony and in the deck-chair had been almost unbearable, despite the lightest clothing and a sunshade; and there were ladies who had already gone into summer then, displaying muslin dresses as early as first breakfast. They were excused to some degree by the peculiar climate up here, which encouraged confusion by meteorologically jumbling the seasons together; but their forwardness also involved much shortsightedness and lack of imagination, that stupidity of creatures of the moment who cannot conceive that things may yet turn otherwise, and, above all, a greed for change and a time-devouring impatience: the calendar said March, that was spring, that was as good as summer, and out came the muslin dresses, so that their owners might display themselves in them before autumn set in. And, in a manner of speaking, it did. April brought gloomy, wet-cold days whose unremitting rain turned to snow, to whirling fresh snow. Fingers stiffened in the loggia, the two camel-hair blankets returned to duty, one came near to resorting to the fur sack, the management resolved to turn on the heating, and everyone complained that they were being cheated of their spring. By the end of the month everything lay deep beneath the snow; but then the foehn arose, predicted and divined from the weather by experienced and sensitive guests: Frau Stöhr, the ivory-coloured Levi, and no less the widow Hessenfeld all felt it unanimously before even the smallest cloud appeared above the summit of the granite mountain to the south. Frau Hessenfeld at once developed a tendency to fits of weeping, Levi took to her bed, and Frau Stöhr, stubbornly baring her rabbit teeth, announced every hour her superstitious fear that she might suffer a pulmonary haemorrhage; for it was said that the foehn promoted and produced such things. Incredible warmth prevailed, the heating went out, the balcony door was left open overnight, and yet in the morning the room stood at eleven degrees; the snow melted mightily, becoming ice-coloured, porous, and riddled with holes, subsiding wherever it lay in heaps, seeming to creep into the earth. Everywhere there was a seeping, oozing, and trickling, a dripping and plunging in the woods; and the shovelled barriers along the roads, the pale carpets of the meadows, disappeared, although the masses had lain too abundantly to vanish quickly. Then there were wondrous apparitions, surprises of spring along the prescribed routes in the valley, fabulous and never seen before. An expanse of meadow lay there—in the background rose the cone of the Schwarzhorn, still entirely covered in snow, with the Scaletta Glacier, likewise still deep in snow, close by on the right; and the ground with its hay-barn somewhere upon it still lay beneath snow as well, though the covering was already thin and sparse, broken here and there by rough, dark elevations of earth and pierced everywhere by dry grass. Yet the walkers found the manner in which this meadow was covered in snow somewhat irregular—in the distance, towards the wooded slopes, it was denser, but in the foreground, directly before their examining eyes, the grass, still winter-dry and discoloured, was merely speckled, dabbed, flowered with snow.... They looked more closely; they bent over it in wonder—that was not snow, it was flowers, snow-flowers, flower-snow, little short-stemmed calyxes, white and bluish-white; it was crocus, upon their honour, sprung in millions from the seeping meadow-ground, so thickly that it might easily have been taken for snow, into which, farther on, it did indeed merge indistinguishably.

They laughed at their error, laughed for joy at the miracle before their eyes, at this sweetly timid and imitative adaptation of organic life as it first ventured forth again. They picked some, contemplated and examined the delicate cup-shaped structures, adorned their buttonholes with them, carried them home, and placed them in the water glasses in their rooms; for the inorganic rigidity of the valley had lasted long—long, though never tedious.

But the flower-snow was covered with real snow, and the same fate befell the blue soldanellas and the yellow and red primroses that followed it. Indeed, how hard spring had to struggle to break through and overcome the winter up here! Ten times it was thrown back before it could gain a foothold—until the next incursion of winter, with white flurries, an icy wind, and the heating once more in operation. At the beginning of May (for it has actually become May already while we were telling of the snow-flowers), at the beginning of May it was sheer torment merely to write a postcard to the flatlands in the loggia, so painfully did one’s fingers ache in the raw November damp; and the region’s five and a half deciduous trees were as bare as the trees of the plains in January. The rain lasted for days, came pouring down for a week; and without the conciliatory qualities of the type of deck-chair used up here, it would have been exceedingly hard to spend so many hours of rest in the open air, amid the reek of cloud, with one’s face wet and rigid. Secretly, however, it was spring rain, and the longer it lasted, the more plainly it revealed itself as such. Almost all the snow melted away beneath it; there was no white left, only here and there a dirty ice-grey, and now the meadows truly began to turn green!

What a mild benefaction to the eye was the green of the meadows after the endless white! And there was another green as well, far surpassing even the green of the new grass in delicacy and lovely softness. These were the young clusters of larch needles—Hans Castorp could seldom refrain, on his prescribed walks, from caressing them with his hand and stroking his cheek with them, so irresistibly lovely were they in their softness and freshness. “One might become a botanist,” the young man said to his companion; “one might truly and sincerely acquire a taste for that science, merely from delight in nature’s reawakening after a winter with us up here! Why, that is gentian, man, what you see there on the slope, and this here is a certain variety of little yellow violet, unknown to me. But here we have buttercups; they look no different down below, of course—from the family Ranunculaceae, double-flowered, as I notice, a particularly charming plant, hermaphroditic, incidentally; you see there a multitude of stamens and a number of ovaries, an androecium and a gynoecium, so far as I remember. I firmly believe I shall acquire one or two botanical tomes in order to inform myself a little better in this field of life and knowledge. Yes, how colourful the world is becoming now!”

“It becomes better still in June,” Joachim said. “The flowering of the meadows here is famous, you know. But I do not think I shall wait for it.—You got the idea of studying botany from Krokowski, I suppose?”

Krokowski? What did he mean by that? Ah yes, he had thought of it because Dr. Krokowski had lately conducted himself botanically at one of his lectures. For anyone who supposed that the changes brought forth by time had gone so far that Dr. Krokowski no longer gave lectures would certainly have been mistaken! He gave them fortnightly, as before, in his frock coat, though no longer in sandals, which he wore only in summer and would accordingly soon be wearing again—every second Monday in the dining-room, just as he had when Hans Castorp, smeared with blood, arrived late during his first days. For three quarters of a year the analyst had spoken of love and illness—never very much at once, but in small portions, in conversational discourses lasting from half to three quarters of an hour, he spread out his treasures of knowledge and thought, and everyone received the impression that he would never need to stop, that it might continue thus for ever and ever. It was a kind of fortnightly “Thousand and One Nights,” spinning itself out from one occasion to the next into the indefinite, and well suited, like Scheherazade’s tales, to appease an inquisitive prince and deter him from acts of violence. In its boundlessness Dr. Krokowski’s theme recalled the enterprise to which Settembrini had lent his collaboration, the Encyclopaedia of Suffering; and how capable it was of variation may be gathered from the fact that the lecturer had recently spoken even of botany—or, more precisely, of fungi.... Incidentally, he may have altered his subject a little; the discussion now concerned love and _death_, rather, which afforded occasion for many observations, some of a delicately poetic, others of an inexorably scientific stamp. It was in this connection, then, that the scholar, in his drawling Eastern cadence and with his lingual r struck only once, had arrived at botany—that is, at fungi, those luxuriant and fantastic creatures of shadow belonging to organic life, carnal by nature and standing very close to the animal kingdom—for products of animal metabolism, protein, glycogen, animal starch, that is, were found in their composition. And Dr. Krokowski had spoken of a fungus famous since classical antiquity for its form and for the powers attributed to it—a morel whose Latin name contained the epithet _impudicus_, and whose shape recalled love, but whose smell recalled death. For, remarkably enough, it was the odour of a corpse that the _Impudicus_ emitted when the greenish, viscous slime that covered its bell-shaped cap and bore its spores dripped away. Yet among the uninstructed the fungus was still regarded as an aphrodisiac to this day.

Well, that had been a little strong for the ladies, in the opinion of Public Prosecutor Paravant, who, morally sustained by the Hofrat’s propaganda, was remaining here throughout the snow-melt. And Frau Stöhr, who likewise held out with fortitude and confronted every temptation towards a wild departure, had remarked at table that Krokowski had really been “obscure” that day with his classical fungus. “Obscure,” said the unfortunate woman, disgracing her illness with unspeakable blunders of education. What surprised Hans Castorp, however, was Joachim’s allusion to Dr. Krokowski and his botany; for as a rule the analyst was no more discussed between them than the person of Clawdia Chauchat or that of Marusja—they did not mention him, preferring to pass over his being and activity in silence. But now Joachim had named the assistant—and in an ill-tempered tone, just as his observation that he did not intend to wait for the meadows to attain their full bloom had also sounded decidedly ill-tempered. Good Joachim seemed by now on the point of losing his equilibrium; his voice quivered with irritation when he spoke, and in gentleness and composure he was no longer at all his former self. Did he miss the perfume of oranges? Was the mockery involving the Gaffky number driving him to despair? Could he not come to terms with himself as to whether he should wait for autumn here or make a false departure?

In reality it was something else again that imparted this irritated trembling to Joachim’s voice and had caused him to mention the recent botanical lecture in an almost derisive tone. Hans Castorp knew nothing of this something—or rather, he did not know that Joachim knew of it, for he himself, this truant, this problem child of life and pedagogy, knew only too well about it. In a word, Joachim had discovered certain practices of his cousin’s; he had unexpectedly overheard him in an act of betrayal, similar to the one of which he had been guilty on Shrove Tuesday—a new breach of faith, aggravated by the circumstance, which admitted of no doubt, that Hans Castorp was committing it continually.

To the eternally monotonous rhythm of passing time, to the divertingly fixed articulation of the normal day, which was always the same, so like itself as to be indistinguishable and bewildering, identical with itself, a standing eternity, so that it was difficult to comprehend how it could bring forth change—to the inviolable order of everyday life, then, belonged, as everyone will recall, Dr. Krokowski’s rounds between half past three and four in the afternoon through all the rooms, that is, along all the balconies, from deck-chair to deck-chair. How often had the normal Berghof day renewed itself since that time when Hans Castorp, in his horizontal mode of life, had been vexed because the assistant described an arc around him and took no notice of him! The guest of those days had long since become a comrade—Dr. Krokowski even frequently addressed him by that name during his inspection round; and though the military word, whose r he produced in exotic fashion by striking his tongue only once against the front of his palate, sat hideously upon him, as Hans Castorp had observed to Joachim, it nevertheless accorded not badly with his stocky, manfully cheerful manner, which invited one to cheerful confidence, though this in turn was to some extent belied by his dusky pallor and invariably retained something questionable about it.

“Well, comrade, how goes it, how fares it!” Dr. Krokowski said as, coming from the Russian barbarian pair, he stepped to the head of Hans Castorp’s couch; and the man addressed in so brisk a fashion, his hands folded upon his breast, smiled anew each day with tormented amiability at the hideous form of address while contemplating the doctor’s yellow teeth, which showed within his black beard. “Rested quite well?” Dr. Krokowski would then continue. “Curve falling? Rising today? Well, it signifies nothing; it will all be right again by your wedding day. I g-dreet you.” And with these words, which likewise sounded hideous, since this was how he pronounced “I greet you,” he passed on at once to Joachim—it was a round, a brief glance to see that all was in order, and nothing more.

Sometimes, however, Dr. Krokowski lingered longer, and, standing broad-shouldered and smiling with unfailing manliness, chatted with his comrade about this and that: the weather, departures and arrivals, the patient’s spirits, his good or bad humour, and occasionally his personal circumstances as well, his origins and prospects, until he said, “I g-dreet you,” and moved on; and Hans Castorp, his hands folded behind his head for a change, replied to all of it, likewise smiling—with a penetrating sense of its hideousness, certainly, but he replied. They spoke in subdued voices—although the glass partition did not entirely separate the loggias, Joachim could not understand the conversation next door and, moreover, made not the slightest attempt to do so. He even heard his cousin rise from the deck-chair and go into the room with Dr. Krokowski, presumably to show him his temperature chart; and there the conversation evidently continued for some considerable time, to judge by the delay with which the assistant reached Joachim by the inside route.

What did the comrades chat about? Joachim did not ask; but should anyone among us decline to follow his example and raise the question, we may point out in general how much material and occasion for intellectual exchange exists between men and comrades whose fundamental views bear the stamp of idealism, and of whom the one, in the course of his cultivation, has come to regard matter as the Fall of the spirit, as a malignant proliferative irritation of it, while the other, as a physician, is accustomed to teaching the secondary character of organic disease. How much, we think, might not be discussed and exchanged concerning matter as a dishonourable degeneration of the immaterial, life as the immodesty of matter, disease as an obscene form of life! With reference to current conferences, they might speak of love as a disease-engendering power, of the supersensual nature of the mark, of “old” and “fresh” spots, of soluble poisons and love-potions, of the transillumination of the unconscious, the blessings of the analysis of the soul, the reconversion of the symptom—and what do _we_ know, on whose part all these are merely suggestions and conjectures, whenever the question is raised as to what Dr. Krokowski and young Hans Castorp had to chat about together!

Besides, they no longer chatted; that lay in the past, it had been so only for a while, for a few weeks; of late Dr. Krokowski once again lingered no longer with this patient than with all the others—“Well, comrade?” and “I g’reet you,” to that the visit was now mostly confined once more. In return, Joachim had made another discovery, the very one he felt to be a betrayal on Hans Castorp’s part; and he had made it entirely by accident, without in his military guilelessness having gone upon the spy’s path in the least, of that one may be assured. Quite simply, one Wednesday he had been called away from the first rest cure and ordered down to the basement to be weighed by the bath attendant—and there he saw it. He came down the stairs, the cleanly linoleum-covered stairs overlooking the door of the consulting-room, on either side of which lay the transillumination cubicles, the organic one on the left and, round the corner on the right, the psychic one, sunk one step lower, with Dr. Krokowski’s visiting-card upon the door. Halfway down the stairs, however, Joachim stopped, for at that very moment Hans Castorp, coming from his injection, left the consulting-room. With both hands he closed the door through which he had swiftly passed and, without looking about him, turned to the right, towards the door upon which the card was fastened with drawing-pins and which he reached in a few noiseless, swaying steps. He knocked, bent down as he did so, and held his ear close to the knocking finger. And when the occupant’s baritone “Come in!”—with its exotically struck r and distorted diphthong—sounded from the chamber, Joachim saw his cousin disappear into the half-darkness of Dr. Krokowski’s analytical pit.

Someone Else

Long days, the longest, objectively speaking and with reference to the number of their hours of sunlight; for astronomical extension could do nothing to impair their diverting brevity, whether as concerned each one individually or their monotonous flight. The spring equinox lay almost three months behind them; the summer solstice was at hand. But the natural year with us up here followed the calendar reluctantly: only now, only in these last few days, had spring definitively arrived—a spring still without any of summer’s heaviness, fragrant, thin-aired and light, with a silvery-radiant blue of heaven and meadows blooming in childishly motley colours.

On the slopes Hans Castorp found again the same flowers of which Joachim had once kindly placed a few last specimens in his room to welcome him: yarrow and bellflowers—a sign to him that the year ran round within itself. But what an abundance of organic life had now formed itself out of the young emerald grass of the inclines and the broad meadowlands of the valley floor, as star, chalice, and bell, or in more irregular shapes, filling the sunny air with dry fragrance: sticky catchflies and wild pansies in whole masses, daisies, marguerites, primroses yellow and red, far lovelier and larger than Hans Castorp thought he had ever seen them in the flatlands, insofar as he had paid them any heed down there; and, in addition, the nodding soldanellas with their fringed little bells, blue, purple, and rosy, a speciality of this sphere.

He gathered some of all this loveliness and carried bouquets home, in a grave spirit and not so much to adorn his room as for the strictly scientific treatment he had resolved to undertake. A certain amount of floristic equipment had been procured: a textbook of general botany, a handy little spade for digging up plants, a herbarium, a powerful magnifying-glass; and with these the young man busied himself in his loggia—now dressed for summer once more, in one of the suits he had brought up with him at the very beginning—this too a token of the year’s rounding.

Fresh flowers stood in several tumblers of water upon the furniture in the inner room and upon the little lamp-table beside his excellent reclining-chair. Flowers half-withered, already drooping but still full of sap, lay loose upon the balcony parapet and scattered over the floor of the loggia, while others, carefully spread between sheets of blotting-paper that drank their moisture, lay beneath a press of stones, so that Hans Castorp might paste the flat, dried specimens into his album with gummed strips of paper. He lay with his knees drawn up and crossed one over the other, and while the spine of the open manual resting upon his chest formed a roof-ridge, he held the thick-ground circle of the magnifying-glass between his simple blue eyes and a blossom whose corolla he had partly removed with his pocketknife in order to study the receptacle more closely, and which swelled behind the powerful lens into a fantastically fleshy structure. There the anthers, at the tips of the filaments, discharged their yellow pollen; from the ovary projected the style with its stigma, and if one made a section through it, one could observe the delicate channel through which the pollen grains and tubes were swept by a sugary secretion into the cavity of the ovary. Hans Castorp counted, examined, and compared; he investigated the structure and disposition of sepals and petals as well as of the male and female sexual organs, checked the agreement between what he saw and schematic and natural illustrations, established with satisfaction the scientific correctness of the structure of plants familiar to him, and proceeded, with Linnaeus in hand, to classify those he would not have known how to name according to division, group, order, species, family, and genus. Since he had plenty of time, he made some progress in botanical systematics on the basis of comparative morphology. Beneath the dried plant in the herbarium he wrote calligraphically the Latin name which humanistic science had gallantly bestowed upon it, added its distinguishing characteristics, and showed it to good Joachim, who marvelled.

In the evening he contemplated the stars. An interest in the year revolving within itself had come over him—though he had already spent some twenty circuits of the sun upon earth and had never before concerned himself with such things. If we ourselves had involuntarily made use of expressions such as “spring equinox,” it was in his spirit and already with an eye to the present matter. For such were the terms he had lately taken pleasure in scattering about him; and by his knowledge in this field too he astonished his cousin.

“The sun is now on the point of entering the sign of Cancer,” he might begin during a walk. “Are you clear about that? It is the first summer sign of the zodiac, you understand? It now passes through Leo and Virgo towards the autumnal point, one of the equinoctial points, towards the end of September, when the sun’s place once more falls upon the celestial equator, as it did recently in March, when the sun entered the point of Aries.”

“That escaped me,” Joachim said morosely. “What is all this you are rattling off so fluently? Point of Aries? Zodiac?”

“Why, yes, the zodiac; _zodiacus_. The ancient signs of heaven—Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, _aquarius_, and whatever they are called; how could one fail to take an interest in them! There are twelve of them, as at least you will know, three for each season, the ascending and the descending signs, the circle of constellations through which the sun travels—magnificent, in my opinion! Imagine that they were found depicted upon the ceiling of an Egyptian temple—and a temple of Aphrodite at that, not far from Thebes. The Chaldeans already knew them too—the Chaldeans, mind you, that ancient race of magicians, Arab-Semitic, profoundly learned in astrology and divination. They too had already studied the girdle of heaven in which the planets move and divided it into the twelve constellation-signs, the Dodecatemoria, as they have come down to us. It is magnificent. It is humanity!”

“Now you say ‘humanity,’ like Settembrini.”

“Yes, like him, or somewhat differently. One must take it as it is, but it is magnificent all the same. I often think with sympathy of the Chaldeans when I lie there watching the planets, which they too already knew—not all of them, for all their cleverness. But the ones they did not know I cannot see either; Uranus was discovered by telescope only recently, a hundred and twenty years ago.”

“Recently?”

“I call that ‘recently,’ if you permit me, compared with the three thousand years back to their time. But when I lie there looking at the planets, those three thousand years become ‘recently’ too, and I think intimately of the Chaldeans, who saw them as well and made their verses about them; and that is humanity.”

“Very well; you certainly have grand designs in your head.”

“You say ‘grand,’ and I say ‘intimate’—call it what you will. But when the sun now enters Libra, in approximately three months, the days will once more have diminished so far that day and night are equal, and then they go on diminishing towards Christmas, as you know. But will you please consider that while the sun is passing through the winter signs, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces, the days are already growing longer again! For then the vernal point comes round once more, for the three-thousandth time since the Chaldeans, and the days continue to grow on into the next year, until summer begins again.”

“Of course.”

“No, it is a piece of Eulenspiegel foolery! In winter the days grow longer, and when the longest arrives, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, things are already going downhill again; they are growing shorter once more, and winter is approaching. You call that a matter of course, but once one disregards the fact that it is a matter of course, it can make one terribly afraid for a moment, and one would like to clutch convulsively at something. It is as though Eulenspiegel had arranged matters so that at the beginning of winter spring actually begins, and at the beginning of summer autumn actually begins.... One is being led by the nose, lured round and round in a circle by the prospect of something that is already another turning-point.... A turning-point in the circle. For the circle consists entirely of extensionless turning-points; its curvature is immeasurable, there is no duration of direction, and eternity is not ‘straight ahead, straight ahead,’ but ‘roundabout, roundabout.’”

“Stop it!”

“Solstice festival!” said Hans Castorp. “Summer solstice! Mountain fires and ring-a-ring-a-roses round the blazing flame, everyone holding hands! I have never seen it, but I hear that is how primitive people do it, how they celebrate the first summer night, with which autumn begins, the noonday hour and zenith of the year, from which the descent begins—they dance and turn and shout for joy. What do they shout for joy about in their primitiveness—can you make sense of it? What are they so wildly merry about? Because things are now going downhill into darkness, or perhaps because until now they were going uphill and the turn has come, the turning-point that cannot be held, Midsummer Night, the full height, with melancholy in its exuberance? I say it as it is, in the words that occur to me for it. It is melancholic exuberance and exuberant melancholy that make the primitive people shout and dance around the flame; they do it out of positive despair, if you care to put it so, in honour of the Eulenspiegel foolery of the circle and of eternity without duration of direction, in which everything returns.”

“I do not care to put it so,” Joachim murmured. “Please do not make me responsible for it. They are far-reaching matters with which you occupy yourself in the evenings while you lie there.”

“Yes, I will not deny that you occupy yourself more usefully with your Russian grammar. You will soon have to speak the language fluently, man; naturally that will be a great advantage to you if there is a war, which God forbid.”

“Forbid? You speak like a civilian. War is necessary. Without wars the world would soon rot, Moltke said.”

“Yes, it probably has a tendency that way. And this much I can concede to you,” Hans Castorp began, and was just about to return to the Chaldeans, who had likewise waged war and conquered Babylonia, although they had been Semites and therefore almost Jews—when both became aware at the same moment that two gentlemen walking directly ahead of them had turned their heads in their direction, alerted by their talk and disturbed in their own conversation.

It was on the main road, between the Kurhaus and the Hotel Belvedere, on the way back to Davos-Dorf. The valley lay in festive dress, in delicate, bright, and cheerful colours. The air was exquisite. A symphony of blithe meadow-flower fragrances filled the pure, dry atmosphere, lucidly flooded with sunlight.

They recognized Lodovico Settembrini at the side of a stranger; yet it seemed that he, for his part, did not recognize them, or wished to avoid an encounter, for he swiftly turned his head away again and, gesticulating, plunged into conversation with his companion, even trying to quicken his pace. When the cousins, to his right, greeted him with cheerful bows, however, he affected an air of wonderfully agreeable surprise, exclaiming “Sapristi!” and “The devil!”; but now he tried once more to hold back and let the two of them pass and go on ahead, which they did not understand—that is, did not notice, because they saw no sense in it. On the contrary, honestly delighted to meet him again after a lengthy separation, they remained beside him and shook his hand, asking after his welfare and meanwhile looking across at his companion in courteous expectation. Thus they compelled him to do what he would evidently rather not have done, but what appeared to them the most natural and expectable thing in the world: namely, to introduce them to the other gentleman—which accordingly took place while they walked and half paused, Settembrini bringing the gentlemen into relation with one another before his breast by means of linking gestures and jocular words, and causing them to extend their hands to one another.

It emerged that the stranger, who might have been of Settembrini’s age, was his housemate: Lukaček the ladies’ tailor’s other subtenant, Naphta by name, as far as the young men understood. He was a small, lean, clean-shaven man, of so sharp—one might say, so corrosive—an ugliness that the cousins were positively astonished. Everything about him was sharp: the curved nose that dominated his face, the narrow, compressed mouth, the thick-ground lenses of the otherwise lightly constructed spectacles he wore before his pale-grey eyes, and even the silence he maintained, from which it could be inferred that his speech would be sharp and rigorously logical. He was bareheaded, as was proper, and wore only a suit—though a very good one: his dark-blue flannel suit with white stripes displayed a fine, restrainedly fashionable cut, as the cousins’ worldly, appraising glance established; while they, for their part, encountered an equally appraising, though swifter and sharper, glance from the little Naphta, gliding down over their persons. Had Lodovico Settembrini not known how to wear his threadbare rough coat and checked trousers with so much grace and dignity, his appearance would have contrasted disadvantageously with such elegance. Yet it did so all the less because the checks had been freshly pressed, so that at first glance one might almost have taken them for new—his landlord’s handiwork, no doubt, the young men reflected in passing. But although the ugly Naphta, in the quality and worldliness of his attire, stood nearer to the cousins than to his housemate, it was not merely his more advanced years that placed him together with the latter in opposition to the young men, but decidedly something else as well, which might most conveniently be reduced to the complexions of the two pairs: namely, that the one pair was brown and sunburnt, the other pale. Joachim’s face had darkened to an even deeper bronze during the winter, and Hans Castorp’s glowed rosy-red beneath his fair crown; but the radiance had been unable to make any impression upon Herr Settembrini’s Latin pallor, which accorded most nobly with his black moustache, and his companion, though fair-haired—the hair, incidentally, was ash-blond, metallic and colourless, and he wore it smooth, brushed back from the receding brow across the whole of his head—likewise displayed the dull-white facial skin of the darker races. Two of the four carried walking-sticks, namely Hans Castorp and Settembrini; for military reasons Joachim went without one, while Naphta, once the introductions were over, immediately clasped his hands behind his back again. They were small and delicate, as were his very dainty feet, in keeping, indeed, with his figure. That he appeared to have a cold and coughed in a certain feeble and unproductive fashion attracted no notice.

Settembrini had immediately and elegantly overcome that touch of dismay or ill humour occasioned by the sight of the young men. He showed himself in the best of spirits and introduced the three with jocular flourishes—for example, he designated Naphta as “_Princeps scholasticorum_.” Gaiety, he said, “held its glittering court within the hall of his breast,” as Aretino had expressed it, and that was the doing of spring, a spring he could praise. The gentlemen knew that he had many grievances against the world up here, however often he had talked them off his chest. Honour, however, to spring in the high mountains!—for a time it could reconcile him to all the horrors of this sphere. Here there was none of the confusion and excitation of spring upon the plain. No seething in the depths! No moist fragrances, no sultry haze! Instead, clarity, dryness, serenity, and austere grace. It was after his own heart; it was superb!

They walked in an irregular line, all four abreast whenever possible; but now, when people approached from the opposite direction, Settembrini, who held the right wing, had to step into the roadway, and now their front temporarily dissolved as individual members fell back and moved in again—Naphta, perhaps, on the left, or Hans Castorp, who occupied the place between the humanist and Cousin Joachim. Naphta gave a short laugh in a voice muted by his cold, which when he spoke resembled the sound of a cracked plate tapped with the knuckle. Indicating the Italian with a sideways movement of his head, he said in his drawling accent:

“Listen to the Voltairian, the rationalist. He praises nature because, even on the most fertile occasion, she does not bewilder us with mystical vapours, but preserves a classical dryness. What was the Latin word for moisture again?”

“Humour,” Settembrini cried over his left shoulder, “the humour in our professor’s contemplation of nature consists in his thinking, like Saint Catherine of Siena, of Christ’s wounds whenever he sees red primroses.”

Naphta replied:

“That would be witty rather than humorous. But at least it would mean carrying spirit into nature. She needs it.”

“Nature,” Settembrini said in a lowered voice, no longer speaking wholly over his shoulder but merely down along it, “has no need whatever of your spirit. She is herself spirit.”

“Do you never grow bored with your monism?”

“Ah, so you admit that it is the pursuit of pleasure when you split the world into hostile halves, tearing God and nature asunder!”

“I am interested to hear you call the pursuit of pleasure what I have in mind when I speak of passion and spirit.”

“To think that you, who employ such grand words for such frivolous needs, should sometimes call me a rhetorician!”

“You persist in maintaining that spirit signifies frivolity. But it cannot help being dualistic by its very nature. Dualism, antithesis—that is the moving, passionate, dialectical, spirited principle. To see the world divided in hostility—that is spirit. All monism is tedious. _Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam._”

“Aristotle? Aristotle transferred the reality of universal ideas into individual things. That is pantheism.”

“False. If you grant individuals a substantial character, if you carry the essence of things forward from the universal into the particular phenomenon, as Thomas and Bonaventure did in their capacity as Aristotelians, then you have severed the world from every unity with the supreme Idea; it is outside God, and God is transcendent. That is the classical Middle Ages, my dear sir.”

“The classical Middle Ages is an exquisite combination of words!”

“I beg your pardon, but I permit the concept of the classical wherever it is in place—that is, wherever an idea reaches its culmination. Antiquity was not always classical. I perceive in you an aversion to the—freedom of movement among categories, to the absolute. Nor do you desire absolute spirit. You want spirit to mean democratic progress.”

“I trust we are united in the conviction that spirit, however absolute it may be, can never serve as the advocate of reaction.”

“Yet it is always the advocate of freedom!”

“Yet? Freedom is the law of human love, not nihilism and malice.”

“Of which you are plainly afraid.”

Settembrini flung an arm over his head. The skirmish broke off. Joachim looked from one to the other in astonishment, while Hans Castorp, his brows raised, gazed down at the path before him. Naphta had spoken sharply and apodictically, although it had been he who championed the more extensive freedom. Particularly disagreeable was his way of contradicting with “False!”—thrusting his lips forward on the sibilant and then pinching his mouth shut. Settembrini had opposed him partly in a more cheerful manner, partly with a noble warmth invested in his words, as when, for example, he had called for agreement upon certain fundamental convictions. Now, while Naphta remained silent, he began to explain the stranger’s existence to the cousins, thereby meeting the need for enlightenment which, after his exchange with Naphta, he presumed in them. The latter allowed this to happen without troubling himself about it. He was professor of the ancient languages in the highest forms of the Fridericianum, Settembrini explained, emphasizing, in the Italian fashion and as pompously as possible, the station of the man being introduced. His fate resembled his own, Settembrini’s. Brought up here five years ago by the state of his health, he had been forced to recognize that he required a lengthy stay, had left his sanatorium, and had established himself privately with Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor. The town’s higher educational institution had wisely secured the distinguished Latinist, a pupil of a school conducted by a religious order, as Settembrini expressed himself somewhat vaguely, as a teacher who did it honour... In short, Settembrini greatly exalted the ugly Naphta, although he had only just engaged in something like an abstract dispute with him, and although this contentious exchange was immediately to be resumed.

For Settembrini now proceeded to give Herr Naphta explanations concerning the cousins, in the course of which it emerged, incidentally, that he had already spoken of them to him. This, then, was the young engineer who had come for three weeks and in whom Hofrat Behrens had discovered a damp spot, he said; and here was that hope of the Prussian military establishment, Lieutenant Ziemßen. And he spoke of Joachim’s rebellion of the heart and his plans for departure, adding that one would doubtless be doing the engineer an injustice if one did not attribute to him the same impatience to return to work.

Naphta pulled a face. He said:

“The gentlemen have an eloquent guardian there. I shall take care not to doubt that he faithfully interprets your thoughts and wishes. Work, work—pray observe, in another moment he will revile me as an enemy of mankind, an _inimicus humanae naturae_, if I venture to recall times when this fanfare of his would by no means have produced its customary effect: namely, times when the opposite of his ideal was held in incomparably higher honour. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, taught a different gradation of perfection from any Herr Lodovico has ever dreamt of. Would you like to know what it was? Its lowest stage is situated in the ‘mill,’ the second in the ‘field,’ but the third and most praiseworthy—do not listen, Settembrini—‘upon the bed of repose.’ The mill is the emblem of worldly life—not badly chosen. The field signifies the soul of the secular man, upon which the preacher and spiritual teacher labours. That stage is already more worthy. But upon the bed—”

“Enough! We know!” cried Settembrini. “Gentlemen, he is now going to demonstrate to you the purpose and use of the wanton bed!”

“I did not know you were prudish, Lodovico. When one sees you winking at the girls... What has become of your pagan freedom from constraint? The bed, then, is the place where the lover joins with the beloved, and, as a symbol, it represents contemplative seclusion from the world and created things for the purpose of union with God.”

“Pah! _Andate, andate!_” the Italian protested, almost in tears. They laughed. But then Settembrini continued with dignity:

“Ah, no, I am a European, an Occidental. That hierarchy of yours is pure Orient. The East abhors activity. Lao-tse taught that doing nothing was more beneficial than anything beneath heaven and upon earth. Once all men had ceased to act, perfect tranquillity and blessedness would reign upon earth. There you have your union.”

“Indeed? And Western mysticism? And Quietism, which may count Fénelon among its adherents, and which taught that all action was erroneous, since to wish to act meant offending God, who alone willed to act? I am quoting the propositions of Molinos. It would seem, then, that the spiritual possibility of finding salvation in repose possesses universal human currency.”

Here Hans Castorp intervened. With the courage of simplicity, he joined the conversation and remarked, gazing into vacancy:

“Contemplation, seclusion. There is something to be said for them; the idea is worth hearing. We do, after all, live in a fairly advanced state of seclusion, we up here—that much may be said. Five thousand feet high, we lie upon our chairs, which are remarkably comfortable, and look down upon the world and created things and pursue our reflections. When I consider it, and if I am to tell the truth, the bed—I mean the reclining-chair, you understand—has advanced me further and given me more thoughts in ten months than the mill in the flatlands did in all those years; there is no denying it.”

Settembrini looked at him with mournfully gleaming black eyes. “Engineer,” he said in a strained voice, “Engineer!” And he took Hans Castorp by the arm and held him slightly back, as though to remonstrate with him privately behind the others’ backs.

“How often have I told you that a man should know what he is and think as befits him! The province of the Occidental, despite all propositions, is reason, analysis, action, and progress—not the monk’s sluggardly bed!”

Naphta had been listening. He called back over his shoulder:

“The monk’s! It is to the monks that we owe the cultivation of European soil! To them we owe it that Germany, France, and Italy are not covered with savage forest and primeval marshes, but bestow upon us grain, fruit, and wine! The monks, my dear sir, most certainly worked...”

“_Ebbè_, there you are, then!”

“If you please. The religious man’s work was neither an end in itself—that is to say, a narcotic—nor did its meaning lie in advancing the world or obtaining material advantages. It was a purely ascetic exercise, a component of penitential discipline, a means of salvation. It afforded protection against the flesh and served to mortify sensuality. Thus—it may be permitted me to establish the fact—it possessed an entirely unsocial character. It was religious egoism in its purest form.”

“I am greatly obliged to you for the enlightenment, and rejoice to see the blessing of work vindicate itself even against man’s will.”

“Yes, against his intention. What we perceive here is nothing less than the distinction between the useful and the humane.”

“What I perceive above all, and with displeasure, is that you are once again engaged in splitting the world asunder.”

“I regret having incurred your displeasure, but one must distinguish and order things, and keep the idea of the _Homo Dei_ free from impure constituents. You Italians invented money-changing and banking; may God forgive you for it. But the English invented the economistic doctrine of society, and for that the genius of man will never forgive them.”

“Ah, the genius of humanity was alive in the great economic thinkers of those islands as well!—You wished to speak, Engineer?”

Hans Castorp denied it, yet spoke nevertheless—and both Naphta and Settembrini listened to him with a certain expectancy:

“In that case you must approve of my cousin’s profession, Herr Naphta, and sympathize with his impatience to take it up ... I myself am a civilian through and through; my cousin often reproaches me for it. I never even served, and am quite decidedly a child of peace, and have sometimes thought that I might very well have become a clergyman—ask my cousin, I have expressed something of the sort on several occasions. But if I set my personal inclinations aside—and perhaps, strictly speaking, I need not set them entirely aside after all—I have a great deal of sympathy with, and understanding for, the military estate. There is something devilishly serious about it, something ‘ascetic,’ if you will—you were so kind as to use that expression in some connection a little while ago—and it must always reckon with the possibility of having to do with death—which, in the last resort, is also what the clerical estate has to do with; what else, indeed? Hence the military estate has _bienséance_ and hierarchy and obedience and Spanish honour, if I may call it that; and it makes very little difference whether a man wears a stiff uniform collar or a starched ruff, for it comes to the same thing, to the ‘ascetic,’ as you put it so admirably just now ... I do not know whether I am succeeding in making my train of thought clear to you ...”

“Oh yes, indeed,” Naphta said, casting a glance across at Settembrini, who was twirling his cane and contemplating the sky.

“And that is why I think,” Hans Castorp continued, “that my cousin Ziemßen’s inclinations must appeal to you, after all you have said. I am not thinking of ‘Throne and Altar’ and such alliances, by which certain people—people who simply love order and are merely well-disposed—sometimes justify the connection. Rather, I am thinking of the fact that the work of the military estate, that is to say, its service—for in this case one speaks of service—is performed absolutely without regard to commercial advantage and has no connection whatever with the ‘economistic doctrine of society,’ as you called it; which is also why the English have so few soldiers, a few for India and a few at home for parades ...”

“There is no purpose in your continuing, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “The military existence—I say this without wishing to offend our lieutenant—is intellectually beyond discussion, for it is purely formal, in itself devoid of content; the fundamental type of the soldier is the mercenary who allowed himself to be hired for this cause or for that—in short, there was the soldier of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, the soldier of the revolutionary armies, Napoleon’s soldier, Garibaldi’s, and there is the Prussian soldier. Let me speak of the soldier when I know _what_ he is fighting for!”

“_That_ he fights,” Naphta replied, “remains, at all events, a tangible peculiarity of his estate; let us grant it that much. It may not suffice to make that estate ‘intellectually discussable’ in your sense, but it places him within a sphere into which bourgeois affirmation of life is forbidden every glimpse.”

“What you are pleased to call bourgeois affirmation of life,” Herr Settembrini retorted with the foremost part of his lips, while the corners of his mouth beneath the sweeping moustache drew tautly apart and his neck, in a most peculiar fashion, screwed itself obliquely and jerkily out of his collar, “will always be found ready to champion the ideas of reason and morality, and their rightful influence upon young and wavering souls, in whatever form may be required.”

A silence followed. The young men stared ahead in dismay. After a few steps Settembrini, having restored his head and neck to their natural position, said:

“You must not be surprised; this gentleman and I quarrel often, but it is done in all friendship and upon the basis of many points of agreement.”

That was reassuring. It was chivalrous and humane of Herr Settembrini. But Joachim, who likewise meant well and intended to carry on the conversation harmlessly, nevertheless said, as though under some pressure and compulsion, and almost against his will:

“As it happens, my cousin and I were speaking of war just now, while we were walking behind you.”

“I heard you,” Naphta replied. “I caught the word and looked round. Were you discussing politics? Debating the state of the world?”

“Oh, no,” Hans Castorp laughed. “How should we ever come to do that! For my cousin here, it would be positively improper on professional grounds to concern himself with politics, and I abstain of my own free will; I understand nothing whatever about it. Since I have been up here, I have not so much as held a newspaper in my hand ...”

Settembrini found this reprehensible, as he had once before. He immediately showed himself excellently informed about the larger situation, and judged it favourably insofar as events were taking a course beneficial to civilization. The general atmosphere of Europe, he said, was filled with thoughts of peace and plans for disarmament. The democratic idea was on the march. He declared that he possessed confidential information to the effect that the Young Turk movement was at that very moment completing its preparations for revolutionary undertakings. Turkey as a national and constitutional state—what a triumph for humanity!

“The liberalization of Islam,” Naphta mocked. “Excellent. Enlightened fanaticism—very good. This concerns you, by the way,” he said, turning to Joachim. “If Abdul Hamid falls, your influence in Turkey is at an end, and England will set itself up as protector ... You must by all means take our Settembrini’s connections and information seriously,” he said to the two cousins; and this, too, sounded impertinent, since he appeared to suppose them inclined not to take Herr Settembrini seriously. “He is well versed in matters of national revolution. At home, they maintain excellent relations with the English Balkan Committee. But what will become of the Reval agreements, Lodovico, if your progressive Turks succeed? Edward the Seventh will no longer be able to concede the opening of the Dardanelles to the Russians, and if Austria nevertheless bestirs itself to pursue an active Balkan policy, then ...”

“Your prophecies of catastrophe!” Settembrini protested. “Nicholas loves peace. We owe him the Hague Conferences, which remain moral facts of the first rank.”

“Why, Russia was obliged to allow herself a little recuperation after her minor mishap in the East!”

“For shame, my dear sir. You should not mock humanity’s longing for its social perfection. The nation that thwarts such endeavours will unquestionably expose itself to moral ostracism.”

“What else is politics for, if not to give one another opportunities for moral self-compromise!”

“You subscribe to Pan-Germanism?”

Naphta shrugged his shoulders, which did not stand at quite the same height. In fact, he was probably somewhat crooked, in addition to his other ugliness. He disdained to answer. Settembrini pronounced judgment:

“In any event, what you say is cynical. In democracy’s magnanimous efforts to establish itself internationally, you choose to see nothing but political cunning ...”

“You presumably expect me to see idealism in them, or even religious devotion? What we are dealing with are the last feeble stirrings of what remains of the instinct of self-preservation still possessed by a condemned world-system. The catastrophe is ordained and must come; it comes by every road and in every fashion. Consider British statecraft. England’s need to secure the Indian glacis is legitimate. But the consequences? Edward knows as well as you and I that the rulers in Petersburg must make good the Manchurian defeat and need a diversion for the revolution as urgently as their daily bread. Nevertheless, he directs—no doubt he must!—the Russian urge for expansion towards Europe, awakens the dormant rivalries between Petersburg and Vienna—”

“Ah, Vienna! You are concerned for that obstacle to the world, presumably because in the decaying empire of which it is the capital you discern the mummy of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation!”

“And I find you Russophile, presumably out of humanistic sympathy with Caesaropapism.”

“My dear sir, democracy has more to hope for even from the Kremlin than from the Hofburg, and it is a disgrace to the land of Luther and Gutenberg—”

“It is probably a folly as well. But even this folly is an instrument of fatality—”

“Oh, spare me your fatality! Human reason need only _will_ itself stronger than fatality, and stronger it _is_!”

“It is always destiny alone that is willed. Capitalist Europe wills its own.”

“One believes in the coming of war only when one does not abhor it sufficiently!”

“Your abhorrence is logically abrupt so long as you do not make it begin with the state itself.”

“The national state is the principle of this world, which you would like to ascribe to the Devil. But make the nations free and equal, protect the small and weak from oppression, create justice, create national frontiers ...”

“The Brenner frontier, I know. The liquidation of Austria. If only I knew how you intend to accomplish it without war!”

“And I should truly like to know when I ever condemned national war.”

“Surely I hear—”

“No, I must confirm Herr Settembrini’s statement,” Hans Castorp interposed in the dispute, which he had followed as they walked, attentively regarding each successive speaker from the side with his head inclined. “My cousin and I have several times had the privilege of conversing with him about these and similar matters—that is, of course, it amounted to our listening while he developed his opinions and made everything clear. And I can confirm, and my cousin here will also remember, that Herr Settembrini spoke more than once, and with great enthusiasm, of the principle of movement and rebellion and the improvement of the world—which is not in itself an altogether peaceful principle, I should say—and that great exertions still lay before this principle before it could have triumphed everywhere and the universal happy world-republic could come into being. Those were his words, though naturally they were far more vivid and literary than mine; that goes without saying. But what I know quite exactly and have retained word for word, because as a dyed-in-the-wool civilian I was actually somewhat alarmed by it, was that he said this day would come, if not on doves’ feet, then upon eagles’ wings (it was the eagles’ wings that alarmed me, as I recall), and that Vienna must be struck down if happiness was to be set upon its way. So one cannot say that Herr Settembrini rejected war altogether. Am I right, Herr Settembrini?”

“More or less,” the Italian said curtly, swinging his cane with his head averted.

“Very bad,” Naphta said with an ugly smile. “There you stand convicted of warlike inclinations by your own pupil. _Assument pennas ut aquilae ..._”

“Voltaire himself approved of war for civilization and advised Frederick the Second to wage war against the Turks.”

“Instead, he allied himself with them, heh, heh. And then the world-republic! I shall refrain from inquiring what becomes of the principle of movement and rebellion once happiness and union have been established. At that moment rebellion would become a crime ...”

“You know very well, and these young gentlemen know it too, that what is meant is a progress of humanity conceived as infinite.”

“But all motion is circular,” Hans Castorp said. “In space and in time; the laws of the conservation of mass and of periodicity teach us so. My cousin and I were speaking of it just now. Can there be any question of progress in a closed motion without permanence of direction? When I lie there in the evening and contemplate the Zodiac—that is, the half of it that can be seen—and think of the wise peoples of antiquity ...”

“You should not brood and dream, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him, “but resolutely entrust yourself to the instincts of your years and your race, which must impel you to action. Your scientific education, too, must bind you to the idea of progress. Across immeasurable spans of time you see life advancing and evolving upward from the infusorian to man; you cannot doubt that infinite possibilities of perfection still lie open to mankind. But if you insist upon mathematics, then conduct your cycle from perfection to perfection and refresh yourself with the doctrine of our eighteenth century: that man was originally good, happy, and perfect; that only the errors of society disfigured and corrupted him; and that by means of critical labour upon the social edifice he is to become, and will become, good, happy, and perfect once more—”

“Herr Settembrini neglects to add,” Naphta interposed, “that the Rousseauistic idyll is a rationalistic distortion of the Church’s doctrine concerning man’s original statelessness and sinlessness, his primal immediacy to God and divine sonship, to which he is destined to return. But the restoration of the City of God, after the dissolution of all earthly forms, lies at the point where earth and heaven, the sensuous and the supersensuous, touch; salvation is transcendent, and as for your capitalist world republic, my dear Doctor, it is decidedly curious to hear you speaking of ‘instinct’ in this connection. The instinctive is altogether on the side of the national principle, and God Himself implanted in men the natural instinct that prompted the peoples to separate themselves from one another into different states. War…”

“War,” cried Settembrini, “even war, my dear sir, has already been obliged to serve progress—as you will concede if you recall certain events from your favourite epoch; I mean, if you recall the Crusades! Those wars of civilisation most happily promoted relations among the peoples in economic and commercial intercourse and united Western humanity under the sign of an idea.”

“You are very indulgent toward the idea. I shall therefore correct you all the more courteously by observing that the Crusades, together with the quickening of intercourse to which they gave rise, had anything but an internationally conciliatory effect; on the contrary, they taught the peoples to distinguish themselves from one another and vigorously advanced the development of the idea of the national state.”

“Very true, insofar as the relation of the peoples to the clerisy is concerned. Yes! It was then that the sense of national honour embodied in the state began to fortify itself against hierarchical presumption…”

“And yet what you call hierarchical presumption is nothing other than the idea of human union under the sign of the spirit!”

“We know that spirit, and want none of it.”

“It is clear that your national mania abhors the Church’s world-transcending cosmopolitanism. If only I knew how you propose to reconcile that with your abhorrence of war. Your antiquising cult of the state must make you a champion of the positive conception of law, and as such…”

“Have we come to law? In international law, my dear sir, the idea of natural law and universal human reason remains alive…”

“Bah, your international law is once again nothing but a Rousseauistic distortion of the _ius divinum_, which has nothing whatever to do with nature or reason, but rests upon revelation…”

“Let us not quarrel over names, Professor! You are quite at liberty to call _ius divinum_ what I revere as natural and international law. The essential point is that above the positive laws of the national states there rises a universal law of higher validity, making possible the settlement of disputed interests by courts of arbitration.”

“By courts of arbitration! The very phrase! By a bourgeois court of arbitration that decides questions of life, ascertains God’s will, and determines history! Very well, so much for the doves’ feet. And where are the eagle’s wings?”

“Bourgeois civilisation—”

“Why, bourgeois civilisation does not know what it wants! They clamour for measures against the declining birth-rate and demand that the costs of bringing up children and preparing them for a profession be reduced. And meanwhile one is suffocating in the crush, and every profession is so overcrowded that the struggle for the feeding-trough casts all the wars of the past into the shade for sheer horror. Open spaces and garden cities! Strengthening the race! But why strengthen it, if civilisation and progress demand that there shall be no more war? War would be the remedy for everything and the means to everything—for strengthening the race, and even for combating the declining birth-rate.”

“You are jesting. This is no longer serious. Our conversation is dissolving, and at precisely the right moment. We have arrived,” Settembrini said, pointing with his cane to the little house before whose garden gate they had halted. It stood near the entrance to “Dorf,” on the road, from which only a narrow front garden separated it, and was modest in appearance. Virginia creeper sprang from exposed roots and twined about the front door, stretching a curved arm that clung to the wall toward the ground-floor window on the right, the display window of a small general shop. The ground floor belonged to the shopkeeper, Settembrini explained. Naphta’s lodgings were one flight up, above the tailor’s shop, while he himself was domiciled beneath the roof. It was a peaceful studio.

With a suddenly displayed amiability, Naphta expressed the hope that further encounters might follow from this one. “Come and visit us,” he said. “I should say: come and visit me, if Dr. Settembrini did not possess an older claim upon your friendship here. Come whenever you please, as soon as you feel inclined to a little colloquy. I value intercourse with youth and am perhaps not wholly without pedagogical tradition myself… If our Master of the Chair”—he indicated Settembrini—“wishes to reserve all pedagogical disposition and vocation for bourgeois humanism, he must be contradicted. Until very soon, then!”

Settembrini raised objections. There were difficulties, he said. The lieutenant’s days up here were numbered, and the engineer would presumably wish to redouble his zeal in the service of the cure so that he might follow him down to the flatlands very shortly.

The young men agreed with both of them, one after the other. They had received Naphta’s invitation with bows, and the next moment acknowledged Settembrini’s reservations as justified, with motions of head and shoulders. Thus everything remained open.

“What did he call him?” Joachim asked as they climbed the loop of the road toward the “Berghof”…”

“I heard ‘Master of the Chair,’” said Hans Castorp, “and I am just thinking about it myself. It is probably some sort of joke; they do have peculiar names for each other. Settembrini called Naphta _princeps scholasticorum_—not bad either. The Scholastics were presumably the learned doctors of the Middle Ages, dogmatic philosophers, if you like. Hm. The Middle Ages did come up more than once—and that reminded me how Settembrini said, on the very first day, that a good many things up here struck him as medieval: we came to it through Adriatica von Mylendonk, through the name.—How did _he_ strike you?”

“The little fellow? Not well. He said several things I liked. Courts of arbitration are naturally a craven business. But I did not much like the man himself, and no matter how many good things a person may say, what use are they to me if he himself is a dubious customer? And dubious he is—you cannot deny it. That business about the ‘place of cohabitation’ alone was decidedly questionable. And besides, he has a Jew’s nose—just look at him! Only Semites are ever so puny in figure. Do you seriously intend to visit the man?”

“Of course we shall visit him!” Hans Castorp declared. “The puniness—that is merely the military speaking out of you. But the Chaldeans had noses like that too, and were devilishly capable all the same, and not only in the occult sciences. Naphta has something of the occult sciences about him as well; he interests me considerably. I will not claim that I have made him out already today, but if we meet him more often, perhaps we shall; and I by no means consider it impossible that we shall grow wiser in general through the occasion.”

“Oh, man, you keep growing wiser and wiser up here, with your biology and botany and your untenable turning-points. And you were occupied with ‘time’ on the very first day. Yet we are here to grow healthier, not cleverer—healthier and perfectly healthy, so that at last they may set us at liberty and discharge us as cured to the flatlands!”

“Freedom dwells upon the mountains!” Hans Castorp sang light-heartedly. “First tell me what freedom is,” he continued in speech. “Naphta and Settembrini were arguing about that just now as well, and reached no agreement. ‘Freedom is the law of human love!’ says Settembrini, and that sounds like his forebear, the Carbonaro. But brave as the Carbonaro was, and brave as our Settembrini himself is…”

“Yes, he grew uncomfortable when personal courage was mentioned.”

“…I nevertheless believe there are many things of which he is afraid and little Naphta is _not_ afraid, do you understand, and that his freedom and courage are rather prim and squeamish. Do you think he would have courage enough _de se perdre ou même de se laisser dépérir_?”

“Why are you starting to speak French?”

“For no particular reason… The atmosphere here is so international, after all. I do not know who ought to find more pleasure in it: Settembrini, on account of his bourgeois world republic, or Naphta with his hierarchical cosmopolis. I was paying close attention, as you see, but the matter did not become clear to me; on the contrary, I thought the confusion produced by their talk was considerable.”

“It is always like that. You will always find that nothing but confusion comes of talking and holding opinions. I keep telling you, what matters is not what opinions a man has, but whether he is the right sort of fellow. The best thing is to have no opinion at all, but simply to do one’s duty.”

“Yes, you can say that, being the mercenary trooper and purely formal existence that you are. With me it is different; I am a civilian, and in a sense I bear responsibility. And it excites me to see such confusion as this: one of them preaches the international world republic and abhors war on principle, yet is so patriotic that he insists at all costs upon the Brenner frontier and is willing to wage a war of civilisation for it—while the other regards the state as the devil’s handiwork and pipes about universal union upon the horizon, but in the next breath defends the rights of natural instinct and mocks peace conferences. We absolutely must go there and make sense of it. You say, to be sure, that we are not to grow wiser here, but healthier. Yet the two must surely be reconcilable, man; and if you do not believe that, then you are sundering the world, and sundering the world is always a grave error, let me tell you.”

Of the City of God and Evil Deliverance

In his balcony box Hans Castorp identified a plant that now, with the astronomical summer begun and the days beginning to shorten, grew luxuriantly in many places: the columbine, or _Aquilegia_, a species of the Ranunculaceae, growing like a perennial on tall stems, with blue and violet, and also reddish-brown flowers, and herbaceous leaves of ample surface. The plant grew here and there, but in masses particularly in the quiet hollow where, nearly a year ago now, he had first seen it: the secluded forest ravine, filled with the rushing of wild water, with its footbridge and resting-bench, where his rashly wide-ranging and unwholesome walk of those days had ended, and which he now sometimes visited again.

It was not so very far away if one set about reaching it less adventurously than he had done then. If one climbed a little way up the slope from the finishing-point of the toboggan races in “Dorf,” the picturesque spot could be reached in twenty minutes along the forest path, whose wooden bridges crossed the bobsleigh run coming down from Schatzalp, without detours, operatic singing, or pauses for exhaustion; and when Joachim was confined to the house by the duties of the cure—an examination, internal photograph, blood test, injection, or weighing—Hans Castorp would, in fine weather, walk there after second breakfast, sometimes even after the first; and he would also use the hours between tea and dinner for a visit to his favourite place, to sit upon the bench where the violent nosebleed had once overtaken him, listen with inclined head to the sound of the torrent, and contemplate the enclosed landscape about him, together with the profusion of blue columbines that now flowered once more in their hollow.

Was that all he went there for? No, he sat there in order to be alone, to remember, to take stock of the impressions and adventures of so many months, and to ponder everything. They were many and manifold—not easy to arrange, moreover, for they appeared to him in many ways interlocked and flowing one into another, so that the tangible could scarcely be distinguished from what had merely been thought, dreamed, and imagined. Yet all of them were adventurous in character, to such a degree that his heart, susceptible as it had been and remained up here from the very first day, faltered and hammered when he thought of them. Or was the sober reflection alone enough—that the _Aquilegia_, here where Pribislav Hippe had once appeared to him in the flesh while he was in a state of diminished vitality, was not still but already once more in bloom, and that the “three weeks” would any day now have become a full year—to terrify his susceptible heart in so adventurous a fashion?

Moreover, he no longer suffered nosebleeds on his bench beside the wild water; that was over. His acclimatization, which Joachim had at once represented to him as difficult, and which had indeed proved its difficulty, had advanced; after eleven months it must be regarded as complete, and little further development in that direction was to be expected. The chemistry of his stomach had regulated and adapted itself; Maria Mancini had flavour once more, the nerves of his desiccated mucous membranes had long since recovered their susceptibility to the bouquet of this modestly priced product, which, whenever his supply ran low, he continued to order from Bremen with a certain feeling of piety, although highly inviting wares commended themselves in the shopwindows of the international health resort. Did not Maria form a kind of link between him, the one removed from the world, and the flatlands, his old home? Did she not maintain and preserve such relations more effectively than, for instance, the postcards he addressed from time to time to his uncles down below, the intervals between them having grown longer in the same measure as, by adopting the notions current up here, he had acquired a more magnificent economy in his handling of time? They were chiefly picture postcards, for the sake of greater pleasantness, with pretty views of the valley under snow or in its summer condition, and afforded only just so much room for writing as was necessary to transmit the latest medical pronouncement, to report to his relations the result of a monthly or general examination—that is to say, to communicate, perhaps, that acoustically as well as optically an unmistakable improvement had been recorded, but that he was not yet free of toxins, and that the slight excess temperature in which he still persisted arose from the small spots that yet remained, but would certainly disappear without a trace if he exercised patience, so that he would then under no circumstances need to return. He could be certain that no epistolary achievements beyond this were demanded or expected of him; the sphere he addressed was not one of humanistic eloquence, nor were the answers he received any more effusive in character. They generally accompanied the pecuniary means of subsistence sent him from home, the interest on his paternal inheritance, which amounted to so advantageous a sum in the currency up here that he had never consumed it before a fresh remittance arrived, and consisted of a few typewritten lines, signed James Tienappel, with greetings and wishes for recovery from his great-uncle and sometimes also from the seafaring Peter.

The administration of injections, Hans Castorp reported home, had lately been suspended by the Hofrat. They did not agree with this young patient, causing headaches, loss of appetite, loss of weight, and fatigue; they had at first raised the “temperature” and had then failed to eliminate it. Subjectively, it continued to glow as a dry heat in his rosy-red countenance, a reminder that acclimatization for this scion of the lowlands and their humidly cheerful meteorology consisted, after all, chiefly in his becoming accustomed to the fact that he did not become accustomed—something Rhadamanthys himself, incidentally, did not do either, for his cheeks were always blue. “Some never become accustomed,” Joachim had said at the very outset, and this appeared to be Hans Castorp’s case. For the trembling at the nape, too, which had begun to trouble him up here soon after his arrival, had refused to disappear, but inevitably made itself felt while he walked, while he conversed, indeed even up here at the blue-blossoming site of his meditations upon the complex of his adventures, so that Hans Lorenz Castorp’s dignified support of the chin had almost become a fixed habit with him—though not without secretly reminding him, whenever he employed it, of the old man’s parricide collars, the provisional form of the ruff of honour, the pale-golden round of the baptismal basin, the devout primeval ancestral sound, and similar family affinities, and thus leading him back once more to contemplation of the complex of his life.

Pribislav Hippe no longer appeared to him in the flesh, as he had eleven months before. His acclimatization was complete; he had no more visions, no longer lay with his body suspended upon the bench while his ego sojourned in a distant present—nothing more of such incidents. The distinctness and vivacity of this remembered image, whenever it hovered before him, remained within normal, healthy bounds; and in connection with it Hans Castorp would then draw from his breast pocket the glass keepsake he preserved there, first in a padded envelope and then inside his wallet: a little plate which, when held parallel with the ground, appeared blackly reflective and opaque, but, when raised against the light of the sky, grew luminous and displayed humanistic matters—the transparent image of the human body, the framework of ribs, the figure of the heart, the arch of the diaphragm and the bellows of the lungs, together with the clavicle and the bones of the upper arm, all surrounded by a pale, misty envelope, the flesh of which Hans Castorp had, during Carnival week, tasted in defiance of reason. What wonder that his mobile heart faltered and plunged when he contemplated the keepsake and then continued to review and ponder “everything,” leaning against the plainly fashioned back of the bench, his arms folded, his head inclined toward his shoulder, amid the noise of the pouring water and in sight of the blue-blossoming columbines?

The sublime structure of organic life, the human form, hovered before him as it had on that night of frost and stars during his learned studies; and to his inward contemplation of it there attached, for the young Hans Castorp, many a question and distinction with which good Joachim might not feel obliged to concern himself, but for which he, as a civilian, had begun to feel responsible, although down in the flatlands he too had never caught sight of them and presumably never would have done so, but only here, where from the contemplative seclusion of five thousand feet one looked down upon the world and its creatures and formed one’s thoughts about them—perhaps also by virtue of an elevation of the body produced by soluble toxins, which burned as a dry heat in the face. In connection with that vision he thought of Settembrini, the pedagogic organ-grinder whose father had been born in Hellas, and who expounded love for the sublime structure as politics, rebellion, and eloquence, consecrating the citizen’s pike at the altar of humanity; he thought also of Comrade Krokowski and of what he had for some time been doing with him in the darkened chamber, and reflected upon the twofold nature of analysis—how far it served action and progress, how far it was akin to the grave and its disreputable anatomy. He summoned up, side by side and in opposition, the images of the two grandfathers, the rebellious and the loyal, who wore black for differing reasons, and weighed their dignity; he further took counsel with himself concerning such extensive complexes as form and freedom, mind and body, honour and shame, time and eternity—and succumbed to a brief but violent vertigo at the thought that the columbines were blooming again and the year was running round within itself.

He had a curious word for this responsible occupation of his thoughts at the picturesque site of his retirement: he called it “governing”—employing this playful, boyish word, this childish expression, for an entertainment he loved, although it was attended by terror, vertigo, and all manner of tumult in the heart, and excessively intensified the heat of his face. Yet he did not find it inappropriate that the exertion associated with this activity compelled him to make use of the chin-support; for the posture accorded well enough with the dignity inwardly bestowed upon him by “governing” in the presence of the sublime structure that hovered before his mind.

“_Homo Dei_” the ugly Naphta had called the sublime structure when defending it against English social doctrine. What wonder that Hans Castorp, for the sake of his civilian responsibility and in the interests of government, felt bound to pay the little man a visit with Joachim? Settembrini viewed it with displeasure—Hans Castorp was shrewd and thin-skinned enough to sense that plainly. The very first encounter had been disagreeable to the humanist; he had manifestly sought to prevent it and had wished, in his pedagogic fashion, to preserve the young men, but especially Hans Castorp himself—so the crafty problem-child told himself—from making Naphta’s acquaintance, although he personally associated and disputed with him. Such are educators. They reserve the interesting for themselves, declaring themselves “equal to it”; but forbid it to youth and demand that youth should feel itself not “equal to it.” It was fortunate only that the organ-grinder had, in sober earnest, no authority whatever to forbid the young Hans Castorp anything, and that he had not even attempted to do so. The troublesome pupil had only to disavow his thin-skinned perceptions and feign innocence, and nothing prevented him from amiably accepting little Naphta’s invitation—which indeed he had done, with Joachim perforce accompanying him, a few days after their first meeting, on a Sunday afternoon after the principal rest-cure period.

It was only a few minutes’ walk down from the Berghof to the little house with the vine-wreathed front door. They entered, passed by the entrance to the grocer’s shop on their right, and climbed the narrow brown staircase, which brought them to a door on the upper floor, beside whose bell only the nameplate of Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor, was affixed. The person who opened to them was a half-grown boy in a kind of livery, a striped jacket and gaiters—a little servant, close-cropped and red-cheeked. They asked him for Herr Professor Naphta and, since they were not provided with cards, impressed their names upon him, which he went to announce to Herr Naphta—he used no title. The door of the room opposite the entrance stood open and afforded a view into the tailor’s workshop, where, notwithstanding the holiday, Lukaček sat cross-legged upon a table and sewed. He was pale and bald; from beneath an enormously large, drooping nose, his black moustache hung down on either side of his mouth with a sour expression.

“Good day!” Hans Castorp wished him.

“Grütsi,” the tailor replied in dialect, although the Swiss expression suited neither his name nor his appearance and sounded false and peculiar.

“So industrious?” Hans Castorp continued with a nod.... “But it is Sunday!”

“Urgent work,” Lukaček replied curtly, continuing to stitch.

“Something elegant, I suppose,” Hans Castorp surmised, “that is wanted in a hurry, for a reunion or something of the kind?”

The tailor left this question unanswered for a while, bit through the thread, and threaded his needle anew. Afterward he nodded.

“Will it be pretty?” Hans Castorp asked further. “Are you putting sleeves on it?”

“Yes, sleeves; it is for an olt voman,” Lukaček answered with a strong Bohemian accent. The return of the little servant interrupted this conversation conducted through the doorway. Herr Naphta begged them to step inside, he announced, and opened for the young men a door two or three paces farther to the right, having also to lift a collapsing portière out of their way. Naphta received the entrants standing in bow-tied slippers upon a moss-green carpet.

Both cousins were surprised by the luxury of the two-windowed study that received them—blinded, indeed, by their surprise; for the meagreness of the little house, its staircase, and its impoverished corridor had given them no reason remotely to expect anything of the kind, and by the force of contrast lent the elegance of Naphta’s furnishings a fairy-tale quality which they scarcely possessed in themselves and would not otherwise have possessed even in the eyes of Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemßen. Nevertheless, the room was refined, even splendid—so much so that, despite the writing desk and bookcases, it did not really preserve the character of a gentleman’s study. There was too much silk in it, wine-red and purple-red silk: the curtains concealing the poor doors were made of it, as were the window valances and the covers of the group of meubles arranged at one narrow end, opposite the second door and before a tapestry that almost entirely covered the wall. They were Baroque armchairs with little cushions upon the side-rests, grouped around a round, metal-mounted table, behind which stood a sofa of the same style, furnished with cushions of silk plush. The bookcases occupied the sections of wall beside the two doors. Like the writing desk—or rather the secretary with a curved rolltop, which had found its place between the windows—they were made of mahogany, with glass doors behind which green silk was stretched. But in the corner to the left of the sofa group there stood a work of art, a large painted wooden sculpture raised upon a pedestal draped in red—something intimately terrifying, a Pietà, artless and effective to the point of grotesquerie: the Mother of God in her coif, her brows contracted and her mouth opened awry in lamentation, with the Man of Sorrows upon her lap, a figure primitively mistaken in proportion and with anatomy crudely brought out, yet betraying ignorance; the drooping head bristled with thorns, face and limbs were stained and trickled over with blood, and thick clusters of clotted blood hung at the wound in the side and the nail-marks in hands and feet. This showpiece certainly lent the silken room a particular accent. The wallpaper, too, visible above the bookcases and upon the window wall, was evidently a contribution by the tenant: the green of its vertical stripes was that of the soft carpet spread over the red floor covering. Only the low ceiling had admitted of little improvement. It was bare and cracked. Yet a small Venetian chandelier hung from it. The windows were veiled with cream-coloured net curtains reaching to the floor.

“Here we are, assembled for a colloquy!” said Hans Castorp, while his eyes clung more to the pious horror in the corner than to the occupant of the surprising room, who expressed his appreciation that the cousins had kept their word. With hospitable gestures of his small right hand he wished to conduct them to the silken seats, but Hans Castorp went straight toward the wooden group as though spellbound, and stood before it with his arms planted upon his hips and his head inclined to one side.

“What have you got here!” he said softly. “Why, it is terribly good. Has anyone ever seen such suffering? Something old, of course?”

“Fourteenth century,” Naphta answered. “Probably of Rhenish origin. It impresses you?”

“Enormously,” said Hans Castorp. “It can hardly fail to make its impression upon the beholder. I should not have thought that anything could be at once so ugly—forgive me—and so beautiful.”

“Products of a world of soul and expression,” Naphta replied, “are always ugly from beauty and beautiful from ugliness; that is the rule. What is at issue is spiritual beauty, not the beauty of the flesh, which is absolutely stupid. Besides, it too is abstract,” he added. “The beauty of the body is abstract. Reality belongs only to inward beauty, the beauty of religious expression.”

“You have distinguished and ordered that with laudable correctness,” said Hans Castorp. “Fourteenth?” he made sure.... “Thirteen hundred and something? Yes, that is the Middle Ages to the life; I recognize in it, as it were, the conception I have formed of the Middle Ages of late. I really knew nothing about them; I am a man of technical progress, insofar as I count for anything at all. But up here the conception of the Middle Ages has been brought home to me from various quarters. Economistic social doctrine did not yet exist then, that much is clear. What, I wonder, was the artist’s name?”

Naphta shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter?” he said. “We ought not to ask, since no one asked when it was created. It has no marvellously individual Monsieur for its author; it is anonymous and collective. It is, moreover, the very advanced Middle Ages—Gothic, _Signum mortificationis_. You will find nothing here of the forbearance and idealization with which the Romanesque period still believed it necessary to portray the Crucified: no royal crown, no majestic triumph over the world and the death of martyrdom. Everything is a radical proclamation of suffering and the weakness of the flesh. It is only the Gothic taste that is truly pessimistic and ascetic. You will not know Innocent the Third’s treatise, ‘_De miseria humanae conditionis_’—an exceedingly witty piece of literature. It dates from the end of the twelfth century, but only this art supplies the illustrations to it.”

“Herr Naphta,” Hans Castorp said after a sigh, “every word of what you are pointing out interests me. ‘_Signum mortificationis_,’ did you say? I shall remember that. Before that you said something about ‘anonymous and collective,’ which also seems well worth reflecting upon. You are unfortunately correct in supposing that I do not know the Pope’s treatise—for I assume that Innocent the Third was a pope. Did I understand you correctly that it is ascetic and witty? I must confess, I had never imagined that the two could go so hand in hand; but when I consider it, the thing is obvious enough—naturally, a treatise on human misery affords ample occasion for wit, at the expense of the flesh. Is the work obtainable? If I were to muster my Latin, perhaps I might be able to read it.”

“I possess the book,” Naphta replied, indicating one of the cabinets with his head. “It is at your disposal. But shall we not sit down? You can see the Pietà from the sofa as well. And here comes our little vesper meal ...”

It was the little servant, bringing tea, together with a handsome silver-mounted basket containing slices of Baumkuchen. But behind him, through the open door, who should enter with a buoyant step, crying “Sapperlot!” “_Accidenti!_” and wearing a delicate smile? It was Herr Settembrini, who lived one flight higher and had appeared with the intention of keeping the gentlemen company. Through his little window, he said, he had seen the cousins arriving and had hastily finished writing the encyclopaedic page then beneath his pen, in order to invite himself here as a guest as well. Nothing was more natural than his coming. His long-standing acquaintance with the residents of the Berghof entitled him to do so; and besides, his intercourse and exchange with Naphta, despite profound differences of opinion, was evidently very lively indeed—as was also shown by the host’s easy and unsurprised greeting of him as one of the circle. This did not prevent Hans Castorp from receiving two very distinct impressions from his arrival. First, he felt that Herr Settembrini had appeared in order not to leave him and Joachim—or, more precisely, simply him—alone with the ugly little Naphta, but to provide, by his presence, a pedagogical counterweight; and secondly, it was plainly evident that he had no objection whatever to doing so, but was quite glad to seize the opportunity of exchanging his quarters beneath the roof for Naphta’s silk-refined room awhile and partaking of a well-served tea: before helping himself he rubbed his yellowish hands, the backs of which were covered with black hair along the little-finger side, and ate the Baumkuchen, whose narrow curved slices were veined with chocolate, with unmistakable and openly expressed enjoyment.

The conversation continued to concern itself with the Pietà, since Hans Castorp clung to the object with both gaze and words, addressing himself to Herr Settembrini and seeking, as it were, to bring him into critical contact with the work of art—although the humanist’s abhorrence of this ornament to the room was legible enough in the expression with which he turned to look at it, for he had seated himself with his back to that corner. Too polite to say all he thought, he confined himself to objecting to faults in the proportions and bodily forms of the group, violations of natural truth which, far from moving him, sprang not from the incapacity of an early age but from malice, from a principle fundamentally hostile to nature—in which Naphta maliciously concurred with him. Certainly, technical ineptitude was quite out of the question. What was at issue was the deliberate emancipation of the spirit from the natural, whose contemptibility was proclaimed in religious terms by the refusal of all humility before it. But when Settembrini declared the neglect of nature and its study to be a human aberration, and began, in resounding words, to exalt against the absurd formlessness indulged in by the Middle Ages and the epochs that imitated them the Greco-Roman heritage, classicism, form, beauty, reason, and a cheerful piety toward nature, which alone were appointed to advance the cause of man, Hans Castorp intervened and asked how matters then stood with Plotinus, who had demonstrably been ashamed of his body, and with Voltaire, who in the name of reason had revolted against the scandalous earthquake of Lisbon. Absurd? That too had been absurd; but, when one considered everything properly, it seemed to him that the absurd might very well be described as what was spiritually honourable, and that the absurd hostility to nature of Gothic art had in the end been just as honourable as the conduct of Plotinus and Voltaire, for the same emancipation from fate and fact found expression in it, the same unservile pride that refused to abdicate before brute power—namely, before nature ...

Naphta burst into laughter, which strongly recalled the plate in question and ended in a fit of coughing. Settembrini said with dignity:

“You are injuring our host by being so witty, and thus proving yourself ungrateful for this exquisite pastry. Is gratitude your affair at all? By which I assume that gratitude consists in putting the gifts one has received to good use ...”

Since Hans Castorp looked ashamed, he added charmingly:

“We know you for a wag, Engineer. Your habit of teasing the Good in a friendly fashion by no means causes me to despair of your love for it. You know, of course, that only such rebellion of the spirit against the natural as keeps the dignity and beauty of man in view may be called honourable—not that rebellion which, even if it does not expressly aim at his degradation and abasement, nevertheless invariably brings them in its train. You also know what dehumanized horrors, what murderous intolerance, were produced by the age to which the artefact behind me owes its existence. I need only remind you of the dreadful type of the heresy judge, of the bloody figure of a Konrad von Marburg, for example, and of his infamous priestly fury against everything that opposed the dominion of the supernatural. You are very far from acknowledging sword and stake as instruments of love for mankind ...”

“In whose service, on the other hand,” Naphta remarked, “the machinery operated with which the Convention purged the world of bad citizens. All ecclesiastical punishments, the stake included, excommunication included, were imposed in order to save the soul from eternal damnation—which cannot be said of the Jacobins’ lust for extermination. I take the liberty of observing that every penal and sanguinary justice which does not spring from belief in a hereafter is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with that of the bourgeois spirit. Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the natural science and economism of the nineteenth century omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed in any way fitted to promote that degradation—beginning with the new astronomy, which transformed the centre of the universe, the august theatre where God and the Devil contended for possession of the creature so ardently desired by both, into an insignificant little wandering star, and for the time being put an end to man’s magnificent cosmic position, upon which, incidentally, astrology had rested.”

“For the time being?” As Herr Settembrini asked the question watchfully, his expression itself had something of that of a heresy judge and inquisitor waiting for the witness to entangle himself in an unquestionably culpable statement.

“Indeed. For a few hundred years,” Naphta confirmed coldly. “Unless all signs deceive us, a vindication of Scholasticism is impending in this respect as well; indeed, it is already well under way. Copernicus will be defeated by Ptolemy. The heliocentric thesis is gradually encountering an intellectual resistance whose undertakings will probably attain their end. Science will find itself philosophically compelled to restore the earth to all the dignities that ecclesiastical dogma sought to preserve for it.”

“What? What? Intellectual resistance? Philosophically compelled? Attain their end? What species of voluntarism is speaking through you? And research free of presuppositions? Pure knowledge? Truth, my dear sir, which is so intimately bound up with freedom, and whose martyrs, whom you would turn into traducers of the earth, are instead the everlasting glory of this star??”

Herr Settembrini had a formidable way of asking questions. He sat bolt upright and let his honourable words rain down upon the diminutive Herr Naphta, raising his voice at the end with such tremendous force that one could plainly hear how certain he was that his opponent’s only possible answer could be a shamefaced silence. He had held a piece of layer cake between his fingers while speaking, but now laid it back upon his plate, for after putting such a question he had no inclination to bite into it.

Naphta replied with disagreeable composure:

“My good friend, there is no such thing as pure knowledge. The legitimacy of the Church’s doctrine of knowledge, which may be summed up in Augustine’s dictum, ‘I believe that I may understand,’ is wholly beyond dispute. Faith is the organ of knowledge, and the intellect secondary. Your science free of presuppositions is a myth. A faith, a world-view, an idea—in short, a will—is invariably present, and it is the business of reason to expound it, to prove it. Always and in every case it comes down to ‘_Quod erat demonstrandum_.’ The very concept of proof, psychologically considered, contains a powerful voluntaristic element. The great Schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were united in the conviction that nothing could be true in philosophy that was false before theology. Let us leave theology out of the matter, if you wish; but a humanism that does not acknowledge that nothing can be true in natural science that is false before philosophy is no humanism at all. The argument of the Holy Office against Galileo was that his propositions were philosophically absurd. No more decisive argument exists.”

“Come, come, the arguments of our poor, great Galileo have proved rather more cogent! No, let us speak seriously, Professore! Before these two attentive young men, answer me this question: Do you believe in truth—in objective, scientific truth, the pursuit of which is the supreme law of all morality, and whose triumphs over authority constitute the glorious history of the human mind?!”

Hans Castorp and Joachim turned their heads from Settembrini to Naphta, the former more quickly than the latter. Naphta answered:

“Such a triumph is impossible, for authority is man—his interest, his dignity, his salvation—and between it and truth there can be no conflict. They coincide.”

“Truth, then, would be—”

“True is whatever serves man’s good. In him nature is summed up; in all nature he alone was created, and all nature was created for him. He is the measure of things, and his salvation the criterion of truth. Theoretical knowledge devoid of practical reference to the idea of man’s salvation is so utterly devoid of interest that it must be denied all truth-value, and its admission prohibited. The Christian centuries were wholly agreed upon the human irrelevance of natural science. Lactantius, whom Constantine the Great chose as tutor to his son, asked outright what blessedness he would gain from knowing where the Nile had its source, or what nonsense the physicists babbled about the heavens. You might try answering him! If Platonic philosophy was preferred to every other, it was because it concerned itself not with the knowledge of nature, but with the knowledge of God. I can assure you that humanity is in the process of returning to this point of view and recognizing that the task of true science is not to run after knowledge devoid of salvation, but on principle to exclude what is harmful, or even merely insignificant in the realm of ideas, and, in a word, to manifest instinct, measure, and discrimination. It is childish to suppose that the Church defended darkness against light. It did thrice well to declare punishable a pursuit of the knowledge of things ‘free of presuppositions’—that is, one which dispensed with regard for the spiritual, for the end of attaining salvation; and what has led man into darkness, and will lead him ever deeper into it, is rather natural science ‘free of presuppositions,’ natural science devoid of philosophy.”

“You are preaching a pragmatism,” Settembrini replied, “which you need only transfer to the political sphere to behold it in all its perniciousness. Good, true, and just is whatever serves the state. Its salvation, its dignity, its power are the criterion of morality. Excellent! Thus the gates are thrown wide to every crime, while human truth, individual justice, democracy—they may fend for themselves as best they can . . .”

“I propose a little logic,” Naphta retorted. “Either Ptolemy and Scholasticism remain in the right, and the world is finite in time and space. Then the Deity is transcendent, the opposition between God and the world remains intact, and man too is a dualistic existence: the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the sensual and the supersensual, and everything social is, by a wide margin, of secondary rank. This is the only individualism I can acknowledge as consistent. Or else your Renaissance astronomers discovered the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there is no supersensual world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here-and-Now, the opposition between God and nature is void, and since in this case the human personality is no longer the battlefield of two hostile principles, but harmonious, but unified, the conflict within man rests solely upon that between individual and collective interests, and the purpose of the state becomes, in good pagan fashion, the law of morality. One or the other.”

“I protest!” cried Settembrini, holding out his teacup to his host at arm’s length. “I protest against the insinuation that the modern state signifies the individual’s enslavement to the devil! I protest for the third time, and this time against the vexatious alternative of Prussianism or Gothic reaction with which you seek to confront us! Democracy has no other meaning than that of an individualistic corrective to every form of state absolutism. Truth and justice are the crown jewels of individual morality, and in the event of conflict with the interests of the state they may indeed assume the appearance of powers hostile to the state, whereas in fact they have in view the higher—yes, let us say it: the supramundane—welfare of the state. The Renaissance the source of the deification of the state! What bastard logic! The achievements—I say it with etymological emphasis: the things _achieved_ by Renaissance and Enlightenment, my dear sir—are personality, the rights of man, freedom!”

The listeners breathed again, for they had held their breath during Herr Settembrini’s grand rejoinder. Hans Castorp could not even refrain from striking the edge of the table with his hand, albeit with some reserve. “Brilliant!” he said between his teeth, and Joachim too displayed keen satisfaction, although a word had been spoken against Prussianism. But then both turned toward the interlocutor who had just been repulsed, Hans Castorp with such eagerness that he planted his elbow on the table and rested his chin upon his fist, much as when drawing the little pig, and gazed intently into Herr Naphta’s face from close at hand.

The latter sat motionless and keen, his lean hands in his lap. He said:

“I sought to introduce logic into our conversation, and you answer me with magnanimous sentiments. That the Renaissance brought into the world all that is called liberalism, individualism, humanistic bourgeois culture was tolerably well known to me; but your ‘etymological emphases’ leave me cold, for the struggling, heroic age of your ideals is long past; those ideals are dead, or at the very least now breathing their last, and the feet of those who will administer the coup de grâce are already at the door. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionary. But if you believe that the outcome of future revolutions will be—freedom, you are in error. The principle of freedom has fulfilled and outlived itself in five hundred years. A pedagogy which still conceives of itself today as a daughter of the Enlightenment, and sees its means of education in criticism, in the liberation and cultivation of the self, in the dissolution of absolutely determined forms of life—a pedagogy of that sort may still achieve momentary rhetorical successes, but to anyone possessed of knowledge its backwardness is beyond all doubt. Every truly educative association has always known what alone is, and must in truth always be, at issue in all pedagogy: the absolute command, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, denial of the self, the violation of personality. In the final analysis, it is a loveless misunderstanding of youth to suppose that it finds its delight in freedom. Its deepest delight is obedience.”

Joachim sat bolt upright. Hans Castorp flushed. Herr Settembrini twisted his handsome moustache in agitation.

“No!” Naphta continued. “Not the liberation and unfolding of the self are the secret and commandment of the age. What it needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.”

He had spoken the last word more softly than anything that preceded it, without a movement of his body; only his spectacle lenses had flashed briefly. All three who heard him had started, Settembrini as well, though he soon recovered himself with a smile.

“And may one inquire,” he asked, “whom or what—you see, I am all question, I do not even know how to frame it—whom or what you conceive as the bearer of this—I dislike repeating the word—this terror?”

Naphta sat motionless, keen and glittering. He said:

“I am at your service. I believe I shall not be mistaken if I assume our agreement in positing an ideal primal condition of mankind, a condition without state or coercion, of immediate divine sonship, in which there was neither dominion nor servitude, neither law nor punishment, no injustice, no carnal union, no distinctions of class, no labour, no property, but equality, fraternity, moral perfection.”

“Very good. I agree,” Settembrini declared. “I agree except upon the point of carnal union, which must plainly have occurred at all times, since man is a vertebrate of the highest development and no more able than other creatures to—”

“As you please. I note our fundamental agreement concerning the original paradisal condition, without justice and in immediate communion with God, which was lost through the Fall. I believe we may remain side by side for a further stretch of the road, namely by tracing the state back to a social contract that takes account of sin and was concluded as a defence against injustice, and by discerning therein the origin of sovereign power.”

“Benissimo!” cried Settembrini. “The social contract—that is the Enlightenment, that is Rousseau. I should never have thought—”

“If you please. Here our paths divide. From the fact that all dominion and power originally resided with the people, and that the people transferred their right of legislation and all their power to the state, to the sovereign, your school deduces above all the revolutionary right of the people against kingship. We, on the other hand—”

“We?” Hans Castorp thought tensely.... Who are “we”? I must be sure to ask Settembrini afterward whom he means by “we.”

“We, for our part,” Naphta said, “perhaps no less revolutionary than you, have always deduced from it first and foremost the precedence of the Church over the secular state. For even if the state’s ungodliness were not written upon its brow, a reference to this very historical fact—that it derives from the will of the people, and not, like the Church, from divine institution—would suffice to demonstrate it, if not actually as an institution of wickedness, then at all events as one of necessity and sinful insufficiency.”

“The state, my dear sir—”

“I know what you think of the national state. ‘Above all stands love of fatherland and boundless thirst for glory.’ That is Virgil. You correct him with a little liberal individualism, and that is democracy; but your fundamental relation to the state remains wholly untouched thereby. That its soul is money evidently does not trouble you. Or do you mean to deny it? Antiquity was capitalistic because it was devout toward the state. The Christian Middle Ages clearly recognized the capitalism inherent in the secular state. ‘Money shall be emperor’—that is a prophecy from the eleventh century. Do you deny that it has been literally fulfilled, and that the complete diabolization of life has thereby been achieved?”

“My dear friend, you have the floor. I am impatient to be introduced to the great unknown, the bearer of the terror.”

“A daring curiosity in the spokesman of a social class which bears the freedom that has brought the world to ruin. I can dispense with your rejoinder at a pinch, for the political ideology of the bourgeoisie is known to me. Its aim is the democratic imperium, the self-transcendence of the principle of the national state into the universal, the world-state. The emperor of this imperium? We know him. Your utopia is dreadful, and yet—at this point we meet again, in a manner of speaking. For your capitalist world-republic possesses something transcendent; indeed, the world-state is the transcendence of the secular state, and we agree in believing that mankind’s perfect initial condition should be answered by a perfect final condition lying at the farthest horizon. Since the days of Gregory the Great, founder of the City of God, the Church has regarded it as her task to lead man back beneath the guidance of God. The pope’s claim to dominion was not advanced for its own sake; his vicarious dictatorship was the means and way to the goal of redemption, a transitional form between the pagan state and the kingdom of heaven. You have spoken to these pupils here of the Church’s deeds of blood, of her punitive intolerance—most foolishly, for zeal for God cannot, self-evidently, be pacifist, and Gregory spoke the words: ‘Cursed be the man who withholdeth his sword from blood!’ We know that power is evil. But the dualism of good and evil, of the beyond and this world, of spirit and power, must, if the Kingdom is to come, be provisionally suspended in a principle that unites asceticism and dominion. That is what I call the necessity of terror.”

“The bearer! The bearer!”

“You ask? Can your Manchester liberalism have failed to notice the existence of a social doctrine which signifies mankind’s conquest of economism, and whose principles and aims coincide precisely with those of the Christian City of God? The Fathers of the Church called Mine and Thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and theft. They rejected the possession of goods because, by divine natural law, the earth belonged in common to all men and therefore brought forth its fruits for the common use of all. They taught that avarice alone, a consequence of the Fall, upheld proprietary rights and had created private property. They were humane enough, hostile enough to trade, to call economic activity as such a danger to salvation—that is, to humanity. They hated money and monetary dealings, and called capitalist wealth fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic law that price results from the relation between supply and demand they despised with all their hearts, and they condemned the exploitation of favourable market conditions as the cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s distress. In their eyes there was an exploitation still more impious: the exploitation of time, the abuse of exacting a premium for the mere passage of time—namely interest—and thus misusing a universally divine institution, time itself, for the benefit of one and the injury of another.”

“Benissimo!” cried Hans Castorp, in his eagerness availing himself of Herr Settembrini’s formula of assent. “Time... A universally divine institution... That is of the highest importance...!”

“Indeed,” Naphta continued. “Those humane spirits found the notion of money multiplying by its own agency repugnant, classed every transaction in interest and speculation under the heading of usury, and declared that every rich man was either a thief or a thief’s heir. They went further. Like Thomas Aquinas, they regarded trade in general—the purely commercial transaction, buying and selling at a profit but without working upon or improving the economic good—as a disgraceful occupation. They were not disposed to value labour in and of itself very highly, for it is merely an ethical concern, not a religious one; it is performed in the service of life, not of God. And if life and economy alone were to be at issue, they demanded that productive activity should be the condition of economic advantage and the measure of respectability. In their eyes the farmer and the craftsman were honourable, not the merchant, not the industrialist. For they wished production to be governed by need, and abhorred the mass production of goods. Well then—all these economic principles and standards, after lying buried for centuries, are celebrating their resurrection in the modern movement of Communism. The agreement is complete, extending even to the meaning of the claim to dominion advanced by international labour against the international order of merchants and speculators: the world proletariat, which today confronts bourgeois-capitalist corruption with humanity and the standards of the City of God. The dictatorship of the proletariat, this politico-economic demand for salvation made by the age, does not signify dominion for its own sake and in perpetuity, but the temporary suspension of the opposition between spirit and power beneath the sign of the Cross; it signifies the overcoming of the world by means of world-dominion, signifies transition, transcendence, the Kingdom. The proletariat has taken up the work of Gregory; his zeal for God lives within it, and no more than he may it withhold its hand from blood. Its task is terror for the salvation of the world and the attainment of the goal of redemption: divine sonship without state or class.”

Thus Naphta’s incisive discourse. The little gathering was silent. The young men looked at Herr Settembrini. It fell to him to adopt some attitude. He said:

“Astonishing. Certainly, I confess myself shaken; I had not expected it. _Roma locuta._ And how—how it has spoken! Before our very eyes he has executed a hieratic somersault—if that is a contradiction in terms, he has ‘temporarily suspended’ it; ah, yes! I repeat: it is astonishing. Do you consider objections conceivable, Professor—objections merely from the standpoint of consistency? A short while ago you endeavoured to make comprehensible to us a Christian individualism founded upon the duality of God and the world, and to prove its precedence over every politically determined morality. A few minutes later you drive socialism as far as dictatorship and terror. How are the two to be reconciled?”

“Opposites,” said Naphta, “may be reconciled. Only the half-hearted and mediocre are irreconcilable. Your individualism, as I already permitted myself to observe, is a half-measure, a concession. It corrects your pagan morality of the state with a little Christianity, a little ‘right of the individual,’ a little so-called freedom; that is all. An individualism, on the other hand, which proceeds from the cosmic, the astrological importance of the individual soul—a religious rather than a social individualism, which experiences the human condition not as the conflict between self and society, but as that between self and God, flesh and spirit—such a true individualism is quite compatible with the most binding of communities...”

“Anonymous and communal—that is what it is,” said Hans Castorp.

Settembrini stared at him wide-eyed.

“Be silent, Engineer!” he commanded, with a severity attributable to his nervousness and tension. “Inform yourself, but do not hold forth!—That is an answer,” he said, turning again to Naphta. “It affords me little comfort, but it is an answer. Let us face all the consequences squarely... In repudiating industry, Christian communism repudiates technology, the machine, progress. In repudiating what you call the mercantile spirit, money and financial dealings—which antiquity esteemed far more highly than agriculture and handicraft—it repudiates freedom. For it is plain, it stares one in the face, that thereby, as in the Middle Ages, all private and public relations become bound to the soil, including—it is not altogether easy for me to utter the words—including the human person. If the soil alone can provide nourishment, then it alone confers freedom. Artisans and peasants, however honourable their calling may be—if they own no land, they are the serfs of whoever does. In fact, far into the Middle Ages, the great mass even of the urban population consisted of serfs. In the course of our conversation you have had this and that to say about human dignity. Yet all the while you are defending an economic morality upon which depend the bondage and degradation of the human person.”

“As to dignity and degradation,” Naphta replied, “there would be something to discuss. For the present, it would give me satisfaction if these connections led you to conceive of freedom not so much as a fine gesture, but as a problem. You establish that Christian economic morality, for all its beauty and humanity, creates men who are unfree. I set against this the fact that the cause of freedom—the cause of the cities, as one may say more concretely—however highly moral it may be, is historically bound up with the most inhuman degeneration of economic morality, with all the horrors of modern mercantilism and speculation, with the satanic dominion of money and business.”

“I must insist that you cease taking refuge behind doubts and antinomies, and declare yourself clearly and unequivocally for the blackest reaction!”

“The first step towards true freedom and humanity would be to rid oneself of this quaking dread of the term ‘reaction.’”

“Well, that is enough,” Herr Settembrini declared in a slightly trembling voice, pushing away his cup and plate, which were empty in any case, and rising from the silken sofa. “Enough for today, enough for one day, it seems to me. Professor, we thank you for the savoury hospitality and the highly spirited conversation. The cure is calling my friends here from the Berghof, and before they go I should like to show them my hermitage upstairs. Come, gentlemen! Addio, Padre!”

Now he had actually called Naphta “Padre”! Hans Castorp took note of it with raised eyebrows. They permitted Settembrini to direct their departure, dispose of the cousins, and allow no question to arise as to whether Naphta might wish to join them. The young men took their leave, likewise expressing their thanks, and were encouraged to return. They went with the Italian, though not before Hans Castorp had been lent the book _De miseria humanae conditionis_, a decaying cardboard-bound volume, to take away with him. The sour-bearded Lukaček was still sitting upon his table, finishing the sleeved dress for the old woman, when they passed his open door on their way to the almost ladder-like stairs leading to the attic storey. Strictly viewed, however, it was no storey at all. It was simply the roof-space, its timbers bare beneath the inner surface of the shingles and filled with the summery atmosphere of a loft, the smell of warm wood. But the roof-space contained two chambers, and these were inhabited by the republican capitalist; they served the man-of-letters engaged upon the “Sociology of Suffering” as studio and sleeping-cabinet. Cheerfully he showed them to his young friends, calling the compartment secluded and cosy, so as to place at their disposal the proper words they might employ in its praise—which they duly did with one voice. It was perfectly charming, they both found, secluded and cosy, just as he said. They cast a glance into the tiny bedroom, where a small rag rug lay before the narrow, short bedstead in the angle of the mansard, and then turned back to the workroom, which was no less makeshift in its appointments, yet displayed a certain parade-ground, even frosty order. Four clumsy, old-fashioned chairs with straw seats stood symmetrically on either side of the doors, and the divan too had been pushed against the wall, so that the green-covered round table, upon which, by way of ornament or refreshment and at any rate with sober intent, stood a water-bottle with a glass inverted over its neck, held the centre of the room in solitude. Books, bound and paper-covered, leaned obliquely against one another upon a small wall-shelf, and beside the open little window there rose on tall legs a lightly constructed folding desk, with a small, thick piece of felt flooring before it, just large enough to stand upon. Hans Castorp stationed himself there experimentally for a moment—at Herr Settembrini’s place of work, where he treated belles-lettres for encyclopaedic purposes from the standpoint of human suffering—rested his elbows upon the sloping surface, and judged that one stood there in seclusion and cosiness. Thus, he thought, Lodovico’s father might once have stood at his desk in Padua, with his nose so long and fine—and learned that it really was the late scholar’s writing-desk before which he stood; indeed, the straw chairs, the table, and even the water-bottle had also belonged to him, and more than that: the straw chairs had once belonged to the Carbonaro grandfather himself and had adorned the walls of his lawyer’s office in Milan. That was impressive. In the young men’s eyes the physiognomy of the chairs acquired something politically subversive, and Joachim vacated the one upon which he had been sitting unsuspectingly with his legs crossed, regarded it with mistrust, and did not resume his seat. Hans Castorp, meanwhile, standing at the elder Settembrini’s desk, reflected how the son now laboured at it, uniting the grandfather’s politics with the father’s humanism in the service of belles-lettres. Then all three departed. The writer had offered to accompany the cousins home.

They walked a little way in silence, but their silence was concerned with Naphta, and Hans Castorp could wait: Herr Settembrini was certain to bring up his housemate—indeed, he had come with them for that very purpose. He was not mistaken. After drawing a breath that resembled the taking of a run, the Italian began:

“Gentlemen—I should like to warn you.”

Since he allowed a pause to ensue, Hans Castorp naturally asked, with feigned astonishment: “Against what?” He might at least have asked, “Against whom?” but he phrased the question impersonally, so as to demonstrate his entire innocence, although even Joachim knew perfectly well what was meant.

“Against the person whose guests we have just been,” Settembrini replied, “and whose acquaintance, contrary to my wish and intention, I have procured for you. You know that chance ordained it; I could not avoid it. Yet I bear the responsibility, and it weighs heavily upon me. It is my duty at least to alert your youth to the intellectual dangers it runs in associating with this man, and also to ask you to keep your intercourse with him within prudent bounds. His form is logic, but his essence is confusion.”

“Well, certainly,” Hans Castorp opined; things were presumably not altogether aboveboard with Naphta, and his discourse did at times strike one as a little peculiar—it had sounded almost as though he wished to maintain that the sun revolved around the earth. But after all, how were they, the cousins, to have imagined that it might be inadvisable to enter into social relations with a friend of his, Settembrini’s? He said it himself: it was through him that they had met Naphta; they had encountered him in his company; he went walking with him and dropped in upon him quite informally for tea; surely that proved—

“Certainly, Engineer, certainly.” Herr Settembrini’s voice sounded gentle and resigned, yet contained a faint tremor. “That may be urged against me, and therefore you urge it. Very well, I shall gladly account for myself. I live under the same roof with this gentleman; encounters are unavoidable, one word leads to another, and an acquaintance is formed. Herr Naphta is a man of intellect—that is rare. He is of a discursive nature—and so am I. Condemn me who will, but I avail myself of the opportunity to cross the blade of ideas with an opponent who is, at all events, my equal. There is no one else for miles around... In short, it is true: I visit him, he visits me, and we also promenade together. We dispute. We dispute to the death, almost every day; yet I confess that the antagonism and hostility of his ideas provide me with an added inducement to meet him. I need the friction. Convictions do not live unless they have occasion to do battle, and—I am firmly established in mine. How could you claim the same for yourselves—you, Lieutenant, or you too, Engineer? You are unarmed against intellectual legerdemain; you run the risk that, under the influence of this half-fanatical, half-malicious sophistry, your minds and souls may suffer harm.”

Yes, yes, Hans Castorp said, that was probably true; his cousin and he were more or less vulnerable natures. It was the old story of life’s problem children, he understood. But against that one might cite Petrarch with his maxim—Herr Settembrini knew the one—and in any event what Naphta had to say was surely worth hearing: one must be fair, that business about communistic time, for the passage of which no one should receive a premium, had been excellent; and besides, he had been greatly interested to hear certain things about pedagogy which, without Naphta, he would probably never have heard at all...

Herr Settembrini compressed his lips, and Hans Castorp therefore hastened to add that he himself naturally refrained from taking sides or adopting any position; he had merely found what Naphta said about the lusts of youth worth hearing. “But now explain one thing to me first!” he continued. “This Herr Naphta—I say ‘this Herr’ to indicate that I am by no means unreservedly sympathetic towards him, but on the contrary maintain an attitude of the utmost inward reserve—”

“And quite rightly so!” Settembrini cried gratefully.

“—Well then, he said a great deal against money, the soul of the state, as he calls it, and against property, because it is theft—in short, against capitalist wealth, which, I believe, he said was the fuel of hellfire; that was approximately how he once expressed himself, unless I am mistaken—and he extolled the medieval prohibition of interest in every possible key. And yet he himself... Forgive me, but surely he must... It is the most astonishing surprise when one enters his rooms. All that silk...”

“Ah yes,” Settembrini smiled, “that is a characteristic tendency of taste.”

“...the beautiful old meubles,” Hans Castorp continued, recollecting, “the fourteenth-century Pietà... The Venetian chandelier... the little heyduke in livery... and there was as much chocolate ring-cake as one could wish... For his own part, surely he must—”

“For his own part,” Settembrini replied, “Herr Naphta is as little a capitalist as I am.”

“But?” Hans Castorp asked... “A ‘but’ is due at this point in your discourse, Herr Settembrini.”

“Well, those people do not let anyone who belongs to them go short.”

“Who are ‘those people’?”

“Those Fathers.”

“Fathers? Fathers?”

“But Engineer, I mean the Jesuits!”

There followed a pause. The cousins displayed the utmost consternation. Hans Castorp exclaimed:

“What in heaven’s name, cross and damnation—the man is a Jesuit?!”

“You have divined it,” Herr Settembrini said delicately.

“No, never in my life would I have... Who would ever think of such a thing! So that is why you addressed him as Padre?”

“That was a small exaggeration of courtesy,” Settembrini replied. “Herr Naphta is not a Father. Illness is to blame for his not having advanced so far, at least for the present. But he has completed his novitiate and taken his first vows. Illness compelled him to interrupt his theological studies. He then served for several years as a prefect in an institution of the order—that is, as supervisor, preceptor, and governor to the young pupils. This accorded with his pedagogical inclinations. Here he is able to indulge them further by teaching Latin at the Fridericianum. He has been here for five years. It has become uncertain whether, and when, he will be permitted to leave this place. But he is a member of the order, and even if his connection with it were looser, he could lack for nothing anywhere. I told you that he is personally poor—which is to say, without possessions. Naturally; that is prescribed. But the order commands immeasurable riches and provides for its own, as you have seen.”

“Thun—derbolt,” Hans Castorp murmured. “And I had no idea, never even imagined, that such things still existed in all seriousness! A Jesuit. So that is it!... But tell me one thing: if he is so well cared and provided for by that quarter—why in the world does he live... I certainly do not wish to disparage your lodgings, Herr Settembrini; you are charmingly situated at Lukaček’s, so pleasantly secluded and, moreover, especially cosy. But what I mean is: if Naphta is so flush, to put it crudely—why does he not take another apartment, a more imposing one, with a proper staircase and large rooms, in an elegant house? There is something positively secretive and adventurous about the way he lives in that hole with all his silk...”

Settembrini shrugged his shoulders.

“It must be considerations of tact and taste,” he said, “that determine him. I assume he salves his anticapitalist conscience by inhabiting a poor man’s rooms, and indemnifies himself by the manner in which he inhabits them. Discretion too will play a part. One does not thrust under people’s noses how handsomely the devil provides for one from behind. One presents a thoroughly unassuming façade and, behind it, gives free rein to one’s silken priestly taste...”

“Most remarkable!” said Hans Castorp. “Absolutely new and positively exciting to me, I confess. No, we are truly indebted to you, Herr Settembrini, for this acquaintance. Will you believe that we shall go and visit him many a time yet? That is settled. Such intercourse broadens one’s horizon to a quite unforeseen degree and affords a glimpse into a world of whose existence one had not the faintest notion. A genuine Jesuit! And when I say ‘genuine,’ I give myself the very cue for what is passing through my mind and what, after all, I must still remark upon. I ask: is he genuine? I know very well that you think there can be nothing genuine about a man for whom the Devil provides from behind. But what I mean comes down to this question: is he genuine _as a Jesuit_—that is what keeps going round in my head. He expressed certain ideas—you know which ones I mean—about modern communism and the godly zeal of the proletariat, which is not to withhold its hand from bloodshed—in short, ideas upon which I shall say no more; but beside them your grandfather with his burgher’s pike was a perfect little lamb, if you will pardon the expression. Is that permissible? Does it have the approval of his superiors? Is it compatible with the Roman doctrine on whose behalf the Order is supposed to intrigue throughout the world, so far as I know? Is it not—what is the word—heretical, divergent, incorrect? That is what _I_ find myself considering with regard to Naphta, and I should be glad to hear what you think.”

Settembrini smiled.

“Quite simple. Herr Naphta is indeed first and foremost a Jesuit, properly and entirely so. But secondly he is a man of intellect—I should not otherwise seek his company—and as such he strives after new combinations, adaptations, affiliations, modifications suited to the times. You saw that I myself was surprised by his theories. He had never revealed himself so fully to me before. I made use of the stimulus which your presence visibly afforded him to provoke him, in a certain respect, into saying his last word. It was bizarre enough, horrible enough ...”

“Yes, yes; but why has he not become a Father? Surely he would be old enough.”

“I told you that it was illness which has for the present prevented him.”

“Very well, but do you not think that if, firstly, he is a Jesuit and, secondly, a man of intellect, with combinations—that this second, additional circumstance has something to do with the illness?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“No, no, Herr Settembrini. I mean only this: he has a damp spot, and that prevented him from becoming a Father. But his combinations might also have prevented him, and to that extent—in a manner of speaking—the combinations and the damp spot belong together. In his own way he too is something of a problem child of life, a _joli jésuite_ with a _petite tache humide_.”

They had reached the sanatorium. On the platform before the building they stood for a little while longer before parting, drawing together into a small group while several patients loitering about the entrance watched their conversation. Herr Settembrini said:

“To repeat myself, my young friends, I warn you. I cannot forbid you to cultivate an acquaintance once made, if curiosity impels you to do so. But arm your hearts and minds with mistrust, and never fail to offer critical resistance. I shall characterize this man for you in a single word. He is a voluptuary.”

The cousins’ faces contorted themselves. Then Hans Castorp asked:

“A ... what? If you please, he is a member of an order. There are certain vows to be taken, so far as I know, and besides, he is so puny and poor in flesh ...”

“You are talking foolishly, Engineer,” Herr Settembrini replied. “It has nothing whatever to do with poverty of flesh, and as for the vows, there are reservations in such matters. I was speaking, however, in a broader and more spiritual sense, for which by now I ought to be entitled to assume some understanding on your part. Do you still remember how I visited you in your room one day—it was long ago, terribly long ago—you were just completing your bed rest after being admitted ...”

“Of course! You came in at twilight and turned on the light; I remember it as though it were today ...”

“Good; on that occasion, as we chatted, we came, as thank God happens fairly often, to loftier subjects. I believe we were speaking of death and life, of the dignities of death insofar as it is a condition and appurtenance of life, and of the grotesqueness into which it lapses when the intellect, abominably, isolates it as a principle. Gentlemen!” Herr Settembrini continued, stepping close before the two young men, spreading the thumb and middle finger of his left hand forkwise towards them, as though to gather them together into attentiveness, and raising the forefinger of his right admonishingly ... “Impress it upon your minds that the intellect is sovereign, its will is free, it determines the moral world. If it isolates death dualistically, then death, through this intellectual act of will, truly and in fact, _actu_, you understand me, becomes an independent power opposed to life, the adversarial principle, the great temptation, and its realm is that of voluptuousness. You ask me why voluptuousness? I answer: because it releases and redeems, because it is redemption—but not redemption from evil; rather, evil redemption. It dissolves custom and morality, it delivers us from discipline and bearing, it sets us free for voluptuousness. When I warn you against the man whose acquaintance I reluctantly procured for you, when I call upon you, in your intercourse and discourse with him, to gird your hearts three times over with criticism, I do so because all his thoughts are voluptuous in kind, for they stand beneath the protection of death—a most dissolute power, as I told you then, Engineer—I remember my expression well; I always retain in my memory any sound and excellent formulations I have had occasion to utter—a power directed against civilization, progress, labour, and life, from whose mephitic breath it is the educator’s noblest duty to protect young souls.”

No one could speak better than Herr Settembrini, more clearly or more roundly. Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemßen thanked him very prettily for what they had heard, took their leave, and ascended to the entrance of the Berghof, while Herr Settembrini, one flight above Naphta’s silken cell, returned to his humanist’s desk.

That was the cousins’ first visit to Naphta, whose course we have recorded here. Since then it had been followed by two or three more, one of them even in Herr Settembrini’s absence; and these too furnished young Hans Castorp with matter for reflection when, while the exalted image called _Homo Dei_ hovered before his inward eye, he sat at the blue-flowering spot of his seclusion and “reigned.”

Irascibility. And Something Else Most Embarrassing

Thus August came, and in its first days the anniversary of our hero’s arrival among us up here had fortunately slipped past. It was just as well that it was over—young Hans Castorp had looked forward to it with some discomfort. Such was the rule. The day of arrival was not popular; among those who had completed one or more full years it went unmentioned, and although otherwise no pretext for festivity and clinking glasses was allowed to pass unused, although the general and major emphases in the rhythm and pulse of the year were augmented by as many private and irregular ones as possible, and birthdays, general examinations, impending wild or genuine departures, and other such occasions were celebrated in the restaurant with feasting and popping corks—this commemorative day was devoted to silence alone; one let oneself glide across it, perhaps genuinely forgot to take notice of it, and could trust that the others did not have it very precisely in mind either. To be sure, people valued articulation; they observed the calendar, the cycle, the external recurrence. But to measure and count the time that was bound up, for the individual, with space up here—the personal and individual time, that is—was the business of short-termers and beginners; in this respect the established residents preferred the unmeasured and heedlessly eternal, the day that was always the same, and each delicately presumed in the other a wish he himself entertained. It would have been regarded as altogether tactless and brutal to tell anyone that today marked his third year here—that simply did not occur. Even Frau Stöhr, whatever else she might lack, was firm and polished in this point of tact; never would such an offence have escaped her. Her illness, the feverish condition of her body, was assuredly accompanied by great want of education. Only recently at table she had spoken of the “affectation” of the tips of her lungs and, when the conversation had turned to historical matters, declared that historical dates had always been her “Ring of Polycrates,” which had likewise produced a certain petrifaction among those seated around her. But that she should, for example, have reminded young Ziemßen of his anniversary in February would have been unthinkable, although she had probably remembered it. For her unfortunate head was of course full of useless dates and facts, and she loved calculating other people’s affairs; but custom held her in check.

So it was on Hans Castorp’s day as well. Once during a meal she had indeed tried to wink at him significantly, but when he met the signal with a blank expression, she had hastily withdrawn. Joachim too had kept silent towards his cousin, though he had certainly remembered the date upon which he had collected the arriving visitor from “Dorf” station. But Joachim, by nature already not much inclined to talk, by no means as much so as Hans Castorp had become, at least up here—to say nothing of the humanists and sophists of their acquaintance—Joachim had of late acquired a peculiar and conspicuous taciturnity; nothing but monosyllables now crossed his lips, though his expression showed inward activity. It was clear that “Dorf” station was associated for him with ideas other than those of meeting someone and arriving ... He was conducting a lively correspondence with the flatlands. Resolutions were maturing within him. Preparations he had made were approaching completion.

July had been warm and cheerful. But with the advent of the new month bad weather set in: dull wetness, sleet, then unmistakable snowfall; and, interrupted by isolated days of resplendent summer, it continued beyond the end of the month and into September. At first the rooms still retained the warmth of the preceding summer spell; they stood at ten degrees, which was considered comfortable. But it rapidly grew colder and colder, and people were glad of the snow that covered the valley, for the sight of it—the low temperature alone would have had no consequences—induced the management to put on the heat, at first only in the dining-room, then in the bedrooms as well; and when, after duly performing one’s rest cure, one unwound oneself from the two blankets and came in from the loggia, one could touch the awakened pipes with damp-stiffened hands, although their dry breath did, to be sure, intensify the burning of one’s cheeks.

Was this winter? The senses could not escape that impression, and people complained that they had been “cheated of summer,” although, assisted by natural and artificial circumstances, through an inwardly as well as outwardly prodigal expenditure of time, they had cheated themselves of it. Reason insisted that fine autumn days would still follow; perhaps they would even come in whole series and with such warm splendour that to call them summer would do them no excessive honour, provided one put out of mind the sun’s already shallower daily course and its already early departure. But the effect upon the emotions produced by the sight of the wintry landscape outside was stronger than such consolations. One stood at the closed balcony door and stared with disgust into the driving snow—it was Joachim who stood there, and in a constricted voice he said:

“Is all that to begin again now?”

Hans Castorp, behind him in the room, replied:

“That would be rather early; it cannot be final, although it certainly puts on a horribly final face. If winter consists of darkness, snow, cold, and warm pipes, then it is winter again—there is no denying it. And when one considers that it was winter only just now and that the thaw has scarcely ended—at any rate, it _seems_ so to us, does it not, as though it had only just been spring—then one may momentarily feel sick, I grant you. It is dangerous to the human appetite for life—let me explain what I mean. I mean that the world is normally arranged in a way that corresponds to man’s needs and conduces to his appetite for life; that must be acknowledged. I will not go so far as to say that the natural order—for example, the very size of the earth, the time it takes to revolve upon its axis and around the sun, the alternation of the times of day and seasons, the cosmic rhythm, if you like—is measured according to our needs; that would probably be presumptuous and simple-minded, it would be teleology, as the thinker says. But the matter is simply that our needs and the general, fundamental facts of nature are, thank God, in harmony with one another—thank God, I say, for it truly is an occasion to praise God—and when summer or winter comes in the flatlands, the previous summer or winter lies exactly far enough behind us for summer and winter to seem new and welcome once more, and upon that the appetite for life depends. But with us up here this order and harmony are disturbed: firstly, because there are really no proper seasons here at all, as you yourself once remarked, but only summer days and winter days jumbled together _pêle-mêle_; and besides, because what passes for one here is not time at all, so that the new winter, when it comes, is not new at all, but the old one over again; and that explains the displeasure with which you are staring through the pane.”

“Thank you very much,” said Joachim. “And now that you have explained it, you are, I believe, so satisfied that, among other things, you are satisfied with the thing itself as well, although it ... No!” said Joachim. “Enough!” he said. “It is a filthy business. The whole thing is a monstrous, revolting filthy business, and if for your part you ... _I_ ...” And he left the room at a rapid stride, angrily pulling the door shut behind him; and, unless all appearances deceived, there had been tears in his beautiful, gentle eyes.

The other remained behind, disconcerted. He had not taken certain resolutions of his cousin’s very seriously so long as the latter had indulged in loud announcements. But now, when they worked only in silence upon Joachim’s countenance and he behaved as he had just done, Hans Castorp was frightened, because he understood that this soldier was a man to proceed to action—frightened to the point of turning pale, and on behalf of them both, himself and Joachim. _Fort possible qu’il va mourir_, he thought, and since this was assuredly knowledge at third hand, the anguish of an old suspicion, never laid to rest, mingled with it as well, while at the same time he thought: Is it possible that he will leave me alone up here—me, who came here only to visit him?! adding: that would be mad and terrible—it would be so mad and terrible that I can feel my face growing quite cold and my heart behaving irregularly, for if I remain behind alone up here—and I shall, if he leaves; my going with him is utterly out of the question—then it is—but now my heart has stopped altogether—then it is forever and ever, for alone I shall never, never in all my life find the way back to the flatlands...

Such was the course of Hans Castorp’s frightened thoughts. That very afternoon he was to gain certainty regarding the course of events: Joachim declared himself, the die was cast, matters came to a head and a decision was reached.

After tea they descended to the bright basement for their monthly examination. It was early September. Upon entering the consulting room, through which dry air was sweeping, they found Dr. Krokowski at his desk, while the Hofrat, very blue in the face, leaned against the wall with folded arms, holding in one hand the stethoscope with which he tapped himself upon the shoulder. He yawned up at the ceiling. “Good day, children!” he said wearily, and continued to display a decidedly listless humour, melancholy, a general renunciation. Probably he had been smoking. But there were also objective vexations at hand, institutional matters of an all too familiar kind, of which the cousins had already heard: a young girl by the name of Ammy Nölting, who had first entered in the autumn of the year before last and, after nine months, had been discharged as healthy in August, only to return before September was out because she had “not felt well” at home, who had again been found entirely free of symptoms in February and restored to the flatlands, but since the middle of July had once more occupied her place at the Polecat table—this Ammy had been caught in her room at one o’clock in the morning with a patient named Polypraxios, the same Greek who had attracted legitimate attention at the Carnival festivities by the shapeliness of his legs, a young chemist whose father owned dye works at Piraeus; and they had been caught by a female friend distraught with jealousy, who had entered Ammy’s room by the same route as Polypraxios, namely across the balconies, and who, torn by pain and fury at what she saw, had raised a fearful outcry, set the whole establishment astir, and proclaimed the affair to all the world. Behrens had been obliged to give all three of them—the Athenian, Nölting, and her friend, who in her passion had paid scant regard to her own honour—their marching orders, and had just been discussing the distasteful business with his assistant, under whose private treatment, incidentally, both Ammy and the betrayer had been. Even during the cousins’ examination he continued to expatiate upon it in tones of melancholy and resignation; for he was so consummate an artist of auscultation that he could at once listen in upon a human being’s interior, speak of something else, and dictate his findings to the assistant.

“Yes, yes, _gentlemen_, that accursed _libido_!” he said. “Naturally you still take pleasure in the _chose_; it’s all very well for you. Vesicular. But the head of an institution gets his nose _plein_ of it, you may—dullness—you may believe me. Is it my fault that phthisis happens to be accompanied by a particular concupiscence—slight roughness? I didn’t arrange matters that way, but before you know where you are, there you stand like the proprietor of a bordello—shortened here beneath the left axilla. We have analysis, we have the heart-to-heart talk—yes, a fine business! The more the rabble talks itself out, the more lustful it becomes. I preach mathematics. Better here, the sound is gone. The study of mathematics, I say, is the best remedy for cupidity. Public Prosecutor Paravant, who was sorely tempted, has flung himself into it; he is now occupied with squaring the circle and feels great relief. But most of them are too stupid and too lazy for it, God have mercy. Vesicular. You see, I know perfectly well that young people here rather easily go to seed and come to ruin, and in earlier days I sometimes tried to intervene against their debaucheries. But then it happened that some brother or fiancé asked me to my face what business it was of mine. Since then I have been nothing but a physician—faint rales at the right apex.”

He had finished with Joachim, put his stethoscope into the pocket of his coat, and rubbed both eyes with his enormous left hand, as he was accustomed to do when he “fell off” and became melancholy. Half mechanically, and yawning now and again from ill humour, he recited his little formula:

“Well, Ziemßen, keep your spirits up. Things still aren’t precisely as they stand in the physiology book; there are hitches here and there, and you haven’t yet settled your affairs with Gaffky once and for all either—you have even moved one number up the scale since last time; it’s six on this occasion—but don’t go trumpeting any cosmic sorrow on that account. You were sicker when you arrived, I’ll give you that in writing, and if you spend another five or six monaths—did you know that people used to say ‘_mōnath_’ and not ‘month’? Much fuller in sound, really. I have resolved to say nothing but ‘monath’ from now on—”

“Herr Hofrat,” Joachim began... He stood there with his upper body bare, in a rigid posture, chest thrust out and heels together, and his face was as mottled as on that former occasion when Hans Castorp had first observed that this was the manner in which the deeply tanned turned pale.

“If you,” Behrens continued over his attempt to speak, “put in another six months or so of smart gaiter-duty up here, you’ll be a made man; you’ll be able to conquer Constantinople, you’ll have so much martial mettle that you can become commander-in-chief in the Marches—”

Who knows what other nonsense he might have spouted in his darkened humour, had Joachim’s unswerving posture, his unmistakable determination to speak—and to speak courageously—not put him out of his stride.

“Herr Hofrat,” the young man said, “I wished most respectfully to report that I have resolved to leave.”

“What’s this? Do you mean to become a travelling salesman? I thought you intended, later on, as a healthy man, to enter the army?”

“No, I must leave now, Herr Hofrat—in eight days.”

“Tell me, am I hearing correctly? You’re throwing down your rifle, you mean to run away? Do you know that amounts to desertion?”

“No, that is not how I see it, Herr Hofrat. I must join my regiment now.”

“Even though I tell you that I can discharge you with certainty in six months, but cannot discharge you before those six months are up?”

Joachim’s posture became more and more strictly military. He drew in his stomach and said shortly, in a constricted voice:

“I have been here for more than a year and a half, Herr Hofrat. I cannot wait any longer. Herr Hofrat originally said three months. Then my cure was extended again and again, by three months and six months at a time, and I am still not well.”

“Is that my fault?”

“No, Herr Hofrat. But I cannot wait any longer. If I am not to lose touch altogether, I cannot remain up here until my complete recovery. I must go down now. I shall still need some time for my equipment and other preparations.”

“You are acting with your family’s consent?”

“My mother consents. Everything has been settled. On the first of October I enter the Seventy-sixth as an officer cadet.”

“At any risk?” Behrens asked, looking at him out of bloodshot eyes...

“Yes, Herr Hofrat,” Joachim answered, his lips twitching.

“Well, then, that’s all right, Ziemßen.” The Hofrat’s expression changed; he relaxed his posture and slackened in every respect. “That’s all right, Ziemßen. At ease! Go with God. I can see that you know what you want; you are taking the matter upon yourself, and it is certainly true that it becomes your affair, not mine, from the moment you take it upon yourself. A man must act for himself. You leave without any guarantee; I answer for nothing. But bless you, it may go perfectly well. It’s an open-air profession you are taking up. It may quite possibly agree with you, and you may fight your way free.”

“Yes, Herr Hofrat.”

“Well, and you, young man from the civilian public? I suppose you’ll make the pilgrimage with him?”

It was Hans Castorp who was expected to answer. He stood there as pale as he had been a year before at the examination that had led to his admission, stood on the very same spot as then, and once again the beating of his heart was plainly visible against his ribs. He said:

“I should like to make that dependent upon your verdict, Herr Hofrat.”

“My verdict. Very good!” And he drew him close by the arm, listened and percussed. He did not dictate. It went rather quickly. When he had finished, he said:

“You may leave.”

Hans Castorp stammered:

“That is... how do you mean? Am I well, then?”

“Yes, you are well. The spot at the left apex is no longer worth mentioning. Your temperature does not correspond to the spot. Where it comes from I cannot tell you. I assume it has no further significance. As far as I am concerned, you may leave.”

“But... Herr Hofrat... perhaps you do not entirely mean that at this moment?”

“Do not mean it? Why not? What do you imagine? What, incidentally, do you imagine me to be, I should like to know? What do you take me for? The proprietor of a bordello?!”

It was a fit of sudden rage. The blue of the Hofrat’s face had deepened to violet beneath the fiery rush of blood; the one-sided contraction of his lip beneath the little moustache had grown so violent that his upper side teeth became visible; he thrust his head forward like a bull, and his eyes bulged, watering and bloodshot.

“I will not have it!” he shouted. “In the first place, I am not a proprietor at all! I am an employee here! I am a physician! I am _only_ a physician, do you understand me?! I am no procurer! I am no Signor Amoroso on the Toledo in beautiful Naples, do you understand me clearly?! I am a servant of suffering humanity! And if you have formed any other conception of my person, then the pair of you may go to the devil, to the dogs, or to perdition, whichever you prefer! A pleasant journey!”

With long, broad strides he went out through the door—the door leading into the anteroom of the X-ray chamber—and let it slam behind him.

Seeking counsel, the cousins looked at Dr. Krokowski, who, however, appeared immersed and buried in his papers. They hurried to get into their clothes. On the stairs Hans Castorp said:

“That was dreadful. Have you ever seen him like that before?”

“No, never quite like that. Those are attacks that superiors have. The only proper thing is to endure them in an irreproachable posture. Naturally he was irritated by the affair with Polypraxios and Nölting. But did you see,” Joachim continued—and one could tell how the joy of having fought his cause through was rising within him and constricting his chest—“did you see how he climbed down and capitulated when he realized I was in earnest? One need only show courage and refuse to let oneself be overborne. Now I have permission, so to speak—he himself said that I should probably fight my way free—and in eight days we leave... in three weeks I shall be with my regiment,” he corrected himself, removing Hans Castorp from the reckoning and confining his joyfully trembling declaration to his own person.

Hans Castorp was silent. He said nothing about Joachim’s “permission,” nor about his own, which might, after all, have afforded some occasion for discussion. He made his preparations for the rest cure, put the thermometer into his mouth, and with short, assured movements, with fully matured artistry and in accordance with that hallowed practice of which no one in the flatlands had the faintest conception, wrapped the two camel-hair blankets about himself; then he lay still, a symmetrical cylinder, upon his excellent reclining chair in the cold dampness of the early-autumn afternoon.

The rain clouds hung low, the weather flag down below had been hauled in, and remnants of snow lay upon the wet branches of the noble fir. From the lower rest hall, whence a year and a day ago Herr Albin’s voice had first struck his ear, quiet conversation rose to the man on duty, whose fingers and face soon stiffened with the damp cold. He was accustomed to it, and knew how to be grateful to the mode of life practised here—which had long since become the only conceivable one for him—for the favour of being allowed to lie secure and ponder everything.

It was decided: Joachim would leave. Rhadamanthus had discharged him—not _rite_, not as a healthy man, yet discharged him nevertheless, with half his approval, on the grounds of and in recognition of his steadfastness. He would travel down, descending by narrow-gauge railway to Landquart, to Romanshorn, then across the broad, abyssal lake over which the horseman rode in the poem, and through the whole of Germany to his home. He would live there, in the world of the flatlands, among people who had no conception of how one must live, who knew nothing of the thermometer, of the art of wrapping oneself up, of the fur sack, of the three daily pleasure walks, of... it was difficult to say, difficult to enumerate all the things of which those down below knew nothing; but the thought that Joachim, after spending more than a year and a half up here, was to live among the ignorant—this thought, which concerned Joachim alone, and only very remotely and tentatively himself as well, Hans Castorp—confused him so profoundly that he closed his eyes and made a warding gesture with one hand. “Impossible, impossible,” he murmured.

But since it was impossible, was he, then, to go on living up here alone, without Joachim? Yes. For how long? Until Behrens discharged him as cured—and in earnest, not as he had done today. But, in the first place, that was a point in time which, in attempting to determine it, one could only make, as Joachim once had on some occasion or other, a gesture into the air signifying the unforeseeable; and secondly: would the impossible then have become any more possible? Quite the contrary. And in fairness it had to be admitted that a hand was being offered him now, while the impossible was perhaps not yet quite so impossible as it would later become—a support and guidance for him, by way of Joachim’s wild departure, upon the road to the flatlands, which on his own he would never in all eternity find again. How humanistic pedagogy would admonish him to grasp that hand and accept its guidance, if humanistic pedagogy learned of the opportunity! But Herr Settembrini was only a representative—of things and powers worth listening to, but not exclusively, not unconditionally; and the same was true of Joachim. He was a military man, yes indeed. He was leaving—almost at the very moment when the high-bosomed Marusja was due to return (she was returning, as was known, on the first of October), whereas to him, the civilian Hans Castorp, departure seemed impossible chiefly and, to put it briefly, because he had to wait for Clawdia Chauchat, of whose return nothing whatever had yet been heard. “That is not how I see it,” Joachim had said when Rhadamanthus spoke to him of desertion—which, as applied to Joachim, had unquestionably been mere stuff and twaddle on the part of the darkly displeased Hofrat. But for him, the civilian, matters surely stood otherwise. For him (yes, beyond all doubt, that was it! It was in order to work this decisive thought up out of his feelings that he had lain down here today in the wet cold)—for him it would truly have been desertion to seize the opportunity and make a wild or half-wild departure for the flatlands: desertion from the far-reaching responsibilities that had grown upon him up here through his contemplation of the exalted structure called _Homo Dei_; betrayal of grave and inflaming duties of governance, duties that indeed exceeded his natural powers yet made him adventurously happy, and which he discharged here in the loggia and at the blue-blossoming place.

He tore the thermometer from his mouth, as violently as he had done only once before: after using it for the first time, when the matron had just sold him the dainty instrument; and he looked down at it with the same eagerness as then. Mercurius had climbed vigorously; it showed thirty-seven point eight, almost point nine.

Hans Castorp flung off the blankets, sprang up, and took a rapid turn into the room, to the corridor door and back. Then, once more in a horizontal position, he called softly to Joachim and asked about his chart.

“I don’t take my temperature any longer,” Joachim replied.

“Well, I have tempus,” said Hans Castorp, treating the word, in imitation of Frau Stöhr, by analogy with “champers”; whereupon Joachim remained silent behind the glass partition.

Nor did he say anything later, that day or on those that followed; he made no verbal inquiry into his cousin’s plans and decisions, which, with so short a time remaining, were bound to reveal themselves of their own accord—through actions or the omission of actions; and reveal themselves they did, namely through the latter. He appeared to subscribe to the Quietism which had maintained that to act was to offend God, who alone wished to do the acting. At any rate, Hans Castorp’s activity during those days had been confined to a visit to Behrens, a consultation of which Joachim knew and whose course and outcome he could calculate on the fingers of one hand. His cousin had declared that he took the liberty of attaching greater weight to the Hofrat’s many earlier admonitions that he should cure his case thoroughly up here, so that he might never have to return, than to the hasty words of an ill-humoured moment; that his temperature was 37.8, that he could not feel himself discharged _rite_, and that, unless the Hofrat’s recent pronouncement was to be understood as an expulsion—a measure which he, the speaker, was not conscious of having given any cause to impose—he had, after calm reflection and in conscious opposition to Joachim Ziemßen, resolved to remain up here and await his complete detoxification. To which the Hofrat had replied, almost word for word: “_Bon_, and very good!” and: “No hard feelings!” and: that was what he called talking like a sensible fellow; and: he had seen from the first that Hans Castorp had more talent for being a patient than that runaway and fire-eater over there. And so forth.

Such, then, according to Joachim’s approximately accurate calculation, had been the course of the conversation; and so he said nothing, merely observing in silence that Hans Castorp did not join him in the steps preparatory to departure. But how much the good Joachim had to occupy him in his own affairs! He truly could not concern himself any further with his cousin’s fate and whereabouts. A storm was surging in his breast—as may readily be imagined. Perhaps it was just as well that he no longer took his temperature, but had broken his instrument, allegedly by letting it fall: readings might have yielded disconcerting results, so frightfully agitated was Joachim, now darkly flushed, now pale with joy and suspense. He could no longer lie down; all day long he paced to and fro in his room, as Hans Castorp could hear: throughout all those hours, four times a day, in which the horizontal prevailed at the Berghof. A year and a half! And now down to the flatlands, home, now actually to the regiment, even if only with half-permission! It was no small matter in any sense, as Hans Castorp felt in sympathy with his restlessly pacing cousin. Eighteen months, the full cycle of the year and then half of it once again, spent up here, deeply settled in, fixed upon this track of order, this inviolable course of life, tested through seven times seventy days and in every season—and now home into foreign parts, among the ignorant! What difficulties of acclimatization might threaten him there? And could one wonder if Joachim’s great agitation consisted not only of joy, but if anxiety too, the pain of parting from all that had become familiar through and through, drove him about his room?—To say nothing whatever of Marusja.

But joy predominated. The good Joachim’s heart and mouth overflowed with it; he spoke of himself and left his cousin’s future to take care of itself. He spoke of how new and refreshed everything would be—life, himself, time: every day, every hour. He would have solid time again, slowly passing, weighty years of youth. He spoke of his mother, Hans Castorp’s step-aunt Ziemßen, who had the same gentle black eyes as Joachim and whom he had not seen throughout all his time in the mountains, since, put off from month to month and half-year to half-year, as he himself had been, she had never brought herself to visit her son. With an enthusiastic smile he spoke of the oath to the colours that he would now very soon take—it was sworn under solemn circumstances in the presence of the flag, sworn to the standard itself. “What’s that?” Hans Castorp asked. “Seriously? To the pole? To the scrap of cloth?”—Yes, indeed; and in the artillery, to the gun, symbolically.—Those were certainly rapturous customs, the civilian remarked, sentimental-fanatical customs, one might say; at which Joachim nodded his head, proud and happy.

He immersed himself in preparations; he settled his final account at the administrative office and began packing his trunk days before the date he had set himself. He packed both summer and winter things, and had the fur sack together with the camel-hair blankets sewn into sacking by the porter: perhaps he might have occasion to use them during manoeuvres. He began to say his farewells. He paid a farewell visit to Naphta and Settembrini—alone, for his cousin did not accompany him on this errand, nor did he ask what Settembrini had thought and said about Joachim’s impending departure and Hans Castorp’s impending non-departure: whether he had said “See, see,” or “So, so,” or both, or “_Poveretto_”—it had to be all the same to him.

Then came the eve of departure, when Joachim performed everything for the last time—every meal, every rest cure, every constitutional—and took his leave of the doctors and the matron. And then the morning itself dawned: hot-eyed and cold-handed, for he had not slept the whole night, Joachim came to breakfast, scarcely ate a morsel, and, when the dwarf announced that the luggage had been strapped on, shot hastily from his chair to take leave of his table companions. Frau Stöhr shed tears, the readily flowing, saltless tears of the uncultivated, as she bade him farewell; and immediately afterward, behind Joachim’s back, she turned upon the schoolmistress, shaking her head and twisting her spread hand to and fro, a nasty face full of exceedingly vulgar scepticism concerning Joachim’s right to depart and his prospects of well-being. Hans Castorp saw it as he stood drinking off his cup, so as to follow close upon his cousin’s heels. Tips still had to be distributed, the official farewell of an emissary from the administration acknowledged in the vestibule. As always, patients stood ready to watch the departure: Frau Iltis with the “Sterilett,” the ivory-coloured Levi, the dissolute Popów with his bride. They waved handkerchiefs while the carriage, braked at the rear wheel, rattled down the drive. Joachim had been given roses. He wore a hat upon his head. Hans Castorp did not.

The morning was splendid, the first sunny one after long days of gloom. The Schiahorn, the Grünen Türme, the summit of the Dorfberg stood unchanged, like landmarks, against the blue, and Joachim’s eyes rested upon them. It was almost a pity, Hans Castorp remarked, that the weather had turned so fine precisely for his departure. There was malice in it, whereas a thoroughly inhospitable final impression made every separation easier. To which Joachim replied that he required no easing, and that this was excellent weather for training; he could well use it down below. Otherwise they spoke little. Given how matters stood for each of them and between them, there was, of course, nothing proper to say. Besides, they had the lame man before them on the box beside the coachman.

Seated high and jolted upon the hard cushions of the cabriolet, they had left the watercourse and the narrow track behind and were travelling along the irregularly built-up road that ran parallel to the railway; and they drew up on the stony square before the station building at “Dorf,” which was little more than a shed. Hans Castorp recognized everything again with alarm. Since his arrival thirteen months before, at the fall of dusk, he had not seen the station again. “This is where I arrived,” he said superfluously, and Joachim answered only: “Yes, so you did,” and paid the coachman.

The bustling lame man attended to everything, the ticket and the luggage. They stood together on the platform beside the miniature train, next to the little grey-upholstered compartment in which Joachim had secured a place with his coat, rolled plaid, and roses. “Well, mind you swear your rapturous oath!” said Hans Castorp, and Joachim replied: “I shall.” What else? They entrusted each other with final greetings, greetings to those down below and those up here. Then Hans Castorp merely traced lines on the asphalt with his walking-stick. When the call came to board, he started, looked at Joachim, and Joachim looked at him. They shook hands. Hans Castorp smiled vaguely; the other’s eyes were grave, sorrowful, and urgent. “_Hans!_” he said—almighty God! had anything so embarrassing ever happened in the world before? He addressed Hans Castorp by his Christian name! Not with “you” or “man,” as they had done all their lives, but, in defiance of every convention of reserve and in a most painfully effusive manner, by his Christian name! “Hans,” he said, anxiously and insistently pressing his cousin’s hand, while the latter could not help noticing that the sleepless, travel-fevered, deeply shaken man’s nape was trembling, as his own did when he was “governing”—“Hans,” he implored, “follow me soon!” Then he swung himself onto the footboard. The door slammed, a whistle sounded, the carriages jolted against one another, the little locomotive gathered way, and the train slipped away. The traveller waved his hat through the window, the one left behind waved his hand. His heart in turmoil, he stood there alone for a long while. Then he slowly retraced the road along which Joachim had guided him a year and a day before.

A Repulsed Attack

The wheel revolved. The hand advanced. The orchis and columbine had faded, and so had the wild pink. The deep-blue stars of the gentian and the autumn crocus, pale and poisonous, showed themselves once more in the damp grass, and a reddish hue lay over the forests. The autumnal equinox had passed, All Souls’ Day was in sight, and, for more practised consumers of time, no doubt the first Sunday in Advent, the shortest day, and Christmas as well. But for the present, fine October days followed one upon another—days of the kind on which the cousins had viewed the Hofrat’s oil paintings.

Since Joachim’s departure, Hans Castorp no longer sat at Frau Stöhr’s table, no longer at the one from which Dr. Blumenkohl had died away and at which Marusja had smothered her unaccountable mirth in the little orange-scented handkerchief. New guests sat there now, complete strangers. Our friend, however, now two and a half months deep into his second year, had been assigned another place by the administration, at a neighbouring table which stood diagonally before the old one, farther toward the left-hand veranda door, between his former table and the Good Russian table—in short, at Settembrini’s table. Yes, Hans Castorp now occupied the humanist’s deserted place, once again at the end of the table, opposite the doctor’s seat, which at each of the seven tables was kept reserved for the Hofrat and his assistant when they came to dine as guests.

Up there, to the left of the medical presidency, the hunchbacked amateur photographer from Mexico perched upon several cushions, his expression, by reason of his linguistic isolation, being that of a deaf man; and beside him sat the elderly young lady from Transylvania who, as Herr Settembrini had already complained, claimed the interest of the entire world for her brother-in-law, although no one knew anything about the man, nor wished to. With a little cane, topped by a crook of Tula silver, which she also used on her prescribed walks, laid crosswise behind her neck, she might be seen at certain hours of the day, standing at the balustrade of her balcony box and expanding her plate-flat chest in hygienic deep breathing. Opposite her sat a Czech gentleman whom everyone called Herr Wenzel, since no one could pronounce his surname. Herr Settembrini had occasionally attempted, in his day, to force out the tangled sequence of consonants of which that name consisted—not from any honest endeavour, certainly, but merely for the cheerful purpose of testing the genteel helplessness of his Latinity upon that savage thicket of sounds. Though fat as a badger and possessed of an appetite remarkable even among those up here, the Bohemian had been declaring for four years that he must die. At the evening gatherings he would sometimes strum the songs of his homeland upon a ribboned mandolin and tell of his sugar-beet plantation, where none but pretty girls worked. Next, already in Hans Castorp's vicinity, sat Herr and Frau Magnus, the brewer and his wife from Halle, one on either side of the table. Melancholy atmospherically enveloped this pair, since both were losing substances essential to life through their metabolism: Herr Magnus sugar, Frau Magnus protein. The state of mind of pale Frau Magnus in particular seemed destitute of every admixture of hope; an intellectual barrenness emanated from her like the musty breath of a cellar, and, almost more explicitly than the uneducated Stöhr, she embodied that union of illness and stupidity at which Hans Castorp, though rebuked for it by Herr Settembrini, had taken intellectual offence. Herr Magnus was of a livelier mind and more talkative, though only in the fashion that had formerly aroused Settembrini's literary impatience. He was also prone to sudden wrath and frequently came into hostile collision with Herr Wenzel over political and other matters. For the Bohemian's national aspirations incensed him, and the latter, moreover, professed antialcoholism and passed moral judgments unfavourable to the brewer's means of livelihood; whereupon Magnus, red in the face, defended the sanitary irreproachability of the beverage with which his interests were so intimately bound up. On such occasions Herr Settembrini had formerly intervened with humorous conciliation; but Hans Castorp, in his stead, found himself little fitted for the task and could not command sufficient authority to replace him in it.

He had more personal relations with only two of his table companions. A. K. Ferge of Petersburg, his neighbour on the left, was one: that good-natured sufferer who, from beneath the brushwood of his reddish-brown moustache, told of the manufacture of rubber shoes and of distant regions, the Arctic Circle, the eternal winter at the North Cape, and with whom Hans Castorp even occasionally shared a prescribed pleasure walk. The other, who joined them as a third whenever chance permitted, and whose place was at the upper end of the table, opposite the Mexican hunchback, was the thin-haired Mannheim man with bad teeth, Wehsal by name—Ferdinand Wehsal, a merchant by calling—he whose eyes had always clung with such mournful desire to Frau Chauchat's graceful person, and who had sought Hans Castorp's friendship ever since Shrovetide.

He pursued it with tenacity and humility, with a devotion that looked upward from below and held much that was repugnant and chilling for its object, since Hans Castorp understood its complicated meaning, but which he made himself meet with humanity. Regarding him calmly, for he knew that the slightest contraction of his brows sufficed to make the wretchedly sensitive man cower and recoil, he tolerated Wehsal's servility, which seized every opportunity to bow before him and curry favour; he even tolerated the other's sometimes carrying his overcoat during their pleasure walks—with a certain reverence he bore it over his arm—and finally he tolerated the Mannheim man's conversation, which was gloomy. Wehsal was eager to raise questions such as whether there were sense and reason in declaring one's love to a woman whom one loved, but who wanted nothing to do with one—the _hopeless_ declaration of love, and what the gentlemen thought of it. For his own part, he thought most highly of it and believed that infinite happiness was bound up with it. For although the act of confession might excite disgust and contain much self-abasement, it nevertheless established, for that instant, the fullest intimacy of love with the desired object, dragged her into one's confidence, into the element of one's own passion; and although everything was admittedly over with that, eternal loss was not too high a price for one moment's rapture of despair; for confession signified violence, and the greater the resisting revulsion against it, the more exquisite the pleasure—. At this point a darkening of Hans Castorp's countenance frightened Wehsal back, though this occurred more out of regard for the presence of the good-natured Ferge—to whom, as he often emphasized, all higher and more difficult subjects were wholly remote—than from any censorious stiffness on our hero's part. For, since we remain at all times equally far from wishing to make him either better or worse than he was, let it be related that when poor Wehsal, one evening when they were alone, pressed him in pallid words, for God's sake to confide to him something more precise about the experiences and adventures of the Shrovetide night after the social gathering, Hans Castorp complied with tranquil kindness, without this muted scene bearing anything basely frivolous about it, as the reader may perhaps suppose. Nevertheless, we have reasons for excluding both him and ourselves from it, and shall add only that thereafter Wehsal carried the amiable Hans Castorp's overcoat with redoubled devotion.

So much for Hans Castorp's new company at table. The place on his right was vacant, or occupied only temporarily, for a few days: by a visitor, as he himself had once been, a relative come to call, a guest from the flatlands and an emissary from there, as one might say—in a word, by Hans Castorp's uncle James Tienappel.

It was an adventurous thing, suddenly to have beside him a representative and envoy of home, still bearing in the fabric of his English suit the atmosphere of the old, the sunken, the former life, of a deeply situated “upper world.” But it had had to come. For a long while Hans Castorp had privately reckoned upon such an advance by the flatlands, and had even quite correctly envisaged the very person who now actually proved to have been entrusted with the reconnaissance—which had not been difficult; for Peter, the seafaring one, scarcely came into consideration, while of Great-Uncle Tienappel himself it was certain that ten horses could never drag him into regions whose atmospheric-pressure conditions gave him every cause for fear. No, it had to be James who, commissioned by the family at home, would come to look after the missing man; indeed, he had been expected before now. But since Joachim had returned alone and informed the family circle of the state of affairs up here, the attack had become due and overdue; and thus Hans Castorp was not in the least astonished when, scarcely a fortnight after Joachim's departure, the concierge handed him a telegram which, opened with foreknowledge, proved to be James Tienappel's announcement of his imminent arrival. He had business on Swiss soil and had resolved to take advantage of the opportunity for an excursion to Hans Castorp's altitude. He was to be expected the day after next.

“Good,” thought Hans Castorp. “Very well,” he thought. And inwardly he even added something like: “By all means!” “If only you had any idea!” he said in his thoughts to the approaching man. In short, he received the announcement with great composure, communicated it, incidentally, to Hofrat Behrens and the management, had a room prepared—Joachim's room was still available—and on the second day thereafter, at the hour of his own arrival, that is, at about eight in the evening, when it was already dark, he drove in the same hard vehicle in which he had escorted Joachim away to the “Dorf” station, to collect the emissary from the flatlands who intended to see that all was as it should be.

Cinnabar-red, hatless, wearing only his suit, he stood at the edge of the platform when the little train rolled in, stationed himself beneath his relative's window, and called upon him simply to come out, for there he was. Consul Tienappel—he was vice-consul and most commendably relieved the old man of much work in this honorary sphere as well—climbed down from the compartment with surprised cheerfulness, muffled against the cold in his winter overcoat, for the October evening really was piercingly chill; little was wanting before one might have spoken of a clear frost, and indeed it would certainly freeze toward morning. His cheerfulness expressed itself in the somewhat thin, highly civilized forms of the refined north-west German gentleman. He greeted his cousin's son with emphatic expressions of satisfaction at his excellent appearance, found himself relieved by the limping porter of every concern for his luggage, and outside, with Hans Castorp, climbed onto the high, hard seat of their conveyance. They drove beneath a richly starred sky, and Hans Castorp, his head tilted back and his forefinger raised in the air, expounded the upper regions to his uncle-cousin, enclosing now one, now another glittering constellation in word and gesture and calling the planets by name—while James, more attentive to his companion's person than to the cosmos, reflected that although it was possible, and did not seem downright mad, to speak just now, here and at once, precisely of the stars, a good many other subjects would nevertheless have lain nearer at hand. Since when did he know his way about so confidently up here? he asked Hans Castorp; to which the latter replied that this was an acquisition of the evening rest cure on the balcony, in spring, summer, autumn, and winter.—What? Did he lie on the balcony at night?—Oh yes. And the Consul would do so too. Nothing else would remain for him.

“Certainly, of course,” said James Tienappel obligingly and somewhat intimidated. His foster-brother spoke calmly and monotonously. Hatless and without an overcoat, he sat beside him in the frost-tinged freshness of the autumn evening. “Surely you aren't cold at all?” James asked him; for he himself was trembling beneath the inch-thick cloth of his coat, and his manner of speech had something at once hurried and impeded about it, since his teeth showed a tendency to chatter. “We do not feel cold,” Hans Castorp answered calmly and briefly.

The Consul could not look at him often enough from the side. Hans Castorp made no inquiries after the relatives and acquaintances at home. Greetings from there, conveyed by James—including Joachim's, who was already with his regiment and radiant with happiness and pride—he received with calm thanks, without entering further into circumstances at home. Disquieted by an indefinite something of which he could not tell whether it emanated from his nephew or had its origin in himself, in the traveller's physical condition, James looked about him, though he could make out little of the high-valley landscape, and drew a deep breath of the air, which, as he exhaled, he declared magnificent. Certainly, the other replied; it was not world-famous for nothing. It possessed powerful properties. Although it accelerated the general combustion, the body nevertheless accumulated protein in it. It was capable of curing diseases that every human being bore latent within him, though at first it vigorously promoted them, bringing them, by means of a general organic stimulation and upward surge, to a festal outbreak, so to speak.—He must permit him—festal?—Indeed. Had James never observed that the outbreak of an illness possessed something festal, constituted a kind of bodily revelry?—“Certainly, of course,” the uncle hastened to say, his lower jaw beyond control, and then announced that he could remain for eight days, that was to say, a week, seven days, perhaps only six. Since, as he had said, he found Hans Castorp looking exceedingly well and strengthened, thanks to a cure that had extended itself far beyond all expectation, he assumed that his nephew would travel straight home to the flatlands with him.

“Come, come, no charging headfirst through the wall,” said Hans Castorp. Uncle James spoke exactly like one of those down below. He must first look about him a little and settle in here among us; then he would change his ideas soon enough. What mattered was a complete cure; completeness was the decisive point, and Behrens had lately saddled him with another six months. At this the uncle addressed him as “boy” and asked whether he was mad. “Have you gone completely mad?” he asked. By now that amounted to a holiday of five quarters of a year, and now another half-year! In Almighty God's name, one simply did not have so much time!—At that Hans Castorp laughed calmly and briefly up at the stars. Ah yes, time! As far as that particular thing was concerned, human time, James would first of all have to revise the notions he had brought with him before presuming to speak of it up here.—In Hans Castorp's interest he would have a serious word with the Hofrat as early as tomorrow, Tienappel promised.—“Do!” said Hans Castorp. “You will like him. An interesting character, brisk and melancholy at once.” And then he pointed out the lights of the Schatzalp sanatorium and casually told him about the corpses that were sent down the bobsleigh run.

The gentlemen dined together in the Berghof restaurant, after Hans Castorp had shown his guest into Joachim's room and given him an opportunity to freshen himself a little. The room had been fumigated with H₂CO, Hans Castorp said—just as thoroughly as if its occupant had not made an unauthorized departure, but quite another kind, not an _exodus_ but an _exitus_. And when his uncle inquired after the meaning: “Jargon!” said the nephew. “A manner of speaking!” he said. “Joachim deserted—to the colours; that is possible too. But hurry, or you will not get any hot food!” And so they sat facing each other in the comfortably heated restaurant, at a raised table. The dwarf-woman served them nimbly, and James ordered a bottle of Burgundy, which was set before them reclining in a little basket. They touched glasses and let the gentle glow stream through them. The younger man spoke of life up here through the changing seasons, of various phenomena in the dining hall, and of pneumothorax, whose nature he explained by adducing the case of the good-natured Ferge and discoursing upon the drastic nature of pleural shock; he also recalled the three coloured swoons into which Herr Ferge claimed to have fallen, the olfactory hallucination that had played a part in the shock, and the laughter he had emitted as he snapped off. He bore the burden of the conversation. James ate and drank heartily, as was his custom, with an appetite sharpened further by travel and change of air. Nevertheless, he sometimes interrupted his consumption of food—sat with his mouth full of victuals that he forgot to chew, knife and fork arrested at an obtuse angle over his plate, and gazed fixedly at Hans Castorp, apparently without knowing it, and without the latter showing himself particularly sensitive to the scrutiny. Swollen veins stood out upon Consul Tienappel's temples beneath his thin blond hair.

There was no talk of matters at home, whether personal and familial, municipal, or commercial, nor of the firm of Tunder & Wilms, shipyard, engineering works, and boiler forge, which was still awaiting the young trainee’s arrival—though this was naturally so far from being its sole occupation that one might wonder whether it was awaiting him at all. James Tienappel had no doubt touched upon all these subjects during the drive and afterward, but they had fallen to the ground and lain there dead—rebounding from Hans Castorp’s calm, decided, and unaffected indifference, a kind of invulnerability or immunity reminiscent of his insensibility to the autumnal evening chill, of his words, “We do not feel the cold,” and perhaps the reason why his uncle sometimes regarded him so fixedly. The conversation also turned to the Matron, the physicians, and Dr. Krokowski’s lectures—it so happened that James would attend one of them if he stayed eight days. Who had told the nephew that his uncle intended to attend the lecture? No one. He assumed it, took it for granted with such calm certainty that the very thought of possibly not attending must have appeared unnatural to the other man himself, and he hastened, with an eager “Certainly, of course,” to forestall any suspicion that for one moment he had contemplated the impossible. This, precisely, was the power whose vague but compelling influence unconsciously impelled Herr Tienappel to keep looking at his kinsman—now, incidentally, with his mouth open, for the passage through his nose had become blocked, although, so far as the Consul knew, he had no cold. He heard his relative speak of the illness that formed the common professional concern of everyone here, and of their receptivity to it; of Hans Castorp’s own modest but protracted case; of the irritation exerted by the bacilli upon the tissue cells of the bronchial ramifications and pulmonary alveoli; of the formation of tubercles and the production of soluble intoxicating toxins; of cellular disintegration and the process of caseation, whereupon the question arose whether this would be brought to a salutary standstill through calcareous petrification and cicatrization of the connective tissue, or would develop into larger foci of softening, eat spreading cavities, and destroy the organ. He heard of the savagely accelerated, galloping form of this process, which led to the exitus within a few months, indeed within weeks; heard of pneumotomy, the craft so masterfully practised by the Hofrat; of pulmonary resection, such as was to be performed tomorrow or shortly afterward upon a newly arrived severe case, an originally charming Scotswoman who had been attacked by _Gangraena pulmonum_, pulmonary gangrene, so that a blackish-green pestilence held sway within her and she spent all day inhaling atomized carbolic-acid solution lest disgust with herself drive her out of her mind—and suddenly, wholly unexpectedly to himself and to his profoundest shame, the Consul burst out. He gave a snorting laugh, though in his alarm he instantly recollected and mastered himself, coughed, and tried by every possible means to disguise the senseless occurrence—perceiving meanwhile, to his reassurance, which nevertheless harboured a fresh uneasiness, that Hans Castorp paid no attention whatever to the mishap, which could not possibly have escaped him, but passed over it with a heedlessness that revealed itself not as tact, consideration, or courtesy, but as pure indifference and invulnerability, as tolerance of an uncanny degree, as though he had long since forgotten how to feel astonished by such incidents. But whether the Consul subsequently wished to drape his outburst of merriment in a little cloak of reason and meaning, or whatever the connection may have been, he suddenly embarked upon men’s and club-room talk, and, with the veins in his head greatly swollen, began speaking of a so-called “chansonette,” a ballad singer, a perfectly outrageous female who was at present carrying on in St. Pauli and, with her temperament-laden charms, which he described to his kinsman, was keeping the male world of the home republic breathless. His tongue slurred somewhat during these tales, but he need not let that trouble him, since his companion’s imperturbable tolerance clearly extended to this phenomenon as well. Nevertheless, the overpowering fatigue of the journey, to which he had fallen victim, gradually became so unmistakable to him that at about half past ten he advocated bringing their evening together to a close; and inwardly he was far from pleased when, in the hall, they encountered the repeatedly mentioned Dr. Krokowski, who had been sitting near the door of one of the salons reading a newspaper, and to whom his nephew introduced him. To the doctor’s robustly jovial address he could find almost no other reply than “Certainly, of course,” and was relieved when his nephew, announcing that he would fetch him at eight the next morning for breakfast, made his way along the balcony from Joachim’s disinfected room to his own, leaving him free to let himself fall, with his customary good-night cigarette, into the deserter’s bed. He came within a hair’s breadth of starting a conflagration, for twice he fell asleep with the glowing article of fumigation between his lips.

James Tienappel, whom Hans Castorp addressed alternately as “Uncle James” and simply “James,” was a long-legged gentleman approaching forty, dressed in English cloth and blossom-fresh linen, with thinning canary-yellow hair, close-set blue eyes, a straw-coloured, clipped little moustache half shaven away, and hands of the finest grooming. A husband and father for several years, though without thereby having been obliged to leave the spacious villa of the old Consul on Harvestehuder Weg—married to a member of his own social circle, a woman as civilized and refined as himself, with the same low, rapid, pointedly courteous manner of speech—at home he presented the figure of a highly energetic, circumspect, and, for all his elegance, coldly practical businessman; but amid unfamiliar customs, while travelling, in the south of the country, for example, he assumed a certain precipitate complaisance, a courteously eager readiness for self-effacement, in which there appeared not the least insecurity concerning his own culture, but, on the contrary, an awareness of its firm integrity, coupled with the desire to correct the limitations imposed by his aristocratic conditioning and to betray no sign of astonishment even amid forms of life that he found incredible. “Naturally, certainly, of course!” he would hasten to say, lest anyone suppose that, though refined, he was narrow-minded. Now, to be sure, he had come here on a definite practical mission, namely with the charge and intention of taking energetic stock of affairs, of “prying loose,” as he phrased it inwardly, his dilatory young relative and delivering him back home; yet he was conscious that he was operating on foreign soil—sensitive from the first moment to the intimation that a world and sphere of manners had received him as a guest which not only equalled his own in compact self-assurance but even surpassed it, so that his businesslike energy at once came into conflict with his good breeding, and into a very grave conflict indeed; for the self-certainty of the host sphere proved positively crushing.

This was precisely what Hans Castorp had foreseen when he inwardly answered the Consul’s telegram with a composed “By all means!”; but one must not suppose that he consciously exploited the strength of character of his surroundings against his uncle. He had long since become far too much a part of them for that, and it was not he who employed them against the assailant, but the other way round, so that everything proceeded in matter-of-fact innocence, from the moment when a first intimation of the hopelessness of his enterprise had breathed vaguely upon the Consul from the person of his nephew, down to the end and outcome—which Hans Castorp, to be sure, could not refrain from accompanying with a melancholy smile.

On the first morning after breakfast, during which the resident had introduced the visiting observer to the circle of his table companions, Tienappel learned from Hofrat Behrens, who came rowing into the dining hall, tall and colourful, followed by his blackly pallid assistant, in order to cruise briefly about it with his rhetorical morning question, “Slept well?”—learned from the Hofrat, we say, not only that it had been a splendidly hare-brained notion of his to come up here and keep his lonely _neveu_ company for a while, but that he was also acting very wisely in his own most personal interest, since he was obviously totally anaemic.—Anaemic? He, Tienappel?—And how! said Behrens, pulling down one of his lower eyelids with his forefinger. Advanced! he said. The gentleman uncle would be downright clever to stretch himself out comfortably on his balcony here for a few weeks and, in every particular, follow his nephew’s example. In his condition there was nothing more sensible one could do than live for a while as one did with a mild _tuberculosis pulmonum_, which, incidentally, was always present.—“Certainly, of course!” the Consul said quickly, and continued for some time to gaze after the retreating, neck-aloft figure with his mouth eagerly and courteously open, while his nephew stood beside him, composed and seasoned. They then set forth upon the prescribed pleasure walk to the bench beside the watercourse, after which James Tienappel took his first reclining hour under Hans Castorp’s instruction; Hans lent him one of his camel-hair blankets to supplement the plaid he had brought with him—he himself had more than enough with one in view of the fine autumn weather—and faithfully instructed him, grip by grip, in the traditional art of wrapping oneself up; indeed, after he had already rounded and smoothed the Consul into a mummy, he undid the whole thing once more, so that James might repeat the established procedure on his own, with assistance intervening only by way of correction, and taught him how to fasten the canvas screen to the chair and angle it against the sun.

The Consul made jokes. The spirit of the flatlands was still strong within him, and he made merry over what he was learning, just as he had already made merry over the measured pleasure walk after breakfast. But when he saw the calmly uncomprehending smile with which his nephew received his jokes, and in which the entire compact self-certainty of the sphere of manners was reflected, fear seized him; he became anxious for his businesslike energy and hastily resolved to bring about the decisive conversation with the Hofrat concerning his nephew at once, as soon as possible, that very afternoon, while he still had some spirit of his own, some strength from below, to throw into the balance; for he felt these forces dwindling, felt the spirit of the place entering into a dangerous alliance with his good breeding against them.

He further felt that it had been quite unnecessary for the Hofrat to recommend that, on account of his anaemia, he conform up here to the customs of the sick: it came about of itself, there appeared to be no other conceivable course; and how far this merely appeared so by virtue of Hans Castorp’s composure and invulnerable self-assurance, how far, in strict and absolute fact, nothing else was possible or conceivable, could not from the outset be distinguished by a well-bred man. Nothing could have been more self-evident than that the first rest cure should be followed by the ample second breakfast, from which the pleasure walk down to “Platz” followed with compelling logic—and after that Hans Castorp wrapped his uncle up again. He wrapped him up: that was the word. And in the autumn sunshine, upon a chair whose comfort was wholly indisputable, indeed highly deserving of praise, he left him lying as he himself lay, until the shattering gong summoned them to luncheon amid the body of patients—a meal that proved first-rate, tip-top, and so extraordinarily abundant that the ensuing general rest-cure duty was more than an outward custom, that it was an inward necessity and was performed from the most personal conviction. Thus matters proceeded through the mighty supper and the evening sociability in the salon with its optical trick instruments—there was simply no objection to be raised against a daily programme that imposed itself with such mild naturalness, and it would have afforded no occasion for objections even had the Consul’s critical faculties not been diminished by a condition which he was unwilling to call outright indisposition, but which formed a troublesome compound of fatigue and agitation, accompanied by simultaneous sensations of heat and chill.

Official channels had been followed to bring about the restlessly desired interview with Hofrat Behrens: Hans Castorp had submitted the request to the bath attendant, who had passed it on to the Matron, whose peculiar acquaintance Consul Tienappel made on this occasion when she appeared on his balcony, found him lying there, and, by means of unfamiliar customs, made heavy demands upon the good breeding of the helpless, cylindrically swaddled man. The honoured child of man, he learned, must kindly possess himself in patience for a few days; the Hofrat was occupied—operations, general examinations; suffering humanity took precedence, according to Christian principles—and since he was allegedly healthy, he must accustom himself to the fact that here he was not Number One, but must stand aside and wait. It would be another matter if he wished to request an examination—at which she, Adriatica, would not be at all surprised; he should just look at her, like this, eye to eye: his eyes were somewhat dull and flickering, and as he lay there before her, all in all it looked very much as though everything might not be entirely in order with him either, not altogether _clean_, he should understand her correctly—and was his request, then, for an examination or for a private conversation?—For the latter, of course, for a private conversation! the recumbent man assured her.—Then he must wait until he received word. The Hofrat rarely had time for private conversations.

In short, everything went differently from what James had imagined, and the conversation with the Matron had dealt his equilibrium a lasting blow. Too civilized to tell his nephew, whose accord with the phenomena up here was clearly manifested in his invulnerable composure, how repellent he found the female, he merely sounded him out cautiously by inquiring whether the Matron was not a rather original lady—which Hans Castorp, after casting a brief, appraising glance into the air, half conceded by returning the question and asking whether Mylendonk had sold him a thermometer.—“No—to me? Is that her line of business?” the uncle replied.... But the dreadful thing was how clearly his nephew’s expression revealed that he would not have been surprised even if what he had asked about had actually occurred. “We do not feel the cold,” was written in that expression. The Consul, however, did feel cold; he was continually cold despite his hot head, and he reflected that, had the Matron actually offered him a thermometer, he would certainly have refused it, but that perhaps this would not, after all, have been correct, since one could not, as a civilized man, use someone else’s—for example, his nephew’s.

Thus several days passed, four or five. The emissary’s life ran upon rails—upon those that had been laid for him—and the possibility that it might run outside them seemed inconceivable. The Consul had his experiences and gathered his impressions—we shall not eavesdrop upon him any further. One day, in Hans Castorp’s room, he picked up a small black glass plate which stood on the chest of drawers among the other little personal possessions with which the occupant had adorned his spotless home, supported upon a carved miniature easel, and which, when raised against the light, proved to be a photographic negative. “What is this?” the uncle asked as he examined it.... He might well ask! The portrait had no head; it showed the skeleton of a human upper body in a misty envelope of flesh—a female torso, incidentally, as could be discerned. “That? A souvenir,” Hans Castorp replied. Whereupon his uncle said, “Pardon!” replaced the portrait upon the easel, and moved quickly away from it. This merely as an example of his experiences and impressions during those four or five days. He also attended one of Dr. Krokowski’s _Conférences_, since it was inconceivable that he should exclude himself from it. And as for the desired private conversation with Hofrat Behrens, he got his wish on the sixth day. He was summoned and, after breakfast, descended into the basement, resolved to have a serious word with the man about his nephew and the manner in which he was consuming his time.

When he came back upstairs, he asked in a subdued voice:

“Have you ever heard the like?!”

But it was clear that Hans Castorp had certainly heard the like before, that this too would not make him shiver, and so he broke off and answered his nephew’s rather listless counter-inquiry merely with: “Nothing, nothing,” but from that hour onward displayed a new habit: namely, of peering obliquely upward somewhere with brows drawn together and lips pursed, then flinging his head about with a violent turn and directing the look just described toward the opposite quarter ... Had the conversation with Behrens, too, taken a different course from what the consul had imagined? Had the talk, as it went on, concerned not only Hans Castorp but himself as well, James Tienappel, so that it had lost the character of a private conversation? His behaviour suggested as much. The consul showed himself in very high spirits, chatted a great deal, laughed without cause, and punched his nephew in the ribs with his fist, exclaiming: “Hallo, old fellow!” In between came that look of his, first this way and then suddenly that. But his eyes also followed more definite paths, at table as on the prescribed walks and during the evening’s sociability.

At first the consul had paid no particular attention to a certain Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrialist, who sat at the table of the currently absent Frau Salomon and the voracious schoolboy with the round spectacles; and indeed she was merely a lady of the rest-cure gallery like any other, a short and full-figured brunette, no longer young, already somewhat grey, but with a dainty double chin and lively brown eyes. There could be no thought of her competing in point of civilization with Frau Consul Tienappel down in the flatlands. Yet on Sunday evening, after supper, in the lounge, the consul had discovered, thanks to a low-cut black sequined gown she wore, that Frau Redisch possessed breasts—dull-white, tightly compressed female breasts, whose cleft had been visible to a considerable depth—and this discovery had shaken and enraptured the mature and cultivated man to the bottom of his soul, as though it involved some entirely new, unsuspected, and unheard-of circumstance. He sought out and made Frau Redisch’s acquaintance, conversed with her at length, first standing and then seated, and went off to bed singing. The next day Frau Redisch no longer wore a black sequined gown, but was veiled from sight; yet the consul knew what he knew and remained faithful to his impressions. He sought to intercept the lady on the prescribed walks, so that he might move along beside her in conversation, turning and inclining himself toward her in a peculiarly attentive and charming fashion; at table he raised his glass to her, which she reciprocated, smiling and flashing the gold caps that covered several of her teeth; and in conversation with his nephew he declared her outright to be a “divine woman”—whereupon he began singing again. Hans Castorp tolerated all this with tranquil forbearance, wearing an expression as though it could not have been otherwise. But it did little to strengthen the elder relative’s authority, and accorded poorly with the consul’s mission.

The meal at which he saluted Frau Redisch with uplifted glass—and twice at that: during the fish ragout and later over the sorbet—was the same one that Hofrat Behrens took at the table of Hans Castorp and his guest; for he always made the rounds of all seven tables, and at each the place at the upper short end was reserved for him. His gigantic hands folded before his plate, he sat with his little turned-up beard between Herr Wehsal and the Mexican hunchback, with whom he spoke Spanish—for he had command of every language, including Turkish and Hungarian—and watched with bulging blue, bloodshot eyes as Consul Tienappel saluted Frau Redisch across the room with his glass of Bordeaux. Later, in the course of the meal, the Hofrat delivered a little lecture, having been spurred to it by James, who called an impromptu question to him down the whole length of the table, asking what happened when a human being decomposed. After all, the Hofrat had studied the corporeal; the body was quite decidedly his line, he was, so to speak, a sort of prince of the body, if one might put it so, and now he must tell them how matters proceeded when the body dissolved!

“First of all, your belly bursts,” the Hofrat replied, his elbows planted on the table as he leaned over his folded hands. “There you lie on your wood-shavings and sawdust, and the gases, you understand, inflate you, puff you up mightily, just as wicked boys do with frogs when they blow air into them—you end up a perfect balloon, and then your abdominal wall can no longer withstand the high pressure and bursts. Bang! You relieve yourself appreciably; you do as Judas Iscariot did when he fell from the branch—you spill yourself out. Well, and after that you are really fit for society again. If you were granted leave, you could visit your bereaved family without giving any further offence. That is called having finished stinking yourself out. If one then betakes oneself into the air, one becomes a very fine fellow again, like the citizens of Palermo who hang in the Capuchins’ subterranean corridors outside Porta Nuova. Dry and elegant they hang there, enjoying universal esteem. The only thing that matters is to have finished stinking yourself out.”

“Of course!” said the consul. “My most obliged thanks!” And the next morning he had vanished.

He was gone, departed, down into the plain on the very earliest little train—naturally not without having put his affairs in order: who could suppose otherwise! He had settled his account, paid the fee for an examination that had taken place, and in perfect silence, without saying a mortal word to his relative, had made his two travelling-cases ready—this had probably been done in the evening, or toward morning while all the house still slept—and when Hans Castorp entered his uncle’s room at the hour of first breakfast, he found it vacated.

He stood with his arms akimbo and said, “So, so.” It was then that a melancholy smile formed upon his features. “Ah, I see,” he said, and nodded. Someone had taken to his heels. Head over heels, in mute haste, as though he must seize upon one moment’s power of resolution and on no account let that moment escape, he had flung his belongings into his cases and made off: alone, not in company with another, not after fulfilling his honourable mission, but heartily glad to escape even alone—the worthy man and deserter to the banner of the flatlands, Uncle James. Well, a pleasant journey!

Hans Castorp let no one perceive that he had known nothing of his visiting relative’s impending departure, least of all the limping attendant who had accompanied the consul to the station. He received a card from Lake Constance, stating that James had received a telegram summoning him immediately to the plain on business. He had not wished to disturb his nephew.—A conventional lie.—“May the rest of your stay be pleasant!”—Was that mockery? If so, it was rather laborious mockery, Hans Castorp thought, for his uncle had assuredly been in no mood for mockery or jest when he had hurled himself into his departure; rather, he had perceived—perceived inwardly and in imagination, with pale horror—that if he now, after eight days’ residence up here, returned to the flatlands, then for a good while down there it would seem altogether wrong, unnatural, and impermissible to him not to undertake an official promenade after breakfast and then, ritually wrapped in blankets, lie horizontally in the open air, but instead to repair to his office. And this alarming perception had been the immediate cause of his flight.

Thus ended the flatlands’ attempt to retrieve Hans Castorp, who had stayed away. The young man made no secret to himself that the complete failure he had foreseen was of decisive significance for his relation to those down below. For the flatlands it meant a final, shrugging renunciation; for him, perfected freedom, before which his heart by now no longer trembled.

_Spiritual Exercises_

Leo Naphta came from a small place near the Galician-Volhynian frontier. His father, of whom he spoke with respect—evidently in the feeling that he had by now grown far enough beyond his original world to be able to judge it benevolently—had been the _schochet_ there, the ritual slaughterer; and how profoundly this calling had differed from that of the Christian butcher, who was craftsman and businessman. Not so Leo’s father. He was an official personage, and one of a spiritual kind. Examined by the rabbi in his pious proficiency, and empowered by him to kill livestock fit for slaughter according to the law of Moses and the prescriptions of the Talmud, Elia Naphta—whose blue eyes, according to his son’s account, had radiated a starlike lustre and been filled with quiet spirituality—had himself acquired something priestly in his nature, a solemnity recalling that in primeval times the killing of sacrificial animals had indeed been the business of priests. When Leo—or Leib, as he had been called in childhood—was permitted to watch his father perform his ritual office in the yard with the aid of a mighty servant, a young man of athletic Jewish type beside whom the slight Elia, with his round blond beard, appeared more delicate and fragile still; when he watched him swing the great _schochet’s_ knife against the bound and gagged but unstunned animal and strike it with a deep cut near the cervical vertebra, while the servant caught the gushing, steaming blood in bowls that rapidly filled—he had taken in this spectacle with that gaze of childhood which penetrates through the sensory to the essential and which may have belonged in special measure to the son of star-eyed Elia. He knew that Christian butchers were required to render their animals unconscious with the blow of a club or axe before killing them, and that this ordinance had been given them so that torment and cruelty to animals might be avoided; whereas his father, although so much more delicate and wise than those louts, and star-eyed besides, as none of them were, acted according to the law by administering the slaughtering cut while the creature’s senses were still awake and allowing it thus to bleed away until it sank down. The boy Leib felt that the method of those clumsy Goyim was governed by an indulgent and profane good-nature, which paid the sacred less honour than did the solemn pitilessness of his father’s practice; and thus in his mind the idea of piety became joined to that of cruelty, just as in his imagination the sight and smell of spurting blood became joined to the idea of the sacred and the spiritual. For he saw well enough that his father had not chosen his bloody craft from the brutal relish that robust Christian lads, or even his own Jewish servant, might take in it, but in a spiritual sense and, delicate of bodily constitution, in the spirit of his starry eyes.

Elia Naphta had indeed been a brooder and speculator, not only a student of the Torah but also a critic of Scripture, who disputed its propositions with the rabbi and not infrequently quarrelled with him. In the district, and not only among his fellow believers, he had been regarded as someone exceptional, as one who knew more than others—partly in a pious way, but partly also in a fashion that may not have been altogether reassuring and was in any case outside the ordinary order of things. There clung to him something irregularly sectarian, something of one intimate with God, a Baal-Shem or Zaddik, that is, a wonder-worker—especially since he had in fact once cured a woman of a malignant eruption, and on another occasion a boy of convulsions, using blood and incantations. But this very aura of a somehow daring piety, in which the odour of blood from his trade played its part, had proved his ruin. For during a popular upheaval and panic of rage provoked by the unexplained death of two Christian children, Elia had met a terrible end: crucified with nails, he had been found hanging on the door of his burning house; whereupon his wife, though consumptive and bedridden, had fled the country with her children, the boy Leib and his four siblings, all of them crying and lamenting with uplifted arms.

Not wholly destitute, thanks to Elia’s foresight, the stricken family had come to rest in a small town in Vorarlberg, where Frau Naphta found work in a cotton-spinning mill, which she performed so far and so long as her strength permitted, while the older children attended the elementary school. But though the intellectual fare offered by this institution may have sufficed for the constitution and needs of Leo’s siblings, this was very far from being the case where he himself, the eldest, was concerned. From his mother he had inherited the seed of pulmonary disease, but from his father, besides delicacy of figure, an extraordinary intelligence, gifts of mind that early allied themselves with proud instincts, higher ambition, and a gnawing longing for nobler forms of existence, and impelled him passionately to strive beyond the sphere of his origins. Alongside his schooling, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old had continued his intellectual formation in an irregular and impatient fashion through books he had contrived to obtain, supplying his understanding with nourishment. He thought and uttered things that caused his ailing mother to draw her head sideways between her shoulders and spread both wasted hands aloft. By his manner and his answers he caught the attention, during religious instruction, of the district rabbi, a pious and learned man who made him his private pupil and satisfied his formal impulse with instruction in Hebrew and the classical languages, his logical impulse with mathematical training. But the good man had reaped a sorry reward for his pains; as time went on, it became increasingly plain that he had nourished a serpent in his bosom. As once between Elia Naphta and his rabbi, so now here: they could not agree; religious and philosophical frictions arose between teacher and pupil, growing ever more acute, and the honest scholar of Scripture had to endure every conceivable torment from young Leo’s intellectual insubordination, his fault-finding and scepticism, his spirit of contradiction, and his cutting dialectic. To this was added the fact that Leo’s subtlety and intellectual burrowing had lately assumed a revolutionary stamp: acquaintance with the son of a Social Democratic member of the Imperial Council, and with that hero of the masses himself, had directed his mind into political paths and given his logical passion a socially critical bent; he delivered speeches that made the good Talmudist’s hair stand on end—for the latter prized his own loyalty—and dealt the final blow to the understanding between teacher and pupil. In short, matters had reached the point where Naphta was cast off by his master and banished forever from his study, precisely at the time when his mother, Rahel Naphta, lay dying.

It was then also, immediately after his mother’s death, that Leo made the acquaintance of Father Unterpertinger. The sixteen-year-old was sitting alone upon a bench in the park grounds of the so-called Margaretenkopf, an eminence west of the little town, on the bank of the Ill, from which one enjoyed a broad and cheerful prospect over the Rhine valley—sitting there, lost in gloomy and bitter thoughts concerning his lot and his future, when a member of the teaching staff of the Society of Jesus boarding school known as “Morning Star,” out for a walk, took a seat beside him, laid his hat at his side, crossed one leg beneath his secular priest’s cassock over the other, and, after some reading in his breviary, began a conversation that developed with great animation and was to prove decisive for Leo’s destiny. The Jesuit, a widely travelled man of cultivated manners, an educator by passion, a judge and fisher of men, pricked up his ears at the first scornfully clear-cut sentences with which the wretched young Jew answered his questions. A keen and tormented spirituality breathed from them; and, pressing further, he encountered a store of knowledge and a malicious elegance of thought rendered only the more surprising by the young man’s ragged appearance. They spoke of Marx, whose _Capital_ Leo Naphta had studied in a popular edition, and passed from him to Hegel, by whom, or about whom, he had likewise read enough to be able to make several striking observations. Whether from a general inclination towards paradox or from courteous intent, he called Hegel a “Catholic” thinker; and when the Father smilingly asked how this could be justified, since Hegel, as the Prussian state philosopher, must surely be regarded as properly and essentially a Protestant, he replied that the very expression “state philosopher” confirmed him in the rightness of his assertion of Hegel’s Catholicity in the religious, though naturally not the ecclesiastical-dogmatic, sense. _For_ (Naphta had a particular fondness for this conjunction; in his mouth it acquired something triumphantly inexorable, and his eyes flashed behind his spectacles whenever he found occasion to introduce it), for the conception of the political was psychologically allied with that of the Catholic; together they formed a category embracing everything objective, wrought into works, active, actualizing, and effective in the outward world. Opposed to it stood the Protestant sphere, born of mysticism and pietistic in character. In Jesuitism, he added, the political and pedagogical essence of Catholicism became manifest; statecraft and education had always been regarded by that Order as its domains. And he further named Goethe, who, though rooted in Pietism and undoubtedly a Protestant, had possessed a strongly Catholic side, namely by virtue of his objectivism and his doctrine of activity. He had defended auricular confession and, as an educator, had indeed been almost a Jesuit.

Whether Naphta had advanced these things because he believed them, because he found them witty, or in order to humour his listener, like a poor man obliged to flatter and carefully calculating what may profit and what may harm him: the Father had concerned himself less with their truth than with the general cleverness to which they testified; the conversation had continued, Leo’s personal circumstances had soon become known to the Jesuit, and the encounter had ended with Unterpertinger’s invitation to Leo to visit him at the academy.

Thus Naphta had been permitted to set foot upon the grounds of the _Stella matutina_, whose intellectually and socially distinguished atmosphere had long excited his yearning in imagination; and more: through this turn of events he had been granted a new teacher and patron, far better disposed than the former one to appreciate and foster his nature, a master whose kindness, cool by nature, rested upon worldly experience, and into whose sphere of life he felt the most ardent desire to penetrate. Like many intellectually gifted Jews, Naphta was by instinct at once a revolutionary and an aristocrat; a socialist—and at the same time possessed by the dream of participating in proud and distinguished, exclusive and law-governed forms of existence. The first utterance elicited from him by the presence of a Catholic theologian, though it had presented itself as purely analytical and comparative, had been a declaration of love to the Roman Church, which he perceived as a power at once aristocratic and spiritual—that is, anti-material, opposed to reality and the world, and therefore revolutionary. And this homage was genuine and sprang from the centre of his being; for, as he himself explained, Judaism, by virtue of its orientation towards earthly and practical things, its socialism, its political spirituality, stood far nearer to the Catholic sphere and was incomparably more akin to it than was Protestantism in its craving for inward absorption and its mystical subjectivity—so that the conversion of a Jew to the Roman Church decidedly constituted a spiritually less constrained proceeding than that of a Protestant.

At odds with the shepherd of his original religious community, orphaned and forsaken, and moreover filled with longing for a purer atmosphere of life, for forms of existence to which his gifts entitled him, Naphta, who had long since attained the legal age of discretion, was so impatiently prepared for a change of confession that his “discoverer” found himself spared all effort to win this soul—or rather, this extraordinary head—for the world of his faith. Even before receiving baptism, Leo had, at the Father’s instigation, found provisional lodging and bodily and intellectual sustenance in the “_Stella_.” He had moved there, abandoning his younger siblings with the utmost equanimity, with the insensibility of the intellectual aristocrat, to public charity and to such a fate as befitted their lesser gifts.

The grounds of the educational establishment were extensive, as were its buildings, which offered room for nearly four hundred pupils. The complex comprised woods and pastureland, half a dozen playing fields, agricultural buildings, and stalls for hundreds of cows. The institute was at once boarding school, model farm, athletic academy, school of learning, and temple of the Muses; for there was continually theatre and music. Life here was lordly and monastic. With its discipline and elegance, its cheerful restraint, its spirituality and well-tended refinement, the precision of its varied daily order, it flattered Leo’s deepest instincts. He was supremely happy. He received his excellent meals in a spacious refectory where silence was obligatory, as it was in the corridors of the establishment, and in whose centre a young prefect, seated upon a lofty chair, entertained the diners by reading aloud. His zeal in his lessons was ardent, and despite a weakness of the chest he exerted himself to the utmost to hold his own at games and sports in the afternoon. The devotion with which he heard early Mass each day and participated on Sundays in the solemn office could not but delight the Father-educators. His social bearing satisfied them no less. On feast days, in the afternoon, after partaking of cake and wine, he went walking in rank and file, dressed in a grey-and-green uniform with standing collar, trouser stripe, and képi.

Grateful rapture filled him at the consideration shown to his origins, his youthful Christianity, and his personal circumstances in general. That he occupied a free place at the institution seemed to be known to no one. The rules of the house diverted his comrades’ attention from the fact that he had neither family connections nor home. The receipt of parcels containing food and delicacies was universally forbidden. Whatever arrived nevertheless was distributed, and Leo received his share. The cosmopolitan character of the establishment prevented his racial stamp from becoming conspicuous. There were young exotics there, Portuguese South Americans, who looked more “Jewish” than he, and thus the very conception lost its relevance. The Ethiopian prince admitted at the same time as Naphta was even a woolly-haired Moorish type, yet exceedingly distinguished.

In the rhetoric class Leo expressed the wish to study theology so that, if he should ever be found worthy, he might one day belong to the Order. The consequence was that his free place was transferred from the “Second Boarding Division,” whose costs and standard of living were more modest, to the “First.” At table he was now served by attendants, and his sleeping compartment adjoined on one side that of a Silesian Count von Harbuval and Chamaré, on the other that of a Marquis di Rangoni-Santacroce from Modena. He completed his course with brilliance and, faithful to his resolve, exchanged the pupil’s life at the academy for that of the novitiate in neighbouring Tisis, a life of ministering humility, silent subordination, and religious training, from which he derived intellectual pleasures in the spirit of his earlier fanatical conceptions.

Meanwhile, however, his health suffered—and less directly from the rigours of the probationer’s life, in which bodily refreshment was not lacking, than from within. The educational practices to which he was subjected, in their shrewdness and subtlety, met his personal dispositions halfway and challenged them at the same time. Amid the spiritual operations with which he occupied his days and part of his nights as well, amid all these examinations of conscience, meditations, deliberations, and contemplations, he entangled himself, with maliciously contentious passion, in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and disputed questions. He was the despair—though at the same time the great hope—of his director of exercises, whose life he daily made a hell with his dialectical fury and his want of simplicity. “_Ad haec quid tu?_” he would ask, his spectacles flashing... And the Father, driven into a corner, had no recourse but to exhort him to prayer, so that he might attain tranquillity of soul—“_ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat_.” Yet this “tranquillity,” when attained, consisted in a complete deadening of individual life and its mortification into a mere instrument, a spiritual churchyard peace whose sinister outward signs Brother Naphta was able to study in many a hollow-eyed physiognomy about him, and which he himself would never succeed in attaining except by way of physical ruin.

It spoke for the intellectual stature of his superiors that these difficulties and vexations did nothing to diminish his standing with them. At the end of his two-year novitiate the Father Provincial himself summoned him, conversed with him, and approved his admission to the Order; and the young scholastic, who had received the four minor orders—those of porter, acolyte, lector, and exorcist—and had also taken the “simple” vows, thus belonging definitively to the Society, departed for the college house at Falkenburg in Holland to commence his theological studies.

He was then twenty years old, and three years later, under the influence of a climate dangerous to him and of intellectual exertion, his inherited malady had made such progress that to remain there would have imperilled his life. A pulmonary haemorrhage alarmed his superiors, and after he had hovered for weeks between life and death, they sent him, imperfectly recovered, back to his point of departure. At the same educational establishment where he had been a pupil, he found employment as a prefect, as supervisor of the alumni and teacher of the humanities and philosophy. This interlude was prescribed in any case, except that after a few years of such service one commonly returned to the college to continue and complete the seven-year study of theology. This was denied Brother Naphta. He remained ailing; physician and superiors judged that service there, in healthy air among the pupils and with agricultural activity, was for the time being what suited him. He did indeed receive the first of the major orders and acquired the right to chant the Epistle at the solemn office on Sundays—a right, however, which he did not exercise, firstly because he was wholly unmusical, and secondly because the morbid brittleness of his voice made him ill-fitted for singing. But beyond the subdiaconate he did not advance—neither to the diaconate, much less to priestly ordination; and when the haemorrhage recurred and the fever likewise refused to subside, he had, at the Order’s expense, taken up residence for a prolonged cure up here, and it had extended into its sixth year—scarcely any longer as a cure, but already and increasingly in the nature of a categorical condition of life, at this rarefied altitude, glossed over by a little activity as a Latin teacher at the school for invalids...

* * * * *

These matters, together with others and with fuller particulars, Hans Castorp learned in conversation from Naphta himself, when he visited him in the silken cell, alone or accompanied by his table companions Ferge and Wehsal, whom he had introduced there; or when he encountered him on a pleasure walk and made the pilgrimage back towards the “village” in his company—learned them occasionally, in fragments and in the form of connected narratives, and found them not only highly remarkable himself, but encouraged Ferge and Wehsal to find them so as well, which they did: the former, to be sure, with the qualifying reminder that all higher things lay remote from him (for the experience of the pleural shock alone had ever elevated him beyond the most unexacting level of humanity), the latter, on the other hand, with visible gratification at the fortunate career of one formerly downtrodden, which now, however—lest the trees should grow into heaven—appeared to have stalled and run aground in the bodily affliction common to them all.

Hans Castorp, for his part, regretted this standstill and thought with pride and concern of the honour-loving Joachim, who with heroic exertion had torn through Rhadamanthys’s tenacious web of talk and fled to his colours, to whose staff, in Hans Castorp’s imagination, he was now clinging, three fingers of his right hand raised in an oath of fidelity. Naphta too had sworn to a standard, he too had been admitted beneath one, as he himself expressed it when instructing Hans Castorp in the nature of his Order; but evidently, with his deviations and combinations, he was less faithful to it than Joachim to his—although Hans Castorp, when listening to the _ci-devant_ or future Jesuit, found himself, as a civilian and child of peace, confirmed in his opinion that either of the two must have found pleasure in the other’s vocation and estate and understood it as closely akin to his own. For both were military estates, and in several senses: in that of “asceticism” no less than in those of rank, obedience, and Spanish honour. The last in particular held mighty sway in Naphta’s Order, which indeed had originated in Spain, and whose regulations for spiritual drill, a kind of counterpart to those later issued by the Prussian Frederick for his infantry, had originally been composed in Spanish; hence Naphta, in his narratives and instructions, frequently made use of Spanish expressions. Thus he spoke of the “_dos banderas_,” the “two standards,” about which the armies gathered for the great campaign: the infernal and the spiritual; the latter in the region of Jerusalem, where Christ, the “_capitan general_” of all the good, commanded—the former on the plain of Babylon, where Lucifer played the “_caudillo_,” or chieftain...

Had not the “Morning Star” institution been a proper cadet school, whose pupils, divided into “divisions,” had been honourably disciplined in clerico-military _bienséance_—a combination of the “stiff collar” and the “Spanish ruff,” if one might put it so? The idea of honour and distinction, which played so brilliant a part in Joachim’s profession—how clearly, Hans Castorp thought, it emerged also in that other calling in which Naphta, unfortunately, had not advanced far on account of his illness! To hear him tell it, the Order consisted entirely of officers of the loftiest ambition, animated by the single thought of distinguishing themselves in the service. (“_Insignes esse_” was the Latin phrase.) According to the doctrine and regulations of the founder and first General, the Spaniard Loyola, they did more, performed more glorious service, than all those who acted merely according to their sound reason. Rather, they accomplished their work “_ex supererogatione_,” beyond what was required: that is, they not only resisted outright the rebellion of the flesh (“_rebellio carnis_”), which was no more than a matter of ordinary sound common sense, but, taking the offensive against the inclinations of sensuality, self-love, and love of the world, acted contrary to them even in matters generally permitted. For to act offensively against the enemy, “_agere contra_”—to _attack_, therefore—was more and more honourable than merely to defend oneself (“_resistere_”). Weaken and break the enemy! ran the field-service regulations; and their author, the Spaniard Loyola, was here once more entirely of one mind with Joachim’s _capitan general_, the Prussian Frederick, and his rule of war: “Attack! Attack!” “Keep on the enemy’s breeches!” “_Attaquez donc toujours!_”

But what Naphta’s world and Joachim’s had especially in common was their relation to blood and their axiom that one must not hold back one’s hand from it: in this above all they agreed sternly, as worlds, orders, and estates; and for a child of peace it was highly worth hearing Naphta tell of the warlike monastic types of the Middle Ages, ascetic to the point of exhaustion and at the same time filled with a spiritual lust for power, who had been unwilling to spare blood in order to bring about the City of God, the world dominion of the supernatural; of militant Knights Templar, who had regarded death in battle against the unbelievers as more meritorious than death in bed, and who, to be killed or to kill for Christ’s sake, had held to be no crime, but the highest glory. It was just as well that Settembrini was not present during these discourses! Otherwise he would merely have played the disruptive organ-grinder again and piped of peace—although there was, after all, the sacred national and civilizing war against Vienna, to which he by no means said no, whereas Naphta chose to chastise precisely this passion and weakness with mockery and contempt. So long, at least, as the Italian glowed with such sentiments, he opposed to them a Christian cosmopolitanism, wished to call every country—and again not a single one—his fatherland, and cuttingly repeated the dictum of an Order-General named Nickel, to the effect that love of country was “a pestilence and the surest death of Christian love.”

It went without saying that it was on account of asceticism that Naphta called love of country a pestilence—for what did he not include under that word, what did not, in his estimation, run counter to asceticism and the Kingdom of God! Not only attachment to family and native soil, but attachment to health and life as well: it was precisely this with which he reproached the humanist whenever the latter piped of peace and happiness; he contentiously accused him of love of the flesh, _amor carnalis_, of love for bodily comforts, _commodorum corporis_, and told him to his face that it was dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois irreligion to attach even the slightest importance to life and health.

This was the great colloquy on health and illness which developed one day, with Christmas already fast approaching, out of such differences during a walk through the snow to “Platz” and back again; and all of them took part in it: Settembrini, Naphta, Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal—all slightly feverish, at once dazed and excited by walking and talking in the high-altitude frost, all without exception inclined to shiver, and, whether they bore the more active part, like Naphta and Settembrini, or remained chiefly receptive and accompanied the conversation only with brief interjections, all so zealously absorbed that they often stopped in self-forgetfulness, forming a deeply preoccupied group, gesticulating and talking over one another, and blocked the way, heedless of strangers who were obliged to make a circuit around them and who likewise stopped, cocked an ear, and listened in astonishment to their extravagant disputations.

The dispute had actually begun with Karen Karstedt, poor Karen with the open fingertips, who had died recently. Hans Castorp had known nothing of her sudden deterioration and her demise; otherwise he would gladly have attended her funeral in a spirit of comradeship—in view of his admitted fondness for funerals in general. But the discretion customary in the place had ordained that he should learn of Karen’s departure too late, and that she should already have entered the garden of the little cherub-god with the crooked snow-cap, there to assume her final horizontal position. _Requiem aeternam ..._ He devoted a few kindly words to her memory, which led Herr Settembrini to speak mockingly of Hans’s charitable activities, his visits to Leila Gerngroß, the businesslike Redleg, the overfilled Zimmermann, the boastful son of _Tous-les-deux_, and the tormented Natalie von Mallinckrodt, and belatedly to take exception once more to the costly flowers with which the engineer had paid devotion to that whole dismal and ridiculous crew. Hans Castorp had pointed out that the recipients of his attentions—with the provisional exception of Frau von Mallinckrodt and the boy Teddy—had in fact died in perfect earnest; whereupon Settembrini asked whether that made them any more respectable. Yet there was, Hans Castorp replied, such a thing as what might be called Christian reverence for misery. And before Settembrini could set him right, Naphta began to speak of pious excesses of active charity witnessed by the Middle Ages, astonishing cases of fanaticism and rapture in the nursing of the sick: kings’ daughters had kissed the stinking wounds of lepers, had deliberately infected themselves with leprosy and then called the sores they contracted their roses, had drunk the water in which they had washed suppurating patients, and afterwards declared that nothing had ever tasted so good to them.

Settembrini made as though he must vomit. It was less the physically revolting quality of these images and conceptions, he said, that turned his stomach than the monstrous insanity manifested in such a conception of active love for mankind. And he drew himself up, recovering his cheerful dignity as he spoke of modern, progressive forms of humanitarian care, of the victorious containment of epidemics, and set hygiene, social reform, together with the achievements of medical science, against those horrors.

Those respectably bourgeois things, Naphta replied, would have been of little service to the centuries he had just invoked—and to neither party: as little to the sick and wretched as to the healthy and fortunate, who had shown them charity not so much out of compassion as for the sake of their own salvation. For successful social reform would have deprived the latter of their most important means of justification, while robbing the former of their sacred estate. The permanent preservation of poverty and illness had therefore lain in the interest of both parties, and this view remained possible so long as it was possible to adhere to the purely religious point of view.

A filthy point of view, Settembrini declared, and a conception whose absurdity he almost considered it beneath him to combat. For the idea of a “sacred estate,” as well as what the engineer had derivatively said about “Christian reverence for misery,” was humbug, founded upon deception, false empathy, a psychological blunder. The compassion which the healthy man extended to the sick man, and which he heightened to the point of reverence because he could not imagine how he himself, if occasion arose, could endure such sufferings—this compassion was greatly exaggerated, was not the sick man’s due at all, and was therefore the result of an error of thought and imagination, inasmuch as the healthy man imputed his own manner of experience to the sick man and imagined the latter as, so to speak, a healthy man obliged to bear the torments of a sick one—which was entirely mistaken. The sick man was simply a sick man, with the nature and modified mode of experience proper to one; illness fashioned its man in such a way that the two could get along together; there were sensory diminutions, lapses, merciful anaesthesias, intellectual and moral measures of adaptation and relief supplied by nature, which the healthy man naively forgot to take into account. The best example was all this rabble of chest cases up here, with its frivolity, stupidity, and dissoluteness, its lack of any good will towards health. In short, let the compassionately reverential healthy man only become sick himself and cease to be healthy, and he would soon see that illness was indeed an estate unto itself, but by no means an estate of honour, and that he had taken it far too seriously.

At this Anton Karlowitsch Ferge rebelled and defended the Pleurachok against slanders and disrespect. What was that—his Pleurachok taken too seriously? No, thank you; he must protest! His large larynx and good-natured moustache travelled up and down, and he refused to tolerate any disparagement of what he had gone through at the time. He was only a simple man, an insurance traveller, and all higher things lay far beyond him—this conversation alone went far over his horizon. But if Herr Settembrini meant, for example, to include the Pleurachok as well in what he had said—that tickling hell with its stench of sulphur and its three coloured swoons—then he really must protest and most humbly declined. For there had not been the faintest trace there of diminutions, merciful anaesthesias, or errors of imagination; it had been the greatest and most outrageous blackguardism under the sun, and anyone who had not experienced it as he had could form no conception whatever of such vileness—

Oh yes, oh yes! said Settembrini. Herr Ferge’s collapse grew more magnificent the longer it had been since he suffered it, and by now he wore it about his head like a halo. He, Settembrini, had little respect for sick people who laid claim to admiration. He was ill himself, and not slightly; but without affectation he was rather inclined to be ashamed of it. Besides, he was speaking impersonally, philosophically; and what he had observed concerning the differences in the nature and mode of experience of the sick and the healthy was perfectly sound—the gentlemen need only consider mental illnesses, hallucinations, for example. If one of his present companions—the engineer, let us say, or Herr Wehsal—were this evening, in the twilight, to behold his late father in a corner of his room, looking at him and speaking to him, that would be something utterly monstrous for the gentleman concerned, an experience disturbing and shattering in the highest degree, which would make him doubt his senses and his reason and induce him to vacate the room at once and submit himself to treatment for his nerves. Or would it not? But the jest of the matter was precisely that no such thing could happen to the gentlemen, since they were mentally healthy. If it did happen to them, however, they would not be healthy but sick, and would not react to it as a healthy man—that is, with horror and precipitate flight—but would accept the apparition as though it were entirely in order and enter into conversation with it, as was the way of hallucinants; and to believe that for them the hallucination constituted a healthy terror was precisely the error of imagination into which the person who was not ill fell.

Herr Settembrini spoke very drolly and vividly of the father in the corner. They all had to laugh, Ferge as well, although he was offended by the disparagement of his infernal adventure. The humanist, for his part, took advantage of their excited humour to expound and defend at greater length the non-respectability of hallucinants and indeed of all _pazzi_: such people, he thought, permitted themselves far too much that was wholly inadmissible, and very often had it perfectly well within their power to curb their madness, as he himself had seen during occasional visits to madhouses. For when the physician or a stranger appeared on the threshold, the hallucinator would generally cease his grimacing, talking, and gesticulating, and behave decently so long as he knew himself observed, only to abandon himself again afterwards. For in many cases madness undoubtedly signified an abandonment of oneself, in such a way that it served as a refuge from great sorrow and as a protective measure adopted by a weak nature against strokes of fate too grievous for such a person to trust himself to endure with a clear mind. But on that footing, so to speak, anyone might do the same; and he, Settembrini, had compelled many a madman to lucidity, at least temporarily, solely by his gaze, by opposing to his whims an attitude of inexorable reason ...

Naphta laughed scornfully, while Hans Castorp protested that he was prepared to believe Herr Settembrini’s account word for word. When he imagined how the latter had smiled beneath his moustache and fixed the poor feeble-minded fellow with the eye of unyielding reason, he could well understand how the poor wretch had been obliged to pull himself together and render homage to lucidity, although naturally he must also have felt Herr Settembrini’s appearance to be a most unwelcome disturbance ... But Naphta too had visited asylums; he recalled spending some time in the “Disturbed House” of one such institution, and there scenes and images had presented themselves to him before which—good God—Herr Settembrini’s rational gaze and chastening influence would scarcely have proved effective: Dantesque scenes, grotesque images of horror and torment: the naked madmen crouching in the continuous bath, in every posture of anguish and stupefied terror, some crying out in loud lamentation, others with upraised arms and gaping mouths emitting laughter in which all the ingredients of hell were mingled ...

“Aha,” said Herr Ferge, and ventured to recall his own laughter, which had escaped him when he snapped off.

And in short, Herr Settembrini’s inexorable pedagogy would have had to pack up entirely before the visions of the Disturbed House, to which the shudder of religious awe would, after all, have been a more human response than that supercilious rationalistic moralizing which our most radiant Knight of the Sun and _Vicarius Salomonis_ here was pleased to oppose to madness.

Hans Castorp had no time to concern himself with the titles Naphta was once again bestowing upon Herr Settembrini. He made a fleeting resolve to get to the bottom of the matter at the first opportunity. For the moment, however, the conversation in progress wholly consumed his attention; for Naphta was just then sharply expounding the general tendencies that prompted the humanist, on principle, to accord all honour to health and, as far as possible, to dishonour and belittle illness—a position which did, admittedly, reveal a remarkable and almost commendable self-abnegation, since Herr Settembrini was himself ill. Yet his attitude, which lost none of its erroneousness through its extraordinary dignity, arose from a respect and reverence for the body that would have been justified only if the body had still existed in its divinely primordial state, rather than in that of abasement—_in statu degradationis_. For, though created immortal, through the deterioration of nature by original sin it had fallen prey to corruption and abomination, had become mortal and putrescible, and was to be regarded as nothing other than the prison and house of punishment of the soul, fit only to awaken the feeling of shame and confusion, _pudoris et confusionis sensum_, as Saint Ignatius said.

This feeling, Hans Castorp exclaimed, had, as was well known, also found expression in the humanist Plotinus. But Herr Settembrini, flinging one arm from the shoulder-joint over his head, called upon him not to confuse the points of view and to maintain, rather, a receptive attitude.

Meanwhile Naphta derived the reverence devoted by the Christian Middle Ages to the wretchedness of the body from the religious assent it had accorded the spectacle of carnal misery. For the body's sores not only made its fallen condition visible to the eye, but also corresponded to the poisonous corruption of the soul in a manner that was edifying and afforded spiritual satisfaction—whereas bodily bloom was a misleading phenomenon, offensive to the conscience, which one did exceedingly well to disavow by profound abasement before infirmity. _Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis hujus?_ Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? That was the voice of the spirit, which was eternally the voice of true humanity.

No, it was a voice of darkness, according to Herr Settembrini's impassionedly delivered opinion—the voice of a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity had not yet risen. Yes, though poisoned in his bodily person, he had kept his spirit healthy and uncontaminated enough to cross swords handsomely with the priestly Naphta in matters of the body, and to make sport of the soul. He went so far as to celebrate the human body as the true temple of God, whereupon Naphta declared this fabric to be nothing more than the curtain between ourselves and eternity, which in turn caused Settembrini to forbid him once and for all the use of the word “humanity”—and so forth.

With faces stiffened by frost, bareheaded, their rubber overshoes now treading the hard-crunching, ash-strewn cover of snow that raised the level of the pavement, now ploughing through the loose masses upon the roadway—Settembrini in a winter jacket whose beaver collar and turned-back cuffs looked almost mangy from their bald patches, though he knew how to wear it elegantly; Naphta in a black, high-buttoned, ankle-length coat, lined with fur but showing none of it outside—they disputed these principles with the most personal earnestness, and it often happened that they addressed themselves not to one another but to Hans Castorp, to whom the man then speaking presented and commended his case, indicating his opponent only with his head or thumb. They had him between them, and he, turning his head this way and that, would agree now with one, now with the other, or, stopping still, his upper body tilted obliquely backward and his hand gesticulating in its lined goatskin glove, would advance some notion of his own, necessarily most inadequate, while Ferge and Wehsal circled the three of them, keeping now ahead, now behind, or forming a row with them until the traffic broke up their line once more.

Under the influence of their interjections, the debate veered towards more concrete subjects and dealt, in rapid succession and with the growing participation of them all, with the problems of cremation, corporal punishment, torture, and the death penalty. It was Ferdinand Wehsal who had brought the penalty of flogging upon the carpet, and the suggestion became him, Hans Castorp thought. It was no surprise that Herr Settembrini, in pure and lofty words and with an invocation of human dignity, declared himself opposed to this savage procedure, both in education and, more especially, in the administration of justice—while it was likewise unsurprising, though startling in its certain sombre effrontery, that Naphta spoke in favour of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to prattle here of human dignity, for our true dignity resided in the spirit, not in the flesh; and since the human soul was only too inclined to suck its entire delight in life from the body, pains inflicted upon the latter were a thoroughly commendable means of making sensual pleasure distasteful to it and driving it, as it were, out of the flesh and back into the spirit, so that the spirit might regain dominion. To regard blows as a particularly degrading form of chastisement was a quite foolish reproach. Saint Elizabeth had been beaten bloody by her confessor, Conrad of Marburg, whereby “her soul,” as the legend put it, had been “rapt even unto the third choir”; and she herself had beaten with rods a poor old woman who was too sleepy to confess. Could one seriously undertake to call barbarous and inhuman the self-flagellations to which members of certain orders and sects, and indeed all persons of a more profound disposition, had subjected themselves in order to strengthen within them the principle of the spiritual? The belief that the legal abolition of flogging in countries which considered themselves refined constituted genuine progress gained in comicality only from its unshakable firmness.

Well, this much, Hans Castorp thought, had absolutely to be conceded: that within the antithesis of body and spirit, the body undoubtedly embodied the evil, diabolical principle—ha ha, embodied it, then—insofar as the body was, of course, nature—“of course, nature,” that was not bad either!—and insofar as nature, in its opposition to spirit and reason, was decidedly evil—mystically evil, one might say, if, on the strength of one's education and knowledge, one ventured something. Once this point of view was maintained, it was only logical to treat the body accordingly, namely by administering disciplinary measures that might likewise, if one ventured something once again, be described as mystically evil. Perhaps if Herr Settembrini, back when the weakness of his body had prevented him from travelling to the Congress of Progress in Barcelona, had had a Saint Elizabeth at his side...

They laughed; and as the humanist was about to flare up, Hans Castorp hastily told of blows he himself had once received: in the lower forms of his grammar school this punishment had still been partly practised; rattan canes had been kept there, and though the teachers had not cared to lay hands upon him, out of consideration for his social position, he had once been thrashed by a stronger schoolmate, a great lout, with the pliant cane across the thighs and the calves, which were covered only by stockings; and it had hurt most shamefully—infamously, unforgettably, positively mystically—and amid disgracefully convulsive sobs the tears had simply burst from him in rage and ignominious woe—Herr Wehsal would kindly excuse the word—and Hans Castorp had also read that, in prisons, the strongest murderous robbers, upon receiving a flogging, wept like little children.

While Herr Settembrini covered his face with both hands, which were encased in very scuffed leather, Naphta asked with statesmanlike coldness how else one proposed to subdue recalcitrant criminals except by bench and cane, which, moreover, were entirely appropriate in style to a penitentiary; a humane penitentiary was an aesthetic half-measure, a compromise, and Herr Settembrini, though a fine rhetorician, understood fundamentally nothing of beauty. As for education, if Naphta was to be believed, the conception of human dignity held by those who wished to banish corporal chastisement from it was rooted in the liberal individualism of the bourgeois epoch of humanity, an enlightened absolutism of the ego which was in the process of dying and giving way to newly emerging, less effeminate social ideas—ideas of constraint and submission, of compulsion and obedience, which could not dispense with sacred cruelty and would also cause the chastisement of the cadaver to be regarded with different eyes once more.

“Hence the name corpse-obedience!” Settembrini jeered; and when Naphta tossed out the remark that, since God consigned our bodies, in punishment for sin, to the hideous disgrace of putrefaction, it was perhaps no crime of lèse-majesté if that same body were also to receive a thrashing now and then—they passed in an instant to cremation.

Settembrini celebrated it. That disgrace could be remedied, he said joyfully. Humanity, for reasons of expediency as well as from ideal motives, was in the process of remedying it. And he declared himself involved in the preparations for an international congress on cremation, which would probably be held in Sweden. An exhibition was planned of a model crematorium, constructed in accordance with all experience gained hitherto, together with a hall of urns, and far-reaching impulses and encouragement might be expected from it. What an antiquated and obsolete procedure burial in the earth was—in view of all modern circumstances! The expansion of the cities! The displacement to the periphery of the space-devouring so-called cemeteries! The price of land! The sobering of the burial rite through the necessary use of modern means of transport! Herr Settembrini knew how to offer sober and telling observations on all of this. He joked about the figure of the deeply bowed widower who made a daily pilgrimage to the grave of his dear departed wife in order to converse with her upon the spot. Such an idyllist must above all enjoy a strange superabundance of life's most precious good, namely time; and in any case the mass operations of the modern central cemetery would soon spoil his atavistic bliss of feeling. The destruction of the corpse by the glow of fire—what a clean, hygienic, and dignified, indeed heroic conception that was, compared with the idea of abandoning it to miserable self-decomposition and assimilation by lower forms of life! Yes, the new procedure also did greater justice to the heart and to the human need for permanence. For what perished in the fire were the body's altogether mutable constituents, those which even during life had been subject to metabolism; those, by contrast, which had taken the least part in that stream and had accompanied the human being almost unchanged throughout his adult existence were also the parts resistant to fire: they formed the ashes, and in these the survivors gathered up what had been imperishable in the departed.

“Very pretty,” said Naphta; oh, that was very, very charming. Man's imperishable part—the ashes.

Ah, of course: Naphta intended to preserve humanity in its irrational attitude towards biological facts; he upheld the primitively religious stage upon which death was a terror, enveloped in shudders of so mysterious a kind that one was forbidden to direct the gaze of clear reason upon the phenomenon. What barbarism! The horror of death originated in epochs of the lowest culture, when violent death had been the rule, and the dreadfulness that did indeed adhere to it had long since become wedded, in human feeling, to the idea of death in general. Increasingly, however, thanks to the development of general hygiene and the strengthening of personal security, natural death was becoming the norm; and to the modern working man the thought of eternal rest after the proper exhaustion of his powers appeared not in the least horrific, but rather normal and desirable. No, death was neither a terror nor a mystery; it was an unequivocal, rational, physiologically necessary and welcome phenomenon, and to dwell upon its contemplation longer than was fitting would have been to rob life. It was therefore also planned to add to that model crematorium and its adjoining hall of urns—the “Hall of Death,” that is—a “Hall of Life,” in which architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry were to unite in order to turn the survivor's mind away from the experience of death, from dull grief and inactive lamentation, and towards the good things of life...

“With all possible haste!” Naphta mocked. “Lest he carry the service of death beyond due bounds, lest he go too far in his devotion to so simple a fact—without which, to be sure, neither architecture, nor painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry would so much as exist at all.”

“He deserts to the colours,” Hans Castorp said dreamily.

“The unintelligibility of your remark, Engineer,” Settembrini replied, “allows its censurable nature to show through. The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is nothing but a spectre.”

“Will obscene symbols be installed in the ‘Hall of Life,’ as they were upon certain ancient coffins?” Hans Castorp asked earnestly.

At any rate, Naphta observed, there would be rich fodder for the senses. In marble and oils a classicizing taste would display the body in all its splendour, this body of sin which one rescued from putrefaction—which was hardly surprising, since out of sheer tenderness one was no longer even willing to let it be chastised...

At this point Wehsal interjected the subject of torture; it became him. The examination under torture—what did the gentlemen think of that? He, Ferdinand, had always been glad, on his business travels, to seize the opportunity of visiting, at ancient seats of culture, those discreet places where this mode of examining the conscience had once been practised. Thus he knew the torture chambers of Nuremberg and Regensburg; for purposes of cultivation he had inspected them more closely. Admittedly, the body had been treated there with very little tenderness for the sake of the soul, and in all manner of ingenious ways. And there had not even been any screaming. The pear rammed into the open mouth, the famous pear, no delicacy even in itself—and then silence had reigned amid all the activity...

“_Porcheria_,” Settembrini murmured.

Ferge declared that all honour was due to the pear, and likewise to the entire silent activity. But even in those days no one could have devised anything more despicable than palpating the pleura.

That had been done to cure him!

The obdurate soul and violated justice no less justified a temporary absence of compassion. Secondly, torture had been a result of rational progress.

Naphta could hardly have been entirely in his right mind.

Yet he was, more or less. Herr Settembrini was a man of letters, and the medieval history of judicial procedure was evidently not altogether clear to him at the moment. It had in fact been a process of progressive rationalization, in such a manner that, little by little and on the grounds of rational considerations, God had been excluded from the administration of justice. Trial by ordeal had fallen into disuse because men had been obliged to observe that the stronger party prevailed even when he was in the wrong. People of Herr Settembrini’s sort, doubters and critics, had made this observation and brought it about that the old, naïve procedure was replaced by the inquisitorial process, which no longer relied upon God’s intervention on behalf of truth, but aimed instead at obtaining a confession of the truth from the accused. No condemnation without confession—one had only to listen to the people even today: the instinct lay deep; however complete the chain of evidence might be, the sentence was felt to be illegitimate if the confession was lacking. How was it to be obtained? How was the truth to be ascertained beyond all mere indications, all mere suspicion? How could one look into the heart, into the brain, of a man who concealed and withheld it? If the spirit was malicious, nothing remained but to appeal to the body, which could be got at. Torture, as the means of bringing about the indispensable confession, was dictated by reason. But the man who had demanded and introduced the confessional procedure had been Herr Settembrini, and thus he was also the originator of torture.

The humanist begged the other gentlemen not to believe it. These were diabolical jests. If everything had been as Herr Naphta taught, if reason had truly been the inventor of that horror, this proved only how bitterly it stood at all times in need of support and enlightenment, and how little cause the worshippers of natural instinct had to fear that affairs on earth might ever grow too rational! But the previous speaker had certainly gone astray. That judicial abomination could not possibly be traced back to reason, if only because its ultimate source had been belief in hell. One had merely to look about one in museums and torture chambers: all this pinching, stretching, racking, and scorching had plainly sprung from a childishly deluded imagination, from the desire piously to imitate what took place in the otherworldly regions of eternal torment. Moreover, men had perhaps even believed themselves to be helping the malefactor. They had assumed that his own poor soul was struggling toward confession, and that only the flesh, as the principle of evil, opposed his better will. Thus they had believed themselves positively to be doing him a service of love by breaking the flesh through torture. Ascetic delusion ...

Whether the ancient Romans, too, had been in its grip.

The Romans? _Ma che!_

And yet they, too, had known torture as an instrument of judicial procedure.

Logical embarrassment ... Hans Castorp sought to smooth it over by autocratically—and as though it could be his affair to guide such a conversation—introducing the problem of capital punishment into the debate. Torture had been abolished, although examining magistrates still had their practices for wearing down the accused. But capital punishment seemed immortal, impossible to dispense with. The most highly civilized nations adhered to it. The French had had very bad experiences with deportation. One simply did not know what, in practical terms, was to be done with certain human-seeming creatures except to shorten them by a head.

They were not “human-seeming creatures,” Herr Settembrini instructed him; they were human beings, like himself, the engineer, and like the speaker himself—merely weak of will and the victims of a defective society. And he told of a hardened criminal, a multiple murderer, belonging to that type which public prosecutors were accustomed to describe in their pleas as “bestialized,” as “beasts in human form.” This man had covered the walls of his cell with verses. And those verses had by no means been bad—far better than the ones public prosecutors themselves were occasionally known to produce.

That cast a peculiar light upon art, Naphta replied. In every other respect, however, it was not at all remarkable.

Hans Castorp had expected Herr Naphta to wish to preserve execution. Naphta, he thought, was probably just as revolutionary as Herr Settembrini, but in a conservative sense—a revolutionary of preservation.

The world, Herr Settembrini smiled with assurance, would pass over the revolution of anti-human reaction and proceed to the order of the day. Herr Naphta would sooner cast suspicion upon art than admit that it consecrated even the most depraved of men as human. No light-seeking youth could be won by such fanaticism. An international league, whose object was the legal abolition of capital punishment in all civilized countries, had just been formed. Herr Settembrini had the honour of belonging to it. The venue of its first congress remained to be determined, but humanity had reason to trust that the speakers who would make themselves heard there would be armed with arguments! And he cited the arguments, among them the ever-present possibility of judicial error, of legal murder, as well as the hope of reform, which must never be abandoned; he even quoted “Vengeance is mine,” taught likewise that the state, if its concern was ennoblement rather than violence, must not requite evil with evil, and rejected the concept of “punishment” after having, from the ground of scientific determinism, contested that of “guilt.”

Thereupon “light-seeking youth” was obliged to watch Naphta wring the neck of each argument in turn. He mocked the philanthropist’s horror of blood and reverence for life, asserting that this reverence for the individual life belonged only to the very shallowest bourgeois, umbrella-bearing times; whereas under circumstances of any tolerable degree of passion, as soon as a single idea transcending that of “security,” anything supra-personal and thus supra-individual, was at stake—and this was the only condition worthy of man, consequently the normal one in the higher sense—the individual life would invariably not only be sacrificed to the higher idea without ceremony, but would also, voluntarily and on the individual’s own initiative, be unhesitatingly hazarded. His honourable adversary’s philanthropy, he said, laboured to strip life of all its grave and mortally serious accents; it aimed at the castration of life, with the determinism of its so-called science as well. But the truth was that the concept of guilt was not only not abolished by determinism, but actually gained through it in gravity and terror.

That was not bad. Did he perhaps demand that the wretched victim of society should feel himself seriously guilty and go to the scaffold from conviction?

Indeed he did. The criminal was as deeply imbued with his guilt as with his own self. For he was as he was, and could not and would not be otherwise, and precisely this was his guilt. Herr Naphta transferred guilt and merit from the empirical into the metaphysical realm. In doing, in action, determination did of course prevail; there was no freedom there, but there was freedom in being. Man was as he had willed to be and as, until his annihilation, he would not cease willing to be; he had, after all, killed “for dear life,” and consequently did not pay too high a price with his life. Let him die, since he had paid for the deepest pleasure.

The deepest pleasure?

The deepest.

Lips were compressed. Hans Castorp gave a little cough. Wehsal had thrust his lower jaw askew. Herr Ferge sighed. Settembrini observed delicately:

“One sees that there is a manner of generalizing which colours the subject personally. You would have a desire to kill?”

“That is no concern of yours. But if I had done it, I should laugh in the face of a humanitarian ignorance that proposed to feed me lentils until my natural end. It is utterly meaningless for the murderer to outlive the murdered man. Alone together, face to face, as two beings are only upon one other, kindred occasion, the one suffering, the other acting, they have shared a secret that binds them for ever. They belong together.”

Settembrini coolly confessed that he lacked the organ for this mysticism of death and murder, and did not miss it. He had nothing to say against Herr Naphta’s religious gifts—they were unquestionably superior to his own—but he noted the absence of envy in himself. An invincible need for cleanliness kept him remote from a sphere in which that reverence for misery of which experimenting youth had spoken earlier evidently prevailed not only in the physical but also in the spiritual sense; in short, from a sphere where virtue, reason, and health counted for nothing, while vice and disease were held in heaven knew what honour.

Naphta confirmed that virtue and health were indeed not a religious condition. Much was gained, he said, once it had been made clear that religion had nothing whatever to do with reason and morality. For, he added, it had nothing to do with life. Life rested upon conditions and foundations belonging partly to epistemology and partly to the moral domain. The former were called time, space, and causality; the latter, morality and reason. All these things were not only alien and indifferent to the religious essence, but actually stood in hostile opposition to it; for they were precisely what constituted life, so-called health—that is, arch-philistinism and primordial bourgeois respectability—as whose absolute, and indeed absolutely inspired, antithesis the religious world was to be defined. For the rest, he, Naphta, did not wish wholly to deny the possibility of genius to the sphere of life. There was a bourgeois respectability of life whose monumental staidness was indisputable, a philistine majesty one might find venerable, provided one held fast to the fact that, in its broad-legged, planted dignity, hands behind its back and chest thrust out, it signified irreligiosity incarnate.

Hans Castorp raised his forefinger as though in school. He wished to give offence on neither side, he said, but they were evidently speaking here of progress, of human progress, and thus, in a manner of speaking, of politics and the eloquent republic and the civilization of the cultivated West; and his own opinion was that the distinction—or, if Herr Naphta absolutely insisted, the opposition—between life and religion could be traced back to that between time and eternity. For progress existed only in time; in eternity there was none, nor was there politics or eloquence. There one leaned one’s head back, so to speak, in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the distinction between religion and morality, confusedly expressed.

The naïveté of his mode of expression, Settembrini said, was less disturbing than his fear of giving offence and his inclination to make concessions to the devil.

Well, Herr Settembrini and he, Hans Castorp, had discussed the devil long ago, a year and a day before. “_O Satana, o ribellione!_” To which devil, then, had he actually made concessions? To the one of rebellion, labour, and criticism, or to the other? It was positively perilous to life—a devil on the right and another on the left; how in the devil’s name was one supposed to get through between them!

Put in that way, Naphta said, the state of affairs was not correctly characterized as Herr Settembrini wished to see it. The decisive feature of his world-picture was that he made God and the devil into two different persons or principles and placed “life,” following, incidentally, a strictly medieval model, between them as the object of their contention. In reality, however, they were one, and united in opposition to life, to the bourgeois respectability of life, to ethics, reason, and virtue—as the religious principle which they jointly represented.

“What a disgusting hotchpotch—_che guazzabuglio proprio stomachevole_!” cried Settembrini. Good and evil, holiness and crime, all mingled together! Without judgement! Without will! Without the capacity to reject what deserved rejection! Did Herr Naphta know _what_ he was denying when, before the ears of youth, he flung God and the devil together and, in the name of this savage dual unity, denied the ethical principle! He was denying _value_—every positing of value—abominable to say! Very well, then: there was neither good nor evil, but only the morally unordered universe! Nor was there the individual in his critical dignity, but only the all-devouring and equalizing community, the mystical extinction of the self within it! The individual ...

Delightful, that Herr Settembrini should once again consider himself an individualist! To be one, however, a man had to know the distinction between morality and blessedness, which was simply not the case with the gentleman Illuminist and monist. Wherever life was stupidly accepted as an end in itself and no question whatever was asked about a meaning and purpose beyond it, there prevailed the ethics of species and society, vertebrate morality, but no individualism—which was at home solely and exclusively in the religious and mystical realm, in the so-called “morally unordered universe.” What, then, was Herr Settembrini’s morality, and what did it seek? It was bound to life, and therefore nothing but useful, and therefore unheroic to a pitiful degree. It existed so that one might grow old and happy, rich and healthy by means of it, and there was an end of the matter. This philistinism of reason and labour passed with him for ethics. As for Naphta, he took the liberty of characterizing it once again as shabby bourgeois respectability of life.

Settembrini requested moderation, yet his own voice was passionately stirred as he declared it intolerable that Herr Naphta should continually speak of “bourgeois respectability of life” in a tone of aristocratic contempt, God knew why, as though _the opposite_—and one knew very well what the opposite of life was—might actually be the more distinguished thing!

New blows and thrusts, new catchwords! Now they had reached distinction, the aristocratic question! Hans Castorp, overheated and exhausted by chill and problematic argument, his judgement reeling even as to the intelligibility or feverish audacity of his own mode of expression, confessed with sluggish lips that he had always imagined death wearing a starched Spanish ruff, or at least, in a sort of little uniform, with parricide collars; life, on the other hand, wearing one of those ordinary little modern stand-up collars ... But he himself took fright at the drunken, dreamlike, socially impossible nature of his speech and assured them that this was not what he had meant to say. Yet was it not the case that there were people, certain human beings, whom one was incapable of imagining dead, and precisely because they were so particularly common! That was to say: they appeared so thoroughly fit for life that it seemed they could never die, as though they were unworthy of the consecration of death.

Herr Settembrini hoped he was not mistaken in assuming that Hans Castorp said such things only in order to be contradicted. The young man would always find him ready to lend a hand in the intellectual defence against such temptations. “Fit for life,” did he say? And use the phrase in a disparaging, vulgar sense? “Worthy of life!” Let him substitute that expression—and the concepts would fall into their true and beautiful order. “Worthiness of life”: and at once, by the easiest and most legitimate association, there arose also the idea of lovableness, so intimately akin to the first that one might say only what was truly worthy of life was also truly lovable. And the two together, that which was worthy of life and therefore lovable, constituted what was called noble.

Hans Castorp found this delightful and exceedingly worth hearing. Herr Settembrini, he said, had won him over completely with his vivid theory. For say what one would—and there was indeed something to be said, for example, that illness was an intensified state of life and thus possessed something festive—this much was certain: illness meant an excessive emphasis upon the bodily, referred and cast man back, as it were, wholly and entirely upon his body, and was therefore detrimental to human dignity even to the point of annihilation, inasmuch as it degraded him to a mere body. Illness was therefore inhuman.

Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately countered; for to be human meant to be ill. Indeed, man was essentially ill; his very illness was what made him human, and whoever wished to make him healthy, to induce him to make his peace with nature, to “return to nature” (although he had never been natural), all the regenerators, raw-food enthusiasts, open-air devotees, sun-bath masters, and so forth who went prophetically abroad today—every species of Rousseau, in short—sought nothing but his dehumanization and reduction to the animal state ... Humanity? Nobility? It was the spirit that distinguished man, this being so largely detached from nature and feeling himself so profoundly opposed to her, from all other organic life. In spirit, therefore, in illness, lay man’s dignity and nobility; in a word, the more ill he was, the more fully human he was, and the genius of illness was more human than that of health. It was astonishing that one who played the lover of mankind should close his eyes to such fundamental truths of humanity. Herr Settembrini was forever invoking progress. As though progress, insofar as such a thing existed, were not indebted solely to illness—that was to say, to genius, which was itself nothing other than illness! As though the healthy had not at all times lived upon the achievements of illness! There had been men who consciously and deliberately entered into illness and madness in order to win insights for humanity—insights that became health once they had been won through madness, and whose possession and enjoyment, after that heroic act of sacrifice, were no longer contingent upon illness and madness. That was the true death upon the cross ...

Aha, thought Hans Castorp, you improper Jesuit, with your combinations and your interpretation of the death upon the cross! One can see why you never became a Father, _joli jésuite à la petite tache humide_! Now roar, lion! he inwardly urged Herr Settembrini. And the latter did “roar,” declaring everything Naphta had just asserted to be illusion, sophistry, a confounding of the world. “Say it, then,” he cried to his adversary, “say it in your responsibility as an educator, say it outright within the hearing of impressionable youth: that spirit—is illness! Truly, that is how you will encourage them toward the spirit and win them to faith in it! Declare, on the other hand, illness and death to be noble, but health and life vulgar—that is the surest method of inciting your pupil to the service of humanity! _Da vero, è criminoso!_” And like a knight he championed the nobility of health and life, the nobility conferred by nature, which had no need to fear the spirit. Form! he said, and Naphta said grandiloquently: “The Logos!” But he who wished to know nothing of the Logos said, “Reason!” while the man of the Logos defended “passion.” It was confused. “The object!” said one, and the other: “The self!” In the end there was even talk of “art” on the one side and “criticism” on the other, and in any case again and again of “nature” and “spirit,” and of which was the nobler, of the “aristocratic problem.” But there was no order or clarification in it, not even a dual and militant one; for everything ran not only counter to everything else, but also across and through it, and not only did the disputants contradict each other, they were at odds with themselves as well. Settembrini had often enough raised rhetorical vivats to “criticism,” whereas now he claimed its opposite, which was supposed to be “art,” as the principle of nobility; and while Naphta had more than once appeared as the defender of “natural instinct” against Settembrini, who had treated nature as the “stupid power,” as mere fact and fate before which reason and human pride must not abdicate, he now took up his position on the side of spirit and “illness,” where alone nobility and humanity were to be found, while the other constituted himself the advocate of nature and her nobility of health, forgetful of all emancipation. Matters were no less tangled with the “object” and the “self”; indeed, here the confusion—which was, incidentally, always the same—was at its most hopeless, and was literally such that no one any longer knew who was truly the devout man and who the free one. Naphta sharply forbade Herr Settembrini to call himself an “individualist,” for he denied the opposition between God and nature, understood by the human question, the conflict within the person, nothing but the conflict between individual and collective interests, and was therefore sworn to a life-bound and bourgeois morality that took life as an end in itself, unheroically aimed at utility, and saw in the purpose of the state the moral law; whereas he, Naphta, well aware that the problem within man rested rather upon the antagonism between the sensual and the supersensual, represented true, mystical individualism and was, properly speaking, the man of freedom and of the subject. But if he was, then what, Hans Castorp wondered, became of “anonymity and community”—to single out at once merely _one_ inconsistency by way of example? And what of the striking remarks he had produced in his colloquy with Pater Unterpertinger concerning the “Catholicity” of the philosopher of the state, Hegel, concerning the inner affinity of the concepts “political” and “Catholic” and the category of the objective which they jointly constituted? Had not statecraft and education always formed the particular field of activity of Naphta’s order? And what an education! Herr Settembrini was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of being intrusive and tiresome; but in respect of an ascetic objectivity contemptuous of the self, his principles could not begin to compete with Naphta’s. Absolute command! Iron constraint! Violation! Obedience! Terror! That might well possess its own honour, but it paid scant regard to the critical dignity of the individual being. It was the drill regulation of the Prussian Frederick and the Spanish Loyola, pious and rigid to the point of bloodshed; and only one question arose: how Naphta actually arrived at this bloody absoluteness, since by his own admission he believed in no pure knowledge or unprejudiced inquiry—in short, did not believe in truth, objective, scientific truth, the pursuit of which meant to Lodovico Settembrini the supreme law of all human morality. That was pious and strict of Herr Settembrini, whereas it was lax and dissolute of Naphta to refer truth back to man and declare that truth was whatever served him! Was it not downright bourgeois subservience to life and utilitarian philistinism to make truth dependent in this fashion upon human interest? Strictly speaking, that was not iron objectivity; there was more freedom and subject in it than Leo Naphta cared to admit—even though, to be sure, it was “politics” in much the same fashion as Herr Settembrini’s didactic assertion that freedom was the law of human love. This plainly meant binding freedom, just as Naphta bound truth: namely, to man. It was decidedly more pious than free, and this in turn was a distinction that ran the risk of being lost amid such definitions. Ah, this Herr Settembrini! Not for nothing was he a man of letters—that was to say, the grandson of a politician and the son of a humanist. He was nobly intent upon criticism and fine emancipation, and trilled at the girls in the street, while sharp little Naphta was bound by stern vows. And yet the latter was almost a libertine from sheer freethinking, while the former, if one chose, was a fool for virtue. Herr Settembrini was afraid of the “absolute spirit” and insisted at all costs upon committing spirit to democratic progress—horrified by the religious libertinage of the militant Naphta, which threw together God and Devil, sanctity and crime, genius and illness, and acknowledged no valuation, no judgment of reason, no will. Who, then, was truly free, and who devout; what constituted the true estate and state of man: submergence in the all-devouring and levelling community, which was at once libertine and ascetic, or the “critical subject,” in whom charlatanry and bourgeois severity of virtue trespassed upon one another’s ground? Ah, the principles and aspects were forever trespassing upon one another’s ground; there was no lack of internal contradiction, and civilian responsibility found it so extraordinarily difficult not merely to decide between the opposites, but even to keep them separately and cleanly prepared for inspection, that the temptation was great to plunge headlong into Naphta’s “morally unordered universe.” It was the universal crossing and interlacing, the great confusion, and Hans Castorp thought he could see that the disputants would have been less embittered had it not weighed upon their own souls even as they disputed.

They had walked together as far up as the Berghof; then the three who lived there had accompanied the outsiders back to their little house, and there they stood for a long while in the snow as Naphta and Settembrini continued their dispute—pedagogically, as Hans Castorp well knew, and in order to work upon the impressionability of light-seeking youth. All this was far too lofty for Herr Ferge, as he repeatedly gave them to understand, and Wehsal showed little interest now that there was no longer any talk of beatings and torture. Hans Castorp, his head lowered, dug in the snow with his stick and pondered the great confusion.

At last they parted. They could not stand there forever, and the colloquy was boundless. The three Berghof guests turned once more toward their dwelling place, while the two pedagogical rivals had to enter the little house together, the one to regain his silken cell, the other his humanist’s chamber with its standing desk and water bottle. Hans Castorp, however, repaired to his balcony box, his ears full of the tumult and clash of arms of the two hosts which, advancing from Jerusalem and Babylon beneath the _dos banderas_, met in the confused uproar of battle.

Snow

Five times daily, at all seven tables, unanimous dissatisfaction found expression with the character of that year’s winter weather. It was judged to be fulfilling its obligations as a high-mountain winter very poorly, and by no means to be furnishing the meteorological remedies to which the region owed its reputation in the measure promised by the prospectus, expected by long-term residents, and imagined by newcomers. Enormous deficiencies in sunshine had to be recorded—in solar radiation, that important therapeutic factor without whose assistance recovery was unquestionably delayed ... And whatever Herr Settembrini might think of the sincerity with which the mountain guests pursued their recovery and their return from their “home” to the flatlands, they demanded their due in any case; they wanted value for their money, or for the money paid on their behalf by their parents and husbands, and thus they grumbled in their conversations at table, in the lift, and in the hall. The management, too, showed a full appreciation of its obligation to provide relief and compensation. A new apparatus for “artificial high-altitude sunlight” was purchased, since the two already installed were insufficient to meet the demand of those who wished to have themselves electrically roasted brown—a treatment that became the young girls and women very well, and lent the men, despite their horizontal mode of life, a splendidly athletic and conquering appearance. Indeed, this appearance bore fruit in reality; the women, though perfectly aware of the technical and cosmetic origin of this virility, were stupid or sophisticated enough, sufficiently enamoured of sensory deception, to let themselves be intoxicated by the illusion and femininely overcome. “My God!” Frau Schönfeld, a red-haired, red-eyed patient from Berlin, said one evening in the hall to a long-legged, hollow-chested cavalier who described himself on his card as an “_Aviateur diplômé et Enseigne de la Marine allemande_,” was equipped with a pneumothorax, and, incidentally, appeared at luncheon in a dinner jacket only to remove that garment again in the evening, claiming that such was the regulation in the navy—“my God!” she said, gazing greedily at the _Enseigne_, “how gloriously brown he is from the high-altitude sun! He looks like an eagle-hunter, the devil!”—“Just you wait, water-nymph!” he whispered into her ear in the lift, making gooseflesh run over her; “you shall pay for the havoc wrought by your glances!” And across the balconies, past the glass partitions, the devil and eagle-hunter found his way to the water-nymph ...

Nevertheless, the artificial high-altitude sun fell far short of being regarded as true compensation for that year’s deficit of genuine celestial light. Two or three clear sunny days in a month—days which, to be sure, shone forth with particular splendour from the dissolving grey of mist and dense veiling, with deep, deep velvet blue behind the white peaks, with diamond glitter and a deliciously hot burning upon human necks and faces—two or three such days in the course of weeks were too few for the spirits of people whose fate justified extraordinary claims upon consolation and who inwardly insisted upon a compact guaranteeing them, in return for renouncing the pleasures and torments of flatland humanity, a life that, though lifeless, was perfectly easy and agreeable—carefree to the point of abolishing time, and wholly propitious. It did the Hofrat little good to remind them how little, even under these circumstances, existence at the Berghof resembled a sojourn in a penal colony or a Siberian mine, and what advantages the air up here, thin and light as it was, almost the empty ether of the universe, poor in earthly admixtures both good and bad, retained even without sunshine over the smoke and vapours of the plain: gloom and protest spread, threats of impetuous departure were the order of the day, and sometimes they were carried out, despite such cautionary examples as the recent sorrowful return of Frau Salomon, whose case had not been severe, though protracted, but had acquired a lifelong character through her self-willed stay in damp and draughty Amsterdam ...

Instead of sun, however, there was snow, snow in masses, so colossally much snow as Hans Castorp had never seen in his life. The previous winter had certainly not been remiss in this respect, yet its achievements had been feeble compared with those of the present one. They were monstrous and immoderate, filling the mind with a consciousness of the adventurousness and eccentricity of this sphere. It snowed day after day and throughout the nights, lightly or in dense flurries, but snow it did. The few paths kept passable looked like sunken lanes, with walls of snow higher than a man on either side, smooth tablets of alabaster, pleasing to behold in their granular, crystalline shimmer, and used by the mountain guests for writing and drawing, for communicating all manner of messages, jests, and suggestive remarks. Yet even between the walls one still trod upon greatly elevated ground, however deep the shovelling had gone; this became evident at loose places and holes, where one's foot would suddenly sink far down, perhaps to the knee: one had to take great care not to break a leg unawares. The rest benches had vanished, submerged; here and there a piece of backrest still projected from its white burial-place. Down in the town, the street level had been displaced so strangely that the shops on the ground floors of the houses had become cellars, into which one descended by steps of snow from the height of the pavement.

And upon the masses already lying there the snow continued to fall, day in, day out, sinking silently in moderate frost, ten or fifteen degrees of cold that did not exactly pierce to the marrow—one scarcely felt them; they might as well have been five or two, for the windlessness and dryness of the air took away their sting. It was very dark in the morning; breakfast was eaten by the artificial glow of the chandelier moons in the hall with its gaily stencilled vaulting ribs. Outside lay the murky nothingness, the world swathed in grey-white wadding that pressed against the panes, densely packed in whirling snow and misty vapour. The mountains were invisible; only a little of the nearest conifers could gradually be made out: they stood heavily laden, were soon lost in the brew, and now and then a spruce discharged its burden, shaking powdery whiteness into the grey. At ten o'clock the sun appeared above its mountain like faintly illuminated smoke, bringing a dim, spectral life, a pallid gleam of sensuality, into the void and unrecognizable landscape. Yet everything remained dissolved in ghostly delicacy and pallor, devoid of any line that the eye could confidently trace. The contours of the peaks blurred, misted over, dissolved in smoke. Pallidly illuminated fields of snow, rising one behind and above another, led the gaze into the insubstantial. Then, perhaps, a luminous cloud, smoke-like, would hover for a long while before a wall of rock without altering its shape.

At noon the sun, half breaking through, showed an endeavour to dissolve the mist into blue. Its attempt remained far from success; yet for moments an intimation of blue sky could be perceived, and the little light sufficed to make the countryside, so strangely disfigured by the adventure of the snow, sparkle far and wide with diamonds. Ordinarily it ceased snowing at this hour, as though to afford a survey of what had been accomplished; indeed, the few scattered days of sunshine, on which the flurries rested and the sudden blaze of heaven sought to thaw the exquisitely pure surface of the masses of new-fallen snow, seemed to serve this same purpose. The aspect of the world was fabulous, childish, and comic. The thick, loose cushions, as though heaped upon the branches of the trees; the humps of ground beneath which creeping timber or ledges of rock lay hidden; all that was crouching, sunken, and drolly muffled in the landscape—these made up a world of gnomes, ridiculous to behold and as though taken from a picture-book. But if the nearby scene, through which one moved laboriously, had a fantastic and roguish air, the more distant background looking in upon it—the towering statues of the snow-covered Alps—awakened feelings of sublimity and holiness.

In the afternoon, between two and four, Hans Castorp lay in his balcony box and, warmly wrapped, his head supported by the back of his excellent reclining-chair, adjusted neither too steeply nor too flat, gazed across the padded parapet at forest and mountains. The green-black fir forest, burdened with snow, climbed the slopes, and between the trees all the ground was cushion-soft with snow. Above it the rocky mountains rose into the grey-white, with immense fields of snow interrupted by isolated, darker-projecting noses of rock and delicately evaporating lines of ridge. Snow fell silently. Everything blurred more and more. The gaze, passing into a wadded nothingness, readily dissolved into slumber. A shiver accompanied the moment of transition, but then there was no purer sleep than this sleep in the icy cold, whose dreamlessness was untouched by any unconscious sensation of the organic burden of life, since breathing the empty, tenuous, vapourless air cost the organism no more effort than not breathing costs the dead. When he awoke, the mountains had vanished completely into the snowy mist, and only fragments of them—a rounded summit, a nose of rock—emerged in turn for a few minutes, only to be veiled again. This quiet play of spirits was exceedingly entertaining. One had to watch closely in order to spy upon the secret transformations of the phantasmagoria of veils. Wild and vast, free in the vapour, a portion of rocky mountain revealed itself, of which neither summit nor foot was visible. But when one had taken one's eyes from it for no more than a minute, it had disappeared.

Then there were snowstorms that made any stay in the balcony recess impossible, for the driving whiteness swept in by the mass and thickly covered everything, floor and furniture alike. Yes, storms could rage even in the sheltered high valley. The tenuous atmosphere rose in tumult; it was so filled with swarming flakes that one could not see a single step ahead. Gusts of suffocating force drove the flurries into a wild, scudding, lateral motion, whirled them upwards from below, from the floor of the valley into the air, churned them together in a frenzied dance—this was no longer snowfall, it was a chaos of white darkness, a monstrosity, the phenomenal excess of a region that passed beyond all moderation, in which only the snow finch, suddenly appearing in flocks, could have felt at home and known its way.

Hans Castorp, however, loved life in the snow. He found it akin in several respects to life on the seashore: the primal monotony of the natural scene was common to both spheres; the snow, this deep, loose, immaculate powder snow, played precisely the same part here as the yellow-white sand down below; contact with each was equally cleanly, for one shook the frost-dry whiteness from shoes and clothes just as down below one shook off the dustless powder of stone and shell from the sea-bed, without a trace remaining; and marching through the snow was laborious in much the same way as wandering over dunes, unless the surfaces had been slightly thawed by the blaze of the sun and then frozen hard at night: one could walk upon them more easily and pleasantly than upon parquet—just as easily and pleasantly as upon the smooth, firm, wave-washed, resilient floor of sand at the margin of the sea.

But this year's snowfalls and accumulated masses miserably curtailed, for everyone except the skier, the possibility of movement in the open air. The snowploughs were at work; yet they had difficulty keeping even the most frequented paths and the principal street of the health resort passable after a fashion, and the few ways that remained open, only to run swiftly into the inaccessible, were densely thronged by healthy and sick, natives and the international society of the hotels; while the tobogganers came careering against the pedestrians' legs—gentlemen and ladies who, leaning backwards, feet foremost, swept swaying and tipping down the slopes upon their children's sledges, uttering warning cries whose tone testified to how deeply they were imbued with the importance of their enterprise, only, upon reaching the bottom, to drag their fashionable plaything uphill again by its rope.

Hans Castorp had now had more than enough of these promenades. He cherished two wishes: the stronger was to be alone with his thoughts and affairs of government, and this his balcony box would have granted him, though only superficially. But the other, connected with the first, was a keen desire for more intimate and freer contact with the snow-ravaged mountains, in which he had taken an interest; and this wish could not be fulfilled so long as the person entertaining it remained an unequipped and unwinged pedestrian, for such a man would at once have found himself buried above the chest in the element had he attempted to advance beyond the end—quickly reached everywhere—of the shovelled thoroughfares.

And so Hans Castorp one day, in this his second winter up here, resolved to buy himself skis and learn their use, so far as his practical need required. He was no sportsman; for want of a physical disposition, he had never been one; nor did he pretend to be one, like certain Berghof guests who, in deference to the spirit and fashion of the place, foppishly arrayed themselves as such—women especially, Hermine Kleefeld for example, who, although deficient respiration kept the tip of her nose and her lips perpetually blue, liked to appear at lunch in a woollen trouser costume, in which after the meal she would sprawl quite slovenly in a wicker chair in the hall, her knees spread apart. Had Hans Castorp asked the Hofrat's permission for his extravagant undertaking, he would unquestionably have met with a refusal. Athletic activity was absolutely forbidden to the community up here, at the Berghof as everywhere in similar establishments; for the atmosphere, apparently so easy to breathe, already made severe demands upon the heart muscle, and as for Hans Castorp personally, his clever phrase about “growing accustomed to the fact that he did not grow accustomed” had remained in full force, while his tendency to fever, which Radamanth attributed to a damp spot, stubbornly persisted. What else would he have been doing up here? Thus his wish and project were contradictory and inadmissible. Yet they had to be properly understood. He was not pricked by the ambition to emulate the outdoor fops and ski-sportsmen, who, had card-playing in a stuffy room happened to be the order of the day, would have pursued it with the same solemn zeal. He felt himself decidedly a member of another, more constrained community than the tribe of tourists; and from a further and more recent point of view as well, by reason of a dignity that set him apart and an obligation that restrained him, he felt it was not for him to disport himself lightly like those others and roll about in the snow like a fool. He contemplated no escapades, meant to keep within bounds, and Rhadamanthys might very well have permitted what he planned. Since he would nevertheless forbid it for the sake of the house rules, Hans Castorp resolved to act behind his back.

On occasion he spoke to Herr Settembrini of his intention. Herr Settembrini almost embraced him for joy. “Why yes, why yes indeed, Engineer, for God's sake, do it! Ask no one and do it—your good angel has whispered it to you! Do it at once, before this wholesome impulse deserts you again! I shall go with you, accompany you to the shop, and on the spot we shall purchase those blessed implements together! I would accompany you into the mountains too, would travel with you, winged shoes upon my feet like Mercurio, but I am not allowed to do so... Eh, allowed! I should do it readily enough if it were merely a question of my ‘not being allowed,’ but I cannot; I am a lost man. You, on the other hand... it will do you no harm, none whatever, if you are sensible and exaggerate nothing. And what of it—even if it did you a little harm, it would still have been your good angel who... I shall say no more. What an excellent plan! Two years here and still capable of such an idea—ah, no, your core is sound; there is no cause to despair of you. Bravo, bravo! You thumb your nose at your shadow-prince up there, you buy those skates, and have them sent to me, or to Lukaček, or to the grocer down below in our little house. You collect them there to practise upon them, and away you glide...”

That was precisely what happened. Under the eyes of Herr Settembrini, who played the critical expert although he knew nothing whatever about sport, Hans Castorp purchased in a specialist shop on the main street a pair of handsome skis, varnished light brown, made of good ashwood, with magnificent leather fittings and sharply upcurved at the front; he bought the poles as well, with iron points and circular baskets, and insisted on carrying everything away upon his own shoulder as far as Settembrini's lodgings, where an arrangement with the grocer for the daily storage of the equipment was soon concluded. Instructed by repeated observation in the manner of its use, he began on his own account to blunder about upon it every day, far from the swarm of the practice grounds, on an almost treeless slope not far behind Sanatorium Berghof; and now and then Herr Settembrini watched him from some distance, leaning upon his stick, his feet gracefully crossed, and greeted each advance in dexterity with cries of bravo. All went well when, one day, as Hans Castorp was steering down the shovelled loop of path toward Dorf, on his way to return the skis to the grocer, he encountered the Hofrat. Behrens did not recognize him, although it was broad noon and the novice nearly collided with him. He wrapped himself in a cloud of cigar smoke and trudged past.

Hans Castorp discovered that one quickly acquires a skill of which one inwardly stands in need. He laid no claim to virtuosity. What he required was learned in a few days, without overheating or breathlessness. He trained himself to keep his feet neatly together and make parallel tracks, experimented with the use of the pole for steering on a descent, learned to take obstacles, slight elevations of the ground, at speed with his arms outspread, rising and plunging like a ship upon a stormy sea; and from the twentieth attempt onward he no longer fell over when, at full speed, he braked with a Telemark turn, one leg thrust forward, the other bent at the knee. Gradually he widened the circuit of his exercises. One day Herr Settembrini saw him vanish into the whitish mist, called a warning after him through cupped hands, and went home pedagogically satisfied.

It was beautiful in the wintry mountains—not beautiful in a mild and friendly fashion, but as the wilderness of the North Sea is beautiful under a strong westerly; without the thunderous roar, to be sure, but in the silence of death, and awakening closely kindred feelings of awe. Hans Castorp's long, flexible soles bore him in all manner of directions: along the left-hand slope toward Clavadel, or rightwards past Frauenkirch and Glaris, behind which the shadow of the Amselfluh massif haunted the mist; into the Dischma valley as well, or uphill behind the Berghof toward the wooded Seehorn, of which only the snowy tip projected above the tree line, and toward the Drusatscha forest, beyond which one could discern the pallid shadow-outline of the deeply snow-covered Rhätikon range. He also had himself and his boards borne steeply aloft by the funicular to the Schatzalp, and wandered at leisure up there, carried away to a height of two thousand metres, over shimmering inclined expanses of powder snow which, in clear weather, afforded a sublime far-reaching view across the landscape of his adventures.

He rejoiced in his new accomplishment, by virtue of which the inaccessible opened before him and obstacles were all but abolished. It surrounded him with the solitude he desired, even the deepest solitude imaginable, a solitude that touched the heart with intimations of what was humanly strange and alien, and critical. On one side of him, perhaps, fir-clad slopes plunged into snowy haze, while on the other rose a wall of rock bearing prodigious, Cyclopean masses of snow, arched and humped, forming caves and caps. The silence, when he stood motionless so as not to hear even himself, was absolute and complete, a padded soundlessness, unknown, never heard before, existing nowhere else. There was no breath of wind to stir the trees ever so faintly, no rustling, not the voice of a bird. It was the primal silence upon which Hans Castorp eavesdropped as he stood there, leaning upon his stick, his head inclined toward his shoulder, his mouth open; and silently, unremittingly, the snow continued to fall within it, sinking calmly down without a sound.

No, this world in its bottomless silence had nothing hospitable about it; it received the visitor at his own risk and peril, did not truly admit or welcome him, but suffered his intrusion, his presence, in an uncanny fashion that guaranteed nothing; and what emanated from it were sensations of the elementally menacing in its stillness, of something not even hostile, but rather indifferently deadly. The child of civilization, by birth remote from and alien to wild nature, is far more susceptible to her grandeur than her rugged son, who, dependent upon her from childhood, lives with her in sober familiarity. The latter scarcely knows the religious dread with which the former, eyebrows raised, steps into her presence, and which at the deepest level determines his whole emotional relation to her, maintaining in his soul a constant devout tremor and timid agitation. Hans Castorp, in his long-sleeved camel-hair waistcoat, his puttees, and upon his luxury skis, felt at bottom exceedingly audacious as he eavesdropped upon the primal silence, the deathly soundless winter wilderness; and the relief that stirred in him when, on his homeward way, the first human habitations reappeared through the veiling mist made him conscious of his previous condition and taught him that for hours a secret, sacred terror had held dominion over his mind. On Sylt, in white trousers, assured, elegant, and reverential, he had stood at the edge of the mighty surf as before a lion’s cage, behind whose bars the beast yawns wide its gorge, displaying its dreadful fangs. Then he had bathed, while a beach attendant blew warnings on a little horn to those who insolently attempted to venture beyond the first breaker, to come even a little too near the onrushing turmoil; and even the cataract’s last wash had struck the nape like the blow of a paw. From there the young man knew the ecstatic happiness of light, amorous contact with powers whose full embrace would mean annihilation. What he had not known, however, was the inclination to intensify that inspiring contact with deadly nature until the full embrace threatened—to venture so far into the monstrous, weak child of humanity though he was, albeit armed and tolerably equipped by civilization, or at least not to flee from it until the intercourse approached the critical point and limits could scarcely any longer be set at will, until it was no longer a matter of the wash of foam and the light blow of a paw, but of the wave, the jaws, the sea.

In a word: Hans Castorp possessed courage up here—if courage before the elements means not dull sobriety in one’s relation to them, but conscious surrender and a terror of death overcome by sympathy. Sympathy? Indeed, Hans Castorp cherished sympathy with the elements in his narrow, civilized breast; and this sympathy was connected with the new sense of dignity of which he had become conscious at the sight of the little sledging folk, and which had made a deeper and grander solitude, less comfortably hotel-like than that of his balcony box, appear fitting and desirable to him. From there he had contemplated the lofty mountains in mist, the dance of the snowstorm, and in his soul had felt ashamed of his gawking across the parapet of comfort. For that reason, and not from sporting enthusiasm or any inborn delight in bodily exercise, he had learned to ski. If he felt ill at ease out there amid the grandeur, the snowing silence of death—and the child of civilization most decidedly did—well, he had long since tasted the uncanny up here with mind and senses. A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not precisely the most comfortable of things either; it too led into pathlessness and extreme danger; and if one could speak of sympathy with the great winter wilderness on Hans Castorp’s part, it was because, despite his devout terror, he felt it to be a fitting theatre for the working-out of his complexes of thought, a seemly abode for one who, without rightly knowing how he had come by them, was burdened with affairs of government concerning the estate and state of the _homo Dei_.

There was no man here to blow danger on a little horn for the overbold, unless Herr Settembrini had been that man when he called through his cupped hands after the vanishing Hans Castorp. But Hans Castorp had courage and sympathy; he paid no more heed to the call behind him than he had to the one that had once sounded after him at certain steps on Carnival Night. “_Eh, Ingeniere, un po’ di ragione, sa!_” Ah yes, you pedagogical Satan with your _ragione_ and _ribellione_, he thought. For all that, I am fond of you. You may be a windbag and an organ-grinder, but you mean well, mean better, and are dearer to me than the sharp little Jesuit and terrorist, that Spanish torturer and flogging-servant with his flashing spectacles, although he is almost always right when you quarrel . . . when you struggle pedagogically over my poor soul, like God and the Devil over man in the Middle Ages . . .

His legs powdered with snow, he poled his way up pale heights somewhere or other, their sheetlike expanses rising in terraces, tier by tier, higher and higher, no one knew whither; they seemed to lead nowhere; their upper reaches melted into the sky, which was as mist-white as they, and of which one could not tell where it began; no summit, no line of ridge was visible—it was the vaporous void toward which Hans Castorp thrust himself upward; and since behind him, too, the world, the inhabited valley of mankind, very soon closed and vanished from sight, while no sound from there reached him any longer, his solitude—indeed, his lostness—had before he knew it become as profound as he could ever have desired, profound to the point of terror, which is the prerequisite of courage. “_Praeterit figura hujus mundi_,” he said to himself in a Latin that was not of humanistic inspiration—he had heard the phrase from Naphta. He stopped and looked about him. There was absolutely nothing anywhere, and nowhere anything to be seen except isolated, very tiny snowflakes, descending from the whiteness above to the whiteness of the ground; and the silence all around was mightily uncommunicative. As his gaze broke against the white emptiness that blinded him, he felt his heart stirring, pounding from the ascent—this muscular organ of the heart, whose animal shape and manner of beating he had, perhaps sacrilegiously, spied upon amid the crackling flashes of the fluoroscopy chamber. And a kind of tenderness came over him, a simple and devout sympathy with his heart, the beating human heart, so utterly alone up here in the icy void with its question and its riddle.

He pushed onward, higher, toward the sky. Sometimes he thrust the upper end of his ski-stick into the snow and watched blue light rush up from the depths of the hole after the stick when he drew it out. This amused him; he could stand for a long time, testing the little optical phenomenon again and again. It was a peculiar, delicate light of mountain and depth, greenish-blue, clear as ice and yet shadowy, mysteriously alluring. It reminded him of the light and colour of certain eyes, slanting eyes that gazed upon destiny, which Herr Settembrini, from the humanistic standpoint, had contemptuously termed “Tartar slits” and “steppe-wolf lights”—eyes beheld early and inevitably found again, Hippe’s and Clawdia Chauchat’s eyes. “Gladly,” he said half aloud into the soundlessness. “But don’t break it: _Il est à visser, tu sais._” And in his mind he heard behind him melodious admonitions to reason.

Off to the right, at some distance, a forest loomed through the mist. He turned toward it, so as to have an earthly goal before his eyes instead of whitish transcendence, and suddenly began to descend without having had the slightest warning of a dip in the terrain. The glare prevented all discernment of the ground’s configuration. One could see nothing; everything melted before the eyes. Quite unexpectedly, obstacles lifted him upward. He yielded himself to the gradient without being able to distinguish by sight the degree of its inclination.

The wood that had attracted him lay beyond the ravine into which he had unwittingly descended. Its floor, covered with loose snow, sloped toward the interior of the mountains, as he observed when he followed it for some distance in that direction. It went downward; the lateral slopes rose higher; like a sunken road, the fold appeared to lead into the mountain. Then the beaks of his conveyance pointed upward again; the ground rose, and soon there was no longer any side wall to climb; Hans Castorp’s pathless course once more crossed an open mountainside toward the sky.

He saw the conifers behind and below him to one side, turned toward them, and in a swift descent reached the snow-laden firs, which, arranged in wedge formation, thrust out into the treeless ground as an offshoot of forests falling steeply away into mist. Resting beneath their branches, he smoked a cigarette, still somewhat oppressed in his soul, tense and constricted by the over-deep silence, the adventurous solitude, yet proud to have conquered it and courageous in the feeling of his dignified right to these surroundings.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. He had set out soon after luncheon, intending to play truant from part of the Great Rest Cure and the afternoon meal and to return before dark. A sense of well-being filled him at the thought that several hours of roaming in the open and the sublime still lay before him. He had some chocolate in the pocket of his breeches and a small bottle of port in his waistcoat pocket.

The position of the sun could scarcely be made out, so densely was it swathed in mist. Behind him, in the region of the valley’s outlet, of the angle between the mountains that could not be seen, the cloud, the vapour, grew darker and appeared to be advancing. It looked like snow—more snow, to supply an urgent need—a proper flurry. And indeed the small, soundless flakes were already falling more thickly over the slope.

Hans Castorp stepped forward to let a few of them fall upon his sleeve and examine them with the expert eyes of the amateur researcher. They appeared to be shapeless little scraps, but he had more than once had their kind beneath his good lens and knew well enough of what exquisitely precise little treasures they were composed: jewels, stars of orders, diamond clasps, such as the most conscientious jeweller could not have fashioned with greater richness or minuteness—indeed, all this light, loose, powdery whiteness, which in masses weighed upon the forest, covered the broad expanses, and over which his footboards bore him, was of a rather different nature from the sands of home that it recalled: what composed it was, as everyone knew, not grains of stone, but myriads of particles of water, shot together in freezing into symmetrical crystalline multiplicity—particles, that is, of the inorganic substance which also caused the plasma of life, the bodies of plants and men, to swell—and among the myriads of magic stars, in their subvisible, secret miniature splendour not intended for the human eye, no one was like another; an inexhaustible delight in invention prevailed there, varying and elaborating with the utmost delicacy one and always the same fundamental scheme, the equilateral and equiangular hexagon; yet in itself each of these cold products was of unconditional symmetry and icy regularity—indeed, that was what was uncanny, anti-organic, and hostile to life about them; they were too regular, substance ordered for life was never so to this degree; life shuddered at such exact correctness, felt it to be deadly, to be the secret of death itself, and Hans Castorp believed he understood why the temple builders of antiquity had deliberately and secretly introduced slight deviations from symmetry into their orders of columns.

He pushed off, shuffled onward upon his runners, descended beside the edge of the forest through the thick covering of snow on the slope and into the mist, and continued to roam, climbing and gliding, aimlessly and at leisure through the dead terrain, which, with its empty, undulating expanses, its dry vegetation consisting of isolated, darkly conspicuous clumps of dwarf pine, and its horizon bounded by gentle elevations, bore so striking a resemblance to a landscape of dunes. Hans Castorp nodded his head in satisfaction whenever he stopped and feasted upon this resemblance; and he accepted with sympathy, too, the burning flush of his face, the tendency of his limbs to tremble, the peculiar and intoxicating mixture of agitation and weariness that he felt, since all this familiarly reminded him of closely related effects produced by the sea air, likewise stimulating and at the same time saturated with sleep-inducing substances. With gratification he felt his winged independence, his freedom to roam. Before him lay no path to which he was bound, behind him none that would lead him back as he had come. At first there had been poles, planted sticks, snow markers, but he had soon deliberately freed himself from their tutelage, since they reminded him of the man with the little horn and seemed inappropriate to his inward relation with the great winter wilderness.

Behind snow-covered rocky knolls, between which he pushed his way, steering now right, now left, lay a slope, then a level expanse, then great mountains whose softly padded ravines and passes seemed so accessible and inviting. Yes, the lure of distances and heights, of ever-new solitudes opening before him, was strong in Hans Castorp’s heart, and at the risk of being late he pressed deeper into the savage silence, into the monstrous realm that answered for nothing—although, moreover, the tension and oppression within him were turning into genuine fear at the prematurely deepening darkness of the sky, which descended upon the landscape like grey veils. This fear made him aware that until now he had secretly been positively intent upon depriving himself of his bearings and forgetting in which direction the valley and the village lay—a design in which he had succeeded with gratifying completeness. To be sure, he could tell himself that if he turned back at once and continued downhill, he would quickly reach the valley, though perhaps at some distance from the Berghof—too quickly; he would arrive too early, would not have made full use of his time, whereas, admittedly, if the snowstorm overtook him, he might for the present be unable to find his way home at all. Yet he refused on that account to take premature flight, however much fear—his sincere fear of the elements—might oppress him. This was hardly the conduct of a sportsman; for the sportsman ventures among the elements only so long as he knows himself their lord and master, practises caution, and plays the wiser part by yielding. But what was taking place in Hans Castorp’s soul could be described by one word alone: defiance. And much blame as the word contains, even when—or especially when—the sacrilegious feeling corresponding to it is joined with so much sincere fear, still, upon some human reflection, it is more or less understandable that in the depths of the soul of a young man, a man who has lived for years as this one had, much should gather, or, as Hans Castorp the engineer would have said, ‘accumulate,’ until one day it discharges itself in an elemental ‘Oh, nonsense!’ or ‘Come on, then!’ born of embittered impatience—in short, precisely as defiance and a refusal of prudent caution. And so he went driving onward upon his long slippers, glided down the slope and pushed across the next hillside, upon which, some distance away, stood a little wooden building, a hay barn or alpine hut with stones weighting its roof, heading towards the nearest mountain, whose ridge bristled with firs and behind which lofty peaks loomed nebulously. The wall before him, dotted with isolated groups of trees, was steep, but by bearing diagonally to the right one might skirt halfway round it at a moderate ascent and get behind it, to see what might lie beyond; and Hans Castorp undertook this work of exploration after first descending, before the field with the herdsman’s hut, into a fairly deep ravine that sloped down from right to left.

He had only just begun to climb again when, as had been expected, snow and storm broke loose in earnest—the snowstorm, in a word, had come, which had so long been threatening, if one may speak of ‘threatening’ with regard to blind and ignorant elements that have no intention of destroying us—which would be comparatively comforting—but are in the most monstrous fashion indifferent to whether our destruction happens incidentally along the way. ‘Hallo!’ thought Hans Castorp, and stopped as the first gust of wind drove into the dense flurry and struck him. ‘That is one kind of breath. It goes to the marrow.’ And indeed this wind was of a thoroughly malicious sort: the frightful cold that actually prevailed, nearly twenty degrees below zero, could not be felt and seemed mild only when the moistureless air was still and motionless, as it usually was; but the moment it stirred into wind, it cut into the flesh like knives, and when it raged as it did now—for the first sweeping rush of wind had been merely a forerunner—seven furs would not have sufficed to protect one’s bones from the icy terror of death; and Hans Castorp wore not seven furs, but only a woollen waistcoat, which at other times had been perfectly sufficient and had even been burdensome at the least touch of sunshine. Besides, the wind came somewhat sideways from behind, so that it seemed scarcely advisable to turn back and receive it head-on; and since this consideration mingled with his obstinacy and the profound ‘Oh, nonsense!’ of his soul, the mad young fellow still pressed onward, among solitary fir trees, in order to get behind the mountain he had undertaken to round.

There was no pleasure in it, however, for nothing could be seen through the dance of flakes, which, seemingly without falling, filled all space with their dense, whirling crush; the icy squalls that drove into him made his ears burn with sharp pain, paralysed his limbs, and numbed his hands, so that he no longer knew whether he was still holding his alpenstock or not. The snow blew down the back of his collar and melted along his spine, settled upon his shoulders, and covered his right side; he felt as though he were to freeze there into a snowman, his stick rigid in his hand; and all this discomfort arose under comparatively favourable circumstances: if he turned, it would be worse; and yet the homeward journey had become a piece of work which he ought surely not to hesitate to undertake.

And so he stopped, shrugged his shoulders angrily, and turned his boards about. The headwind at once took his breath away, so that he submitted once more to the awkward procedure of turning, in order to get air and confront the indifferent enemy with greater composure. With lowered head and a carefully regulated economy of breath, he did then succeed in setting himself in motion in the opposite direction—surprised, despite his grim expectations, by the difficulties of advancing, which arose chiefly from his blindness and want of breath. At every moment he was forced to halt, first in order to turn his back upon the storm and draw breath, and then also because, peering upward with bowed head, he saw nothing through the white darkness and had to guard against running into trees or being thrown by obstacles. The flakes flew into his face in masses and melted there, so that it froze. They flew into his mouth, where they dissolved with a faintly watery taste, flew against his eyelids, which closed convulsively, flooded his eyes, and prevented any prospect—which would in any case have been useless, since the dense veiling of his field of vision and the glare of all that whiteness had already almost entirely disabled his sight. It was nothingness, white, whirling nothingness, into which he gazed whenever he forced himself to see. And only now and then did spectral shadows of the world of appearances emerge within it: a mountain-pine bush, a group of spruces, and even the faint silhouette of the barn he had passed a little while before.

He left it behind and sought his way back across the hillside where the shed stood. But there was, of course, no path; keeping to a direction, the approximate direction homewards and into the valley, was far more a matter of luck than of judgment, since one could see at most one’s hand before one’s eyes, but not even the tips of one’s skis; and even had one seen better, ample provisions had still been made to render progress difficult in the extreme: one’s face full of snow, the storm an adversary that ruined one’s breathing, cut it off, prevented both the drawing-in of air and its expulsion, and at every moment compelled one to turn away gasping—let anyone make progress under such conditions, Hans Castorp or another, stronger man—one stood still, gasped, blinking the water from one’s lashes, beat away the armour of snow that had formed upon one’s front, and felt it an unreasonable demand that one should advance in such circumstances.

Hans Castorp nevertheless advanced—that is to say, he moved from the spot. But whether this was purposeful progress, progress in the right direction, and whether it might not have been less mistaken to remain where one was—which did not seem practicable either—remained an open question; indeed, theoretical probability spoke against it, and in practical terms Hans Castorp soon felt that something was amiss with the ground beneath him, that he did not have the right terrain underfoot—that is, the level hillside which, climbing out of the ravine, he had regained with great difficulty and which, above all, had to be traversed again. The level ground had been too short; he was climbing once more. Evidently the storm, coming from the southwest, from the direction of the valley’s outlet, had forced him aside with its furious counter-pressure. It was false progress, and had been for some time, upon which he was exhausting himself. Blindly, enveloped in a whirling white night, he was only labouring deeper into that which threatened indifferently.

‘Well, that’s something!’ he said between his teeth, and halted. He expressed himself no more pathetically, although for one moment he felt as though an ice-cold hand had reached for his heart, making it give a convulsive leap and then beat against his ribs as rapidly as on the occasion when Rhadamanthys had discovered the damp spot in him. For he saw that he had no right to grand words and gestures, since defiance had been his part and every peril of the situation was entirely for his own account. ‘Not bad,’ he said, and felt that his features, the expressive muscles of his face, no longer obeyed his soul and were quite incapable of conveying anything at all—neither fear, nor rage, nor contempt—for they were frozen stiff. ‘What now? Down the slope here and then straight ahead, following my nose, always directly into the wind. That is easier said than done,’ he continued, panting and in broken phrases, yet actually speaking half aloud as he set himself in motion again; ‘but something must be done, I cannot sit down and wait, because then I shall be covered over by hexagonal regularity, and Settembrini, when he comes with his little horn to look for me, will find me squatting here with glassy eyes and a snow-cap askew upon my head . . .’ He became aware that he was talking to himself, and rather oddly at that. He therefore forbade himself to do so, but did this too half aloud and explicitly, although his lips were so numb that he dispensed with their use and spoke without the consonants formed by their aid—which reminded him of an earlier situation in his life when things had been the same. ‘Be quiet and see that you get away from here,’ he said, and added: ‘It seems to me that you are rambling and not entirely clear in the head. That is bad in a certain respect.’

Yet that it was bad, considered from the standpoint of his escape, was a mere finding of supervisory reason, as it were of a strange and uninvolved, though concerned, person. His natural part was strongly inclined to surrender itself to the confusion that, as his weariness increased, sought to take possession of him; he nevertheless took note of this inclination and lingered over it in thought. ‘This is the modified mode of experience of someone who is caught in a snowstorm in the mountains and can no longer find his way home,’ he thought as he laboured onward, muttering breathlessly to himself broken fragments of the thought while discreetly avoiding more explicit expressions. ‘Anyone who hears about it afterwards imagines it to be horrible, but forgets that illness—and my situation is, after all, in a sense an illness—so conditions its man that the two can get along together. There are sensory diminutions, merciful narcoses, measures of relief supplied by nature, indeed there are . . . One must fight against them, however, for they have a double face, are ambiguous in the highest degree; in judging them everything depends upon one’s point of view. They are well meant and a blessing, provided one is not supposed to get home; but they are very ill meant and must be resisted to the utmost, provided there is still any question at all of getting home—as there is with me, who have no thought, no thought in this heart of mine beating so stormily, of letting myself be covered over here by imbecilically regular crystallometry . . .’

In truth he was already badly affected and fought the incipient confusion of his senses in a confused and feverish fashion. He was not as alarmed as, in a healthy state, he ought to have been when he became aware that he had once again strayed from the level course: this time evidently to the other side, where the hillside descended. For he was gliding downhill with the wind coming diagonally against him, and although for the present he ought not to have been doing so, it was the easiest thing at that moment. ‘Very well,’ he thought. ‘Farther down I shall take my bearings again.’ And he did so, or believed that he did, or did not quite believe it himself either, or—more ominously still—was beginning to be indifferent as to whether he did or not. Such was the effect of the ambiguous lapses, which he resisted only feebly. That mixture of weariness and agitation which formed the familiar permanent condition of a guest whose acclimatisation consisted in becoming accustomed to the fact that he did not become accustomed had increased so greatly in both its components that considered resistance to the lapses was no longer possible. Dazed and reeling, he trembled with intoxication and excitation, much as he did after a colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini, only incomparably more violently; and thus it may have happened that, with drunken reminiscences of such discussions, he embellished his indolence in resisting the narcotic lapses—muttering to himself, despite his contemptuous indignation at being covered over by hexagonal regularity, something to the following sense or nonsense: that the sense of duty which sought to impel him to combat these suspicious diminutions was nothing but mere ethics, which meant shabby bourgeois respectability in matters of life and irreligious philistinism. Desire and temptation to lie down and rest stole upon his mind in the form of his telling himself that it was like a sandstorm in the desert, which caused the Arabs to throw themselves upon their faces and draw their burnouses over their heads. Only the circumstance that he had no burnous, and that a woollen waistcoat could not very well be drawn over one’s head, did he regard as an objection to such conduct, although he was no child and knew with fair precision, from all manner of received accounts, how one freezes to death.

After a moderately rapid descent and a stretch of level ground, the way now led upward again, and rather steeply. That need not be wrong, for even on the way down into the valley there must now and then be another ascent; and as for the wind, it had probably capriciously shifted, for Hans Castorp now had it at his back once more and found that worthy of gratitude in itself. But was it the storm that bent him forward, or did the soft white sloping surface before him, veiled by the dusky flurry, exert an attraction upon his body, so that he inclined towards it? It would merely be a matter of leaning against it if one yielded, and the temptation to do so was great—quite as great as the books said it was and as it had been designated typically dangerous, which, however, did nothing whatever to diminish the temptation’s living and immediate power. It asserted individual rights, refused to be subsumed under what was generally known or to recognise itself therein, declared itself unique and incomparable in its urgency—without, admittedly, being able to deny that it was a whisper from a particular quarter, the inspiration of a being in Spanish black with a snow-white, pleated platter-ruff, with whose idea and fundamental conception were associated all manner of gloomy, keenly Jesuitical and misanthropic things, all manner of servitude to torture and the lash, an abomination to Herr Settembrini, who, however, only made himself ridiculous in opposition to it, with his barrel organ and his _ragione_ . . .

But Hans Castorp held out stoutly and resisted the temptation to lean himself down. He could see nothing, but he struggled and made headway—whether to any purpose or not, he did his part and kept moving, despite the oppressive fetters into which the frost-laden gale bound his limbs ever more heavily. When the ascent grew too steep for him, he turned aside, without giving himself much account of it, and for a while skied along the slope. To wrench his cramped eyelids apart and peer about him was an exertion whose proven uselessness offered little encouragement to undertake it. Nevertheless, at times he saw something: fir trees drawing together, a stream or ditch whose blackness stood out from the terrain between overhanging rims of snow; and when, for a change, he began once more to descend, though against the storm, he perceived before him, at some distance, suspended as it were in the sweeping tangle of veils, the shadow of a human structure.

Welcome, consoling sight! Stoutly had he managed it, despite every adversity, so that now even human structures were appearing, as a sign that the inhabited valley was near. Perhaps there were people there; perhaps he might enter and wait beneath shelter until the weather had spent itself, and, if need be, have company and guidance should natural darkness have fallen in the meantime. He made for the chimerical something, which often vanished entirely into the murk of the weather, had still to overcome an exhausting ascent against the wind in order to reach it, and, upon arriving, convinced himself—with indignation, amazement, terror, and giddiness—that it was the familiar hut, the hay barn with the stone-weighted roof, which by all manner of detours and with the most honest exertion he had regained.

That was the devil's own work. Fierce curses, with the labial sounds omitted, escaped Hans Castorp's stiffened lips. Prodding his way around the hut to get his bearings, he established that he had reached it again from behind, and thus for a good hour—by his reckoning—had been engaged in the purest and most futile nonsense. But that was how it went; so it stood in the book. One went round in circles, wore oneself out with the notion of making progress in one's heart, and all the while described some wide, absurd arc that led back into itself, like the vexatious round of the year. Thus one wandered astray; thus one failed to find one's way home. Hans Castorp recognized the traditional phenomenon with a certain satisfaction, though also with terror, and smote his thigh in wrath and wonder because the universal had occurred so punctually in his own peculiar, individual, present case.

The solitary shed was inaccessible, its door locked; there was no way of getting inside. Yet Hans Castorp resolved to remain there for the time being, since the projecting roof afforded the illusion of a certain hospitality, while the hut itself, on the side facing the mountains, which Hans Castorp sought out, offered some real protection from the storm if one leaned one's shoulder against the wall built of tree trunks, since leaning one's back against it was scarcely practicable because of the long skis. Thus he stood at an angle, having thrust his ski pole into the snow beside him, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his woollen jacket turned up, the outer leg employed as a counter-brace, and rested his reeling head against the plank wall with closed eyes, merely glancing now and then along his shoulder, across the ravine toward the opposite mountainside, which at times became dimly visible through the veiling drift.

His position was comparatively comfortable. “If need be, I can stand like this all night,” he thought, “provided I change legs from time to time, lie on the other side, so to speak, and naturally take a little exercise in between, which is indispensable. Though frozen stiff outside, inwardly I have stored up warmth through the exertion I have made, and so the excursion was not altogether useless, even if I have perished and wandered from hut to hut ... ‘Perished’—what sort of expression is that? There is no need for it at all; it is not commonly used for what has befallen me, and I apply it quite arbitrarily because my head is not entirely clear; and yet in its way it seems to me the right word ... It is just as well that I can endure it, for this driving, this driving snow, this mad carrying-on, may very well last until tomorrow morning; and even if it lasts only until dark, that is bad enough, for by night the danger of perishing, of going round in circles, is just as great as in a snowstorm ... It must already be evening, in fact, about six—the amount of time I have frittered away perishing. What time is it?” And he looked at his watch, although his rigid fingers found it no easy matter to dig it insensibly out from beneath his clothes—his gold hunter watch with its monogram, which ticked briskly and dutifully here in the savage solitude, rather like his heart, the touching human heart within the organic warmth of his breast's chamber ...

It was half past four. What the devil, it had been almost that late already when the weather broke. Was he to believe that his wandering had lasted scarcely a quarter of an hour? “Time has grown long for me,” he thought. “Perishing is tedious, it seems. But by five or half past five it will be properly dark; that remains certain. Will it stop before then, early enough to spare me further perishing? I might take a sip of port on the strength of that, to fortify myself.”

He had brought this dilettantish beverage with him solely because it was kept ready in flat little bottles at the “Berghof” and sold to excursionists—by whom, of course, they did not mean people who without permission lost their way in the mountains amid snow and frost and, under such circumstances, awaited the night. Had his senses been less impaired, he would have had to tell himself that, from the point of view of getting home, it was almost the most mistaken thing he could possibly have taken; and he did tell himself so, after swallowing a few sips which produced an immediate effect very much like that of the Kulmbach beer on the evening of his first day up here, when, with dissolute and uncontrolled talk of fish sauces and the like, he had given offence to Settembrini—to Herr Lodovico, the pedagogue, who could summon even madmen abandoning all restraint back to reason with his gaze, and whose melodious little horn Hans Castorp now heard sounding through the air, a sign that the oratorical educator was approaching in mighty marches to rescue the pupil of sorrow, the problem child of life, from his mad predicament and conduct him home ... Which, of course, was sheer nonsense and arose only from the Kulmbach beer he had drunk by mistake. For in the first place Herr Settembrini possessed no little horn at all, but only his barrel organ, which stood on one stilt upon the pavement and to whose fluent playing he raised humanistic eyes toward the houses; and in the second place he knew and perceived nothing whatever of what was happening, since he was no longer at the “Berghof” sanatorium but in his garret room, with its water bottle, at Lukaček the ladies' tailor's, above Naphta's silken cell—and had neither the right nor the means to intervene, any more than he had once had on Carnival night, when Hans Castorp had found himself in an equally mad and perilous situation, returning to the ailing Clawdia Chauchat _son crayon_, her pencil, Pribislav Hippe's pencil ... And what, incidentally, about his “position”? To be in a position, he would have to be lying, not standing, if the word was to acquire its just and proper meaning instead of a merely metaphorical one. Horizontal—that was the position befitting a long-standing member of those up here. Was he not accustomed to lying outdoors in snow and frost, by night as well as by day? And he was making ready to sink down when insight shot through him, seized him by the collar, so to speak, and held him upright: this babbling of his thoughts about his “position,” too, was to be laid solely to the account of the Kulmbach beer, sprang solely from that impersonal desire of his to lie down and sleep which stood in the book as typically dangerous and sought to beguile him with sophistries and plays upon words.

“A mistake has been made,” he recognized. “The port was not the right thing; those few sips have made my head altogether excessively heavy—it is falling on my chest—and my thoughts are muddled stuff and insipid jests that I must not trust: not only the original ones that first occur to me, but also the second ones, the criticisms I make upon the first; that is the misfortune. ‘_Son crayon_’! It means ‘her’ _crayon_, not his, in this instance, and one says only ‘_son_’ because ‘_crayon_’ is masculine; all the rest is jesting. That I should dwell on it at all! When, for example, a far more pressing fact is that my left leg, against which I am bracing myself, bears a striking resemblance to the wooden stilt of Settembrini's barrel organ, which he is forever thrusting before him with his knee along the pavement when he steps nearer beneath the window and holds out his velvet hat for the maiden above to throw something into it. And all the while I am being impelled, impersonally, almost as though by hands, to lie down in the snow. Only movement can help against that. I must take some exercise, as punishment for the Kulmbach and to limber up the wooden leg.”

He pushed himself away with his shoulder. But the moment he detached himself from the shed and took no more than a single step forward, the wind hewed at him as with scythes and drove him back against the sheltering wall. It was undoubtedly the appointed place of his sojourn, with which he must for the present content himself, though he remained free, by way of variation, to lean upon his left shoulder and support himself on his right leg, swinging the left a little to restore its life. In weather of this kind one does not leave the house, he thought. Moderate variation is permissible, but no craving for novelty and no picking quarrels with the bride of the winds. Keep still, and by all means let your head hang, since it happens to be so heavy. The wall is good, wooden beams; a certain warmth seems to emanate from it, insofar as warmth can be spoken of here—a discreet native warmth of the wood, possibly more a matter of mood, subjective ... Ah, the many trees! Ah, the living climate of the living! How fragrant it is! ...

It was a park that lay beneath him, beneath the balcony on which he must be standing—a broad, luxuriantly green park of deciduous trees, of elms, plane trees, beeches, maples, birches, the shades of their full, fresh, shimmering foliage delicately graduated, their crowns softly rustling. A delicious, moist air blew there, embalmed by the breath of the trees. A warm shower of rain was passing, but the rain was shot through with light. One could see high into the sky, the air filled with bright trickling water. How beautiful! Oh, breath of home, fragrance and abundance of the lowlands, so long denied him! The air was full of birdsong, full of dainty, intimate, sweet piping, twittering, cooing, trilling, and sobbing, though not one of the little creatures could be seen. Hans Castorp smiled and breathed gratefully. But meanwhile everything began to grow lovelier still. A rainbow arched sideways across the landscape, full-formed and strong, sheer splendour, glimmering moistly with all its colours, which flowed down, rich as oil, into the dense and gleaming green. It was like music, like nothing but the sound of harps, mingled with flutes and violins. The blue and violet especially streamed forth marvellously. Everything dissolved into them in magical fusion, transformed itself, unfolded anew and ever more beautifully. It was as once, many years ago now, when Hans Castorp had been privileged to hear a world-famous singer, an Italian tenor, from whose throat grace-filled art and powers had poured themselves over the hearts of men. He had sustained a high note that had been beautiful from the very beginning. Yet gradually, from moment to moment, the passionate euphony had opened, swelling and expanding, growing ever brighter and more radiant. Veil after veil, which no one had perceived before, seemed to fall away from it—a final one, which now, surely, one believed, had disclosed the uttermost and purest light; and then a last of all, and then, improbably, one very last beyond it, liberating such an excess of brilliance and tear-glimmering glory that muffled sounds of rapture, sounding almost like protest and contradiction, had broken from the multitude, and a sob had risen even in him, the young Hans Castorp. So it was now with his landscape, which changed and opened into ever-increasing transfiguration. Blue radiance swam ... The shining veils of rain descended: there lay the sea—a sea, the southern sea it was, deep, deep blue, flashing with silver lights, a wonderfully beautiful bay, opening hazily on one side, broadly half-embraced by ranges of mountains fading into ever fainter blue, with islands between, from which palms rose or where small white houses could be seen shining out of cypress groves. Oh, oh, enough, wholly undeserved—what bliss was this of light, of profound purity of sky, of sunlit freshness upon the water! Hans Castorp had never seen it, never anything of the kind. On holiday journeys he had scarcely sipped at the South; he knew the rough, pale sea and clung to it with childish, ponderous feelings, but had never reached the Mediterranean, Naples, Sicily, perhaps, or Greece. And yet he _remembered_. Yes, strangely enough, it was a recognition that he celebrated. “Ah yes, that is how it is!” cried something within him—as though he had always borne in his heart, secretly and concealed from himself, the blue sunlit happiness spread out before him: and this “always” was vast, infinitely vast, like the open sea to the left, there where the sky descended upon it in delicate violet.

The horizon lay high, the expanse seemed to rise, which came of Hans's seeing the gulf from above, from a certain height: the mountains curved round as promontories, entering the sea in bushy woodland, and extended in a semicircle from the centre of the prospect to where he sat, and beyond; it was a mountainous coast where he crouched upon sun-warmed stone steps; before him the shore, mossy and stony, descended in terraced blocks, with scrub, to a level strand, where among reeds the stone rubble formed blue inlets, little harbours, lagoons. And this sunny region, these accessible coastal heights, these laughing rocky basins, as well as the sea outward to the islands, where boats passed to and fro, were populated far and wide: human beings, children of sun and sea, moved and rested everywhere, a beautiful young humanity, sensible and serene, so pleasing to behold—Hans Castorp's whole heart opened wide, yes, painfully wide and lovingly, at the sight of them.

Young men exercised horses, running with a hand on the halter beside the neighing, head-tossing creatures as they trotted, tugging at the bucking ones on long reins, or driving them into the sea as they rode bareback, striking the horses’ flanks with their bare heels; the muscles of their backs played beneath their golden-brown skin in the sunlight, and the calls they exchanged or addressed to their animals sounded, for some reason, enchanting. At an inlet which reached far into the land and reflected its shores like a mountain lake, girls were dancing. One of them, whose hair, swept up from the nape into a knot, possessed a peculiar charm, sat with her feet in a hollow of the ground and played upon a shepherd’s flute, her eyes directed beyond the play of her fingers toward her companions, who, in long and ample robes, advanced in the dance singly, their arms spread wide with smiles, and in pairs, their temples sweetly inclined toward one another; while behind the flute-player—whose back, owing to the position of her arms, was white and long and delicate and softly rounded at the sides—other sisters sat or stood embracing, watching in tranquil conversation. Farther on, young men practised archery. It was a happy and companionable sight to see the older ones instructing the curly-headed novices in drawing the bowstring and taking aim, aiming with them and laughingly supporting them when, as the arrow went whirring forth, the recoil made them stagger. Others were fishing. They lay on their stomachs upon flat rocks by the shore, swinging one leg and holding their lines in the sea, their heads turned in leisurely conversation toward a neighbour who, stretching his body from a slanting seated posture, cast his bait far out. Others again were occupied in hauling, pushing, and bracing themselves to launch a high-sided boat with mast and yard into the sea. Children played and shouted for joy among the breakwaters. A young woman, stretched out at length and looking backward, drew her flowered garment upward between her breasts with one hand, while with the other she reached longingly into the air for a leafy fruit which a slim-hipped youth, standing erect above her head, playfully withheld from her at arm’s length. People reclined in niches among the rocks; they lingered at the water’s edge, holding their own shoulders with crossed hands and testing the coolness of the water with the tip of a toe. Couples strolled along the shore, and the mouth of the man who guided the girl familiarly was at her ear. Long-haired goats leapt from slab to slab, watched over by a young shepherd who stood upon a height, one hand at his hip and the other resting upon his long staff, a small hat with its brim turned up behind perched upon his brown curls.

“How charming it is!” Hans Castorp thought with all his heart. “How exceedingly delightful and winning! How handsome, healthy, intelligent, and happy they are! Yes, not merely well formed—they are intelligent and lovable from within as well. That is what moves me so and makes me quite fall in love with them: the spirit and meaning, I should like to say, that underlie their nature, within which they live and have their being together!” By this he meant the great friendliness and equably distributed courteous consideration that governed the intercourse of these people of the sun: a light reverence, concealed beneath smiles, which they paid one another at every step, almost imperceptibly and yet by virtue of a clearly prevailing bond of feeling and an ingrained idea; even a dignity and severity, though wholly dissolved into cheerfulness and determining their every act and omission solely as an ineffable spiritual influence of seriousness without gloom, of intelligent piety—yet not entirely without ceremony. For there, upon a round, moss-covered stone, sat a young mother in a brown garment loosened from one shoulder, nursing her child. And everyone who passed greeted her in a particular fashion which gathered into itself all that was so expressively left unspoken in the general conduct of the people: the young men, turning toward the maternal figure, lightly, swiftly, and formally crossed their arms over their breasts and bowed their heads with a smile; the girls made a not too exact suggestion of a genuflection, like a churchgoer who, in passing the high altar, makes a slight obeisance. Yet as they did so they nodded to her several times, briskly, merrily, and cordially—and this mingling of formal devotion and cheerful friendship, together with the slow gentleness with which the mother looked up from her little mite, whose drinking she eased by pressing her forefinger into her breast, and thanked those paying her reverence with a smile, filled Hans Castorp through and through with delight. He could not have his fill of looking, and yet asked himself uneasily whether he was even permitted to look, whether his spying upon this sunny and well-ordered happiness did not make him, an outsider who felt himself ignoble, ugly, and clumsily booted, gravely culpable.

It seemed harmless enough. A beautiful boy, whose abundant hair, laid sideways across his head, projected over his forehead and fell toward his temple, stood apart from his companions directly below Hans Castorp’s seat, his arms folded upon his breast—not sadly or defiantly, but simply and serenely apart. And this boy saw him, raised his gaze toward him, and his eyes moved to and fro between the watcher and the scenes upon the shore, listening in upon his listening. Suddenly, however, he looked beyond him, gazing into the distance behind him, and at once the smile of courteous, fraternal consideration common to them all vanished from his beautiful, severely chiselled, half-childish face—indeed, without any darkening of his brows, a seriousness arose in his features as if hewn wholly from stone, expressionless and unfathomable, a death-locked reserve before which Hans Castorp, scarcely reassured, was seized by pale terror, not without an admixture of vague presentiment of its meaning.

He too looked behind him ... Mighty columns without bases, built up of cylindrical drums from whose joints moss sprouted, towered behind him—the columns of a temple gateway, upon whose stepped substructure, open in the middle, he had been sitting. With a heavy heart he rose, descended the steps at the side, and entered the deep gateway, passed through it, and continued along a tiled road which soon brought him before new propylaea. He passed through these as well, and now the temple lay before him, massive and weathered to a greyish green, with a steep stepped base and a broad front resting upon the capitals of such enormous and almost squat columns, tapering toward the top, from whose structure a fluted round drum would sometimes jut sideways, displaced from its setting. With difficulty, using his hands as well and sighing—for his heart grew ever more constricted—Hans Castorp clambered up the high steps and gained the forest of columns within the hall. It was very deep; he wandered through it as among the trunks of the beechwood beside the pale sea, deliberately avoiding the centre and seeking to evade it. Yet he strayed back toward it and found himself, where the rows of columns parted, before a group of statues: two stone figures of women upon a pedestal, mother and daughter, as it seemed—the one seated, older and more dignified, quite gentle and divine, though with mournful brows above her empty, starless eyes, wearing a richly folded tunic and outer garment, her waved matronly coiffure covered by a veil; the other standing, maternally embraced by the first, with a round maidenly face, her arms and hands wrapped in the folds of her outer robe and concealed within them.

As he contemplated the statue, Hans Castorp’s heart grew still heavier for obscure reasons, more fearful and more full of foreboding. He scarcely dared, and yet was compelled, to pass around the figures and traverse the next double row of columns behind them: there the metal door of the temple chamber stood open before him, and the poor fellow’s knees threatened to give way at what he beheld with staring eyes. Two grey women, half naked, shaggy-haired, with sagging witches’ breasts and teats as long as fingers, were at work inside among flickering braziers in the most hideous fashion. Over a basin they tore a small child apart, tore it apart with their hands in savage silence—Hans Castorp saw delicate fair hair smeared with blood—and devoured the pieces, so that the brittle little bones cracked in their mouths and blood dripped from their ravaged lips. A ghastly, icy cold held Hans Castorp spellbound. He wanted to clap his hands before his eyes and could not. He wanted to flee and could not. They had already seen him at their abominable work; they shook their bloody fists at him and reviled him without a sound, but with the utmost vileness, obscenely, and in the local dialect of Hans Castorp’s native country. He felt so sick, so sick as never before. Desperately he tried to wrench himself from the spot—and just as, in doing so, he had collapsed sideways against the column behind him, so he found himself once more, the loathsome whispering shrieks still in his ears and wholly gripped by cold horror, beside his shed in the snow, lying upon one arm with his head propped against it, his legs stretched out before him with the skis.

It was not, however, a true and proper awakening; he merely blinked, relieved to be rid of the women of horror, but otherwise it was neither very clear nor very important to him whether he was lying against a temple column or a shed, and he went on dreaming, as it were—not now in images, but in thoughts, though no less audacious and tangled for that.

“I knew all along that was a dream,” he babbled inwardly. “A perfectly delightful and dreadful dream. At bottom I knew it the whole time, and I made it all myself—the leafy park and the dear dampness, and then all that came afterward, the beautiful and the hideous alike; I almost knew it beforehand. But how can one know such things and make them oneself, make oneself so happy and so afraid? Where did I get that lovely gulf with its islands, and then the temple precinct toward which the eyes of that pleasant one, who stood apart, directed me? One does not dream merely out of one’s own soul, I should like to say; one dreams anonymously and in common, though each in his own fashion. The great soul, of which you are only a particle, no doubt dreams through you at times, in your own fashion, of things it secretly dreams forever—of its youth, its hope, its happiness and peace ... and its blood feast. Here I lie against my column, and in my body I still have the real remnants of my dream: the icy horror of the blood feast, and also the gladness of heart that came before it, the joy in the happiness and pious civilization of white mankind. It is my due, I maintain; I have chartered rights to lie here and dream such things. I have learned much from those up here about promiscuity and reason. I have perished with Naphta and Settembrini in the highly perilous mountains. I know everything about man. I have recognized his flesh and blood; I have returned Pribislav Hippe’s pencil to the sick Clawdia. But whoever knows the body, knows life, knows death. Only that is not the whole—merely a beginning, rather, if one considers it pedagogically. One must set the other half beside it, the contrary. For every interest in death and illness is nothing but a kind of expression of an interest in life, as is proved by medicine’s humanistic faculty, which always addresses life and its illness so courteously in Latin and is only a shading of the one great and most urgent concern, which now, with all sympathy, I call by its name: it is life’s problem child; it is man, and his estate and state ... I am not a little versed in him; I have learned much from those up here, have been driven high upward from the flatlands until I, poor creature, almost lost my breath; but now, from the base of my column, I command a not inconsiderable view ... I dreamed of man’s estate and of his courteous, intelligent, reverent community, behind which the hideous blood feast takes place within the temple. Were the people of the sun so courteous and charming to one another with this very horror silently in mind? What an exquisite and truly gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall side with them in my soul, and not with Naphta—nor, for that matter, with Settembrini either; they are both chatterers. The one is lascivious and malicious, and the other forever toots his little horn of reason and imagines he can sober up even the mad, which is absurd. It is philistinism and mere ethics, irreligious—that much is settled. Nor will I side with little Naphta, with his religion, which is nothing but a _guazzabuglio_ of God and Devil, good and evil, just the thing to let the individual creature plunge headfirst into it for the purpose of mystical extinction in the universal. Those two pedagogues! Their quarrel and their oppositions are themselves only a _guazzabuglio_ and a confused din of battle by which no one will allow himself to be deafened who has even a little freedom in his head and piety in his heart. And their aristocratic question! Their nobility! Death or life—illness, health—spirit and nature. Are these really opposites? I ask: are these questions? No, they are not questions, nor is the question of their nobility one. The promiscuity of death is in life; without it life would not be life, and in the middle lies the estate of the _homo Dei_—midway between promiscuity and reason—as his state also lies between mystical community and windy individualism. That I see from my column. In this estate he must conduct himself toward himself with fine gallantry and friendly reverence—for he alone is noble, and not the opposites. Man is lord of the opposites; they exist through him, and therefore he is nobler than they. Nobler than death, too noble for it—that is the freedom of his head. Nobler than life, too noble for it—that is the piety in his heart. There, I have made a rhyme, a dream-poem about man. I shall remember it. I shall be good. I shall grant death no dominion over my thoughts! For in that consists goodness and love of man, and in nothing else. Death is a great power. One doffs one’s hat and sways forward on tiptoe in its presence. It wears the ruff of dignity belonging to that which has been, and one dresses severely and in black oneself to do it honour. Reason stands looking foolish before it, for reason is nothing but virtue, whereas death is freedom, promiscuity, formlessness, and lust. Lust, says my dream, not love. Death and love—that is a bad rhyme, a tasteless, false rhyme! Love stands opposed to death; it alone, not reason, is stronger than death. Love alone, not reason, gives kindly thoughts. Form too comes only of love and goodness: the form and civilized conduct of an intelligently friendly community and a beautiful human state—with the blood feast silently in mind. Oh, how clearly it was dreamed, and how well governed! I shall remember it. I shall keep faith with death in my heart, yet remember in bright clarity that fidelity to death and to that which has been is only wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of mankind when it determines our thought and governance. _For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts._ And with that I wake ... For with that I have dreamed to the end and properly reached my goal. I have long been searching for this word: at the place where Hippe appeared to me, in my box, and everywhere. The search for it drove me into the snowy mountains as well. Now I have it. My dream has given it to me with the utmost clarity, so that I shall know it forever. Yes, I am deeply delighted and thoroughly warmed by it. My heart is beating strongly and knows why. It is not beating merely for physical reasons, not as the nails continue to grow on a corpse; it is beating humanly, and truly because my spirit is glad. This word of my dream is a draught—better than port and ale; it streams through my veins like love and life, so that I tear myself out of my sleep and dream, which of course I know very well are in the highest degree dangerous to my young life ... Up, up! Open your eyes! Those are your limbs, those legs there in the snow! Draw them in and get up! Look—fine weather!”

The struggle to free himself from the bonds that entangled him and sought to hold him down was prodigiously hard; yet the impetus he had contrived to give himself proved stronger. Hans Castorp heaved himself onto his elbows, manfully drew up his knees, tugged, braced himself, and performed the gymnastic feat of getting upright. He stamped the snow with his boards, beat his arms about his ribs, and shook his shoulders, casting excited and straining glances this way and that and upward to the sky, where pale blue showed between veil-thin, grey-blue clouds that drifted gently and uncovered the narrow crescent of the moon. Faint twilight. No storm, no snowfall. The mountain wall opposite, with its fir-roughened ridge, could be seen whole and clear, lying at peace. Shadow reached halfway up; the upper half was most delicately illumined in pink. What, then, was the state of things, and how did matters stand with the world? Was it morning? And had he lain all night in the snow without freezing to death, as happened in books? Not one limb was dead, not one broke off with a clatter as he stamped, shook, and beat himself, an activity in which he was anything but remiss while at the same time trying mentally to fathom the situation. His ears, fingertips, and toes were numb, to be sure, but no more so than they had been so often during his winter-night reclining in the balcony box. He managed to dig out his watch. It was going. It had not stopped, as it was wont to do when he forgot to wind it in the evening. It was not yet five—not by a long way. Twelve, thirteen minutes were wanting. Astonishing! Could it be that he had lain here in the snow for only ten minutes or a little longer, fabulizing for himself so many images of happiness and terror and so many audacious thoughts, while the hexagonal mischief cleared away as quickly as it had come? In that case he had enjoyed remarkably good fortune from the point of view of getting home. For twice his dreaming and fabulizing had taken such a turn that he had started violently into life: once from horror, and the second time from joy. It seemed that life had meant well by its care-child, astray in the heights ...

But however that might be, and whether it was morning around him or afternoon (beyond all doubt it was still the early part of the evening’s afternoon), there was in any case nothing in the circumstances or in his personal condition to prevent him from making for home, and that, accordingly, was what Hans Castorp did—taking a grand sweep, downhill as the crow flies, so to speak, to where lights were already burning when he arrived, although the remnants of daylight preserved by the snow had amply sufficed him on the way. He came down the Brehmenbühl, at the edge of the Mattenwald, and at half past five reached “Dorf,” where he left his sporting equipment with the shopkeeper, rested in Herr Settembrini’s attic cell, and reported how he too had now once allowed himself to be caught in a snowstorm. The humanist was deeply alarmed. He flung a hand over his head, inveighed mightily against such dangerous recklessness, and on the spot set the puffing spirit-stove alight to make coffee for the thoroughly exhausted young man, whom its strength did not prevent from falling asleep there in his chair.

An hour later the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof was caressing him. At dinner he ate prodigiously. What he had dreamed was beginning to fade. What he had thought, he no longer quite understood even that same evening.

A Soldier—and Brave

Hans Castorp had continued to receive brief reports from his cousin: good and high-spirited at first, then less favourable, and finally such as faintly put the best face upon something very sad indeed. The series of postcards began with the cheerful announcement that Joachim had entered upon his service, and of the rapturous ceremony at which, as Hans Castorp expressed it on his card in reply, he had vowed poverty, chastity, and obedience. Then matters proceeded merrily: the stages of a smooth and favoured career, its way levelled by passionate devotion to the cause and the goodwill of his superiors, were indicated with greetings and waves of the hand. Since Joachim had studied for a few terms, he was exempted from attending the military academy and released from service as an ensign. At New Year he was promoted to sergeant and sent a photograph showing him with his braid. Delight in the spirit of that hierarchy, rigid with honour, forged of iron, yet conceding to human nature with grim humour, and into which he had now been fitted, shone from every one of his terse reports. He related anecdotes about the romantically intricate attitude towards him, the fallible young subordinate, of his sergeant-major, a gruff and fanatical soldier who nevertheless saw in him the consecrated superior of tomorrow, already, in fact, admitted to the officers’ mess. It was droll and fierce. Then there was talk of his admission to the officers’ examination. At the beginning of April Joachim became a lieutenant.

Manifestly there was no happier man alive, none whose nature and desires could have found purer fulfilment in this particular form of life. With a kind of bashful rapture he told how, for the first time in his youthful splendour, he had walked past the town hall and, from some distance, waved an acknowledgment to the sentry who had come to attention in salute. He reported the minor vexations and satisfactions of the service, the splendid, comfortable comradeship, the sly fidelity of his orderly, comical incidents at drill and during instruction, inspections and love-feasts. Social matters too—calls, dinners, balls—were occasionally mentioned. Of his health, not a word.

Not until towards summer. Then came word that he was keeping to his bed and had unfortunately been obliged to report sick: catarrhal fever, a matter of a few days. At the beginning of June he was back on duty, but by the middle of the month he had once more “fallen out,” complained bitterly of his “bad luck,” and betrayed his fear that he might not be at his post for the grand manoeuvres at the beginning of August, to which he was looking forward with all his heart. Nonsense; in July he was sound as a bell, for weeks on end—until an examination appeared upon the horizon, rendered necessary by the accursed fluctuations in his temperature, and upon which a great deal would depend. For a long while thereafter Hans Castorp heard nothing of the result of this examination, and when word did come, it was not Joachim who wrote to him—whether because he was in no condition to write or because he was ashamed—but his mother, Frau Ziemßen, and she telegraphed. She announced that the doctors had found a leave of several weeks unavoidable for Joachim. High mountains indicated, immediate departure advised, reservation of two rooms requested. Reply prepaid. Signed: Aunt Luise.

It was the end of July when Hans Castorp skimmed this dispatch in his balcony box, then read it and read it again. He nodded softly over it, not only with his head but with the whole upper part of his body, and said between his teeth: “Sho, sho, sho! Shee, shee, shee!”—“Joachim is coming back!” The joy of it suddenly shot through him. But at once he grew quiet again and thought: “Hm, hm, weighty news. One might also call it a fine mess. Damn it, that was quick—ripe for home already! His mother is coming with him—” (he said “his mother,” not “Aunt Luise”; his sense of kinship, of family relations, had imperceptibly dwindled almost to estrangement) “—that is serious. And just before the manoeuvres, which the good fellow was so keen upon! Hm, hm, there is a pretty portion of spite in it, mocking spite; it is an anti-idealistic fact. The body triumphs; it wants otherwise than the soul and gets its way, to the disgrace of those lofty spirits who teach that it is subject to the soul. They seem not to know what they are saying, for if they were right it would cast a dubious light upon the soul in a case like this. _Sapienti sat_, I know what I mean. For the very question _I_ raise is how far it is mistaken to set them against one another, how far they are rather in league and playing a prearranged game—which, fortunately for them, never occurs to the lofty spirits. Good Joachim, who would wish to cast doubt upon you and your ardent zeal! You are sincere—but what is sincerity, I ask, if body and soul are in league to begin with? Could it be possible that you have been unable to forget certain refreshing scents, a high bosom, and unmotivated laughter awaiting you at Frau Stöhr’s table? ... Joachim is coming back!” he thought anew, huddling himself together with joy. “He is coming in a bad condition, evidently, but we shall be two again; I shall no longer be living up here quite on my own account. That is good. Everything will not be exactly as before; his room is occupied, of course: Mistress Macdonald—there she coughs in her toneless way and naturally has the photograph of her little son beside her on the table again, or else in her hand. But that is the final stage, and if the room has not already been reserved again, then ... For the present another one will surely be available. Number 28 is free, so far as I know. I shall go straight to the administration, and above all to Behrens. What news this is—sad on the one hand and splendid on the other, but in any case tremendous news! I should merely like to wait for our effusive comrade, who must be coming directly, since, as I see, it is half past three. I should like to ask him whether even in this case he still holds to the view that the physical is to be regarded as secondary ...”

Before tea he was in the administrative office. The room he had in mind, situated in the same corridor as his own, was available. Accommodation could also be found for Frau Ziemßen. He hurried to Behrens. He found him in the “laboratory,” a cigar in one hand and in the other a test tube containing discoloured matter.

“Herr Hofrat, do you know what?” Hans Castorp began ...

“Yes—that there is no end to vexation,” replied the pneumotomist. “That is Rosenheim of Utrecht,” he said, indicating the tube with his cigar. “Gaffky ten. And here comes Factory Director Schmitz, ranting and complaining that Rosenheim has spat on the promenade—with Gaffky ten. And I am expected to haul him over the coals. But if I haul him over the coals, he will have a fit, for he is inordinately irritable and has taken three rooms for himself and his family. I cannot frighten him away, or I shall have the general management down upon me. There you see the sort of conflicts one gets into at every turn, however much one might wish to go one’s way quietly and undefiled.”

“A stupid business,” said Hans Castorp with the insight of an intimate and long-established resident. “I know the gentlemen. Schmitz is colossally correct and ambitious, while Rosenheim is decidedly careless. But perhaps there are other points of friction besides the hygienic ones; I should be inclined to think so. Schmitz and Rosenheim are both friendly with Doña Perez of Barcelona, at the Kleefeld table; that, at bottom, is probably the heart of it. I would suggest perhaps issuing a general reminder of the prohibition in question and otherwise turning a blind eye.”

“Of course I turn one. I am already getting blepharospasm from all this eye-closing. What brings you marching in here?”

And Hans Castorp came out with his sad and, on the other hand, splendid news.

Not that the Hofrat was surprised. He would not have been in any case, but was particularly far from it because Hans Castorp, whether asked or unasked, had kept him informed of Joachim’s condition and had reported his confinement to bed as early as May.

“Aha,” said Behrens. “Well, there we are. And what did I tell you? What did I tell him and you, word for word, not ten times but a hundred? There you have it now. For three quarters of a year he has had his own way and his kingdom of heaven. But a kingdom of heaven not wholly purged of poison carries no blessing with it; the runaway would not believe old Behrens about that. But one should always believe old Behrens, or one comes off second best and grows wise too late. So now he has made lieutenant, to be sure; nothing to be said against that. And what good does it do him? God looks into the heart; He pays no heed to rank or station; before Him we all stand in our nakedness, whether general or common soldier ...” He was getting into his stride, rubbed his eyes with the enormous hand between whose fingers he held the cigar, and said that for this once Hans Castorp was not to bother him any longer. A cubbyhole for Ziemßen could surely be laid hold of, and when he arrived his cousin was to put him to bed without delay. As far as he, Behrens, was concerned, he bore no one a grudge; his arms stood open in paternal welcome, and he was prepared to slaughter a calf for the runaway.

Hans Castorp telegraphed. He told all and sundry that his cousin was coming back, and everyone who knew Joachim was saddened and delighted, both quite sincerely, for Joachim’s trim, chivalrous nature had won universal affection, and many an unspoken judgment and feeling tended towards the belief that he had been the best of all those up here. We have no particular person in mind, but we do believe that some felt a certain satisfaction at Joachim’s being obliged to return from the soldier’s estate to the horizontal mode of life, and at his becoming, in all his trimness, one of us once more. Frau Stöhr, as we know, had thought her own thoughts from the first; she found herself vindicated in the vulgar ambiguity with which she had accompanied Joachim’s departure for the flatlands, and did not disdain to boast of her foresight. “Rotten, rotten,” she said. She had known at once that the business was rotten, and only hoped Ziemßen had not made himself utterly rotten with his obstinacy. (“Utterly rotten” was what she said, out of sheer immeasurable commonness.) It was far better, after all, to stick to one’s post from the outset, as she had done; she too had her vital interests in the flatlands, namely in Cannstatt, a husband and two children, but knew how to control herself ... No further word came from either Joachim or Frau Ziemßen. Hans Castorp remained ignorant of the day and hour of their arrival; for that reason there was no reception at the station, but three days after Hans’s dispatch had been sent they were simply there, and Lieutenant Joachim stepped up, laughing excitedly, to his cousin’s couch of duty.

The evening rest cure had begun. They had been brought up by the same train on which Hans Castorp had arrived up here years ago—years neither short nor long, but timeless, extraordinarily rich in experience and yet null and void—and the season, too, was the same, precisely so: one of the very first days of August. Joachim, as we have said, came in joyfully—yes, for the moment unquestionably stirred with joy—to Hans Castorp, or rather came out of the room, which he had crossed at a rapid stride, onto the balcony, and greeted him laughing, breathing quickly, in subdued and broken phrases. He had once more made the long journey, through the domains of several sovereigns, across the sea-like lake and then upward by constricted paths—high, high up—and now there he stood as though he had never been away, received with cries of “Hallo!” and “Well, well!” by his kinsman, who had half started up from the horizontal. His colour was lively, whether thanks to the outdoor life he had led or to the heat of travel. Without first entering his own room, he had hurried directly to No. 34 to greet the companion of former days, days now becoming the present once more, while his mother attended to her toilette. They were to dine in ten minutes, naturally in the restaurant. Hans Castorp would surely still be able to eat a little something, or at least drink a glass of wine. And Joachim drew him over to No. 28, where matters proceeded as they had on the evening of Hans’s arrival, only in reverse: Joachim, talking feverishly, washed his hands at the gleaming basin while Hans Castorp watched him—astonished, incidentally, and in a certain sense disappointed, to see his cousin in civilian clothes. There was nothing whatever about him to betray his career. He had always imagined him as an officer, in uniform, and now there he stood in plain grey like anyone else. Joachim laughed and thought him naive. Oh no, he had sensibly left his uniform at home. Hans Castorp must know that a uniform was a serious matter. One did not visit every establishment in uniform. “Ah, I see. Much obliged,” said Hans Castorp. But Joachim seemed unaware of any offensive implication in his explanation and inquired after all the persons and circumstances at the Berghof, not merely without the slightest arrogance, but with all the eager emotion of one returning home. Then Frau Ziemßen appeared through the communicating door and greeted her nephew in the manner some people adopt on such occasions: as though she were delightedly surprised to find him there—an expression that was, however, melancholically subdued by weariness and a quiet sorrow evidently concerning Joachim—and they went down.

Luise Ziemßen had the same beautiful, black, gentle eyes as Joachim. Her hair, likewise black but already strongly intermingled with white, was held in shape and place by an almost invisible veil-net; and this accorded with her whole bearing, which was composed, kindly measured, and gently self-contained, lending her, despite an evident simplicity of mind, a pleasing dignity. It was clear—and Hans Castorp was not surprised—that she could neither understand Joachim’s gaiety, the rapidity of his breathing and the tumbling haste of his speech, manifestations probably at variance with his behaviour at home and during the journey and certainly at variance with his actual situation, nor help taking a certain exception to them. This arrival seemed sorrowful to her, and she believed that she ought to conduct herself accordingly. She could not enter into Joachim’s feelings, those turbulent feelings of homecoming which for the moment ecstatically outweighed everything opposed to them and were perhaps further inflamed by breathing once again the air, our incomparably light, insubstantial, and exhilarating air up here; they were opaque to her. “My poor boy,” she thought, while she watched the poor boy abandon himself with his cousin to exuberant merriment, revive a hundred memories, ask a hundred questions, and fling himself laughing back into his chair at the answers. Several times she said, “But, children!” And what she finally said was meant to sound pleased, but came out with bewilderment and gentle reproof: “Joachim, truly, I have not seen you like this for a long time. It seems we had to come here for you to be yourself again, as you were on the day of your promotion.” At which, to be sure, Joachim’s gaiety came to an end. His mood veered; he came to his senses, fell silent, ate none of the dessert, although what appeared was an exceedingly delicious chocolate soufflé with whipped cream—Hans Castorp applied himself to it in his stead, although barely an hour had passed since the conclusion of the overpowering dinner—and at last ceased looking up altogether, evidently because there were tears in his eyes.

That had certainly not been Frau Ziemßen’s intention. More for propriety’s sake than anything else, she had wished to introduce a little temperate gravity, unaware that precisely the middle and the moderate were foreign to this place and that only a choice between extremes was offered here. When she saw her son so broken, she herself seemed not far from tears and was grateful to her nephew for his efforts to revive the deeply sorrowful young man. Yes, as far as the personnel was concerned, he said, Joachim would find some things changed and renewed; others, by contrast, had already re-established themselves during his absence and were as before. The great-aunt, for example, with her companion, had long since returned. The ladies sat, as always, at Frau Stöhr’s table. Marusja laughed often and heartily.

Joachim remained silent, but these words reminded Frau Ziemßen of an encounter and of greetings that were to be conveyed before she forgot—the encounter with a lady, not unlikable, though unattached and possessed of rather too regular eyebrows, who in Munich, where they had spent a day between two nights of travel, had approached her and Joachim’s table in the restaurant to greet him. A former fellow patient—Joachim must help her remember...

“Frau Chauchat,” Joachim said quietly. She was at present staying at a health resort in the Allgäu and intended to go to Spain in the autumn. She would then probably return here for the winter. Her warmest greetings.

Hans Castorp was no longer a boy; he had command of the vasomotor nerves that might have caused his face to pale or redden. He said:

“Oh, was that who it was? Well, well, so she has emerged from behind the Caucasus again. And she means to go to Spain?”

The lady had named a place in the Pyrenees. “A pretty woman, or at least an attractive one. Pleasant voice, pleasant movements. But free in her manners, careless,” said Frau Ziemßen. “She simply addresses us as old friends, asks questions and tells us things, although Joachim, as I understand it, never actually made her acquaintance. Foreign.”

“That is the East and illness,” Hans Castorp replied. One must not approach such things with the standards of humanistic civilization; that would be mistaken. And now he was reflecting on the fact that Frau Chauchat intended to go to Spain. Hm. Spain, on the other hand, lay equally far from the humanistic mean—not on the soft side, but on the hard; it was not formlessness but excessive form, death as form, so to speak, not dissolution in death but deathly rigour, black, aristocratic, and bloody: the Inquisition, starched ruffs, Loyola, the Escorial... It would be interesting to see how Frau Chauchat liked Spain. She would probably lose her habit of slamming doors there, and perhaps some compensation between the two extra-humanistic camps might take place in the direction of the human. But something decidedly malicious and terroristic might also result when the East went to Spain...

No, he had neither reddened nor paled, but the impression made upon him by the unexpected news of Frau Chauchat expressed itself in speeches to which, admittedly, only embarrassed silence could serve as an answer. Joachim was less alarmed; he knew his cousin’s acuteness up here from former days. But the utmost consternation showed in Frau Ziemßen’s eyes; she behaved no differently than if Hans Castorp had uttered gross indecencies, and after a painful pause brought the meal to an end with words tactfully designed to cover the matter. Before they parted, Hans Castorp conveyed the Hofrat’s order that Joachim was in any event to remain in bed the following day until he had examined him. The rest would become clear. Soon afterward the three relations lay in their open rooms in the freshness of the high-mountain summer night—each with his own thoughts, Hans Castorp chiefly with the thought of Frau Chauchat’s return, to be expected within the next half-year.

And so poor Joachim had reported home once more for a little follow-up cure that had become advisable. This phrase, the little follow-up cure, was evidently the watchword issued in the flatlands, and up here they allowed it to pass as well. Even Hofrat Behrens adopted the expression, although to begin with he imposed four weeks in bed upon Joachim: they were necessary to repair the worst of the damage, for renewed acclimatization, and provisionally to put his thermal economy somewhat in order. He contrived to avoid committing himself to any fixed duration for the follow-up cure. Frau Ziemßen, sensible, discerning, and by no means sanguine, suggested, when they were away from Joachim’s bedside, the autumn—October, perhaps—as the date of discharge; and Behrens agreed with her to the extent of declaring that by then they would in any event have advanced beyond their present position. She liked him exceedingly, incidentally. He was chivalrous, said “my most gracious lady” while regarding her with his bloodshot, bulging eyes in a look of manly candour, and spoke in such a phrase-ridden university-corps fashion that, despite all her sorrow, she was compelled to laugh. “I know he is in the best of hands,” she said, and eight days after her arrival returned to Hamburg, since there could be no serious question of any need for nursing and Joachim, moreover, had a relation to keep him company.

“So be glad: in the autumn,” Hans Castorp would say when he sat beside his cousin’s bed in No. 28. “The old man has committed himself to some extent, after all; you can hold him to it and reckon upon it. October—that is about the date. Some people go to Spain then, and you, too, will return to your _bandera_, to distinguish yourself beyond all measure...”

His daily occupation was to console Joachim, particularly over the fact that the latter had to miss the great war game up here, which began during these August days—for this he could not overcome and went so far as to express contempt for himself on account of the God-damned feebleness to which he had succumbed at the final moment.

“_Rebellio carnis_,” said Hans Castorp. “What can you do about that? The bravest officer is helpless against it, and even Saint Anthony knew a song to sing on the subject. In God’s name, manoeuvres take place every year; and besides, you know what time is like up here! It is no time at all; you have not been away long enough to have the slightest difficulty falling back into its tempo, and before you can turn your hand, your little follow-up cure will be over.”

Nevertheless, the refreshment of his sense of time that Joachim had experienced through life in the flatlands was too considerable for him not to dread the four weeks. Yet he received help from many quarters in getting through them; the sympathy universally felt for his upright nature expressed itself in visits from near and farther afield: Settembrini came, showed concern, and was charming, and since he had always called Joachim “Lieutenant,” he now addressed him as “_Capitano_”; Naphta, too, paid a call, and from within the house the old acquaintances gradually came to see him, making use of a quarter-hour free from duty to sit beside his bed, repeat the phrase about the little follow-up cure, and hear him tell of his fortunes: the ladies Stöhr, Levi, Iltis, and Kleefeld, the gentlemen Ferge, Wehsal, and several others. Some even brought him flowers. When the four weeks were over, he got up, since his fever had been subdued sufficiently for him to walk about, and took his seat in the dining hall beside his cousin, between him and the brewer’s wife, Frau Magnus, opposite Herr Magnus, in the corner place formerly occupied by Uncle James and, for a few days, by Frau Ziemßen as well.

Thus the young men lived side by side once more as in former days; indeed, to restore the old picture still more completely, his traditional room beside Hans Castorp’s reverted to him when Mrs Macdonald, holding the picture of her boy in her hands, had breathed her last—after thorough disinfection with H₂CO, of course. Properly speaking, and as a matter of feeling, it was now Joachim who lived at Hans Castorp’s side, no longer the reverse: Hans Castorp was now the established resident, whose mode of existence the other shared for a short time and as a visitor. For Joachim endeavoured firmly and unremittingly to keep the October date in view, although certain points in his central nervous system refused to conform to the humanistic norm of conduct and prevented the compensatory discharge of heat through his skin.

They also resumed their visits to Settembrini and Naphta, as well as their walks with those two antagonists bound together in enmity; and when A. K. Ferge and Ferdinand Wehsal joined them, as often happened, they made a party of six, and those adversaries of the spirit fought their unceasing duels before a respectable audience—duels whose presentation we could not attempt to make in any way complete without losing ourselves, as they did daily, in the desperate infinite—even though Hans Castorp was inclined to regard his own poor soul as the principal object of their dialectical contest. From Naphta he had learned that Settembrini was a Freemason—a disclosure that had made no less an impression upon him than the Italian’s revelation of Naphta’s Jesuit origins and support. Once again he had been fantastically astonished to hear that such things still existed in earnest, and had deliberately sounded the terrorist upon the origin and nature of that curious institution, which in a few years would be able to celebrate its bicentenary. Whereas Settembrini, behind Naphta’s back, spoke of his intellectual nature in tones of impassioned warning, as of something diabolical, Naphta, behind the other’s, made effortless mockery of the sphere he represented, intimating that it was something decidedly old-fashioned and backward: bourgeois enlightenment and a free-thinking spirit from the day before yesterday, which was nothing but the wretched haunting of ghosts, yet indulged in the grotesque self-delusion that it was still filled with revolutionary life. He said: “What do you expect? His grandfather was already a Carbonaro—a charcoal-burner, in plain English. From him he inherited the charcoal-burner’s faith in reason, freedom, human progress, and that whole moth-eaten chest of classicistic-bourgeois ideology of virtue ... You see, what confounds the world is the disproportion between the speed of the spirit and the monstrous clumsiness, slowness, inertia, and persistence of matter. One must admit that this disproportion would suffice to excuse any lack of interest on the spirit’s part in reality, for as a rule the fermenting agents that bring about revolutions in reality have long since become repugnant to it. Indeed, dead spirit is more abhorrent to living spirit than any basalt formations, which at least do not lay claim to being spirit and life. Such basalts, remnants of former realities that the spirit has left so far behind that it refuses any longer to associate them with the very concept of reality, sluggishly endure and, by their coarse and lifeless persistence, regrettably preserve the absurd from becoming aware of its own absurdity. I speak in general terms, but you will know how to apply them to that humanitarian liberalism which believes itself still heroically arrayed against dominion and authority. Ah, and then the catastrophes by means of which it would prove itself alive, the belated and spectacular triumphs it is preparing and dreams of celebrating one day! At the very thought, living spirit might die of boredom, did it not know that in truth it alone will emerge from such catastrophes as victor and beneficiary—it, which fuses elements of the old with the most futuristic into true revolution ... How is your cousin, Hans Castorp? You know that I feel great sympathy for him.”

“Thank you, Herr Naphta. Everyone is surely bound to feel sincere sympathy for him, so fine a fellow as he quite plainly is. Herr Settembrini too is extremely fond of him, even if he must naturally disapprove of a certain visionary terrorism inherent in Joachim’s profession. And now I hear that he is a brother of the lodge. Well, well. It gives me food for thought, I must say. It casts his person in a new light for me and makes several things clearer. Does he too, on occasion, set his feet at right angles and impart some special character to his handshake? I have never noticed anything ...”

“Our good Brother Three-Dots,” Naphta observed, “has probably risen above such childishness. I assume that lodge ceremonial has undergone a rather sorry accommodation to the sober civic spirit of the times. They would presumably be ashamed of the ritual of former days as uncivilized hocus-pocus—and not without reason, for to dress atheistic republicanism in the robes of mystery would, after all, be truly preposterous. I do not know by what terrors Herr Settembrini’s steadfastness was put to the test—whether he was led blindfold through all manner of corridors and made to wait in gloomy vaults before the assembly hall, filled with reflected light, revealed itself to him. Whether he was solemnly catechized and, in the presence of a skull and three lights, had his bared breast threatened with swords. You must ask him yourself, but I fear you will find him little inclined to talk; for even if the proceedings were far more bourgeois, he must in any case have taken a vow of secrecy.”

“A vow? Of secrecy? So it is true after all?”

“Certainly. Secrecy and obedience.”

“Obedience as well. Listen, Professor, it strikes me now that he has no cause whatever to take exception to the visionary enthusiasm and terrorism of my cousin’s profession. Secrecy and obedience! I should never have thought that so liberal-minded a man as Settembrini could submit to such decidedly Spanish conditions and vows. I positively detect something military-Jesuitical in Freemasonry ...”

“Your instinct is perfectly sound,” Naphta replied. “Your divining rod twitches and knocks. The very idea of a league is inseparably, radically bound up with that of the absolute. Consequently it is terrorist—that is to say, anti-liberal. It relieves the individual conscience of responsibility and, in the name of the absolute end, sanctifies every means, even bloodshed, even crime. There is evidence that in Masonic lodges, too, the brotherhood was once symbolically sealed in blood. A league is never contemplative in character, but always and by its very essence something organizational in the absolute spirit. Did you not know that the founder of the Order of Illuminati, which for a time almost merged with Masonry, was a former member of the Society of Jesus?”

“No, naturally that is new to me.”

“Adam Weishaupt organized his humanitarian secret society entirely upon the model of the Jesuit order. He was himself a Mason, and the most eminent lodge members of the time were Illuminati. I am speaking of the second half of the eighteenth century, which Settembrini will not hesitate to characterize for you as a period in which his guild was corrupted. In reality it was the period of its highest flowering, as of the whole system of secret societies in general, the period when Masonry attained a truly higher life—a life of which it was later purified once more by men of our friend of humanity’s stamp, who in those days would certainly have numbered among those reproaching it with Jesuitism and obscurantism.”

“And were there grounds for that?”

“Yes—if you like. Trivial free thought had grounds for it. It was the time when our fathers sought to fill the brotherhood with Catholic-hierarchical life, and when a Jesuit Masonic lodge flourished at Clermont in France. It was also the time when Rosicrucianism penetrated the lodges—a most remarkable brotherhood, of which you may take note that it combined purely rational aims for political and social improvement and human happiness with peculiar connections to the secret knowledge of the East, to Indian and Arabian wisdom and magical knowledge of nature. It was then that the reform and rectification of many Masonic lodges took place in the spirit of Strict Observance—a pronouncedly irrational and mysterious, magical-alchemical spirit, to which the Scottish higher degrees of Masonry owe their existence: degrees of chivalric orders added to the old military gradation of apprentice, fellow craft, and master; degrees of grand mastery leading into the hieratic and filled with Rosicrucian secret knowledge. What was involved was a return to certain spiritual orders of knighthood from the Middle Ages, the Templars in particular—you know, those who before the Patriarch of Jerusalem took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. To this day one of the higher degrees in the Masonic hierarchy bears the title ‘Grand Prince of Jerusalem.’”

“New to me, entirely new to me, Herr Naphta. I am getting upon the scent of our Settembrini ... ‘Grand Prince of Jerusalem’ is not bad. You ought to call him that in jest one of these days. He, for his part, recently bestowed the nickname ‘_Doctor angelicus_’ upon you. That calls for revenge.”

“Oh, there are any number of similarly impressive titles belonging to the higher and Templar degrees of Strict Observance. We have a Perfect Master, a Knight of the East, a Grand High Priest, and the thirty-first degree is even called the ‘Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret.’ You will observe that all these names point to connections with Oriental mysticism. The reappearance of the Templar itself meant nothing other than the establishment of such connections—indeed, the irruption of irrational ferment into a world of ideas devoted to rational and useful social improvement. Masonry thereby acquired a new fascination and splendour, which explains the influx it enjoyed at the time. It drew to itself all those elements that had grown weary of the century’s rationalizing, its humane enlightenment and disillusionment, and thirsted for stronger draughts of life. The success of the order was such that the Philistines complained it estranged men from domestic happiness and the dignity of woman.”

“Well, listen, Professor, in that case one can understand why Herr Settembrini does not care to recall this period of his order’s highest flowering.”

“No, he does not care to recall that there were times when his brotherhood drew upon itself all the antipathy that free thought, atheism, and encyclopaedic reason otherwise directed against the complex of Church, Catholicism, monk, and Middle Ages. You heard that the Masons were accused of obscurantism ...”

“Why? I should like to hear more clearly how that came about.”

“I shall tell you. Strict Observance was tantamount to a deepening and extension of the order’s traditions, to the transference of its historical origins back into the world of mystery, the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages. The grand-master degrees of the lodges were initiates of the _physica mystica_, bearers of magical knowledge of nature, principally great alchemists ...”

“Now I must exert all my powers of recollection to remember roughly what alchemy was about in the larger scheme of things. Alchemy—that means making gold, the philosopher’s stone, _Aurum potabile_ ...”

“Yes, in popular terms. In somewhat more learned terms, it is purification, the transformation and ennoblement of matter, transubstantiation—and specifically into something higher, thus enhancement: the _lapis philosophorum_, the male-female product of sulphur and mercury, the _res bina_, the bisexual _prima materia_, was nothing more and nothing less than the principle of enhancement, of elevation by external influences—magical pedagogy, if you like.”

Hans Castorp was silent. Blinking, he gazed obliquely upwards.

“One symbol of alchemical transmutation,” Naphta continued, “was, above all, the crypt.”

“The grave?”

“Yes, the place of decay. It is the epitome of all hermeticism, nothing other than the vessel, the securely sealed crystal retort in which matter is constrained towards its ultimate transformation and purification.”

“‘Hermeticism’ is well said, Herr Naphta. ‘Hermetic’—I have always liked that word. It is a genuine magic word with vaguely extensive associations. Forgive me, but it always makes me think of our preserving jars, which our Hamburg housekeeper—her name is Schalleen, without Frau or Fräulein, simply Schalleen—keeps standing in rows upon the shelves of her pantry: hermetically sealed jars with fruit and meat and all manner of things inside. They stand there for years on end, and when one is opened, as required, the contents are perfectly fresh and untouched; neither year nor day has been able to harm them, and one can enjoy them just as they are. That, to be sure, is not alchemy and purification, it is merely preservation, hence the word preserve. But the magical thing about it is that what was preserved had been withdrawn from time; it was hermetically shut away from time, time passed it by, it had no time, but stood outside it upon its shelf. Well, so much for the preserving jars. Not much has come of that. Pardon. You wished, I believe, to instruct me further.”

“Only if you wish it. The apprentice must be eager for knowledge and fearless, to speak in the style of our subject. The crypt, the grave, was always the principal emblem of initiation into the brotherhood. The apprentice, the greenhorn seeking admission to knowledge, must prove his intrepidity amid its terrors; the custom of the order requires that, by way of trial, he be conducted down into it and obliged to remain there, in order then to emerge from it led by the hand of an unknown brother. Hence the labyrinthine corridors and gloomy vaults through which the novice had to wander, the black cloth with which even the assembly hall of Strict Observance was draped, the cult of the coffin, which played so important a part in the ceremonies of initiation and assembly. The path of mysteries and purification was beset with dangers; it led through mortal anguish, through the realm of decay, and the apprentice, the neophyte, is youth thirsting for the wonders of life, longing to be awakened to a demonic capacity for experience, guided by masked figures who are merely shadows of the mystery.”

“Thank you very much, Professor Naphta. Excellent. So that would be hermetic pedagogy. It can do no harm that some word of it should have reached my ears as well.”

“So much the less since what is involved is a guidance towards the ultimate, towards the absolute profession of the supersensuous, and thereby towards the goal. The alchemical observance of the lodges led many noble, seeking spirits in later decades to that goal—I need not name it, for it cannot have escaped you that the graduated sequence of the Scottish higher degrees is merely a surrogate for the hierarchy; that the alchemical wisdom of the Master Mason finds its fulfilment in the mystery of transformation; and that the secret guidance which the lodge bestowed upon its pupils is reproduced as clearly in the means of grace as the symbolic diversions of the brotherhood’s ceremonial are in the liturgical and architectural symbolism of our holy Catholic Church.”

“Ah, I see!”

“Pray, that is not yet all. I have already ventured to suggest that the derivation of the lodge system from those respectably artisanal masons’ guilds is merely an externalizing interpretation of history. The Strict Observance, at least, endowed it with far deeper human foundations. The mystery of the lodges shares with certain mysteries of our Church a manifest relation to the festal secrets and sacred excesses of earliest mankind ... As regards the Church, I have in mind the nocturnal love-feast, the sacramental partaking of body and blood; as regards the lodge, however—”

“One moment. One moment for a marginal observation. In the unconditional life of fellowship to which my cousin belongs there are also so-called love-feasts. He has often written to me about them. Naturally everything is conducted with great propriety, apart from a little drunkenness—not even so strong as at the student corps’ drinking bouts ...”

“As regards the lodge, however, I mean the cult of vault and coffin to which I drew your attention earlier. In both cases we are dealing with a symbolism of the last and uttermost things, with elements of orgiastic primordial religion, unrestrained nocturnal rites of sacrifice in honour of dying and becoming, death, transformation, and resurrection ... You will recall that the mysteries of Isis, like those of Eleusis, were celebrated by night and in dark caverns. Well, there were, and still are, a great many Egyptian reminiscences in Masonry, and among the secret societies were some that called themselves Eleusinian associations. There were lodge festivals, festivals of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Aphrodisian secrets, at which woman did at last enter into the proceedings—festivals of roses, alluded to by those three blue roses upon the Mason’s apron, and which, it appears, commonly ended in Bacchic revelry ...”

“Come, come, what am I hearing, Professor Naphta? And all that is Freemasonry? And am I to associate all that in my mind with our clear-headed Herr Settembrini ...”

“You would do him a grave injustice! No, Settembrini knows absolutely nothing of all that any longer. I told you that the lodge has been purified once more, by people of his sort, of every element of higher life. It has been humanized, modernized, good heavens. From such aberrations it has returned to utility, reason, and progress, to the struggle against princes and priests—in short, to the promotion of social happiness; they now converse there once again about nature, virtue, moderation, and the fatherland. And also, I assume, about business. In a word, it is bourgeois wretchedness in club form ...”

“A pity. A pity about the festivals of roses. I shall ask Settembrini whether he really knows nothing of them any longer.”

“The honest Knight of the Square!” Naphta mocked. “You must bear in mind that it was by no means easy for him to gain admission to the building-site of the temple of humanity, for he is as poor as a church mouse, and there not only higher cultivation—humanistic cultivation, if you please—is required, but one must also belong to the propertied class in order to afford the by no means trifling initiation fees and annual dues. Cultivation and property—there you have the bourgeois! There you have the foundations of the liberal world republic!”

“Indeed,” Hans Castorp laughed; “there they stand before us, plain and unmistakable.”

“Nevertheless,” Naphta added after a pause, “I should advise you not to take this man and his cause too lightly; indeed, since we have once begun to speak of these matters, I would expressly urge you to be on your guard. The absurd is not therefore synonymous with the innocent. Narrowness need not be harmless. These people have poured a great deal of water into their wine, which in its time was fiery; but the idea of the brotherhood itself remains strong enough to withstand a great deal of dilution. It preserves vestiges of fertile mystery, and there is no more reason to doubt that the lodges have a hand in the game of the world than there is to doubt that in this amiable Herr Settembrini one must see more than merely himself—that powers stand behind him, whose kinsman and emissary he is ...”

“An emissary?”

“Why, yes: a maker of proselytes, a catcher of souls.”

And what sort of emissary are you? Hans Castorp thought. Aloud he said:

“Thank you, Professor Naphta. I am sincerely obliged to you for the hint and the warning. Do you know what? I shall now go a floor higher—so far as one can still speak of floors up there—and sound out our masked brother of the order a little. An apprentice must be inquisitive and fearless ... Cautious too, of course ... With emissaries, caution is naturally called for.”

He could without embarrassment approach Settembrini too for further instruction, since the latter had nothing with which to reproach Herr Naphta in matters of discretion and, moreover, had never been particularly concerned to make a secret of his membership in that harmonious society. The “_Rivista della Massoneria Italiana_” lay openly upon his table; Hans Castorp had simply failed to notice it. And when, enlightened by Naphta, he brought the conversation round to the royal art, treating Settembrini’s association with it as a matter of which he had never entertained the slightest doubt, he encountered only slight reserve. There were, it is true, certain points upon which the man of letters would not express himself, but at their mention closed his lips with a certain ostentation, evidently bound by those terroristic vows of which Naphta had spoken: a secretiveness that concerned outward usages and his own position within the remarkable organization. Otherwise, however, he spoke in positively grandiose terms and gave his inquisitive listener an impressive picture of the extent of his league, which, in some twenty thousand lodges and a hundred and fifty grand lodges, embraced nearly the whole world and even civilizations such as Haiti and the Negro republic of Liberia. Nor did he fail to make much of all manner of great names whose bearers had been Masons or were so today: he named Voltaire, Lafayette, and Napoleon, Franklin and Washington, Mazzini and Garibaldi; among the living, even the King of England, as well as a host of men in whose hands lay the affairs of the European states, members of governments and parliaments.

Hans Castorp expressed respect, but no astonishment. It was just the same with the student corps associations, he observed. They too held together throughout life and knew very well how to find positions for their people, so that hardly anyone rose to anything substantial in the official hierarchy unless he had been a corps brother. It was perhaps therefore not altogether logical of Herr Settembrini to present the membership of those prominent men as flattering to the lodge; for one might conversely suppose that the filling of so many important posts with brethren merely proved the power of the brotherhood, which assuredly had a greater hand in the game of the world than Herr Settembrini cared to admit outright.

Settembrini smiled. He even fanned himself with the issue of the “_Massoneria_” that he held in his hand. Did they imagine they were setting a trap for him? he asked. Did they perhaps intend to lure him into incautious statements concerning the political nature, the essentially political spirit, of the lodge? “Fruitless cunning, Engineer! We profess politics—unreservedly and openly. We care nothing for the odium attached to that word and title in the eyes of certain fools—they are to be found in your country, Engineer, and almost nowhere else. The friend of humanity cannot acknowledge any distinction whatsoever between politics and non-politics. There is no non-politics. Everything is politics.”

“Without qualification?”

“I am well aware that there are people who think fit to point to the originally unpolitical nature of the Masonic idea. But these people are playing with words and drawing boundaries which it is long past time to recognize as imaginary and nonsensical. In the first place, the Spanish lodges at least displayed a political colouring from the very beginning—”

“I can well imagine it.”

“You can imagine very little, Engineer. Do not suppose that you can imagine a great deal out of your own resources; instead, endeavour to absorb and assimilate—I beg it of you in your own interest, in that of your country, and in the interest of Europe—what I am now, in the second place, about to impress upon you. For secondly, the Masonic idea was never unpolitical, at no time; it could not be, and whenever it believed itself to be so, it deceived itself as to its own nature. What are we? Builders and labourers upon a structure. The purpose of all is one; the good of the whole is the fundamental law of fraternity. What is this good, this structure? The social edifice erected according to the rules of art, the perfecting of humanity, the new Jerusalem. What in the world can politics or non-politics signify here? The social problem, the very problem of coexistence, is politics—politics through and through, nothing but politics. Whoever devotes himself to it—and no one who withheld himself from such consecration would deserve the name of man—belongs to politics, internal as well as external; he understands that the art of the free Mason is the art of government—”

“Govern—”

“That Illuminist Masonry recognized the degree of Regent ...”

“Very good, Herr Settembrini. The art of government, the degree of Regent—I like that. But now let me hear one thing: are you Christians, all of you together in your lodge?”

“_Perchè!_”

“Forgive me, I shall put the question differently, more generally and simply. Do you believe in God?”

“I shall answer you. Why do you ask?”

“I did not mean to tempt you just now, but there is a biblical story in which someone tempts the Lord with a Roman coin and receives the answer that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. It seems to me that this manner of distinguishing provides the distinction between politics and non-politics. If God exists, then this distinction exists as well. Do the Freemasons believe in God?”

“I pledged myself to answer you. You speak of a unity which is being created, but which, to the sorrow of all good men, does not yet exist today. The worldwide union of Freemasons does not exist. When it has been established—and I repeat that this great work is being pursued with the utmost quiet diligence—then without doubt its religious profession will also be uniform, and it will read: ‘_Écrasez l’infâme_.’”

“Obligatory? That would not be tolerant.”

“You are hardly equal to the problem of tolerance, Engineer. At least impress upon yourself that tolerance becomes a crime when it is extended to evil.”

“God would be evil?”

“Metaphysics is evil. For it is good for nothing but lulling to sleep the diligence we ought to devote to building the temple of society. And so, a generation ago, the Grand Orient of France set an example by striking the name of God from all its documents. We Italians have followed its lead ...”

“How Catholic!”

“You mean—”

“How enormously Catholic I find it, striking out God!”

“You wish to express—”

“Nothing worth hearing, Herr Settembrini. Pay no particular attention to my chatter! It merely occurred to me at that moment that atheism was something colossally Catholic, and that one struck out God only in order to be all the more successfully Catholic.”

If Herr Settembrini allowed a pause to ensue at this, it was plainly done solely from pedagogical circumspection. After a measured silence he replied:

“Engineer, I am far from wishing to unsettle or offend you in your Protestantism. We were speaking of tolerance ... It is needless to emphasize that I accord Protestantism more than mere toleration, that I feel the profoundest admiration for it as the historical opponent of the fettering of conscience. The invention of printing and the Reformation are, and remain, the two most sublime services rendered by Central Europe to humanity. Beyond question. But after what you have just said, I do not doubt that you will understand me at once when I point out that this is only one side of the matter, and that it has another. Protestantism harbours elements ... The personality of your Reformer himself harboured elements ... I am thinking of elements of blissful repose and hypnotic absorption which are not European, which are alien and hostile to the law of life governing this active continent. Just look at him, this Luther! Consider portraits of him, from his youth and his later years! What kind of skull is that, what kind of cheekbones, what a strange setting of the eyes! My friend, that is Asia! I should be surprised, I should be exceedingly surprised, if there were not something Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian at work there, and if therefore the—who would deny it?—mighty phenomenon of this man had not signified a fatal overloading of one of the two scales poised so dangerously level in your country—a terrible weight cast into the eastern scale, beneath which the other, the western scale, outweighed by it, still flutters heavenward to this day ...”

From the humanist’s folding lectern by the little window, before which he had been standing, Herr Settembrini had moved to the round table with the water bottle, nearer to his pupil, who sat upon the backless couch pushed against the wall, his elbow on his knee and his chin propped in his hand.

“_Caro!_” said Herr Settembrini. “_Caro amico!_ Decisions will have to be made—decisions of incalculable consequence for the happiness and future of Europe; and they will fall to your country, they will have to be accomplished within its soul. Placed between East and West, it will have to choose; finally and consciously, it will have to decide between the two spheres that contend for its very being. You are young; you will take part in this decision, you are called upon to influence it. Let us therefore bless the fate that has cast you into these dreadful regions, yet at the same time affords me the opportunity, with my not unpractised, not wholly feeble word, to act upon your impressionable youth and make it feel the responsibility which it—which your country bears before the countenance of civilization ...”

Hans Castorp sat with his chin upon his fist. He gazed out through the attic window, and in his simple blue eyes a certain spirit of recalcitrance could be read. He remained silent.

“You are silent,” Herr Settembrini said with emotion. “You and your country—you maintain a guarded silence whose opacity permits no judgment of its depth. You do not love the word, or do not possess it, or sanctify it in an unfriendly fashion—the articulate world neither knows nor learns where it stands with you. My friend, that is dangerous. Language is civilization itself ... The word, even the most contradictory word, is so binding, so unifying ... But wordlessness isolates. One suspects that you will seek to break your isolation through deeds. You will send Cousin Giacomo”—Herr Settembrini was in the habit, for convenience’ sake, of calling Joachim “Giacomo”—“you will send your cousin Giacomo forth before your silence, ‘and two he lays low with mighty blows, while the others flee’—”

When Hans Castorp began to laugh, Herr Settembrini smiled as well, for the moment gratified by this effect of his graphic utterance.

“Very well, let us laugh!” he said. “You will always find me ready for cheerfulness. ‘Laughter is a radiance of the soul,’ says one of the ancients. Besides, we have strayed—from matters which, I admit, are connected with the difficulties encountered by our preliminary work toward establishing the Masonic World League, difficulties raised principally by Protestant Europe ...” And Herr Settembrini went on, speaking warmly of the idea of this World League, which had been brought into being in Hungary and whose hoped-for realization was destined to confer world-determining power upon Freemasonry. He casually displayed letters he had received on the subject from foreign dignitaries of the League, including an autograph letter from the Swiss Grand Master, Brother Quartier la Tente of the thirty-third degree, and discussed the plan of declaring the artificial idiom Esperanto the League’s universal language. His ardour raised him into the sphere of high politics; he cast his eye this way and that and assessed the prospects of the revolutionary-republican idea in his own country, in Spain, and in Portugal. He also claimed to maintain a correspondence with persons at the head of the Grand Lodge of the last-named monarchy. There, beyond all doubt, matters were ripening toward a decision. Hans Castorp should think of him when, in the very near future, events down below began to follow one another with precipitous speed. Hans Castorp promised that he would.

It should be observed that these Masonic conversations, conducted separately between the pupil and each of his two mentors, had still taken place before Joachim’s return to those up here. The dispute to which we now come occurred after he was once more present, and in his presence, nine weeks after his return, at the beginning of October; and Hans Castorp always retained so exact a memory of that gathering in the autumn sunshine before the Kurhaus in “Platz,” over refreshing drinks, because Joachim had caused him secret anxiety at the time—anxiety through statements and symptoms not otherwise apt to inspire any anxiety at all, namely a sore throat and hoarseness: harmless afflictions, then, which nevertheless appeared to young Castorp in a somehow peculiar light—the very light, one might say, that he believed he could discern in the depths of Joachim’s eyes, eyes which had always been gentle and large, but which today, precisely today for the first time, had undergone a certain indefinable enlargement and deepening, with a pensive and—one must add the strange word—_threatening_ expression, together with that aforementioned quiet illumination from within, which would be characterized quite falsely if one said that Hans Castorp had not liked it—on the contrary, he liked it very much indeed, except that it caused him anxiety nonetheless. In short, these impressions can be spoken of only confusedly, in keeping with their own character.

As for the conversation, the controversy—a controversy between Naphta and Settembrini, naturally—it was a matter in itself and stood in only loose connection with those separate discussions of lodge affairs. Besides the cousins, Ferge and Wehsal were also present, and everyone’s interest was keen, although not everyone was equal to the subject—Herr Ferge, for example, expressly was not. But a dispute conducted as though life itself were at stake, and yet with such wit and polish as though life were _not_ at stake, but merely an elegant contest—and thus were all disputes between Settembrini and Naphta conducted—such a dispute is naturally and intrinsically entertaining to hear, even for one who understands little of it and only dimly perceives its implications. Even wholly uninvolved persons seated nearby listened to the exchange with raised eyebrows, held captive by the passion and refinement of the verbal encounter.

It was, as we have said, before the Kurhaus, in the afternoon after tea. The four Berghof guests had met Settembrini there, and Naphta had joined them by chance. They all sat around a small metal table over various drinks diluted with soda, anisette and vermouth. Naphta, who was taking his vesper meal there, had ordered wine and cake, evidently in remembrance of his days as an alumnus; Joachim frequently moistened his ailing throat with natural lemonade, which he drank very strong and sour, because it had an astringent effect and afforded him relief; and Settembrini partook of nothing more than sugar-water, though through a straw and in so gracefully appetizing a fashion that he might have been sipping the most precious refreshment. He jested:

“What do I hear, Engineer? What rumour has reached my ears? Your Beatrice is returning? Your guide through all nine revolving spheres of Paradise? Well, I hope that even then you will not entirely disdain the guiding hand of your friend Virgil! Our ecclesiastic here will confirm that the world of the _medio evo_ is incomplete when Franciscan mysticism lacks the counterpole of Thomistic knowledge.”

They laughed at so much jocular erudition and looked at Hans Castorp, who, laughing likewise, raised his glass of vermouth toward “his Virgil.” Yet it is scarcely credible what an inexhaustible conflict of minds arose during the following hour from Herr Settembrini’s remark, ornate though it was, yet entirely harmless. For Naphta, challenged in a certain sense, immediately went on the attack and fell upon the Latin poet whom Settembrini notoriously adored, indeed ranked above Homer, whereas Naphta had more than once displayed the sharpest contempt for him, as for Latin poetry in general—and now promptly and maliciously seized this opportunity to do so again. It had been a most good-natured bondage to his age on the part of the great Dante, he said, to take this mediocre versifex so solemnly and assign him so exalted a role in his poem, although Herr Lodovico probably invested that role with an excessively Masonic significance. After all, what was there to this courtly Laureatus and sycophant of the Julian house, this metropolitan man of letters and pompous rhetorician without a spark of creative power, whose soul, if he had possessed one, had in any event been second-hand, and who had been no poet at all, but a Frenchman in an Augustan full-bottomed wig!

Herr Settembrini did not doubt that the previous speaker would know ways and means of reconciling his contempt for Rome’s high civilization with his office as a teacher of Latin; but it seemed necessary to point out the graver contradiction into which such judgments brought him with his own favourite centuries, which, far from despising Virgilius, had done justice to his greatness in their simple-minded fashion by turning him into a magician mighty in wisdom.

Quite in vain, Naphta retorted, did Herr Settembrini invoke in his aid the simplicity of those dawn-like ages—the simplicity of the victor, who had still manifested her creative power in the demonization of the vanquished. Besides, the teachers of the young Church had never wearied of warning against the lies of the ancient philosophers and poets, and especially against staining oneself with Virgil’s voluptuous eloquence; and today, when once again an age was sinking into the grave and another proletarian dawn was breaking, the hour was truly favourable for entering into their feelings! Thus, to answer everything, Herr Lodovico might rest assured that he, the speaker, pursued his little bourgeois occupation, to which the gentleman had been kind enough to allude, with all due _reservatio mentalis_, and that it was not without irony that he took his place within a classical-rhetorical educational establishment whose remaining lifespan only a sanguine temperament could still reckon in decades.

“You possessed them,” Settembrini cried, “you studied them until you sweated, those ancient poets and philosophers; you sought to appropriate their precious legacy, just as you employed the materials of ancient buildings for your houses of prayer! For you felt well enough that your proletarian soul was incapable of producing a new artistic form from its own resources, and hoped to defeat antiquity with its own weapons. So it will be again, so it will always be! Your uncouth dawn will have to go to school to that which you would persuade yourselves and others to despise; for without cultivation you could not stand before the face of mankind, and there is only _one_ cultivation: that which you call bourgeois, and which is human!” A question of decades—the end of the humanist principle of education? Courtesy alone prevented Herr Settembrini from bursting into laughter as carefree as it was mocking. A Europe that knew how to preserve its eternal patrimony would calmly pass from the proletarian apocalypses people pleased to dream of here and there to the order of the day prescribed by classical reason.

Precisely as to the order of the day, Naphta replied cuttingly, Herr Settembrini did not appear to be entirely well informed. The very question on the order of the day was what the gentleman saw fit to treat as settled: namely, whether the Mediterranean-classical-humanist tradition was a concern of mankind and therefore humanly eternal—or whether it had perhaps been merely the intellectual form and appurtenance of an epoch, the bourgeois-liberal epoch, and might die with it. That would be for history to decide, and Herr Settembrini would in any case be well advised not to lull himself into too great a certainty that the decision would favour his Latin conservatism.

It was a particular piece of insolence on little Naphta’s part to call Herr Settembrini, the avowed servant of progress, a conservative. Everyone felt it so, and with especial bitterness, naturally, the man concerned, who excitedly twirled his sweeping moustache and, while searching for a counterstroke, allowed the enemy time for further sallies against the classical ideal of cultivation, the rhetorical-literary spirit of the European school and educational system, and its grammatical-formal mania, which was nothing but an accessory to the interests of bourgeois class rule and had long since become a laughing-stock among the people. Indeed, no one suspected how heartily the people mocked our doctoral titles and our entire mandarinism of cultivation, as well as the state elementary school, that instrument of bourgeois class dictatorship, wielded under the delusion that popular education was diluted scholarly education. The cultivation and education the people needed in their struggle against the decaying bourgeois realm, they had long known how to obtain elsewhere than in compulsory institutions imposed by authority; and by now the sparrows were proclaiming from the housetops that our whole type of school, as it had evolved from the monastic school of the Middle Ages, represented a ridiculous pigtail and anachronism, that no one in the world owed his true education to school any longer, and that free, open instruction through public lectures, exhibitions, cinemas, and so forth was vastly superior to any instruction offered by schools.

In the mixture of revolution and obscurantism which Naphta was serving up to his listeners, Herr Settembrini replied, the obscurantist ingredient predominated in an unpalatable fashion. The pleasure aroused by his concern for the enlightenment of the people suffered some diminution from the fear that what prevailed here was rather an instinctive inclination to envelop both people and world in the darkness of illiteracy.

Naphta smiled. Illiteracy! People fancied they had now uttered a true word of horror, had displayed the Gorgon’s head, convinced that everyone must dutifully blanch before it. He, Naphta, regretted having to disappoint his interlocutor by telling him that the humanists’ dread of the concept of illiteracy merely amused him. One had to be a Renaissance littérateur, a précieux, a Seicentist, a Marinist, a buffoon of the _estilo culto_, to assign so exaggerated an educational precedence to the disciplines of reading and writing that one imagined the night of the spirit must reign wherever they were unknown. Did Herr Settembrini remember that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, had been illiterate? At that time in Germany it had been considered shameful to send a boy to school unless he specifically intended to become a cleric, and this aristocratic and popular contempt for the literary arts had always remained the mark of noble substantiality—whereas the man of letters, that true son of humanism and bourgeoisdom, could admittedly read and write, which the nobleman, the warrior, and the people could not do, or could do only poorly—but beyond that he could do and understand nothing whatever in all the world, and remained a Latinist windbag who administered speech and left life to honest men—which was why he also made politics into a bag full of wind, namely full of rhetoric and belles-lettres, what in the language of parties was called radicalism and democracy—and so forth, and so forth.

At this, then, Herr Settembrini! Far too boldly, he cried, did the other parade his taste for the fervent barbarism of certain epochs by deriding the love of literary form, without which, indeed, no humanity was possible or conceivable—indeed not, never and under no circumstances! Nobility? Only misanthropy could baptize wordlessness, raw and mute objecthood, with that name. Nobility, rather, lay solely in a certain noble luxury, the _generosità_ manifested in ascribing to form a human intrinsic value independent of content—the cult of speech as an art for art’s sake, that legacy of Greco-Roman civilization which the humanists, the _uomini letterati_ of Romania, had at least restored to it, and which was the source of every further idealism of content, including the political. “Yes indeed, my dear sir! What you would disparage as the separation of speech and life is nothing but their higher unity within the crowning orb of beauty; and I have no fear as to which side high-minded youth will always take in a dispute whose alternatives are called literature and barbarism.”

Hans Castorp, whose attention had been only half engaged by the conversation, since he was preoccupied with the person of the warrior present, the representative of noble essentiality—or, rather, with the novel expression in his eyes—started slightly when Herr Settembrini’s final words made him feel summoned and called upon; but then he assumed the same expression he had worn when Settembrini had solemnly sought to compel him to choose between “East and West”: an expression, that is, full of reservation and recalcitrance, and remained silent. They drove everything to extremes, these two, as was doubtless necessary if one meant to argue, and wrangled bitterly over ultimate alternatives, whereas it seemed to him that somewhere midway between the contentious intolerabilities, between rhetorical humanism and illiterate barbarism, must lie what one might personally address as the human or humane. But he did not address it, lest he annoy both spirits, and, cloaked in reserve, watched them drift onward, giving each other hostile assistance in passing from one thing to a thousand others, after Settembrini’s little jest about Virgil the Latin had provided the impetus.

He did not yet relinquish the floor; he brandished the word, he made it triumph. He constituted himself the protector of the literary genius, celebrated the history of letters from the moment when, for the first time, a human being had carved word-signs into stone in order to confer monumental permanence upon his knowledge and feeling. He spoke of the Egyptian god Thoth, with whom the thrice-great Hermes of Hellenism had been identical, and who had been worshipped as the inventor of writing, patron of libraries, and inspirer of all intellectual endeavour. In his speech he bent the knee before this Trismegistus, the humanistic Hermes, master of the palaestra, to whom mankind owed the sublime gift of the literary word, of agonistic rhetoric; and thus prompted Hans Castorp to observe that this native Egyptian had evidently been a politician as well, and had played on a grander scale the same part as Herr Brunetto Latini, who had bestowed polish upon the Florentines in particular and taught them how to speak, as well as the art of governing their republic according to the rules of politics—whereupon Naphta replied that Herr Settembrini was cheating a little and had given him far too sleek a picture of Thoth-Trismegistus. For he had been, rather, an ape, moon, and soul divinity, a baboon with a crescent moon upon his head, and, under the name of Hermes, above all a god of death and of the dead: the compeller and conductor of souls, who had already become the arch-magician of later antiquity and, for the cabbalistic Middle Ages, the father of hermetic alchemy.

What, what? All was confusion and turmoil in Hans Castorp’s workshop of thought and imagination. There stood blue-cloaked death as a humanistic rhetorician; and when one looked more closely at the pedagogic god of letters and friend of mankind, one found crouching in his stead an apish grimace with the sign of night and sorcery upon its brow.... He warded it off with a wave of his hand, then laid the hand over his eyes. But into the darkness where he had taken refuge from confusion sounded Settembrini’s voice, continuing his praise of literature. Not only contemplative but active greatness, he cried, had at all times been allied with it; and he named Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, named Frederick of Prussia and other heroes, even Lassalle and Moltke. He was not disconcerted when Naphta sought to send him packing to China, where the most grotesque deification of the alphabet ever achieved prevailed, and where one became a field marshal if one could paint all forty thousand written characters, which must surely be entirely to a humanist’s taste. Eh, Naphta knew perfectly well that it was not a question of painting characters, but of literature as an impulse of humanity, of its spirit, poor scoffer!—which was spirit itself, the miracle of the union of analysis and form. It was this that awakened understanding for all things human, promoted the weakening and dissolution of stupid value-judgements and convictions, and brought about the moralization, ennoblement, and betterment of the human race. By creating the utmost moral refinement and sensitivity, it educated men, far from making them fanatical, simultaneously in doubt, justice, and tolerance. The purifying and sanctifying effect of literature, the destruction of the passions through knowledge and the word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness, and love, the redeeming power of language, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the human spirit altogether, the man of letters as the perfect human being, as saint—from this radiant key issued Herr Settembrini’s apologetic hymn of praise. Ah, but his adversary too was not at a loss for words; he knew how to disrupt the angelic hallelujah with sinister, brilliant objections, taking the side of preservation and life against the spirit of disintegration concealed behind that seraphic hypocrisy. The miraculous union over which Herr Settembrini had warbled, it was now declared, amounted to nothing but deception and legerdemain; for the form which the literary spirit boasted of uniting with the principle of investigation and separation was merely a sham and lying form, no genuine, organic, natural form, no form of life. The so-called improver of mankind might have purification and sanctification upon his lips, but in truth what he sought was the emasculation and exsanguination of life; indeed, spirit, zealous theory, was a violator of life, and whoever wished to destroy the passions wished for nothingness—pure nothingness, pure indeed, since “pure” was in fact the only attribute that might conceivably still be applied to nothingness. Yet precisely in this Herr Settembrini, the man of letters, showed himself plainly for what he was: namely, a man of progress, liberalism, and bourgeois revolution. For progress was pure nihilism, and the liberal bourgeois was, in the strictest sense, the man of nothingness and of the Devil; indeed, he denied God, the conservative and positive Absolute, by swearing allegiance to the diabolical Counter-Absolute, and with his pacifism of death fancied himself pious beyond measure. Yet he was anything but pious: he was a supreme criminal against life, deserving to be arraigned painfully before its Inquisition and stern Vehmic tribunal—_et cetera_.

Thus Naphta knew how to give matters their point, to turn the hymn of praise into something diabolical and present himself as the incarnation of the preserving severity of love, so that distinguishing where God was and where the Devil, where death and where life, once again became a sheer impossibility. We shall readily be believed when we say that his antagonist was man enough not to remain in his debt for an answer—an excellent one, to which he in turn received another equally good—after which matters continued thus for a while, and the conversation flowed into discussions already indicated earlier. But Hans Castorp no longer listened, for Joachim had remarked in the meantime that he was certain he had a fever from his cold and did not rightly know how he ought to conduct himself now, since colds were, after all, not “_reçu_” up here. The duellists had passed over the remark, but Hans Castorp, as we have shown, kept an anxious eye upon his cousin and departed with him in the midst of a rejoinder, leaving it to chance whether the remainder of the audience, consisting of Ferge and Wehsal, would provide sufficient pedagogic stimulus for the continuation of the contest.

On the way he and Joachim agreed that in the matter of his cold and throat trouble they would follow official channels—that is, instruct the bath attendant to notify the matron, whereupon something would surely be done for the sufferer. This proved a wise course. That very evening, just after dinner, Adriatica knocked at Joachim’s door while Hans Castorp happened to be in his room, and in a shrill voice enquired after the young officer’s wishes and complaints. “Sore throat? Hoarseness?” she repeated. “Good gracious, my dear fellow, what antics are you up to?” And she attempted to gaze piercingly into his eyes; it was no fault of Joachim’s that their glances failed to rest within one another: hers was the one that strayed aside. That she should try again and again, when experience had shown that she simply was not endowed with the ability to carry the enterprise through! With the aid of a kind of metal shoehorn which she drew from her belt pouch, she inspected the patient’s gullet, while Hans Castorp was obliged to provide illumination with the bedside lamp. As she stood on tiptoe, peering about Joachim’s uvula, she said:

“Tell me, my esteemed young man—have you ever choked on anything?”

What answer was one to make to that! For the moment, while she was peering, it was wholly impossible to reply; but even after she had released him, good counsel remained hard to come by. Naturally, once or twice in his life he had choked while eating or drinking; but that was the common lot of mankind and could scarcely be what she meant by her question. He said: How did she mean? He could not remember the last time.

Well, good; it had merely been an idea that had occurred to her. So he had caught cold, she said, to the cousins’ astonishment, since the very word “cold” was otherwise taboo in this establishment. A closer examination of the throat might, if necessary, require the Hofrat’s laryngeal mirror. When she left, she deposited some Formamint, together with a bandage and gutta-percha for moist compresses during the night; and Joachim made use of both, thought he felt distinct relief from these applications, and therefore continued them—particularly as his hoarseness showed no inclination to clear, but actually grew worse over the next few days, although the soreness of his throat at times almost entirely disappeared.

His fever from the cold, incidentally, had been pure imagination. The objective findings were the usual ones—precisely those which, together with the results of the Hofrat’s examinations, detained the honour-loving Joachim here for a brief supplementary cure before he could hasten back to the colours. The October date had passed without song or sound. No one said a word about it, neither the Hofrat nor the cousins to one another: silently and with downcast eyes they passed over it. After what Behrens had dictated at the monthly examination for his psychologically trained assistant to set down, and what the photographic plate revealed, it was all too clear that at most there could have been question of a wholly reckless departure; whereas this time the task was to persevere in service up here with iron self-discipline until he had definitively acquired the hardiness required for service in the flatlands, for the fulfilment of his oath down below.

This was the prevailing watchword, upon which they tacitly pretended to be agreed. But the truth of the matter was that neither felt entirely certain whether the other, in his innermost soul, believed in this watchword; and when they lowered their eyes before one another, it was in consequence of this doubt, and not without their eyes first having _met_. This had occurred more frequently since that colloquy on literature, during which Hans Castorp had for the first time noticed the novel light in the depths of Joachim’s eyes, as well as their peculiar “threatening” expression. On one occasion in particular it happened at table: the hoarse Joachim unexpectedly choked with extraordinary violence and could scarcely regain his breath. And then, while Joachim gasped behind his napkin and Frau Magnus, his neighbour, thumped him on the back in accordance with an ancient practice, their eyes met in a fashion that alarmed Hans Castorp more profoundly than the mishap itself, which of course might happen to anyone; and then Joachim closed his eyes and, concealed behind his napkin, left the table and the dining-hall to cough himself out in the corridor.

Smiling, though still somewhat pale, he returned after ten minutes with an apology for the disturbance upon his lips, took part as before in the overwhelmingly abundant meal, and afterward they even forgot to make so much as a remark upon the commonplace incident. But when, several days later—this time not at dinner but during the sumptuous second breakfast—the same thing occurred, though without their eyes meeting, at least not those of the cousins, since Hans Castorp, bent over his plate, continued eating with an air of inattention, a word could hardly be avoided after they had risen from table; and Joachim railed against that damned female, Mylendonk, who with her question dragged in by the hair had put a flea in his ear, talked him into something, and bewitched him—the Devil take her. Yes, obviously it was suggestion, Hans Castorp said—amusing to establish, for all its unpleasantness. And Joachim, once they had called the thing by its name, thenceforth successfully resisted the witchcraft, took care while eating, and choked no more frequently than unbewitched people might do after all: only once again, nine or ten days later, and there was nothing further to be said about that.

Nevertheless, he was summoned to Rhadamanthys out of turn and at an unscheduled hour. The matron had reported him, and had probably not acted so foolishly; for since there was a laryngeal mirror in the establishment, this persistent hoarseness, which for hours at a time degenerated into actual loss of voice, and also the sore throat that reappeared whenever Joachim neglected to keep his throat supple with saliva-inducing remedies, seemed sufficient cause to take the ingeniously devised instrument out of its cupboard—not to mention that if Joachim now choked only with normal infrequency, this was due solely to the great caution he exercised while eating, which left him behind the others at meals almost without exception.

The Hofrat accordingly mirrored, reflected, and peered long and deep down Joachim’s throat, whereupon the patient, at Hans Castorp’s particular request, presented himself immediately in the latter’s balcony box to give his report. It had been very troublesome and ticklish, he communicated in a half-whisper, since the principal rest cure and the injunction of silence were just then in force; and in the end Behrens had talked all sorts of rot about a state of irritation and said that swabbings would have to be performed every day, that tomorrow he meant to begin cauterizing, but must first prepare the medication. So: a state of irritation and cauterizations. Hans Castorp, his head full of trains of association that ran far afield and extended to quite remote persons, such as the limping concierge and that lady who had held her ear all week and yet had been entitled to feel entirely reassured, had further questions upon his lips, but could not bring them across; instead, he resolved to put them to the Hofrat in private, and confined himself, with Joachim, to expressing his satisfaction that the nuisance was now under supervision and that the Hofrat had taken the matter in hand. He was a splendid fellow and would soon set things right. Whereupon Joachim nodded without looking at him, turned, and went across into his own balcony box.

What was the matter with the honour-loving Joachim? During the last few days his eyes had grown so uncertain and shy. Only recently Matron Mylendonk had failed in her attempt to bore through his gentle, dark gaze; but if she were now to try her luck once more, one could truly no longer be sure how the affair would turn out. In any case he avoided such encounters, and when one nevertheless occurred (for Hans Castorp looked at him a great deal), it afforded no greater comfort. Oppressed, Hans Castorp remained behind in his compartment, beset by an urgent temptation to call the chief to account at once. But that would not do, since Joachim would have heard him rise; and so delay was called for, and Behrens would have to be intercepted in the course of the afternoon.

But this proved impossible. Strange! It simply would not prove possible to lay hold of the Hofrat, either that evening or throughout the whole of the next two days. Joachim was naturally something of an impediment, since he was not to notice anything, but that did not suffice to explain why the interview could not be obtained and Rhadamanthus could in no way be run to earth. Hans Castorp sought him and asked after him throughout the house, was directed here and there, where he would be certain to find him, and then found that he was no longer there. Behrens was present at one meal, but sat far away, at the Bad Russian Table, and disappeared before dessert. A few times Hans Castorp thought he had him already by the button; he saw him standing on stairs and in corridors, talking with Krokowski, with the matron, with a patient, and lay in wait for him. But the moment he had merely turned his eyes away, Behrens was gone.

Not until the fourth day did he attain his object. From his balcony he saw the quarry in the garden giving instructions to the gardener, slipped quickly out of his blanket, and hurried downstairs. The Hofrat, round-necked, was just rowing away toward his residence. Hans Castorp trotted after him and even ventured to call, but gained no hearing. At last, arriving breathless, he brought his man to a halt.

“What business have you here!” the Hofrat thundered at him, his eyes starting. “Am I to have a special copy of the house regulations issued to you? To my knowledge, this is rest-cure time. Your chart and the plate give you no special right to play the baron. We ought to have some divine thief-scarer set up here somewhere, threatening with impalement anyone who indulges in libertinage in the garden between two and four! What is it you want?”

“Herr Hofrat, I absolutely must speak to you for a moment!”

“I have noticed that you have been fancying so for quite some time. You pursue me as though I were a female and some prodigious object of desire. What do you want of me?”

“It is only about my cousin, Herr Hofrat—forgive me! He is being swabbed now... I am convinced that this has set matters on the right course. It is harmless, is it not—that is all I wished to permit myself to ask?”

“You always want everything to be harmless, Castorp; that is your way. You are by no means averse to becoming involved with things that are not harmless now and again, but then you treat them as though they were harmless, and imagine that by doing so you make yourself pleasing to God and man. You are a sort of coward and skulker, my good fellow, and when your cousin calls you a civilian, that is still very euphemistically expressed.”

“That may all be so, Herr Hofrat. Naturally, the weaknesses of my character are beyond question. But that is precisely the point: at the moment they are presumably beside the question, and what I have been wanting to ask you for three days is only—”

“That I pour you some wine nicely sugared and adulterated! You want to pester and bore me into confirming you in your damned skulking ways, so that you may sleep in innocence while other people keep watch and let the wind blow about their noses.”

“But, Herr Hofrat, you are very severe with me. On the contrary, I wanted—”

“Yes, severity is precisely not your affair at all. Your cousin is a different sort of fellow, made of different stuff. He knows what is what. He knows it _in silence_, do you understand me? He does not hang on to people’s coat-tails in order to have blue mist and harmlessness conjured up before him. He knew what he was doing and what he was staking upon it, and he is a man who understands bearing and holding his tongue, which is a masculine art, but unfortunately no affair of such bipedal amenities as yourself. But I tell you this, Castorp: if you start making scenes here, and raise an outcry, and abandon yourself to your civilian sentiments, I shall put you out. For here men wish to be among themselves, do you understand me?”

Hans Castorp was silent. By now, when his colour changed, he too became blotchy. He was too copper-red to turn altogether pale. At last he said, his lips twitching:

“Thank you very much, Herr Hofrat. I suppose I know what is what now too, for I assume you would not speak to me so—how shall I put it—so solemnly, if matters were not serious with Joachim. Nor am I at all given to scenes and outcries; you do me an injustice there. And if discretion is what is called for, then I too shall stand my ground; I believe I can promise you that.”

“You are attached to your cousin, Hans Castorp?” the Hofrat asked, suddenly seizing the young man’s hand and looking up at him from below with his blue, whitishly lashed, bloodshot, starting eyes...

“What is there to say, Herr Hofrat? So near a relation, and so good a friend, and my comrade up here.” Hans Castorp gave a brief sob and rose upon the toe of one foot, turning the heel outward.

The Hofrat hastened to release his hand.

“Well, then, be nice to him for these six or eight weeks,” he said. “Give yourself over to your innate harmlessness; that will please him best. I am still here too, and here for the purpose of arranging matters as cavalierly and comfortably as possible.”

“_Larynx_, is it not?” said Hans Castorp, nodding to the Hofrat.

“_Laryngea_,” Behrens confirmed. “Rapidly advancing destruction. And the mucous membrane of the windpipe is already in a bad way too. It may be that all the shouting of commands on duty created a _locus minoris resistentiae_ there. But we must always be prepared for such diversions. Little prospect, my boy; really none at all. It goes without saying that everything possible, however costly, will be tried.”

“His mother...” said Hans Castorp.

“Later, later. There is no hurry yet. See to it, with tact and good taste, that she is gradually given the picture. And now take yourself back to your post. He notices, you know. And it must surely distress him to know that he is being discussed behind his back in this fashion.”

—Every day Joachim went to be swabbed. It was a beautiful autumn; in white flannel trousers with his blue tunic, he would often come late from treatment to the meal, trim and military, salute briefly, with friendly, manly composure, asking pardon for his tardiness, and sit down to his meal, which was now specially prepared for him, since, owing to the danger of food going the wrong way, he could not manage the ordinary fare: he was given soups, hashes, and gruels. His table companions quickly grasped the situation. They returned his greeting with emphatic courtesy and warmth, addressing him as “Herr Lieutenant.” In his absence they questioned Hans Castorp, and people came from the other tables as well and asked him. Frau Stöhr came wringing her hands and lamented without refinement. But Hans Castorp answered only in monosyllables, conceded the seriousness of the incident, yet denied it to a certain degree; he did so for honour’s sake, from the feeling that he must not betray Joachim before his time.

They went walking together, three times daily completing the prescribed constitutional to which the Hofrat had now most precisely restricted Joachim, so that any unnecessary expenditure of strength might be avoided. Hans Castorp walked on his cousin’s left—they had formerly walked thus or otherwise, just as it happened, but now Hans Castorp kept predominantly to the left. They did not speak much; they uttered the words that the Berghof’s normal day brought to their lips, and nothing else. Of the subject that stood between them there was nothing to be said, least of all between persons of moral reserve who addressed one another by their Christian names only in the last extremity. Nevertheless, at times it rose urgently and surgingly in Hans Castorp’s civilian breast, on the point of pouring itself forth. But that was impossible. What had swollen painfully and tempestuously upward subsided again, and he fell silent.

Joachim walked beside him with bowed head. He looked at the ground as though contemplating the earth. It was so strange: here he walked, trim and orderly, saluting passers-by in his chivalrous fashion, mindful of his appearance and of _bienséance_ as always—and he belonged to the earth. Well, to it we all belong sooner or later. But to belong to it at such short notice, so young and with so good and joyful a will to serve beneath the colours, is bitter indeed: still more bitter and incomprehensible to a knowing Hans Castorp walking at his side than to the earthbound man himself, whose decently unspoken knowledge is actually of a decidedly academic nature, possesses little character of reality for him, and is at bottom less his concern than that of others. In fact, our dying is more an affair of those who continue to live than of ourselves; for whether or not we know how to cite it, the saying of the witty sage possesses, in any case, complete validity for the soul: that so long as we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not; that consequently no real relation whatever exists between us and death, and that death is a thing which does not concern us at all, but at most concerns the world and nature—which is why all creatures look forward to it with great tranquillity, indifference, irresponsibility, and egoistic innocence. Hans Castorp found much of this innocence and irresponsibility in Joachim’s nature during those weeks, and understood that although the latter knew, it was therefore not difficult for him to maintain a decent silence concerning that knowledge, because his inward relations to it were merely loose and theoretical or, insofar as they came practically into account, were regulated and determined by a healthy sense of propriety, which no more permitted discussion of that knowledge than of so many other functional indecencies of which life is conscious and by which it is conditioned, but which do not prevent it from preserving _bienséance_.

Thus they walked and kept silent about nature’s matters unbecoming to life. Joachim’s complaints, at first so agitatedly and angrily voiced, about missing the manoeuvres and military service in the flatlands altogether, had likewise fallen silent. But why, in their stead and despite all innocence, did the expression of troubled shyness so often return to his gentle eyes—that uncertainty which would probably have brought the matron victory had she once more chosen to put matters to the test? Was it because he knew himself to be large-eyed and hollow-cheeked? For such he visibly became during these weeks, far more so even than he had been on returning from the flatlands, and his brown complexion grew more yellow and leathery from day to day. As though his surroundings gave him cause for shame and self-contempt—surroundings which, with Herr Albin, thought of nothing but enjoying the boundless advantages of disgrace. Before what and before whom, then, did his once so candid gaze cringe and conceal itself? How strange, the creature’s shame of life, which creeps into hiding in order to perish—convinced that outside, in nature, it can expect no respect or reverence for its suffering and death; rightly convinced of this, since the flock of birds rejoicing in their wings not only fails to honour its sick companion, but assails it furiously and contemptuously with blows of the beak. Yet that is base nature, and a compassion born of the highest human love swelled in Hans Castorp’s breast when he saw the dark instinctive shame in poor Joachim’s eyes. He walked on his left, did so expressly; and since Joachim was now becoming somewhat unsteady on his feet as well, he would support him when a little grassy slope had to be climbed, overcoming his moral reserve to put an arm about him—indeed, afterward he would sometimes forget for a while to remove his arm from Joachim’s shoulders, until the latter shook it off with half-irritated impatience and said:

“Here, you, what is the meaning of this? We look drunk, coming along like this.”

But then came a moment when the dimness in Joachim’s gaze appeared to young Hans Castorp in yet another light, and that was when Joachim received orders to keep to his bed, at the beginning of November—the snow lay deep. For by then it had become all too difficult for him to consume even the hashes and gruels, since every second mouthful went down the wrong way. A transition to an exclusively liquid diet was indicated, and at the same time Behrens prescribed permanent bed rest for the sake of conserving his strength. It was therefore on the eve of Joachim’s permanent confinement to bed, on the last evening when he was still on his feet, that Hans came upon him—came upon him in conversation with Marusja, Marusja who laughed so often and for no reason, with her little orange-coloured handkerchief and her outwardly well-formed bosom. It was after dinner, during the evening social hour, in the hall. Hans Castorp had been in the music-room and came out to look for Joachim: there he found him before the tiled fireplace beside Marusja’s chair—it was a rocking-chair in which she sat, and Joachim, with his left hand upon its back, was holding it tilted backward, so that from a reclining position Marusja looked up into his face with her round brown eyes, while he bent it over hers, speaking softly and in broken phrases, and she from time to time shrugged her shoulders, smiling, agitated, and disdainful.

Hans Castorp hastened to withdraw, though not without observing that other members of the company too, as was apt to happen, had an amused eye upon the scene—unnoticed by Joachim, or at least unheeded by him. This sight—Joachim heedlessly absorbed in conversation with the full-bosomed Marusja, with whom he had sat so long at one and the same table without exchanging a single word; before whose person and existence he had lowered his eyes with a stern expression, rational and honour-loving, although he turned blotchily pale whenever she was mentioned—shook Hans Castorp more profoundly than any sign of exhaustion he had otherwise observed in his poor cousin during these weeks. “Yes, he is lost!” he thought, and quietly seated himself on a chair in the music-room, so as to allow Joachim time for what he was still granting himself there in the hall on this last evening.

From then on, therefore, Joachim permanently assumed the horizontal, and Hans Castorp wrote of it to Luise Ziemßen, wrote to her from his excellent reclining-chair that he must now add to his earlier occasional communications that Joachim had become bedridden; and that although he had said nothing, the wish to have his mother with him could be read in his eyes, and Hofrat Behrens expressly supported this unspoken wish. This too he added delicately and clearly. And so it was no wonder that Frau Ziemßen availed herself of the swiftest means of transport in order to join her son: only three days after this humane letter of alarm had been dispatched, she arrived, and Hans Castorp fetched her by sleigh from the “Dorf” station in a driving snowstorm—composing his features as he stood on the platform before the little train came in, so that they should not alarm the mother too greatly at once, but also so that she should not read anything false or cheerful in them at her first glance.

How often, one wondered, had such greetings already taken place here, how often this hurrying toward one another while the person who had alighted from the train searched urgently and anxiously in the eyes of the one who had come to meet him! Frau Ziemßen gave the impression of having walked here all the way from Hamburg. Her face flushed, she drew Hans Castorp’s hand to her breast and, glancing about her with a certain timidity, asked hurried questions in an almost secretive manner; he evaded them by thanking her for having come so quickly—it was splendid, and how tremendously pleased her Joachim would be. Well, unfortunately he was confined to bed for the present; it was because of the liquid nourishment, which naturally was not without its effect upon his state of strength. But if need arose there were still various expedients, artificial feeding, for example. In any case, she would see for herself.

She saw; and at her side Hans Castorp saw as well. Until this moment the changes that had taken place in Joachim during the past weeks had scarcely been apparent to him at all—young people, after all, have little eye for such things. But now, beside the mother who had come from outside, he regarded him, as it were, through her eyes, as though he had not seen him for a long time, and recognised clearly and distinctly what she too undoubtedly recognised, but what Joachim himself most certainly knew best of the three: namely, that he was a moribundus. He held Frau Ziemßen’s hand in his own, which was as yellow and wasted as his face; and from that face, precisely because of its emaciation, his ears—that slight vexation of his better years—stood out more prominently than before, and to a regrettably disfiguring degree; yet apart from this defect, and despite the stamp of suffering and the expression of earnestness and severity, indeed of pride, which it bore, the face seemed if anything to have gained in masculine beauty—although his lips, with the little black moustache above them, now appeared altogether too full against the shadowy hollows of his cheeks. Two furrows had engraved themselves in the yellowish skin of his forehead between his eyes, which, though lying deep in bony sockets, were larger and more beautiful than ever, and in which Hans Castorp might well take pleasure. For since Joachim had taken to his bed, all disturbance, clouding, and uncertainty had vanished from them, and in their tranquil, dark depths there was only that light which had been noticed so early—and, to be sure, that “threat” as well. He did not smile as he held his mother’s hand and whispered good day and welcome to her. Nor had he smiled for a single instant when she entered, and this immobility, this unchanging quality of his expression, said everything.

Luise Ziemßen was a brave woman. She did not dissolve into lamentation at the sight of her worthy son. Composed and gathered together in the manner of her hair, secured beneath its scarcely visible net of gauze, phlegmatic and energetic, as people in her part of the country were known to be, she took Joachim’s nursing into her own hands, spurred by the very sight of him to a maternal eagerness for battle and filled with the conviction that, if there were anything to be saved, salvation could be achieved only by her strength and vigilance. It was certainly not for her own convenience, but solely from a sense of what was proper and imposing, that a few days later she consented to the summoning of a trained nurse as well to attend the gravely ill man. It was Sister Berta, in reality Alfreda Schildknecht, who appeared at Joachim’s bedside with her black valise; but neither by day nor by night did Frau Ziemßen’s jealous energy leave her much to do, and Sister Berta had plenty of time to stand in the corridor, the ribbon of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, peering about inquisitively.

The Protestant deaconess was a matter-of-fact soul. Alone in the room with Hans Castorp and the sick man, who was by no means asleep but lay upon his back with open eyes, she was capable of saying:

“I should never have dreamed that I would one day nurse one of you gentlemen to his death after all.”

The horrified Hans Castorp shook his fist at her with a savage expression, but she scarcely understood what he wanted—far removed, and rightly so, from the thought that it might be advisable to spare Joachim, and much too matter-of-fact to consider that anyone, least of all the person most immediately concerned, could harbour illusions about the nature and outcome of this case. “There,” she said, pouring eau de Cologne onto a handkerchief and holding it beneath Joachim’s nose, “take a little more pleasure in that, Herr Leutnant!” And indeed, at that time there would have been little sense in attempting to deceive good Joachim—unless for the purpose of exerting a tonic influence, as Frau Ziemßen intended when, in a strong and impassioned voice, she spoke to him of his recovery. For two things were clear and unmistakable: first, that Joachim was going to his death in full consciousness; and second, that he was doing so in harmony and contentment with himself. Only during the final week, toward the end of November, when weakness of the heart became apparent, did he lose awareness for hours at a time, enveloped in a hope-blessed confusion regarding his condition, and speak of his imminent return to the regiment and his participation in the grand manoeuvres, which he imagined were still in progress. But it was at this same time that Hofrat Behrens ceased trying to offer the family hope and declared that the end was now merely a question of hours.

A phenomenon as melancholy as it was governed by law, this forgetfully believing self-delusion even of masculine minds at a time when the process of destruction is in fact approaching its lethal goal—law-governed, impersonal, and superior to all individual consciousness, like the seduction of sleep that ensnares the freezing man, and like the circling course of one who has lost his way. Hans Castorp, whose grief and heartache did not prevent him from viewing the phenomenon objectively, attached to it some clumsy, though acute, reflections in conversation with Naphta and Settembrini when reporting to them upon his relative’s condition, and drew a rebuke from the latter by suggesting that the conventional notion that philosophical faith and confidence in the good were expressions of health, while pessimism and condemnation of the world were symptoms of disease, evidently rested upon an error; for otherwise it could not be precisely the hopelessly terminal condition that engendered an optimism beside whose sinister rosiness the preceding melancholy appeared as a robustly healthy manifestation of life. Thank God, he was able at the same time to inform the sympathisers that Rhadamanthus, within hopelessness, still left room for hope and prophesied a gentle exit, painless despite Joachim’s youth.

“An idyllic affair of the heart, my gracious lady!” he said, holding Luise Ziemßen’s hand between both his shovel-sized hands and looking up at her from below with bulging, tearful, bloodshot blue eyes. “I am glad, immensely glad, that it is taking a cardiac course and that he need not wait for oedema of the glottis or any other villainy; he will thus be spared a great many harassments. The heart is failing rapidly—fortunate for him, fortunate for us; we can dutifully do our part against it with our camphor injections, without much prospect of thereby causing him any protracted complications. He will sleep a great deal at the last and dream pleasantly, I believe I can promise you that; and if at the very end he should happen not to be asleep, he will nevertheless make a brief, imperceptible crossing—it will be fairly immaterial to him, you may rely upon that. Fundamentally, by the way, it is always so. I know death; I am an old employee of his. People overestimate him, believe me! I can tell you, there is almost nothing to it. For whatever torments may under certain circumstances _precede_ it cannot properly be reckoned as part of death; that is a vigorously living affair and may lead to life and recovery. But of death itself no one who returned could tell you anything of consequence, for one does not experience it. We come out of darkness and go into darkness; between the two lie experiences, but beginning and end, birth and death, are not experienced by us. They possess no subjective character; as processes, they belong wholly to the realm of the objective—that is the truth of it.”

This was the Hofrat’s manner of offering consolation. Let us hope that it did the sensible Frau Ziemßen a little good; and his assurances were indeed fulfilled to a considerable extent. During these final days the weakened Joachim slept for many hours at a time, and doubtless dreamed whatever it pleased him to dream—things of the flatlands and the military, we may suppose; and when he awoke and was asked how he felt, he invariably answered, though indistinctly, that he felt well and happy—even though he had almost no pulse remaining and in the end no longer felt the prick of the hypodermic needle at all. His body was insensible; they might have burned and pinched it, and it would already have been no concern of good Joachim’s.

Yet since his mother’s arrival great changes had still taken place in him. As shaving had become burdensome to him and he had already omitted it for eight or ten days, while his beard grew very vigorously, his waxen face with its gentle eyes was now framed by a full black beard—a campaigner’s beard, such as a soldier might let grow in the field, and one that, moreover, became him handsomely and manfully, as everyone agreed. Yes, through this beard, and probably not through it alone, Joachim had suddenly changed from a youth into a mature man. He lived rapidly, like clockwork spinning down, raced at a gallop through the stages of life that he had not been granted time to attain, and during the final twenty-four hours became an old man. The weakness of his heart brought with it a strained-looking swelling of his face, so that Hans Castorp received the impression that dying must at the very least be a great toil, even if Joachim, thanks to various failures and diminishments, seemed not to be aware of it; but this swelling affected the region of the lips most severely, and a drying-out or enervation of the inner mouth visibly contributed to it, so that Joachim mumbled when he spoke like a very old man and was, moreover, genuinely annoyed by this impediment: if only he were rid of it, he declared in slurred speech, everything would be all right, but it was an accursed nuisance.

What he meant by saying that “everything would be all right” was not altogether clear; the tendency of his condition toward ambiguity became strikingly evident. More than once he made equivocal remarks, seemed both to know and not to know, and on one occasion, evidently shuddering with a sense of annihilation, declared with a shake of the head and a certain contrition that never before had he been in such an utterly wretched state.

Then his manner became forbidding, severely noncommittal, even discourteous; he would no longer tolerate any fictions or embellishments, made no response to them, and stared before him with the eyes of a stranger. Particularly after the young pastor whom Luise Ziemßen had summoned, and who, to Hans Castorp’s regret, had worn no starched ruff but only preaching bands, had prayed with him, his bearing assumed an official, service-like character, and he expressed his wishes only in the form of brief words of command.

At six o’clock in the afternoon he began a peculiar activity: repeatedly he passed his right hand, about whose wrist lay his gold chain bracelet, over the bedclothes in the region of his hip, raising it slightly on the return and then drawing it back toward himself across the coverlet in a scraping, raking motion, as though he were gathering and drawing something in.

At seven o’clock he died—Alfreda Schildknecht was in the corridor; only his mother and cousin were present. He had slipped down in the bed and curtly ordered them to prop him higher. While Frau Ziemßen, her arm about his shoulders, complied with the instruction, he declared with a certain haste that he must immediately draw up and submit an application for an extension of his leave; and as he said it, the “brief crossing” took place—observed devoutly by Hans Castorp in the light of the red-shaded table lamp. His eye broke, the unconscious exertion left his features, the laborious swelling of his lips visibly subsided, a beautifying return to early manly youthfulness spread over the silenced countenance of our Joachim—and so it had happened.

Since Luise Ziemßen had turned away sobbing, it was Hans Castorp who, with the tip of his ring finger, closed the eyelids of the motionless and breathless man and carefully folded his hands upon the coverlet. Then he too stood and wept, letting the tears run down his cheeks which had so burned the English naval officer there—that clear moisture, flowing so abundantly and bitterly throughout the world and at every hour that the vale of earth has poetically been named for it; that alkaline and saline glandular product which the nervous shock of penetrating pain, physical as well as spiritual, presses from our body. He knew that it also contained a little mucin and albumen.

The Hofrat came, having been notified by Sister Berta. He had been there less than half an hour before and had injected camphor; he had missed only the very instant of the brief crossing. “Well, he has it behind him,” he said simply, straightening up with his stethoscope from Joachim’s silent breast. And he pressed the hands of the two relatives, nodding to them. Afterward he stood with them for a while longer at the bedside, contemplating Joachim’s motionless, warrior-bearded countenance. “Extraordinary boy, extraordinary fellow,” he said over his shoulder, indicating the resting man with his head. “Wanted to force the issue, you know—his service down below was all compulsion and violence, of course—he performed his duty in a fever, come what might. The field of honour, you understand—he has slipped away from us to the field of honour, the runaway. But honour was death to him, and death—you may reverse it as you please—at any rate, he has now said, ‘I have the honour!’ Extraordinary lad, extraordinary fellow.” And he departed, tall and stooped, the nape of his neck thrust out.

It had been decided that Joachim should be conveyed home, and the Berghof establishment attended to everything required for it, as well as to whatever else seemed fitting and dignified—his mother and cousin scarcely needed to stir. On the following day, dressed in his silk shirt with cuffs, flowers upon the coverlet, and resting in the muted brightness of the snow, Joachim had become still more beautiful than immediately after the crossing. Every trace of exertion had now departed from his face; grown cold, it had settled into the purest, silent form. Short curls of his dark hair fell over the motionless, yellowish forehead, which seemed fashioned from a noble but delicate substance somewhere between wax and marble, and within the likewise somewhat curling beard the lips arched themselves fully and proudly. An antique helmet would have suited this head well, as several of the visitors who came to take their leave observed.

Frau Stöhr wept rapturously at the sight of the form of the former Joachim. “A hero! A hero!” she cried repeatedly, and demanded that Beethoven’s “Erotica” be played at his grave.

“Do be silent!” Settembrini hissed at her from the side. He and Naphta were in the room at the same time as she, and he was deeply moved. With both hands he directed those present toward Joachim, calling upon them to lament. “_Un giovanotto tanto simpàtico, tanto stimàbile!_” he cried repeatedly.

Naphta could not refrain, from within his constrained posture and without looking at him, from remarking softly and caustically in his direction:

“I am pleased to see that, besides freedom and progress, you also have a feeling for serious things.”

Settembrini swallowed that. Perhaps he felt that circumstances had temporarily lent Naphta’s position a certain superiority over his own; perhaps it was this momentary preponderance of his opponent’s that he had sought to counterbalance by the vehemence of his grief, and that now kept him silent—even when Leo Naphta, exploiting the inconstant advantages of his position, remarked with sharp sententiousness:

“The error of men of letters lies in the belief that it is the spirit alone that makes a man decent. The contrary is nearer the truth. Only where there is _no_ spirit can there be decency.”

“Well,” thought Hans Castorp, “there is another of those Pythian pronouncements! Purse your lips after delivering it, and for the moment everyone is overawed . . .”

That afternoon the metal coffin arrived. A man who had come with it insisted upon regarding Joachim’s transfer into this stately receptacle, adorned with rings and lions’ heads, as his concern alone: a relative of the undertaker whose services had been engaged, dressed in black, in a sort of short frock coat, and wearing a wedding ring on his plebeian hand, into whose flesh the yellow band had, as it were, grown, and by which it was quite engulfed. One was inclined to fancy that the smell of corpses emanated from his frock coat, though this was merely prejudice. Yet the man did betray the specialist’s conceit that all his activity ought, as it were, to take place behind the scenes, and that only its ceremoniously reverent results should be exposed to the gaze of the bereaved—a notion that positively aroused Hans Castorp’s mistrust and was by no means to his liking. He did indeed approve of Frau Ziemßen’s withdrawing, but refused to be politely ushered out himself; he remained and lent a hand: taking the figure beneath the armpits, he helped carry it across from the bed into the coffin, upon whose sheet and tasselled cushion Joachim’s shell was laid high and solemnly to rest, between standing candelabra supplied by the house of Berghof.

On the day after that, however, a phenomenon appeared which caused Hans Castorp inwardly to part and detach himself from the form, and in fact to leave the field to the professional, the unsavoury guardian of reverence. For Joachim, whose expression until then had been so grave and honourable, had begun to smile within his warrior’s beard, and Hans Castorp did not conceal from himself that this smile harboured a tendency to degenerate—it filled his heart with feelings of haste. Thus, in God’s name, it was well that the removal was imminent, that the coffin was to be closed and screwed down. Setting aside his native prudery of manners, Hans Castorp tenderly touched the stone-cold brow of what had once been his Joachim with his lips in farewell, and, despite all his mistrust of the man from behind the scenes, obediently left the room with Luise Ziemßen.

We let the curtain fall, for the penultimate time. Yet while it rushes down, let us in spirit, together with Hans Castorp, who has remained behind upon his height, peer and listen far below into a damp garden of crosses in the flatlands, where a sword flashes and sinks, words of command crack out, and three rifle volleys, three fervent honours, crash down over Joachim Ziemßen’s root-threaded soldier’s grave.