The Magic Mountain — Chapter 7

Chapter 8 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

A Walk on the Beach

Can one narrate time, time itself, as such, in and for itself? Truly, no, that would be a foolish undertaking! A narrative that went: "Time passed, it ran away, time streamed on," and so forth forever - no one in his senses could very well call that a narrative. It would be as if one meant, in a brain-fevered fashion, to sustain one and the same note or chord for an hour and pass that off as music. For narrative resembles music in this, that it _fills_ time, "fills it out properly," "divides it up," and makes it so that "there is something to it" and "something going on with it" - to quote, with the melancholy piety devoted to the sayings of the dead, occasional words of the late Joachim: words long since died away - we do not know whether the reader is still altogether clear how long since. Time is the _element_ of narrative, as it is the element of life - inseparably bound up with it, as with bodies in space. It is also the element of music, which measures and articulates time, making it at once diverting and precious: akin in this, as has been said, to narrative, which likewise (and unlike the work of the plastic arts, shining with an all-at-once presentness and bound to time only as a body) knows how to present itself only as a succession, only as something that runs its course, and, even if it should attempt at every moment to be wholly there, still requires time for its appearance.

That is plain enough. But that a distinction prevails here is equally clear. The time-element of music is only one: a segment of human earthly time into which it pours itself, in order unspeakably to ennoble and exalt it. Narrative, on the other hand, has two kinds of time: first, its own, the musically real time that conditions its course, its appearance; second, the time of its content, which is perspectival, and to such varying degrees that the imaginary time of the narrative may almost, indeed wholly, coincide with its musical time, but may also stand from it as far off as the stars. A piece of music called "Five-Minute Waltz" lasts five minutes - in this, and in nothing else, consists its relation to time. But a narrative whose span of content amounted to five minutes could, by virtue of extraordinary conscientiousness in the filling out of those five minutes, itself last a thousand times as long - and be highly diverting in doing so, although in relation to its imaginary time it would be very tedious. On the other hand, it is possible for the content-time of the narrative, by way of abbreviation, to exceed its own duration beyond all measure - we say "by way of abbreviation" in order to indicate an illusory or, to speak quite plainly, a pathological element that is plainly relevant here: namely, insofar as in such a case the narrative avails itself of a hermetic magic and of an overperspective in time that recalls certain abnormal cases of actual experience and points distinctly toward the supernatural. There are records left by opium-smokers who testify that during the short time of his rapture the stupefied man lived through dreams whose temporal extent amounted to ten, to thirty, even to sixty years, or indeed left behind every limit of humanly possible experience of time - dreams, then, whose imaginary span vastly exceeded their own duration, and in which there prevailed an incredible abbreviation of time-experience, ideas crowding one upon another with such speed as though, in the words of a hashish-eater, from the brain of the intoxicated man "something had been removed, like the spring from a broken clock."

Similarly, then, to these dreams of vice, narrative is able to set to work upon time; similarly it is able to treat it. But since it can "treat" it, it is clear that time, which is the element of narrative, can also become _its subject_; and if it would be saying too much to claim that one can "narrate time," still, to wish to narrate _about time_ is evidently not quite so absurd an undertaking as it at first appeared to us - so that the name of the "time-novel" might then acquire a peculiarly dreamlike double meaning. In fact, we raised the question whether time can be narrated only in order to confess that, in the present tale, we really do intend something of the sort. And if we touched upon the further question whether those gathered round us were still altogether clear how long ago it now is that the honour-minded Joachim, now deceased, wove that remark about music and time into the conversation (a remark which, incidentally, testifies to a certain alchemical intensification of his nature, since remarks of that sort did not properly belong to his good plain character) - then we should not have been greatly angered to hear that one was indeed at the moment no longer quite clear about it: not greatly angered, indeed satisfied, for the simple reason that the general participation in the experience of our hero naturally lies in our interest, and because he, Hans Castorp, was by no means very sure on the point in question, and had long since ceased to be. That belongs to his novel, a time-novel - taken so, and again so.

How long Joachim had actually lived up here with him, up to his wild departure or taken all in all; when, by the calendar, that first defiant departure had taken place, how long he had been away, when he had arrived again and how long Hans Castorp himself had already been here when he arrived again and then went out of time; how long, to leave Joachim aside, Frau Chauchat had been absent, since when, roughly by the year, she was _back again_ (for she was back again), and how much earthly time Hans Castorp had spent at the Berghof by the time she returned: to all these questions, supposing they had been put to him, which nobody did, not even he himself, for he was no doubt afraid to put them to himself, Hans Castorp would have drummed with his fingertips upon his brow and decidedly not known the proper answer - a phenomenon no less disquieting than that temporary inability which had overtaken him on the first evening of his stay up here, namely, to tell Herr Settembrini his own age; indeed, an aggravation of that incapacity, for now in all seriousness and permanently he no longer knew how old he was!

That may sound adventurous, but it is so far from being unheard-of or improbable that, under certain conditions, it can happen at any time to any one of us: given such conditions, nothing would preserve us from sinking into the profoundest ignorance concerning the passage of time and therefore concerning our age. The phenomenon is possible by virtue of the absence of any organ of time within us, thus by virtue of our absolute incapacity to determine the course of time from within ourselves and without external points of reference, even with approximate reliability. Miners, buried in and cut off from any observation of the alternation of day and night, estimated, upon their happy rescue, the time they had spent in darkness, between hope and despair, at three days. It had been ten. One would have thought that in their extremely anguished condition time must have seemed long to them. It had shrunk for them to less than a third of its objective extent. It appears, then, that under bewildering conditions human helplessness is more inclined to experience time in strong abbreviation than to overestimate it.

No one, of course, denies that if Hans Castorp had wished, he could without real difficulty have reckoned his way out of uncertainty into clarity - just as the reader too could do with little trouble, should the blurred and the dream-spun resist his healthy common sense. As for Hans Castorp, perhaps he did not feel particularly comfortable in it; all the same, he would not put himself to any effort to wrench himself free from the blur and the dream-spinning and make clear to himself how old he had become up here; and the reluctance that kept him from doing so was a reluctance of conscience - although it is plainly the worst unconscientiousness not to heed time.

We do not know whether it should be put to his credit that circumstances so greatly came to the aid of his lack of good will - if indeed one ought not rather to speak outright of ill will. When Frau Chauchat had returned (otherwise than Hans Castorp had dreamt - but of that in its place), Advent had once more been in season and the shortest day, the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, stood near at hand. In reality, however, theoretical arrangement apart, as far as snow and frost went they had already had winter again for God knows how long; indeed, it had at all times been interrupted only quite briefly by blazing summer days with a sky-blue of such exaggerated depth that it verged on blackness - by summer days, that is, of the kind that moreover also fell in winter, if one set aside the snow, which, moreover, fell in every month of summer. How often had Hans Castorp chatted with the late Joachim about this great confusion, which mingled the seasons, tossed them together, robbed the year of its articulation, and thereby made it tediously diverting or divertingly tedious, so that of time, according to an early utterance of Joachim's made in disgust, there could be no question at all. What was actually mingled and mixed in this great confusion were the feeling-notions or states of consciousness of "still" and "already again" - one of the most bewildering, knotted, and bewitched experiences there can be, and one, at that, for the tasting of which Hans Castorp had felt an immoral inclination on his very first day up here: namely, at the five overpoweringly ample meals in the cheerfully stencilled dining-room, where a first dizziness of this sort, comparatively innocent still, had come over him.

Since then this deception of sense and mind had assumed a far greater scale. Time, even if its subjective experience be weakened or abolished, has objective reality insofar as it is active, insofar as it "brings forth." It is a question for professional thinkers - and only out of youthful presumption had Hans Castorp once meddled with it - whether the hermetically sealed preserve upon its wall shelf is outside time. But we know that time does its work even upon the dormouse. A physician attests the case of a twelve-year-old girl who one day fell asleep and remained so for thirteen years - whereby, however, she did not remain a twelve-year-old girl, but meanwhile blossomed into a mature woman. How could it be otherwise. The dead man is dead and has blessed the temporal world farewell; he has much time, that is: he has none at all - taken personally. That does not prevent his nails and hair from continuing to grow, and that altogether - but we do not wish to repeat the somewhat hoydenish expression Joachim once used in this connection, and at which Hans Castorp at the time took flatland offence. His own hair and nails too grew, they grew quickly, it seemed; he sat so often, wrapped in the white cloak, in his operating chair at the coiffeur's on the village main street and had his hair cut, because fringes had formed again around his ears - he was really always sitting there; or rather, whenever he sat there and chatted with the flattering, adroit assistant who performed his work upon him after time had done its own; or when he stood at his balcony door and, with scissors and file taken from his handsome velvet necessaire, trimmed his nails - suddenly that dizziness flew upon him with a kind of fright into which curious delight was mingled: a dizziness in the wavering double meaning of the word, of vertigo and deception, the whirling no-longer-distinguishing between "still" and "again," whose mixture and effacement yields the timeless always and forever.

We have often assured the reader that we wish to make him neither better nor worse than he was, and so we will not conceal that he often sought to atone for his blameworthy pleasure in such mystical visitations, which perhaps he even consciously and deliberately called forth, by efforts of the opposite kind. He could sit, his watch in his hand - his flat, smooth gold pocket-watch, whose cover with the engraved monogram he had sprung open - and look down upon its porcelain circular face, doubly ringed all about with black and red Arabic numerals, on which the two daintily magnificent gold hands, lavishly arabesqued, pointed apart, while the thin second hand made its busy pecking progress around its own little sphere. Hans Castorp kept his eye upon it, in order to arrest and stretch a few minutes, to hold time by the tail. The little hand pattered along its way, heedless of the numerals it reached, touched, overstepped, left behind, far behind, approached again and reached again. It was insensible to goals, sections, markings. At sixty it ought to have paused a moment, or at least given some tiny sign that here something had been completed. Yet from the way it swiftly crossed it, no differently from any other unnumbered little stroke, one perceived that the whole numbering and articulation of its course was only _laid beneath_ it, and that it simply went, went... So Hans Castorp put his Glashütte watch back into his waistcoat pocket and left time to itself.

How are we to make intelligible to flatland respectability the changes that took place in the inner economy of the young adventurer? The scale of vertiginous identities increased. If, with a certain yieldingness, it was not difficult to set a present moment off against one of yesterday, of the day before, and of the day before that, which resembled it as one egg does another, yet a present moment was already inclined and able to confuse its presentness with one that had prevailed a month or a year before, and to blur with it into the everlasting. So far, however, as the moral states of consciousness of still and again and the yet-to-come remained distinct, there crept in a temptation to enlarge the relational names with which "today" keeps past and future at a determinate distance from itself - "yesterday," "tomorrow" - and apply them to larger relations. One might easily conceive beings, perhaps on smaller planets, who managed a miniature time and for whose "short" life the nimble pattering of our second hand would have the tenacious thrift of an hour hand. But beings may also be imagined with whose spatial scale a time of mighty stride would be conjoined, so that the notions of interval, "just now" and "in a little while," "yesterday" and "tomorrow," would acquire enormously expanded meaning in their experience. That would be, let us say, not only possible, it would, judged in the spirit of a tolerant relativism and according to the maxim "country ways, decent ways," also have to be pronounced legitimate, healthy, and respectable. But what is one to think of an earth-born man, and of mature years into the bargain, for whom a day, a round of weeks, a month, a half-year ought still to play so important a role, to bring with it so many changes and advances in life - who one day adopts the blasphemous habit, or at least now and then yields to the inclination, of saying, instead of "A year ago," "Yesterday," and "Tomorrow" for "A year hence"? Here beyond doubt the judgement "straying and confusion" is in place, and with it the gravest concern.

There exists on earth a condition of life, there are circumstances of landscape, if one may speak of “landscape” in the case we have in mind, under which such confusion and blurring of temporal and spatial distances into a dizzying sameness takes place, as it were by nature and by right, so that a sinking into its enchantment may perhaps be held permissible during holiday hours. We mean the walk upon the seashore, a mode of being of which Hans Castorp never thought without the greatest tenderness, as indeed we know that life in the snow gladly and gratefully prompted in him memories of the dunes of home. We trust that the reader’s own experience and memory too will not fail us when we appeal to this marvellous lostness. You go and go... you will never return home again at the proper time after such walking, for time is lost to you and you to it. O sea, we sit far from you as we tell our tale, we turn our thoughts, our love, toward you; expressly and aloud, in the form of invocation, you shall be present in our narrative, as in silence you always were and are and will be... Soughing desolation, arched over in pale bright grey, full of austere damp from which a taste of salt clings to our lips. We go, go upon lightly resilient ground strewn with seaweed and little shells, our ears wrapped in the wind, in this great, wide, and gentle wind that traverses space freely and unhindered and without malice, producing a mild stupefaction in our heads; we wander, wander, and see the tongues of foam from the advancing and then backward-heaving sea lick at our feet. The surf is seething; with a bright-muffled crash wave upon wave rushes silken onto the flat strand, there as here and out on the banks, and this confused and universal, softly roaring tumult closes our ear to every voice of the world. Deep contentment, deliberate oblivion... Let us close our eyes, secure in eternity! No, look, there in the foamy grey-green expanse that loses itself toward the horizon in prodigious foreshortenings, there is a sail. There? What sort of there is that? How far? How near? You do not know. In a dizzying fashion it withdraws itself from your judgment. In order to say how far that ship is from shore, you would have to know how large it is in itself as a body. Small and near, or great and far? In ignorance your gaze breaks down, for no organ or sense within you gives you any account of space... We go, go; how long now? How far? That remains undecided. Nothing changes with our step; there is as here, just now as now and then; in the unmeasured monotony of space, time is drowned, movement from point to point is no movement any longer when sameness reigns, and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time.

The teachers of the Middle Ages held that time was an illusion, its course in causality and consequence only the result of an apparatus of our senses, and the true being of things a standing present. Had the doctor who first conceived this thought been walking by the sea, the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We repeat, at all events, that these are holiday licenses of which we speak, fantasies of life at leisure, with which the moral spirit is as quickly sated as a hearty man is with resting in the warm sand. To exercise criticism upon the means and forms of human knowledge, to call their pure validity into question, would be absurd, dishonourable, adversarial, if any other meaning were attached to it than that of assigning reason limits which it does not overstep without making itself guilty of neglecting its proper tasks. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini when, with pedagogic decisiveness, he characterized metaphysics as “Evil” to the young man whose fate concerns us, and whom on occasion he had very delicately addressed as a “problem child of life.” And we honour the memory of one dear to us and dead best by declaring that the meaning, purpose, and goal of the critical principle can and may be only one thing: the idea of duty, the commandment of life. Yes, by critically marking out the boundaries of reason, legislative wisdom planted upon those very boundaries the flag of life and proclaimed it the soldierly obligation of man to serve beneath it. Ought one to place it on the credit side of young Hans Castorp’s excuses, and assume that the fact that what a melancholy ranter had called the “beer-zeal” of his military cousin had taken a lethal turn strengthened him in his blasphemous economy of time, his evil dalliance with eternity?

Mynheer Peeperkorn

Mynheer Peeperkorn, an elderly Dutchman, was for a time a guest of the house Berghof, which with such good right bore upon its shield the epithet “international.” Peeperkorn’s lightly coloured nationality, for he was a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a coffee planter, would hardly of itself suffice to move us to introduce his person, that of Pieter Peeperkorn, for so he was called, so he designated himself; “now Pieter Peeperkorn refreshes himself with a schnapps,” he was wont to say; would hardly, let us say, yet determine us to bring his person into our story at the eleventh hour; for good God, in what tints and gradations did not the society of the tried and trusted institution, which Hofrat Doctor Behrens medically directed amid much-tongued discursiveness, disport itself! It was not enough that of late there was here even an Egyptian princess, the very same who had once given the Hofrat that remarkable coffee service and the Sphinx cigarettes, a sensational personage with nicotine-yellow ringed fingers and short-cropped hair, who, apart from the principal meals at which she wore Paris toilettes, went about in a man’s jacket and pressed trousers, and moreover wanted nothing to do with the male world, but turned her favour, at once languid and vehement, exclusively upon a Romanian Jewess who was, simply and plainly, named Frau Landauer, while for Her Highness’s sake Staatsanwalt Paravant neglected mathematics and in his infatuation positively played the fool; not enough, then, with her in person, but among her little retinue there was also a black eunuch, a sickly, feeble man who nevertheless, despite the constitutional condition that Karoline Stöhr was fond of sniggering over, seemed more attached to life than anyone, and showed himself inconsolable over the picture the plate presented of his interior after they had transilluminated his blackness...

Compared with such apparitions, Mynheer Peeperkorn might almost appear colourless. And if this section of our narrative, like an earlier one, might bear the title “One More Person,” no one need therefore fear that here once again an author of intellectual and pedagogic confusion is stepping onto the stage. No, Mynheer Peeperkorn was by no means the man to bring logical confusion into the world. He was a wholly different kind of man, as we shall see. That grave confusion nonetheless proceeded from his person onto our hero is intelligible from what follows.

Mynheer Peeperkorn arrived on the same evening train at the station “Dorf” as Madame Chauchat, and drove with her in the same sleigh home to the Berghof, where he supped with her in the restaurant. It was more than a simultaneous arrival, it was a common arrival, and this commonness, which found its continuation, for example, in the arrangement by which Mynheer was assigned his place at table beside the returned one, at the Good Russian table, opposite the doctor’s place, there where formerly the teacher Popów had staged his wild and equivocal performances, this belonging-together was what disconcerted good Hans Castorp, since he had not foreseen anything of the sort. The Hofrat had, in his own fashion, indicated to him the day and hour of Clawdia’s return. “Well now, Castorp, old boy,” he had said, “faithful waiting gets rewarded. The little cat slips back in again the evening after tomorrow, I’ve had it by telegraph.” But of the fact that Frau Chauchat would not be coming alone he had let nothing be heard, perhaps because he himself had known nothing of her and Peeperkorn’s coming together and belonging together, at least he affected surprise when Hans Castorp, on the day after the joint arrival, in a manner of speaking called him to account.

“Can’t tell you either where she picked him up,” he explained. “A travelling acquaintance, evidently, from the Pyrenees, I suppose. Well then, you’ll just have to take him into the bargain, you disappointed Celadon; there’s no help for it. Thick friendship, you understand. As it seems, they even have a common travelling purse. The man is heavily rich, from all I hear. Retired coffee king, you must know, Malay valet, opulent circumstances. Besides, he’s certainly not here for amusement, for apart from a considerable alcoholic catarrh there appears to be malignant tropical fever, ague, you understand, neglected, obstinate. You will have to be patient with him.”

“By all means, by all means,” said Hans Castorp condescendingly. “And you?” he thought. “How do you feel? You too are not entirely uninvolved, from former times, unless this and that deceives me, blue-cheeked widower with your graphic oil-painting. There is a good deal of malicious satisfaction in your words, it seems to me, and yet we are fellow-sufferers, in a certain sense, where Peeperkorn is concerned.” “A curious man, a decidedly original figure,” he said with a sketching gesture. “Robust and sparse, that is the impression one receives of him, at least the one I received from him at breakfast today. Robust and then again sparse, with these adjectives one must characterize him in my opinion, although they are not generally held compatible. He is certainly tall and broad and likes to stand with his legs apart, his hands buried in his vertical trouser pockets, they are set vertically in his case, as I had to observe, not sideways as with you and me and, I should think, elsewhere in the higher social classes, and when he stands there like that and speaks from the palate in the Dutch way, then he undeniably has something downright robust about him. But his chin-beard is thin, long, but thin, so that one believes one could count the hairs, and his eyes too are only small and pale, quite colourless, I cannot help it, and it is no use that he is always trying to open them wide, which gives him those pronounced forehead-lines that run first upward at the temples and then horizontally across his brow, his high red brow, you know, around which the white hair stands long indeed, but sparse; the eyes remain small and pale all the same, despite all that opening wide. And his high-buttoned waistcoat gives him something clerical, notwithstanding that the frock-coat is checked. That is my impression from this morning.”

“I see you have taken aim at him,” answered Behrens, “and have had a good look at the man in his peculiar character, which I find sensible, for you will have to come to terms with his presence.”

“Yes, we shall doubtless have to,” said Hans Castorp. It fell to him to sketch a rough picture of the new and unexpected guest, and he did his work not badly; we could not have done it much better ourselves. To be sure, his observation post had been the most favourable: we know, indeed, that during Clawdia’s absence he had moved neighbourly close to the Good Russian table, and since his own stood parallel with that one, only the other projected somewhat farther toward the veranda door, and Hans Castorp as well as Peeperkorn occupied the narrow sides facing the interior of the dining-room, they sat, so to speak, side by side, Hans Castorp somewhat behind the Dutchman, which made unobtrusive exploration easier, while he had Frau Chauchat diagonally before him in three-quarter profile. By way of supplement to his gifted sketch, it might be added that Peeperkorn’s upper lip was shaven, his nose large and fleshy, and his mouth likewise large and with an irregular formation of the lips, as though torn. Furthermore, his hands were fairly broad, but furnished with long tapering nails, and he employed them when speaking, in his almost unceasing speaking, though Hans Castorp could never quite seize its content, for exquisitely graduated gestures that held the attention, the delicately nuanced, carefully tended, exact and clean gestures of a conductor, the forefinger curved with the thumb into a ring, or the flat hand, broad, yet sharp-nailed, spread protectingly, damping, demanding attentiveness, only then to disappoint the smiling attentiveness he had aroused by the ungraspability of the utterance he had so elaborately prepared, or rather not exactly to disappoint it, but to transform it into delighted astonishment; for the force, delicacy, and significance of the preparation made ample compensation afterwards for what failed to appear, and had a satisfying, entertaining, indeed enriching effect in and of itself. Sometimes the utterance did not come at all. He would gently lay his hand upon the forearm of his neighbour to the left, a young Bulgarian scholar, or upon that of Madame Chauchat on his right, then raise this hand diagonally upward, enjoining silence and suspense for what he was about to say, and gaze, with lifted brows so that the lines running at right angles from his forehead to the outer corners of his eyes deepened masklike, down at the tablecloth beside the person thus spellbound, while his great, torn lips, parted, seemed about to release something of the utmost importance. After a while, however, he exhaled, renounced the attempt, motioned, as it were, “At ease,” and turned, with nothing accomplished, back to his coffee, which he had had served extra-strong, in a machine of his own.

After he had drunk it, he proceeded as follows. He damped down the conversation with his hand, created silence like the conductor who brings to rest the confusion of the tuning instruments and gathers his orchestra, with cultivated authority, for the beginning of the performance; for since his great head, wreathed in white hair, with the pale eyes, the mighty furrows of the brow, the long chin-beard, and the exposed suffering mouth, had an undeniably impressive effect, everything yielded to his gesture. All fell silent, looked at him smilingly, waited, and here and there someone nodded at him with a smile in encouragement. He said in a rather low voice:

“Ladies and gentlemen. Good. All good. Set-tled. Yet you will be pleased to keep before your eyes and not, not for one instant, lose sight of the fact that, but on this point no more. What it falls to me to utter is less that than above all and solely this, that we are obligated, that the inviolable, I repeat and lay all emphasis upon this expression, the inviolable claim is made upon us. No! No, ladies and gentlemen, not so! Not so that I should perhaps, how far astray it would be to think that I, set-tled, ladies and gentlemen! Completely settled. I know us to be agreed in all this, and so then: to the matter!”

He had said nothing; but his head had appeared so indubitably significant, his play of feature and gesture had been so decided, urgent, expressive, that everyone, and the listening Hans Castorp as well, thought they had heard something of the utmost importance, or, insofar as they had become aware of the failure of any factual and completed communication, did not in any case miss such a thing. We ask ourselves how a deaf man would have felt. Perhaps he would have been aggrieved, because he had committed the fallacy of inferring from the expression to the expressed and had imagined that through his affliction he came short intellectually. Such people are inclined to mistrust and bitterness. A young Chinese man, on the other hand, at the other end of the table, who had as yet little command of German and had not understood, but had heard and seen, manifested his delighted satisfaction by the cry: “Very well!” and even applauded.

And Mynheer Peeperkorn came "to the point." He drew himself up, expanded his broad chest, buttoned his checked frock-coat over the fastened waistcoat, and his white head was kingly. He beckoned one of the dining-room maids over to him, the dwarf woman it was; and though very busy, she at once obeyed his significant sign and took her place beside his chair, milk-pot and coffee-pot in hand. Nor could she refrain from nodding to him with a smile of encouragement from her large, elderly face, held in attentive thrall by his pale gaze beneath the mighty furrows of his brow, by his raised hand, whose forefinger joined the thumb in a circle while the other three fingers stood upright, overtopped by the lance-points of the nails.

"My child," he said, "good, very good, so far. You are small, what is that to me? On the contrary! I value it positively; I thank God that you are as you are, and by virtue of your characterful smallness. Well then! What I desire of you is small too, small and characterful. But first of all, what is your name?"

She stammered with a smile, and then said that her name was Emerentia.

"Excellent!" cried Peeperkorn, throwing himself back against the chair and stretching out his arm toward the dwarf. He cried it with an emphasis as though he meant to say: But what do you want? Everything stands magnificently! "My child," he went on, with the utmost gravity and almost sternly, "that surpasses all my expectations. Emerentia, you utter it modestly, but the name, and in conjunction with your person, in short, it opens the loveliest possibilities. It is truly worth lingering over and setting every feeling in one's breast upon it, so that, in the pet form, you understand me, my child, in the pet form, it might be Rentia; but Emchen too would be warming, and for the moment I adhere without wavering to Emchen. Emchen, then, my child, attend: a little bread, my dear. Stop! Stay! Let no misunderstanding creep in! I can see from your comparatively large face that the danger exists. Bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread; we have it here in abundance, in every variety of form. Distilled bread, my angel. God's bread, clear bread, a little pet name, and for the sake of refreshment. I am uncertain whether the sense of that word is clear to you; I would propose to substitute 'heartening' for it, were there not here again the danger of taking it in the sense of customary frivolity. Settled, Rentia. Settled and excluded. Rather in the sense of our duty and sacred obligation. For example, then, the debt of honour incumbent upon me, with stout heart, to rejoice in your characteristic smallness. A genever, beloved! I was about to say. Schiedam, Emerenzchen. Hurry and bring me one!"

"A genever, genuine," repeated the dwarf, turned once round on herself in her wish to rid herself of her pots, and then set them down on Hans Castorp's table beside his place-setting, plainly because she did not wish to trouble Herr Peeperkorn with them. She hurried off, and her employer at once received what he wanted. The little glass had been filled so full that the "bread" ran down it on every side and wetted the saucer. He took it between thumb and middle finger and held it up to the light. "Thus," he declared, "does Pieter Peeperkorn refresh himself with a dram." And he swallowed the grain spirit after chewing it briefly. "Now," he said, "I look at you all with refreshed eyes." And he took Frau Chauchat's hand from the tablecloth, carried it to his lips, and then laid it back again, after which he let his own rest there upon it for some time longer.

A singular man, weighty in personal presence, though indistinct. The Berghof company took a lively interest in him. He had lately withdrawn from colonial business, it was said, and brought his own safely to shore. People spoke of his splendid house in The Hague and of his villa at Scheveningen. Frau Stöhr called him a "money-magnet" (magnate! The appalling woman!), and in saying so could point to a string of pearls Madame Chauchat had worn with her evening gown ever since her return, which in Karoline's opinion could scarcely be taken as evidence of Transcaucasian conjugal gallantry, but must have come out of the "common travelling purse." She winked as she said it, tilted her head sideways toward Hans Castorp, and drew down the corners of her mouth in parodic distress, using his predicament for merciless mockery, unrefined by illness and suffering. He preserved his composure. He even corrected her educational blunder with a touch of wit. She had misspoken, he said. A money-magnate. But magnet was not bad either, for Peeperkorn evidently had much that was attractive. And to Fräulein Engelhart too, when she asked him, faintly blushing, smiling askance and not looking at him, how the new guest pleased him, he replied with well-kept equanimity. Mynheer Peeperkorn was a "blurred personality," he said, a personality, but blurred. The precision of this characterization proved objectivity and with it serenity of mind; it dislodged the schoolmistress from her position. And as for Ferdinand Wehsal and his contorted hint at the unexpected circumstances in which Frau Chauchat had returned, Hans Castorp here proved that there are looks which fall not a hair short of the most articulated word in precise unequivocalness. "Wretch!" said the look with which he measured the man from Mannheim, said it to the exclusion of any interpretation that might go ever so slightly astray; and Wehsal, for his part, acknowledged the look and pocketed it, indeed even nodded to it while showing his ruined teeth, but from that time on refrained from wearing Hans Castorp's overcoat on walks with Naphta, Settembrini, and Ferge.

In God's name, he could carry it himself; indeed he preferred carrying it himself, and had only from kindness lent it now and then to that pitiable fellow. But surely no one in our circle mistakes the fact that Hans Castorp was hard hit by those wholly unforeseen circumstances which ruined all the preparations he had inwardly made for the reunion with the object of his Carnival adventures. Better said, they made them superfluous, and therein lay the humiliation.

His resolutions had been of the most delicate and prudent kind, far removed from clumsy impetuosity. There had been no thought whatever of meeting Clawdia at the station, and fortunate indeed that he had not let such a thought arise. It had in any case been wholly uncertain whether a woman to whom illness gave so great a freedom would even be willing to acknowledge as real the fantastic events of a distant masked and foreign-tongued night of dream, or would wish to be reminded of them outright. No importunity, no coarse claim! Even granting that his relation to the slant-eyed invalid had in essence left behind the bounds of occidental reason and civility, in form the most perfect civilization must be maintained, and for the moment even the appearance of forgetfulness. A cavalier's greeting from table to table, nothing further for the present. A courtly approach at some later opportunity, with a light inquiry after the traveller's welfare since the other day... The real reunion might then, in its own hour, arise as the reward of controlled chivalry.

All this delicacy, as has been said, now appeared null and void because spontaneity, and with it every possibility of merit, had been taken from him. The presence of Mynheer Peeperkorn too thoroughly excluded the possibility of any tactic that had not consisted in the utmost reserve. From his balcony recess on the evening of the arrival Hans Castorp had seen the sleigh, on whose box beside the driver the Malay valet was seated, and had seen a little yellow man in an overcoat with a fur collar and a stiff hat come walking up the curved approach; and there beside Clawdia in the back had sat the stranger, his hat low on his brow. Hans Castorp slept little that night. In the morning it had offered no difficulty to learn the name of the confusing fellow-traveller, together with the additional information that the two had taken adjoining superior rooms on the first floor. Then came first breakfast, at which, early in his place and pale enough, he had waited for the slam of the glass door. It did not come. Clawdia's entrance had taken place noiselessly, for behind her Mynheer Peeperkorn had closed the glass door, and great, broad, and high-browed, with the mighty head white-encircled as by flames, he had followed in the tracks of his travelling companion as she, with familiar catlike tread and thrust-forward head, approached her table. Yes, it was she, unchanged. Contrary to his programme and forgetful of himself, Hans Castorp took her in with his sleepless gaze. There was her reddish-blond hair, not elaborately dressed, but laid in a simple braid round her head; there were her "steppe-wolf lights," the curve of her nape, her lips, which seemed fuller than they were by virtue of that emphasis of the cheekbones which produced a graceful hollowing of the cheeks themselves... Clawdia! he thought, shuddering; and he looked the unexpected one in the face, not without a mockingly defiant toss of the head against the masklike grandeur of his appearance, not without calling upon his heart to make merry over the grand mightiness of a present claim of possession which certain pasts cast in a rather crooked light: certain pasts indeed, not dark and uncertain ones lying in the province of amateur oil-painting, such as may well have disturbed him himself... Frau Chauchat too had preserved her manner, before sitting down, of turning smilingly to face the room, as though presenting herself to the company; and Peeperkorn followed her lead in this, standing obliquely behind her and allowing the little ceremony to be completed before seating himself at the end of his table beside Clawdia.

There had been nothing doing with the cavalier's greeting from table to table. At the "presentation" Clawdia's eyes had drifted over Hans Castorp's person, indeed over his whole location, toward remoter regions of the dining room; at the next meeting in the dining hall it had been no different; and the more meals went by without the eyes encountering one another in any other fashion than in a blind and indifferent passing sweep from Frau Chauchat's side when she happened to turn round once during the meal, the less fitting it became to bring in the cavalier's greeting at all. During the brief evening sociability the travelling companions kept to the small salon. They sat side by side on the sofa, amid the circle of their table companions, and Peeperkorn, whose magnificent face glowed a deep red against the whiteness of his flaming hair and chin-beard, finished the bottle of red wine he had had served for dinner. At every principal meal he drank one, even one and a half or two, not to speak of the "bread" with which he began already at first breakfast. The kingly man was evidently in unusual need of refreshment. He administered it to himself several times a day in the form of extra-strong coffee as well: not only in the morning, but at noon too he drank it from a large cup, not after the meal, but during it and beside the wine. Both, Hans Castorp heard him say, were good against the fever, quite apart from all their restorative effect, very good against his intermittent tropical fever, which on the second day already confined him for several hours to his room and bed. The Hofrat called it quartan fever, since it came over the Dutchman about every fourth day: first as a chattering, then as a burning, and then as a sweating. He was said to have a swollen spleen from it as well.

_Vingt et un_

Thus a span of time went by, weeks it was, three to four by our estimate, since we cannot possibly rely on Hans Castorp's judgment and sense of measure. They glided past without bringing forth any fresh change; they brought forth on the side of our hero a habitual defiance of unforeseen circumstances, of that circumstance which even called itself Pieter Peeperkorn when it took a dram; of the disturbing presence of this kingly, weighty, and indistinct man, disturbing indeed in a much coarser fashion than Herr Settembrini had once "disturbed matters up here" in old days. Defiant, ill-humoured furrows dug themselves vertically between Hans Castorp's brows, and from beneath these furrows he looked five times a day at her who had come home, glad all the same to be able to look at her, and full of contempt for a grandly mighty presence which had no inkling what a crooked light the past cast upon it.

One evening, however, as might well happen once without any particular occasion, the evening sociability in hall and rooms took on a livelier form than usual. There had been music, gypsy airs, boldly performed on the violin by a Hungarian student, after which Hofrat Behrens, who had likewise appeared with Doctor Krokowski for a quarter of an hour, had compelled somebody or other to play the melody of the "Pilgrims' Chorus" in the lower register of the piano, while he himself, standing beside it, worked upon the treble of the instrument in a hopping fashion with a brush and thus parodied the accompanying violin figures. That provoked laughter. Amid loud applause, and with a benevolent shaking of the head directed at his own high spirits, the Hofrat afterwards left the reception rooms. But the sociability spun itself on; music still continued, without demanding gathered attention for it; people sat over dominoes and bridge with drinks, amused themselves with the comic instruments, and chatted here and there. The company of the Good Russian Table too had mingled among the groups in the hall and the piano-room. Mynheer Peeperkorn was to be seen in various places, one could not help seeing him; his majestic head towered above every surrounding, overwhelmed it by royal force and significance, and if those who stood about him may at first have been drawn only by the rumour of his wealth, it was yet very soon his personality itself, and itself alone, to which they clung: they stood smiling and nodded to him, encouragingly and forgetful of themselves, held spellbound by his wan eye beneath the mighty furrows of his brow, kept in suspense by the urgency of his long-nailed gestures of culture, and never becoming conscious of the faintest feeling of disappointment at the incomprehensible brokenness, indistinctness, and actual uselessness of what followed them.

If under these conditions we look about for Hans Castorp, we find him in the writing-and-reading room, that reception room where once, in former days, there had fallen to his lot weighty disclosures regarding the organization of mankind's progress. That former time is vague; narrator, hero, and reader are no longer altogether clear as to its degree of pastness. It was quieter here; only a few persons shared the room with him. Someone was writing under an electric hanging lamp at one of the double desks. A lady with two pairs of pince-nez on her nose sat by the library turning the pages of an illustrated volume. Hans Castorp sat near the open passage to the piano-room, with his back to the portiere, with a newspaper, on the chair that happened to stand there, a plush-covered Renaissance chair, if one wishes to see it, with a high straight back and no arms. The young man did indeed hold his newspaper as one holds it in order to read, but he was not reading; instead, with head askew, he listened to the broken music next door interspersed with talk, while the darkness of his brows indicated that even this reached only half an ear, and that his thoughts were going by unmusical ways, thorny ways of disappointment with circumstances which, after a long waiting-time a young man had taken upon himself, were at the end of it shamefully making a fool of him; bitter ways of defiance, on which it could surely no longer be very far to the resolve, and its execution, of laying the newspaper on this chance and uncomfortable chair, going out through that door into the hall, and exchanging the frost-biting solitude of the balcony recess, alone with Maria Mancini, for this botched sociability.

"And your cousin, Monsieur?" a voice asked behind him, above his head. It was an enchanting voice to his ear, an ear formed once and for all to feel its tart-sweet veiling as an extreme delight, carrying the very notion of the pleasant to an extreme summit; it was the voice that in former times had said, "With pleasure. But don't break him," a conquering voice, a voice of destiny, and, if he had heard rightly, it had asked after Joachim.

He slowly let his newspaper sink and lifted his face a little higher, so that his head lay farther up against the steep back of the chair, touching it only with the crown of his hair. He even closed his eyes a little, but opened them again at once, in order to direct them slantwise upward, in the direction prescribed to his glance by the posture of his head, somewhere into emptiness. The poor fellow, one might have said that there was almost something visionary and somnambulistic in his expression. He wished she would ask once again, but that did not happen. Thus he was not even sure whether she was still standing behind him when, after a considerable time, with strange belatedness and in a half voice, he replied:

"He is dead. He did duty in the flatlands and died."

He himself noticed that "dead" was the first emphatic word to fall again between them. At the same time he noticed that, for want of familiarity with his language, she chose expressions of sympathy that were too facile when she said behind and above him:

"Oh dear. That is a pity. Quite dead and buried? Since when?"

"For some time. His mother took him down with her. He had grown a war beard. Three volleys of honour were fired over his grave."

"He had deserved them. He was very good. Much better than other people, certain others."

"Yes, he was good. Radamanth was always speaking of his worthy zeal. But his body wanted it otherwise. _Rebellio carnis_, the Jesuits call it. He was always physically inclined, in an honourable way. But his body had let dishonourable things enter into it, and played his worthy zeal a trick. Besides, it is more moral to lose oneself and ruin oneself than to preserve oneself."

"I can see one is still a philosophical good-for-nothing. Radamanth? Who is that?"

"Behrens. Settembrini calls him that."

"Ah, Settembrini, I know. That was that Italian there ... I did not love him. He was not humanly inclined." The voice pronounced the word "humanly" with a certain languid, dreamy lengthening. "He was arrogant." The stress fell on the second syllable. "He is no longer here? I am stupid. I do not know what Radamanth is."

"Something humanistic. Settembrini is spoilt. We philosophized at length in those times, he and Naphta and I."

"Who is Naphta?"

"His adversary."

"If he is his adversary, I should like to make his acquaintance. But did I not say that your cousin would die if he tried to be a soldier in the flatlands?"

"Yes, you knew it."

"What can you be thinking of!"

Long silence. He retracted nothing. He waited, the crown of his head pressed against the steep back, with a seer's gaze for the sounding forth again of the voice, once more uncertain whether she was still behind him, fearing that the broken music next door might have swallowed the sound of departing steps. At length, however, it came again:

"And Monsieur did not even go to his cousin's funeral?"

He answered:

"No, I said adieu to him here, before they shut him in, when he began to smile. You cannot imagine how cold his forehead was."

"There it is again! What a manner of speaking to a lady one hardly knows!"

"Shall I speak humanistically instead of humanly?" Involuntarily he too lengthened the word in a sleepy way, rather like someone stretching himself and yawning.

"_Quelle blague!_ You were always here?"

"Yes. I have been waiting."

"For what?"

"For you."

A laugh above his head, uttered together with the word "Fool!" "For me! They will not have let you go."

"Oh yes, Behrens would once have let me go, in a fit of rage. But it would only have been a wild departure. For besides the old scars from former times, from my schooldays, you know, there is the fresh spot Behrens found, and that gives me the fever."

"Still fever?"

"Yes, always a little. Almost always. It varies. But it is not intermittent fever."

"_Des allusions?_"

He was silent. He drew dark brows above his seer's gaze. After a while he asked:

"And where have _you_ been?"

A hand struck the back of the chair.

"_Mais c’est un sauvage!_ Where have I been? Everywhere. In Moscow" the voice said the word with a languid lengthening akin to that of "humanly," "in Baku, in German spas, in Spain."

"Oh, in Spain. What was it like?"

"So-so. One travels badly. The people are half Moors. Castile is very arid and rigid. The Kremlin is more beautiful than that palace or monastery there at the foot of the mountains ..."

"The Escorial."

"Yes, Philip's palace. An inhuman palace. What pleased me much better was the folk-dance in Catalonia, the sardana, to the bagpipes. I danced with them myself. They all take hold of one another and dance in a ring. The whole square is full. _C’est charmant._ It is human. I bought myself a little blue cap, such as all the men and boys of the people wear there, almost already a fez, the boina. I wear it in the rest cure and at other times. Monsieur shall judge whether it becomes me."

"Which Monsieur?"

"The one here in the chair."

"I thought: Mynheer Peeperkorn."

"He has judged already. He says it becomes me charmingly."

"Did he say that? Say it to the end? Speak the sentence through so that one could understand it?"

"Ah, it seems one is ill-humoured. One would like to be malicious, biting. One tries to make fun of people who are much greater and better and more human than oneself together with one's ... _avec son ami bavard de la Méditerranée, son maître grand parleur_ ... But I shall not permit anyone to speak of my friends-"

"Do you still have my interior portrait?" he interrupted the voice in a melancholy tone.

She laughed. "I should have to look for it sometime."

"I carry yours here. Besides, I have a little easel on my chest of drawers where at night and-"

He did not get to the end. Before him stood Peeperkorn. He had been looking about for his travelling companion; through the portieres he had come in and was standing before the chair of the man with whom he saw her chatting over its back, standing there like a tower, and indeed so close in front of Hans Castorp's feet that the latter, though his somnambulism did not prevent his perceiving that he must now rise and be polite, had difficulty in getting up from his chair between the two of them; he had to slide sideways down from it, so that the actors in the scene stood in a triangle with the chair in their midst.

Frau Chauchat satisfied a requirement of the civilized West by introducing "the gentlemen" to one another. An acquaintance from former times, she said with reference to Hans Castorp, from the days of her previous stay. Herr Peeperkorn's existence required no elucidation. She named him, and the Dutchman, his pale glance fixed on the young man beneath the idol-like arabesque work of his attentively deepened furrows of brow and temples, held out his hand, the broad back of it freckled, a captain's hand, thought Hans Castorp, if one disregarded the nail-lances. For the first time he stood under the immediate influence of Peeperkorn's massive personality ("personality": the word was constantly in one's mind in his presence; all at once one knew what that was, a personality, when one saw him; more than that, one was convinced that a personality could not possibly look otherwise than he did), and his wavering years of youth felt crushed by the weight of this broad-shouldered, red-faced, white-maned man of sixty, with the painfully torn mouth and the chin-beard hanging long and narrow down upon the clerically buttoned waistcoat. Besides, Peeperkorn was politeness itself.

"My dear sir," he said, "quite so. No, allow me,-quite so! I make your acquaintance this evening, the acquaintance of a trustworthy young man,-I do it knowingly, my dear sir, I am in the matter with all my strength. I like you, my dear sir; I-beg leave! Settled. You appeal to me."

There was no gainsaying that. His gestures of cultivation were far too peremptory; Hans Castorp pleased him. And Peeperkorn drew conclusions from it, which he let be known by hints, and which found helpful and appropriate completion through the mouth of his travelling companion.

"My child," he said, "all well. But how would it be-I beg you to understand me properly. Life is short, our capacity to do justice to its demands, it is simply-Those are facts, my child. Laws. Inexorabilities. In short, my child, in short and in fine.-" He remained in an expressively suggestive gesture, disclaiming responsibility in case, despite his hint, a decisive mistake should be committed here.

Evidently Frau Chauchat was practised in discerning the direction of his wishes from half a word. She said:

"Why not. One might stay together a little longer, perhaps have a little game and drink a bottle of wine. Why are you standing there?" she turned to Hans Castorp. "Bestir yourself! We are not going to remain three by ourselves, we must have company. Who is still in the salon? Engage whoever you find! Fetch some friends from the balconies. We shall ask Doctor Ting-Fu from our table."

Peeperkorn rubbed his hands.

"Absolutely," he said. "Perfect. Excellent. Make haste, young friend! Obey! We shall form a circle. We shall play and eat and drink. We shall feel that we-Absolutely, young man!"

Hans Castorp took the lift to the second floor. He knocked at A. K. Ferge's door, and Ferge for his part fetched Ferdinand Wehsal and Herr Albin out of their chairs in the lower rest hall. They had found State Prosecutor Paravant and the Magnus couple still in the hall, Frau Stöhr and Kleefeld still in the salon. Here, beneath the central chandelier, a spacious gaming-table was set up, and surrounded with chairs and little serving tables. Mynheer greeted every guest who joined them with pale and courteous glance beneath attentively uplifted brow-arabesques. Twelve persons sat down, Hans Castorp between the majestic host and Clawdia Chauchat; cards and counters were laid out, for they had agreed upon a few rounds of _Vingt et un_, and Peeperkorn, in his significant manner, ordered from the summoned dwarf some wine, a white Chablis of the year '06, three bottles to begin with, and sweets besides, whatever dried southern fruit and confectionery might be procured. The hand-rubbing with which he welcomed the good things as they were brought in was full of contentment, and in words too, words that broke off in a significant fashion, he sought to communicate his sensations, with complete success indeed so far as a general effect of personality was concerned. He laid both hands upon the forearms of his neighbours, raised the lance-pointed forefinger, and with all-embracing success demanded the highest attention for the splendid golden colour of the wine in the glasses, for the sugar sweated out by the Malaga grapes, for a certain sort of little salt-and-poppy pretzels, which he called divine, stifling in the bud, by a peremptory gesture of cultivation, any contradiction that might have stirred against so strong a word. He was the first to take the bank; but he soon handed it over to Herr Albin, since, if one understood him rightly, the office hindered him in the free enjoyment of circumstances.

Plainly hazard was a secondary matter to him. In his opinion they were playing for nothing, having fixed fifty rappen as the smallest stake at his suggestion; but that was a very great deal for the majority of those concerned; State Prosecutor Paravant as well as Frau Stöhr turned alternately red and pale, and this lady in particular writhed in dreadful struggles when confronted with the question whether on eighteen she should buy again. She shrieked aloud when Herr Albin, with cold routine, tossed her a card whose value brought her venture utterly to grief, and Peeperkorn laughed heartily over it.

"Shriek, shriek, madame!" he said. "It sounds shrill and full of life and comes from the deepest - Drink, refresh your heart for new -" And he poured for her, poured for his neighbours too and for himself, ordered three more bottles, and clinked glasses with Wehsal and the inwardly desolated Frau Magnus, since those two seemed to him most in need of reviving. Quickly the faces flushed higher and ever higher from the wine, truly wonderful as it was, with the exception of Doctor Ting-Fu's, which remained unchangeably yellow, with jet-black rat-slits in it, and who, with a hidden giggle, made very high stakes, and with outrageous luck at that. Others would not be left behind. Prosecutor Paravant, with swimming eyes, defied fate by staking ten francs on an opening card of only moderate promise, overbought himself, turning pale, and won the money back doubled, since Herr Albin, in deceptive confidence in an ace he had received, had had all the stakes doubled. These were shocks that did not confine themselves to the person who prepared them for himself. The whole circle shared in them, and even Herr Albin, whose cool circumspection rivalled that of the croupiers at the casino in Monte Carlo, where he declared himself a regular guest, was only imperfectly master of his excitement. Hans Castorp too played high; so did Kleefeld and Frau Chauchat. They went on to the "rounds," played "Railway," "My Aunt, Your Aunt," and the dangerous "Différence." Outbursts of jubilation and despair, discharges of rage and hysterical fits of laughter, provoked by the stimulus which the impish luck exercised upon their nerves, took place, and they were genuine and serious - they could have sounded no otherwise amid the vicissitudes of life itself.

Yet it was not only, nor even chiefly, the play and the wine that brought about the spiritual over-tension of the circle, this heating of the features, this widening of the shining eyes, or that which one might have called the strained quality of the little company, its breath-held state, its almost painful concentration upon the moment. Rather, all this was to be attributed to the effect of a ruling nature among those present, to that of the "personality" among them, that of Mynheer Peeperkorn, who kept the lead in his gesture-rich hand and forced them all beneath the spell of the hour by the spectacle of his grand countenance, his pale gaze beneath the monumental fold-work of his brow, by his speech and the urgency of his pantomime. What did he say? Extremely indistinct things, and the more indistinct the more he drank. But they hung upon his lips, smiled and stared, nodding with lifted brows at the circle his forefinger formed with his thumb, beside which the other fingers rose pointed as lances, while it laboured expressively in his royal face, and let themselves without resistance be held to a service of feeling far beyond the measure of devoted passion that these people were otherwise accustomed to exact of themselves. For some individuals this service was beyond their strength. Frau Magnus at least was taken ill. She threatened to sink away in a swoon, yet stubbornly refused to go to her room, contenting herself instead with being laid upon the chaise longue, where her forehead was furnished with a wet towel, and whence, after some recovery, she returned to the circle.

Peeperkorn wished to attribute her collapse to insufficient nourishment. In words that broke off with significance, forefinger raised, he expressed himself to that effect. One must eat, eat properly, if one is to do justice to the demands, he gave them to understand, and ordered sustenance for the circle, a collation, meat, cold cuts, tongue, goose breast, roast, sausage, and ham - platters heaped with fatty delicacies which, garnished with balls of butter, radishes, and parsley, resembled splendid flower-beds. But although, notwithstanding a preceding supper, of whose substantial quality not a word need be said, they met with cheerful favour, Mynheer Peeperkorn after a few mouthfuls declared them "trumpery" - and with an anger that testified to the alarming incalculability of his ruling nature. Indeed, he flew into a choleric passion when someone ventured to defend the snack; his mighty head swelled, and he struck the table with his fist, declaring it all damned rubbish - whereupon they all fell silent in embarrassment, since in the end, as donor and host, he had the right to judge his own gifts.

Besides, the anger, however incomprehensible it might appear, became him excellently, as Hans Castorp in particular was obliged to confess. It did not disfigure him in the least, did not diminish him, but, in its inexplicability, which no one in his heart presumed to connect with the quantities of wine consumed, appeared so great and royal that all shrank down and everybody took care not to take another bite of the meats. It was Frau Chauchat who soothed her travelling companion. She stroked his broad captain's hand, resting on the table after the blow, and said coaxingly that one might order something else, a warm dish, if he wished, and if the chef could still be won over to it. "My child," he said, "- good." And effortlessly, in full dignity, he found the transition from heavy choler to a moderated state by kissing Clawdia's hand. He wanted omelettes for himself and his own - for everyone a good herb omelette, so that one might do justice to the demands. And with the order he sent a hundred-franc note into the kitchen, to induce the staff to interrupt their evening rest.

His well-being too was wholly restored when the steaming dish appeared on several platters, canary-yellow and flecked with green, spreading through the room a soft warm fragrance of eggs and butter. They fell to, together with Peeperkorn and under his supervision in their enjoyment, while with broken words and compelling gestures of culture he held everyone to the most attentive, indeed the most fervent appreciation of the gift of God. He had Dutch genever poured with it, a full round, and compelled them all to take the clear draught, from which there rose a wholesome scent of grain with a delicate tincture of juniper, with strained devotion.

Hans Castorp smoked. Frau Chauchat too did justice to the cigarettes with mouthpieces which, for her convenience, she had laid before her on the table in a Russian lacquer box adorned with a hurtling troika, and Peeperkorn did not censure it that his neighbours abandoned themselves to this pleasure, though he himself did not smoke, never did. If one understood him rightly, tobacco consumption already counted in his judgment among the over-refined pleasures, the cultivation of which signified a theft from the majesty of the simple gifts of life, those gifts and demands to which our power of feeling scarcely succeeds in doing justice. "Young man," he said to Hans Castorp, holding him spellbound with his pale gaze and his gesture of culture, "young man - the simple! The sacred! Good, you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming egg dish, a pure grain spirit - let us first fulfil and enjoy that, exhaust it, truly do it justice, before we - Absolutely, sir. Settled. I have known persons, men and women, cocaine-eaters, hashish-smokers, morphinists - Good, dear friend! Perfect! Let them! We ought not to chide and judge. But to that which should have come first, the simple, the great, the God-originated, these people were wholly - Settled, my friend. Condemned. Rejected. They had left everything owing to it! Whatever your name may be, young man - Good, I knew it already, I have forgotten it again - it is not in cocaine, not in opium, not in vice as such, that viciousness consists. The sin that cannot be forgiven, it lies -"

He broke off. Great and broad, turned towards his neighbour, he remained in a mightily expressive silence that compelled understanding, forefinger raised, the mouth under the bare and red, somewhat razor-sore upper lip irregularly torn open, the linear fold-work of his bald forehead, ringed round with white, strainedly drawn upward, the small pale eyes widened, in which Hans Castorp saw something flicker like horror at the crime, the great transgression, the unpardonable failure to which he had alluded and whose terribleness he silently commanded him to fathom with all the spellbinding force of an indistinct ruling nature... Horror, thought Hans Castorp, of an objective sort, but also something like personal horror, relating to himself, the royal man - _fear_, then, but not petty and paltry fear; rather something like panic dread flickered there, so it seemed, for an instant, and Hans Castorp was of too reverent a disposition for this observation, despite all the grounds that existed for a hostile attitude on his part towards Frau Chauchat's majestic travelling companion, not to have shaken him.

He lowered his eyes and nodded, to afford his exalted neighbour the satisfaction of being understood.

"That is certainly true," he said. "It may be a sin - and a sign of inadequacy - to indulge refinements without having done justice to the simple and natural gifts of life, which are so great and sacred. That is your opinion, if I understand you rightly, Mynheer Peeperkorn, and although the thought has never yet occurred to me of itself, I can assent to you out of my own conviction now that you point it out. It may, besides, be rare enough for these healthy and simple gifts of life to receive really full justice. Most people are surely too slack and inattentive and conscienceless and gone slack within to let such justice befall them; that is likely how it is."

The mighty man was highly satisfied. "Young man," he said, "- perfect. Will you permit me - not another word. I beg you to drink with me, to empty the glass to the bottom, arm in arm. This is not yet to say that I offer you the brotherly thou - I was just on the point of doing so, but recollect that it would be a trifle over-hasty. Most probably, before very long, I shall - rely upon it! But if you wish, and insist, that we should at once -"

Hans Castorp signified his approval of the postponement suggested by Peeperkorn himself.

"Good, my boy. Good, comrade. Inadequacy - good. Good and ghastly. Conscienceless - very good. Gifts - not good. Demands! Sacred, womanly demands of life upon honour and manly force -"

Hans Castorp had suddenly to realize that Peeperkorn was heavily drunk. Yet even his drunkenness did not work as something petty and shameful, not as a state of degradation, but combined with the majesty of his nature into a magnificent and awe-inspiring phenomenon. Bacchus himself, thought Hans Castorp, leaned drunken upon his enthusiastic companions without thereby losing divinity, and in the highest degree everything depended on _who_ was drunk, a personality or a linen-weaver. Inwardly, out of respect for the overpowering travelling companion, he took the greatest care not to relax in the slightest, although his gestures of culture had grown lax and his tongue slurred.

"Thou-brother -" said Peeperkorn, throwing back the mighty body in free and proud drunkenness, his arm stretched out upon the table-top and striking it lightly with the loosely clenched fist, "- contemplated, in near prospect, though sobriety at first still - good. Settled. Life - young man - it is a woman, a woman lying spread out, with breasts welling close together and a great soft expanse of belly between wide-sweeping hips, with slender arms and swelling thighs and half-closed eyes, that in glorious, mocking challenge exacts our utmost entreaty, all the tension of our manly desire, which stands before it or comes to shame - to shame, young man, do you understand what that would mean? The defeat of feeling before life, that is the inadequacy for which there is no grace, no pity, and no dignity, but which is mercilessly and mockingly cast off - settled, young man, and spat out... Shame and dishonour are mild words for this ruin and bankruptcy, for this ghastly disgrace. It is the end, hellish despair, the end of the world..."

As he spoke, the Dutchman had thrown the mighty body farther and farther back, while at the same time his royal head sank towards his chest, as though he meant to fall asleep. But at the last word he let the limp fist sweep out and fall in a heavy blow upon the table, so that the slight Hans Castorp, nervous from play and wine and from the peculiarity of all the circumstances, started and looked up at the mighty man in reverent alarm. "The end of the world" - how the word sat upon his countenance! Hans Castorp could not remember ever having heard it spoken, except perhaps in religion class, and that was no accident, he thought; for to which of all the people he knew could such a thunder-word have belonged, who had _the stature_ for it - to put the question properly? Little Naphta might perhaps once have made use of it; but that would have been usurpation and sharp talk, whereas in Peeperkorn's mouth the thunder-word gained its full blaring and trumpet-surrounded weight, in short, biblical greatness. "My God - a personality!" he felt for the hundredth time. "I have fallen in with a personality, and he is Clawdia's travelling companion!" Fairly bemused on his own account as well, he set his wine-glass spinning on the table, the other hand in his trouser pocket and one eye screwed up against the smoke of the cigarette he held in the corner of his mouth. Ought he not to have kept silence after thunder-words had been spoken from an authorized quarter? What was his dry voice beside them? But accustomed to discussion through his democratic educators - both democratic by nature, though one of them struggled against being so - he allowed himself to be seduced into one of his loyal-hearted comments. He said:

"Your remarks, Mynheer Peeperkorn" (what a word that was: remarks! Does one make "remarks" about the end of the world?), "bring my thoughts back once more to what was settled earlier about vice, namely, that it consists in an offence against the simple and, as you say, sacred, or, as I should like to say, classical gifts of life, the gifts of life with stature, so to speak, in favour of the late and over-fine ones, the refinements to which one 'gives oneself over,' as one of us expressed it, while one 'consecrates oneself' to the great ones and 'does homage' to them. But here it seems to me that the excuse - forgive me, I am of a nature inclined to excuse - although excuse, to be sure, has no stature, as I distinctly feel - the excuse, then, for vice lies precisely in this, namely insofar as it rests upon 'inadequacy,' as we called it. You have said things of such stature about the terrors of inadequacy that you see me sincerely affected by them. But it seems to me that the vicious man shows himself by no means insensitive to these terrors; on the contrary, he does them all justice, in that the failure of his feeling before the classical gifts of life drives him to vice, in which therefore there lies, or need lie, no insult to life, since it may just as well be conceived as homage to it, insofar as the refinements are, after all, means of intoxication and exaltation, _stimulantia_, as people say, supports and intensifications of the powers of feeling, so that life is indeed their purpose and meaning, love of feeling, inadequacy's striving after feeling... I mean..."

What was he talking about? Was it not impertinence enough, democratic impertinence, to say “one of the two of us,” when one party was a personality and the other was himself? Did he draw the courage for this insolence from bygone relations that cast certain present rights of possession in an oblique light? Was he so pricked on that he must needs entangle himself, into the bargain, in an equally impertinent analysis of “vice”? Well, now he might see how he was to get himself out of the affair; for it was clear that he had conjured up something dreadful.

During his guest’s speech Mynheer Peeperkorn had remained in his thrown-back attitude, with head sunk upon his breast, so that one might have doubted whether Hans Castorp’s words were penetrating to his consciousness. But now, gradually, while the young man grew confused, he began to straighten himself from the back of his chair, higher and higher, to his full height, while at the same time his majestic head swelled red, the arabesques of his brow lifted and tightened, and his little eyes widened into a pale menace. What was preparing? A fit, beside which the preceding one would have meant only slight irritation, seemed to be coming on. Mynheer’s lower lip braced itself in mighty wrath against the upper, so that the corners of his mouth sank and his chin was thrust forward, and slowly his right arm rose from the table to the height of his head and beyond, the fist clenched, drawing back magnificently for the annihilating blow against the democratic chatterer, who, driven into fright and yet also adventurously delighted by the spectacle of expressively royal anger that unfolded before him, had difficulty concealing his fear and his impulse to flee. He said hastily, forestalling him:

“Naturally I expressed myself imperfectly. The whole thing is a question of format, nothing more. One cannot call vice anything that has format. Vice never has format. The refinements have none. But from the most ancient times there has been placed in man’s hand, for his striving after feeling, an aid, an intoxicant and stimulant, which itself belongs among the classic gifts of life and bears the character of the simple and the holy, and therefore not of vice, an aid of format, if I may put it so: wine, then, a divine gift to mankind, as even the old humanistic peoples maintained, the philanthropic invention of a god, with which civilization itself is connected, permit me to point that out. For we hear, do we not, that thanks to the art of planting the vine and pressing the grape, men emerged from a state of brutality and attained civility, and even today the peoples among whom wine grows count as more civilized, or count themselves so, than the wineless, the Cimmerians, which is certainly noteworthy. For it means that civility is not at all a matter of intellect and well-articulated sobriety, but rather has to do with exaltation, intoxication, and the solaced feeling. Is that not, if I may take the liberty of putting the question to you, your view too in this matter?”

A rogue, this Hans Castorp. Or, as Herr Settembrini had expressed it with writerly finesse, a “wag.” Incautious and even insolent in his dealings with personalities, and then again deft enough when it was a question of pulling himself out of the mire. First, in a most perilous situation and on the spur of the moment, he had accomplished a vindication of drink with a great deal of propriety; next, quite incidentally, he had brought the talk round to “civility,” of which, in Mynheer Peeperkorn’s primordial and terrible attitude, there was admittedly little to be felt; and finally he had loosened that attitude and made it unsuitable by putting to the man magnificently involved in it a question that could not possibly be answered with uplifted fist. The Hollander accordingly relaxed his antediluvian gesture of wrath; slowly his arm sank back to the table, his head subsided, “your luck!” was to be read in his expression, now only conditionally and after the event threatening, the storm drew off, and moreover Frau Chauchat now intervened, drawing her travelling companion’s attention to the spreading decay of sociability.

“Dear friend, you are neglecting your guests,” she said in French. “You are devoting yourself far too exclusively to this gentleman, with whom you no doubt have important matters to settle. But meanwhile the game has almost come to a stop, and I am afraid people are bored. Shall we bring the evening to a close?”

Peeperkorn at once turned to the circle round the table. It was true: demoralization, lethargy, stupor had spread; the guests were carrying on like an unsupervised school class. Several were falling asleep. Peeperkorn immediately seized the dragging reins. “My ladies and gentlemen!” he cried, with raised forefinger, and this lance-point finger was like a beckoning sword or like a banner, while his cry resembled the leader’s “After me, whoever is no coward!” that brings a beginning rout to a standstill. And indeed the deployment of his personality had an immediate waking and rallying effect. People pulled themselves together, tightened their slackened features, and nodded smiling into the powerful host’s pale eyes beneath the idol-like lineation of his brow. He held them all under a spell and once more called them to service, lowering the tip of his forefinger to that of his thumb and letting the others stand up beside them with their long nails. He spread out his captain’s hand protectively and restrainingly, and from his painfully torn lips came words whose jerky indistinctness, thanks to the support of his personality behind them, exercised the most compelling power over all minds.

“My ladies and gentlemen, good. The flesh, my ladies and gentlemen, is, after all, finished. No, allow me: ‘weak,’ that is how it stands in Scripture. ‘Weak,’ that is to say inclined to yield to the demands... But I appeal to your... In short and good, my ladies and gentlemen, I _ap-peal_. You will tell me: sleep. Good, my ladies and gentlemen, perfect, excellent. I love and honour sleep. I venerate its deep, sweet, refreshing voluptuousness. Sleep belongs among the, what was your phrase, young man? among the classic gifts of life of the first, the very first... if you please... of the highest order, my ladies and gentlemen. Yet kindly observe and remember: Gethsemane! ‘And took unto him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee. And said unto them: Stay here and watch with me.’ You remember? ‘And came unto them and found them sleeping and said unto Peter: Could you then not watch with me one hour?’ Intense, my ladies and gentlemen. Penetrating. Heart-moving. ‘And came and found them sleeping again, and their eyes were full of sleep. And said unto them: Ah, will you now sleep and take your rest? Behold, the hour is here...’ My ladies and gentlemen: piercing, heart-rending.”

In truth all were moved and ashamed in the depths of their souls. He had folded his hands before his breast above the narrow pointed beard and inclined his head sideways. His pale gaze had broken under what of lonely death-pain had come from his torn lips. Frau Stöhr sobbed. Frau Magnus uttered a high sigh. Staatsanwalt Paravant felt constrained, representatively, as it were as deputy of the company, to address a few words in lowered voice to the honoured host, in order to assure him of the general loyalty. There must be some misunderstanding here. Everyone was fresh and alert, lively, cheerful, and in the thing with heart and mind. It was such a beautiful, festive, utterly extraordinary evening; all understood and felt that, and nobody had for the present the least intention of making use of the boon of sleep. Mynheer Peeperkorn might rely upon his guests, upon each and every one of them.

“Perfect! Splendid!” cried Peeperkorn, and straightened himself up. His hands came apart, went outward and upward, spread, upright, the inner surfaces turned outward, as though in heathen prayer. His magnificent physiognomy, just now animated by Gothic pain, blossomed into opulence and gaiety; a sybaritic dimple even suddenly showed in his cheek. “The hour is here...” And he had the card handed to him, set on a horn-rimmed pince-nez whose temples rose high upon his brow, and ordered champagne, three bottles of Mumm & Co., _Cordon rouge, très sec_; together with _petits fours_, delicious, cone-shaped little morsels of gourmandise, coated with coloured icing, of the most delicate sponge-cake nature, within moistened by chocolate and pistachio cream, and offered on paper doilies with rich lace borders. Frau Stöhr licked all her fingers in her enjoyment. Herr Albin, with languid routine, loosened the first cork from its captivity of wire, let the mushroom-shaped stopper slip from the adorned neck with the crack of a child’s pistol and fly to the ceiling, whereupon, in elegant fashion, he wrapped the bottle in a napkin for pouring. The noble foam moistened the linen of the serving tables. The flat goblets were made to ring, and the first glass was emptied at a draught; stomachs were electrified by the ice-cold, fragrant prickle. Eyes glittered. The game had come to an end, without anyone’s having thought it necessary to clear cards and money from the table. The company gave itself over to a blissful idleness, exchanging a disconnected chatter whose elements in each individual sprang from heightened feeling and in some primordial state had promised the fairest things, but which on the way to communication became a fragmentary, lip-lame, partly indiscreet, partly unintelligible galimatias, fitted to provoke the angry shame of any sober newcomer, though borne by those taking part without inconvenience, since all were rocked in the same irresponsible condition. Frau Magnus herself had got red ears and confessed that she felt life coursing through her, which, however, did not seem agreeable to Herr Magnus. Hermine Kleefeld leaned with her back against Herr Albin’s shoulder, holding out her goblet to him to be filled. Peeperkorn, directing the Bacchanal with lance-point gestures of culture, saw to supply and replenishment. He had coffee brought after the champagne, _Mocca double_, accompanied in turn by “bread” and by sweet pungencies, Apricots Brandy, Chartreuse, Crème de Vanille, and Maraschino for the ladies. Later there were sour fish fillets and beer besides, finally tea, both Chinese and camomile for those who did not prefer to remain with the sparkling wine or liqueur, or to return to a serious wine, as Mynheer himself did, who after midnight, together with Frau Chauchat and Hans Castorp, had come round to a Swiss red of an artlessly sprightly sort, and with real thirst poured down one tumbler after another of it.

At one o’clock the festive sitting was still going on, held together partly by the leaden paralysis of drunkenness, partly by the peculiar pleasure of making a night of it, partly by the effect of Peeperkorn’s personality and by the deterrent example of Peter and his companions, in whose weakness of the flesh nobody wished to share. Generally speaking, the female contingent seemed less endangered in this respect. For while the men, red or pale, stretched out their legs and puffed their cheeks, applying themselves only mechanically now and then to the cup, no longer animated by any true zeal for service, the women kept more active. Hermine Kleefeld, with her bare elbows propped on the table and her cheeks in her hands, laughingly displayed the sheen of her front teeth to the giggling Ting-Fu, while Frau Stöhr, with drawn-in chin, coquettishly over her shoulder thrust forward, sought to bind the Staatsanwalt to life. With Frau Magnus things had gone so far that she had taken a seat on Herr Albin’s lap and was pulling both his earlobes, which, however, Herr Magnus seemed rather to experience as a relief. Anton Karlowitsch Ferge was called upon to favour the company with the story of his pleura-shock, but owing to the stroke upon his tongue he could not manage it and honestly declared his bankruptcy, which was unanimously proclaimed an occasion for drinking. Wehsal wept bitterly for a while, out of whatever depths of misery, into which his tongue too was no longer able to open a view for his fellow men, but was spiritually set on his feet again with coffee and cognac, and moreover, by the whimpering in his chest and by his wrinkled, trembling chin dripping with tears, excited the most considerable interest in Peeperkorn, who, with raised forefinger and lifted arabesques, claimed the general attention for Wehsal’s condition.

“That is...,” said he. “That is now indeed... No, allow me: holy! Dry his chin, my child, take my napkin! Or better still, no, leave it! He himself dispenses with it. My ladies and gentlemen, holy! Holy in every sense, in the Christian as in the heathen! A primordial phenomenon! A phenomenon of the first... of the highest... No, no, this is... ...”

Upon this “That is,” “That is now indeed,” were in general pitched the guiding and explanatory utterances with which, under precise, though by now somewhat burlesque, gestures of culture, he accompanied his entertainment. He had a way of holding up above his ear the ring his bent forefinger formed with his thumb, and of turning his head from it with a slanting, humorous motion, that awakened feelings such as might be awakened by the elderly priest of some alien cult, dancing before the altar of sacrifice in gathered robes and wondrous grace. Then again, broadly established in his magnificence, his arm flung round the back of the neighbouring chair, he compelled them all, to their dismay, to immerse themselves with him in a vivid and penetrating conception of the morning, a frosty, dark winter morning, when the yellowish gleam of our bedside lamp is reflected outward through the windowpane between bare branches, which outside stare into an icy, crow-cry-hard misty dawn... By way of mere suggestion he knew how to make this sober everyday vision so powerful that everyone shuddered, especially as he also bethought himself of the ice-cold water one might at such an hour press from a great sponge over the nape of one’s neck, and which he called holy. This was only a digression, an exemplary lesson in attentiveness to life, a fantastic impromptu, which he dropped in order at once to turn his ministering urgency and presence of feeling back to the festively loosened hour of night. He showed himself enamoured of every attainable femininity, indiscriminately and without respect of persons. He made proposals of such a sort to the dwarf woman that the crippled creature puckered its overlarge, elderly face into grinning folds; he said civilities to Stöhr of such a calibre that the vulgar woman thrust her shoulder forward still more outrageously and drove her affectation to the point of complete derangement; he begged Kleefeld for a kiss upon his great torn mouth and even made love to the disconsolate Frau Magnus, all this without prejudice to his tender devotion toward his travelling companion, whose hand he often raised to his lips with gallant reverence. “The wine...” said he. “The women... That is... That is now indeed... Allow me... World’s end... Gethsemane...”

Toward two o’clock the news flew round that “the old man,” Hofrat Behrens that is, was approaching the reception rooms in forced marches. In that same instant panic raged through the unnerved company of guests. Chairs and ice buckets went over. They fled through the library room. Peeperkorn, seized by royal fury at the abrupt dissolution of his festival of life, did indeed strike with his fist and send after the scattering fugitives something about “timorous slaves,” but then Hans Castorp and Frau Chauchat reconciled him, to a certain degree, to the thought that this feast, which had lasted six hours, must in any case at some point have come to an end; he gave ear as well to the admonition concerning the holy refreshment of sleep and consented to be conducted to bed.

“Support me, my child! Support me on the other side, young man!” he said to Frau Chauchat and Hans Castorp. And so they helped his heavy body up from the chair, offered him their arms, and, hooked into them both, he set out upon the way to rest, straddle-legged, his mighty head inclined upon one of his hunched shoulders and thrusting now the one, now the other of his guides aside by the swayings of his step. At bottom it was surely a royal luxury that he permitted himself in letting himself be piloted and propped in this fashion. Probably, had it mattered to him, he could have walked alone as well — he disdained that exertion, however, which could indeed have had no other than the petty and subordinate sense of shamefacedly concealing his intoxication, whereas he was plainly not merely not in the least ashamed of it, but on the contrary took a large and lavish pleasure in it and made a royal joke of shoving his serving guides swayingly to right and to left. He himself remarked along the way:

“Children — nonsense — one is of course not in the least — If at this moment — You ought to see — Ridiculous ——”

“Ridiculous!” Hans Castorp confirmed. “But beyond every doubt! One renders the classic gift of life its due by frankly letting oneself sway in its honour. In earnest, on the other hand ... I too have had my share, but for all my so-called drunkenness I am clearly conscious that I have the particular honour of putting a pronounced personality to bed — so little power has intoxication even over me, who in the matter of format do not so much as come into comparison ——”

“Well now, you little prattler,” said Peeperkorn, and shoved him staggering against the banister, drawing Frau Chauchat along with him.

Evidently the rumour of the Hofrat's approach had been an empty alarm shot. Perhaps the weary dwarf had fired it in order to break up the gathering. Under these circumstances Peeperkorn stopped and wished to turn back and go on drinking; but he was talked to from both sides in a better sense, and so let himself be set in motion again.

The Malay valet, that little man in the white cravat and with black silk shoes upon his feet, was awaiting his master in the corridor, before the door of the apartment, and received him with a bow, laying one hand upon his breast as he made it.

“Kiss each other!” Peeperkorn commanded. “Kiss this charming woman upon the brow in parting, young man!” he said to Hans Castorp. “She will have nothing against it and will return it. Do it to my health and with my permission!” he said; but Hans Castorp refused.

“No, Your Majesty!” he said. “Excuse me, that will not do.”

Peeperkorn, leaning upon the valet, drew his arabesques high and demanded to know why that would not do.

“Because I cannot exchange kisses upon the brow with your travelling companion,” said Hans Castorp. “I wish you a very good rest! No, that would be, looked at from every side, pure nonsense.”

And since Frau Chauchat too was already making for the door of her room, Peeperkorn let the refractory fellow go, though he did gaze after him for a while over his own shoulder and the Malay's, his web of folds drawn tight, astonished at an insubordination which his sovereign nature might not have been accustomed to encounter.

Mynheer Peeperkorn (Continued)

Mynheer Peeperkorn remained at the Berghof throughout that whole winter — so much of it as was still left — and on into the spring, so that at the last there was still a quite memorable joint excursion (Settembrini and Naphta were of the party too) into the Flüela valley and to the waterfall there ... At the last? And after that, then, he stayed no longer? — No, no longer. — He departed? — Yes and no. — Yes and no? Please, no mystery-mongering! One will know how to compose oneself. Lieutenant Ziemßen too has died, to say nothing of so many less honourable dancers of death. So the indistinct Peeperkorn was carried off by the malignant tropical fever? — No, he was not, but why the impatience? That not everything is there at once remains to be respected as a condition of life and of narration, and surely one will not wish to rebel against the God-given forms of human cognition! Let us do time at least as much honour as the nature of our story still permits us! There is not much of it left in any case; by now it goes helter-skelter! or, if that is too noisily said, it goes whisk, whisk! A little hand measures our time, one that trips along as though it were measuring seconds, whereas each time, God knows what, it has to signify when it passes cold-bloodedly and without pause through its zenith. Years, so much is certain, we have been up here; our head swims, this is a dream of vice without opium or hashish, the censor of morals will condemn us — and yet we deliberately oppose to the evil befogging much clarity of understanding and logical acuteness! Not by chance, let it be acknowledged, have we chosen heads such as Herr Naphta and Herr Settembrini for our company, instead of surrounding ourselves, say, with nothing but indistinct Peeperkorns — and that leads, to be sure, to a comparison which in many respects, and notably on the point of _format_, must turn out in favour of this late apparition, as indeed it did in Hans Castorp's thoughts when he lay in his loggia and confessed to himself that the two over-articulate educators who had taken his poor soul between them positively dwindled to dwarfs beside Pieter Peeperkorn, so that he was inclined to call them what the latter, in royally drunken raillery, had called him, namely “little prattlers”, and that it was a very good and happy thing that the hermetic pedagogy brought him into contact with a decided personality as well.

That this personality had come upon the scene as Clawdia Chauchat's travelling companion, and thus as a mighty disturbance, was a point in itself, by which Hans Castorp did not let himself be confused in his valuations. He did not let himself, we repeat, be put out in his sincerely respectful, if at times somewhat pert, sympathy for a man of format — merely because that man kept a common travelling purse with the woman from whom Hans Castorp had borrowed a pencil on the night of carnival. That was not in his nature — and here we fully reckon with the fact that this or that member of our circle will take offence at such “lack of temperament” and would rather have seen him hate and shun Peeperkorn and speak of him inwardly only as an old ass and a jabbering drunkard, instead of visiting him when he was gripped by the intermittent fever, sitting at his bedside, chatting with him — a word which of course fits only _his_ contributions to the conversations, not those of the magnificent Peeperkorn — and letting the essence of personality work upon him with the curiosity of a traveller in search of culture. But that is what he did, and we relate it, indifferent to the danger that someone may find himself reminded thereby of Ferdinand Wehsal, who had carried Hans Castorp's overcoat. That reminiscence signifies nothing. Our hero was no Wehsal. Depths of wretchedness were not his affair. He simply was no “hero”, that is to say: he did not let his relation to the masculine be determined by the woman. Faithful to our principle of making him neither better nor worse than he was, we record that he simply declined — not consciously and expressly, but quite naively declined — to let himself be cheated by novelistic influences of his justice toward his own sex — and of his sense for profitable experiences of formation in this sphere. That may displease women — we believe we know that Frau Chauchat took involuntary offence at it; one or another pointed remark that escaped her, and which we shall yet insert, permitted that conclusion —, but perhaps it was this quality that made him so serviceable an object of contention for pedagogy.

Pieter Peeperkorn lay ill a good deal — that he did so on the very day after that first evening of cards and champagne could occasion no surprise. Almost all the participants in that protracted and strenuous conviviality were in a bad way, Hans Castorp not excepted, who had a severe headache, but did not let that burden hinder him from paying yesterday's host a sick-call: by the Malay, whom he met in the corridor of the first floor, he had his offer conveyed to Peeperkorn, and was bidden welcome.

He entered the Dutchman's two-bedded bedroom through a salon that separated it from Frau Chauchat's, and found it distinguished above the average type of the Berghof guest-rooms by its spaciousness and the elegance of its appointments. There were silken armchairs and tables with curved legs; a soft carpet covered the floor, and the beds too were not of the breed of the usual hygienic death-beds, they were positively splendid: of polished cherrywood with brass mountings, and they had a small canopy in common — without hangings of curtains —, it was merely a small, sheltering, unifying baldachin.

Peeperkorn lay in one of the two bedsteads, books, letters, and newspapers upon the red silk quilt, and was reading the “Telegraaf” through his high-perched horn-rimmed pince-nez. Coffee things stood on a chair beside him, and a half-emptied bottle of red wine — it was the naively sparkling one of yesterday evening — beside medicine glasses on the little night-table. To Hans Castorp's modest surprise the Dutchman wore no white shirt, but a woollen one with long sleeves, buttoned at the wrists and without a collar, cut round instead, lying smooth against the old man's broad shoulders and mighty chest: the human magnificence of his head upon the pillow was heightened still further, removed from the bourgeois, by this garb, which lent his appearance a stamp part popular and workmanlike, part eternalized and bust-like.

“By all means, young man,” he said, seizing the pince-nez by its high bridge and lifting it off. “I beg of you — by no means. On the contrary.” And Hans Castorp sat down beside him and concealed his sympathetic wonder — if the feeling to which his justice compelled him was not indeed real admiration — behind friendly, lively chatter, which Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent broken phrases and the most emphatic play of gesture. He did not look well, yellow, quite ailing and worn. Toward morning he had had a severe attack of fever, whose consequent lassitude now joined with the after-pains of his intoxication.

“We did it badly yesterday —,” he said. “No, permit me — grossly and badly! You are still — good, there it comes to nothing further — But at my years and with my endangered — My child,” he turned with tender but decided severity to Frau Chauchat, who was just entering from the salon, “— all very well, but I repeat to you that better care ought to have been taken, that I ought to have been prevented —.” Something almost like a rising royal choler was in his features and his voice at these words. But one had only to imagine what a storm would have broken out had anyone seriously wished to disturb him in his drinking, in order to measure the whole injustice and unreasonableness of his reproach. Such things doubtless belong to greatness. His travelling companion accordingly passed over it, greeting Hans Castorp, who had risen — without, however, giving him her hand, but only with a smile and a wave and the injunction that he should “by all means” keep his seat, should “by no means” let himself be disturbed in his _tête à tête_ with Mynheer Peeperkorn ... She busied herself with this and that about the room, directed the valet to clear away the coffee things, disappeared for a while and returned on soft soles, in order, standing, to take a small part in the conversation, or — if we are to render Hans Castorp's indefinite impression — in order to keep a little watch over it. Naturally! She was able to return to the Berghof in company with a personality of great format; but when the man who had waited here so long for her then paid that personality the reverence due to it, from man to man, she displayed uneasiness and even pointedness, with her “by all means” and “by no means”. Hans Castorp smiled at it, bending over his knees to conceal the smile, and at the same time glowed inwardly with joy.

He had a glass of wine poured for him by Peeperkorn, from the bottle on the night-table. Under circumstances such as today's, the Dutchman opined, it was best to take up again where one had left off the night before, and this sparkling wine rendered precisely the same services as soda water. He clinked glasses with Hans Castorp, and the latter, drinking, watched how the freckled, sharp-nailed captain's hand over there, encircled at the wrist by the buttoned cuff of the woollen shirt, raised the glass, how the broad, ragged lips grasped its rim, and the wine drove down through the rising and sinking workman's or bust's gullet. They then spoke further of the medicine on the night-table, that brown juice, of which Peeperkorn, at Frau Chauchat's admonition and from her hand, took a spoonful — it was an antipyretic, quinine in essence; Peeperkorn gave his guest a little of it to taste, in order to let him experience the characterful, bitter-spicy flavour of the preparation, and then said several things in praise of quinine, which was a blessing not only through its germ-destroying action and its salutary influence upon the heat-centre, but must also be esteemed as a tonic: it diminished the albumen turnover, promoted the state of nutrition, in short was a true restorative, a splendid means of strengthening, awakening, and enlivening — an intoxicant, moreover, into the bargain; one could easily drink oneself a little tipsy or fuddled upon it, he said, jesting magnificently with fingers and head as he had yesterday, and again resembling therein the dancing heathen priest.

Yes, a splendid substance, the fever bark! — it was, moreover, not yet three hundred years since the pharmacology of our continent had gained knowledge of it, and not yet a century since chemistry had discovered the alkaloid upon which its virtues actually rested, quinine, that is — discovered it and analysed it up to a certain point; for chemistry could not claim to have grown truly wise as yet about its constitution, or to be in a position to produce it artificially. Our science of medicaments did well everywhere not to pride itself blasphemously upon its knowledge, for as it fared with quinine, so it fared with many another thing: it knew this and that about the dynamics, the effects of substances, but the question to what, precisely, these effects were to be traced back often enough left it at a loss. The young man might just look about him in the science of poisons — as to the elementary properties that conditioned the effects of the so-called toxic substances, nobody would be able to give him information. There were, for example, the snake venoms — of which nothing more was known than that these animal substances simply belonged among the protein compounds, consisted of various albuminous bodies which, however, only in this particular — that is to say, wholly indeterminate — combination produced their fulminant effects: brought into the bloodstream, they gave rise to effects at which one could only marvel, since one was not accustomed to rhyme protein with poison. But with the world of substances, said Peeperkorn, raising beside his pale-eyed head, lifted from the pillow with its arabesques upon the brow, the ring of exactitude and the lances of his fingers — with substances it stood thus, that all of them vouched for life and death at once: all were tisanes and poisons together, materia medica and toxicology were one and the same, by poisons one recovered, and what passed for the bearer of life might under circumstances kill with a single convulsive stroke in the space of seconds.

He spoke very urgently and with unusual coherence of the tisanes and the poisons, and Hans Castorp listened with head aslant, nodding, occupied less with the content of his discourse, which seemed to lie close to his heart, than with the quiet exploring of the effect of his personality, which in the last analysis was quite as inexplicable as the effect of snake venoms. Dynamics, said Peeperkorn, was everything in the world of substances — all the rest was wholly conditional. Quinine, too, was a healing poison, powerful in the first place. Four grams of it made one deaf, dizzy, short of breath, produced disturbances of vision like atropine, intoxicated like alcohol, and the workers in quinine factories had inflamed eyes and swollen lips and suffered from eruptions of the skin. And he began to tell of the cinchona, the quina tree, of the primeval forests of the Cordilleras, where at three thousand metres it had its home, and whence its bark had come so late to Spain as ‘Jesuits’ powder’ — long known in its powers to the natives of South America; he described the vast cinchona plantations of the Netherlands government in Java, from which every year many millions of pounds of the reddish, cinnamon-like tubes of bark were shipped to Amsterdam and London ... Barks in general, the bark tissue of woody plants, from the epidermis to the cambium — there was something in them, said Peeperkorn, almost always they possessed extraordinary dynamic virtues, for good as for evil — the drug lore of the coloured peoples was there far superior to ours. Upon certain islands east of New Guinea the young people prepared themselves a love charm, in that they ground to powder the bark of a certain tree, probably a poison tree like the _Antiaris toxicaria_ of Java, which, like the manzanillo tree, was said by its exhalations to poison the air round about it and to stupefy man and beast to death — in that, then, they ground the bark of this tree to powder, mixed the powder with shavings of coconut, rolled the mixture in a leaf and roasted it. They then sprinkled the juice of the compound, while she slept, into the face of the coy one whom it concerned, and she would take fire for him who had sprinkled it. Sometimes it was the root-bark that had the power in it, like that of a climbing plant of the Malay Archipelago called Strychnos Tieuté, from which the natives, with the addition of snake venom, prepared the Upas-Radscha, a drug which, brought into the bloodstream, by an arrow shot for instance, brought on death with the utmost swiftness, without anyone being able to tell young Hans Castorp how this actually came about. Only so much was clear, that the Upas stood close to strychnine in respect of dynamics ... And Peeperkorn, now sitting fully upright in bed and carrying now and again with slightly trembling captain’s hand the wineglass to his ragged lips to take great, thirsty draughts, told of the crow’s-eye tree of the Coromandel coast, from whose orange-yellow berries, the ‘crow’s eyes’, the most dynamic of all alkaloids, called strychnine, was obtained — told, with voice lowered to a whisper and the lineature of his brow drawn high, of the ash-grey boughs, the strikingly glossy foliage and the yellow-green blossoms of this tree, so that there stood before young Hans Castorp’s eyes an image of a tree at once dismal and hysterically gaudy, and all in all he came to feel somewhat uncanny.

And now, too, Frau Chauchat intervened, saying that this was not good, the conversation was tiring Peeperkorn, he might have fever again from it, and however unwillingly she broke off the entrevue, she must nevertheless beg Hans Castorp to let it be enough for this time. This he did, of course; but often still, after an attack of the quartan fever, he sat during the following months at the regal man’s bedside, while Frau Chauchat, lightly supervising the conversation or even taking part in it with a few words, went to and fro; and on Peeperkorn’s fever-free days as well he spent many an hour with him and his pearl-adorned travelling companion. For when the Dutchman was not bedridden, he seldom failed after dinner to gather about him a small and variously composed selection of the Berghof guest-body for cards and wine and all manner of further refreshments, whether in the conversation room, as the first time, or in the restaurant, on which occasions Hans Castorp habitually had his place between the languid woman and the magnificent man; and even out of doors they moved about together, took walks together, in which Herr Ferge and Herr Wehsal might join, and soon Settembrini and Naphta as well, the adversaries in spirit, whom one could not have failed to encounter, and whom to make acquainted with Peeperkorn — and at the same time, finally, with Clawdia Chauchat too — Hans Castorp positively counted himself fortunate, wholly unconcerned whether this acquaintance and connection was welcome to the disputants or not, and in the quiet confidence that they stood in need of a pedagogic object and would sooner take an unwelcome appendage into the bargain than renounce the fighting out of their oppositions before him.

Nor was he deceived in this, that the members of his motley circle of friends would at least grow accustomed to not growing accustomed to one another: tensions, estrangements, even quiet hostility there were of course in plenty among them, and we ourselves wonder how our insignificant hero contrived to hold them together about him — we explain it to ourselves by a certain sly friendliness toward life in his nature, which let him find everything ‘worth hearing’, and which one might call obligingness even in the sense that it bound to him not only the most disparate persons and personalities, but to a certain degree bound even these to one another.

Curiously criss-crossing relationships! It tempts us to make their tangled threads for a moment generally visible, just as Hans Castorp himself contemplated them on these walks with sly and life-friendly eye. There was the wretched Wehsal, who smoulderingly desired Frau Chauchat and abjectly revered Peeperkorn and Hans Castorp, the one for the sake of his ruling present, the other for the sake of the past. There was Clawdia Chauchat for her part, the gracefully soft-stepping invalid and traveller, Peeperkorn’s bondwoman, and that assuredly out of conviction, yet always somewhat disquieted and inwardly sharp at seeing the knight of a distant carnival night upon such good terms with her master. Did not this irritation recall somewhat that which determined her relation to Herr Settembrini? To that fine speaker and humanist whom she could not endure and whom she called arrogant and inhuman? To young Hans Castorp’s pedagogic friend, whom she would all too gladly have taken to task as to what words those had been that he, in his Mediterranean idiom — of which she understood as little as a syllable as he of hers, only with a less assured disdain — had sent after the presentable young German, that pretty little bourgeois of good family and with a damp spot, when he had that time been on the point of approaching her? Hans Castorp, in love, as the saying goes, ‘over both ears’, yet not in the cheerful sense of that phrase, but as one loves when the case lies forbidden and unreasonable and no peaceable little songs of the flatlands can be sung upon it — sorely in love, then, and thereby dependent, subjected, suffering and serving, was nevertheless the man to preserve in his slavery slyness enough to know quite well what value his devotion might have and retain for the soft-gliding invalid with the enchanting Tartar slits: a value to which, as he added to himself in all his suffering subjection, she could be made attentive by Herr Settembrini’s bearing toward her, which confirmed her suspicion only too openly, being as dismissive as humanistic politeness at all permitted. The bad thing, or, in Hans Castorp’s eyes, rather the advantageous one, was that in her relations with Leo Naphta, upon which she had after all set hopes, she did not find the right compensation either. True, here she did not meet with that fundamental negation which Herr Lodovico opposed to her nature, and the conditions of conversation lay more favourably: at times they talked apart, Clawdia and the trenchant little man, of books, of problems of political philosophy, in whose radical treatment they were at one; and Hans Castorp took part in it guilelessly. But a certain aristocratic restriction of the accommodation which the parvenu, cautious as all parvenus are, showed her, may well have become perceptible to her; his Spanish terrorism agreed at bottom but little with her door-slamming, vagrant ‘hoomanity’; and there came in addition, as the last and subtlest thing, a light, hardly graspable animosity which with feminine instinct she could not but feel blowing toward her from _both_ adversaries, Settembrini and Naphta (quite as her carnival knight himself felt it blowing), and which had its ground in the relation of both of them to him, Hans Castorp: the ill-humour of the educator against woman as a disturbing and distracting element, that silent and primordial antagonism which united them, because in it their pedagogically condensed discord was annulled.

Did not something of this hostility play into the bearing of the two dialecticians toward Pieter Peeperkorn as well? Hans Castorp believed he noticed it, perhaps because he had maliciously expected it and had on the whole been not a little eager to bring the regal stammerer together with his two ‘government councillors’, as he sometimes jestingly called them to himself, and to study the effect. Mynheer did not make quite so magnificent an impression out of doors as within four walls. The soft felt hat which he wore pushed low upon his brow, and which covered his white flame of hair, his mighty brow-lineature, diminished his features, made them as it were shrink together, and lowered even his reddened nose in its majesty. His walking, too, was less good than his standing: he had the habit, at each of his short steps, of letting his whole heavy body and even his head fall somewhat sideways, toward the side of the foot he was just setting forward, which seemed rather good-naturedly senile than regal; nor did he mostly walk drawn up to his full height, as he stood, but somewhat sunken together. But even so he still overtopped Herr Lodovico, and the little Naphta all the more, by a head’s length — and that was not the only reason why his presence weighed so heavily, quite as heavily as Hans Castorp had anticipated in imagination, upon the existence of the two politicians.

It was a pressure, a diminution and impairment through comparison — perceptible to the crafty observer, but perceptible without doubt to the parties concerned as well, both to the slight over-articulate ones and to the magnificently stammering one. Peeperkorn treated Naphta and Settembrini with the utmost politeness and attentiveness, with a respect which Hans Castorp would have called ironic, had he not been hindered from it by his full insight into the incompatibility of that concept with that of the grand format. Kings know no irony — not even in the sense of a straightforward and classical device of rhetoric, let alone in a more involved sense. And so what characterized the Dutchman’s behaviour toward Hans’s friends, hidden beneath a slightly exaggerated seriousness or lying openly to view, was rather to be called a mockery at once fine and magnificent. “Yes — yes — yes —!” he might well say, shaking his finger threateningly in their direction, his head turned away, his ragged lips smiling in jest. “That is — Those are —. Ladies and gentlemen, I direct your attention — — Cerebrum, cerebral, you understand! No — no, perfect, extraordinary, that is, there one sees after all — —.” They revenged themselves by exchanging glances which, after the encounter, wandered despairingly heavenward, and into which they sought to draw Hans Castorp as well, which, however, he declined.

It happened that Herr Settembrini took his pupil directly to task and thus gave evidence of his pedagogic disquiet.

“But, in God’s name, Engineer, the man is a stupid old man! What do you find in him? Can he further you? My understanding stands still! Everything would be clear — without being precisely praiseworthy — if you took him into the bargain, if in his company you sought only that of his present mistress. But it is impossible not to see that you concern yourself almost more with him than with her. I implore you, come to the aid of my comprehension ...”

Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means!” he said. “Perfect! It is simply — Permit me — Good!” And he sought to copy Peeperkorn’s gestures of culture as well. “Yes, yes,” he laughed on, “you find it stupid, Herr Settembrini, and in any case it is indistinct, which in your eyes is probably worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is not the best of them ... Hullo! There I have coined something, I believe, a saying, a mot. How do you like it?”

“Very good. I look forward expectantly to your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time to beg you to take account in it of certain reflections which we have on occasion made upon the misanthropic nature of the paradox.”

“It shall be done, Herr Settembrini. It shall absolutely be done. No, you do not find me hunting paradoxes with my _mot_. My sole concern was to point out the great difficulties involved in defining ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ ... involved, you see? They are so hard to distinguish, they merge so thoroughly into one another ... I know very well that you hate the mystical _guazzabuglio_ and stand for value, judgment, the judgment of value, and there I agree with you entirely. But this matter of ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ is sometimes a complete mystery, and surely one must be permitted to concern oneself with mysteries, provided there is an honest endeavour to fathom them as far as possible. I ask you the following. I ask you: Can you deny that he has us all in his pocket? I put it crudely, and yet, so far as I can see, you cannot deny it. He has us in his pocket, and from somewhere he derives the right to make sport of us. Whence? How so? In what respect? Not by virtue of his cleverness, of course. I grant you that cleverness can scarcely be spoken of. He is, rather, a man of obscurity and feeling; feeling is positively his plume—pardon the colloquial expression! So I say: it is not through cleverness that he has us in his pocket, that is, not for intellectual reasons—you would refuse to countenance such a thing, and indeed it is out of the question. But surely not for physical reasons either! Surely not because of his captain’s shoulders, in consideration of sheer brute strength and because he could strike any one of us down with his fist—he never thinks of being able to do so, and if the thought ever does occur to him, a few civilized words are enough to pacify him ... So not for physical reasons either. And yet the physical quite unquestionably plays a part in it—not in the brute sense, but in another, the mystical sense; as soon as the physical plays a part, the matter becomes mystical—and the physical passes over into the spiritual, and vice versa, and they cannot be distinguished, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be distinguished, but the effect is there, the dynamic force, and we are put in his pocket. And for this we have only one word placed at our disposal, and that word is ‘personality.’ One also uses it sensibly enough, as when we say that we are all persons—moral persons and legal persons and whatever other kinds there may be. But that is not how it is meant here. It is meant as a mystery lying beyond stupidity and cleverness, with which one must surely be permitted to concern oneself—partly in order to fathom it as far as possible, and partly, insofar as that is not possible, to be edified by it. And if you stand for values, then personality is, after all, a positive value too, I should think—more positive than stupidity and cleverness, positive in the highest degree, _absolutely_ positive, like life itself; in short, a vital value, and therefore eminently deserving of our earnest attention. That is what I felt obliged to reply to what you said about stupidity.”

Of late Hans Castorp no longer became confused and tongue-tied during such effusions, nor did he falter. He spoke his part to the end, lowered his voice, put a full stop to it, and went his way like a man, although he still reddened as he did so and was in truth somewhat afraid of the critical silence that would follow his ceasing to speak, giving him time to feel ashamed. Herr Settembrini allowed this silence to reign, and then said:

“You deny that you are hunting paradoxes. Yet you know perfectly well that I am equally reluctant to see you hunting mysteries. By making a mystery of personality, you run the risk of lapsing into idolatry. You venerate a mask. You see mysticism where there is merely mystification, one of those fraudulent hollow forms with which the demon of physical physiognomy sometimes delights in making fools of us. Have you never moved in theatrical circles? Do you not know those actors’ heads in which the features of Julius Caesar, Goethe, and Beethoven are united, but whose fortunate possessors, the moment they open their mouths, reveal themselves as the most pitiful simpletons under the sun?”

“Very well, a freak of nature,” said Hans Castorp. “But surely not merely a freak of nature, not mere mockery. For since these people are actors, they must possess talent, and talent itself lies beyond stupidity and cleverness; it is itself a vital value. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent too, say what you will, and with it he puts us all in his pocket. Place Herr Naphta in one corner of a room and let him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God—most worth hearing—and in the other corner Peeperkorn stands with his peculiar mouth and the furrows raised upon his brow and says nothing but ‘Absolutely! Permit me—Settled!’ You will see: the people will gather around Peeperkorn, every one of them, and Naphta will sit there quite alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he expresses himself so clearly that it goes through one’s marrow and penny, as Behrens is fond of saying ...”

“Be ashamed of your worship of success!” Herr Settembrini admonished him. “_Mundus vult decipi._ I do not demand that people gather around Herr Naphta. He is a pernicious obstructionist. But I am inclined to take his side in view of the imaginary scene you depict with such reprehensible approval. By all means despise the distinct, the precise, and the logical, the humanly coherent word! Despise it in honour of some hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry—and the devil has you beyond all question ...”

“But I assure you, he can often speak quite coherently when he grows warm,” said Hans Castorp. “He once told me about dynamic drugs and Asiatic poison-trees, so interestingly that it was almost uncanny—the interesting is always somewhat uncanny—and yet it was not so much interesting in itself as it was through its connection with the effect of his personality: that was what made it uncanny and interesting at once ...”

“Of course, your weakness for the Asiatic is well known. Such marvels, indeed, are not mine to offer,” Herr Settembrini replied with so much bitterness that Hans Castorp hastily declared that the merits of his conversation and instruction lay, naturally, in an entirely different direction, and that no one would dream of making comparisons that would do injustice to both parties. But the Italian ignored and disdained the courtesy. He continued:

“In any event, you must permit one to admire your objectivity and composure, Engineer. They verge slightly upon the grotesque, as you will concede. Considering, after all, how matters stand ... This painted idol has taken your Beatrice from you—I call things by their names. And you? It is without precedent.”

“Differences of temperament, Herr Settembrini. Differences in the heat and chivalry of the blood. Naturally, as a man of the South, you would probably resort to poison and the dagger, or at least give the affair a social and passionate turn—in short, behave like a cock. That would certainly be very manly, socially manly and gallant. But with me it is different. I am not at all manly in the sense of seeing in another man merely the rival male—I may not be manly at all, but certainly not in that fashion, which I involuntarily call ‘social,’ though I do not know why. In my sluggish breast I ask myself whether I have anything to reproach him with. Has he knowingly done me any wrong? But insults must be intentional, or they are not insults. And as for ‘doing me wrong,’ I should have to address myself to _her_, and once again I have no right to do that—none at all, and particularly none where Peeperkorn is concerned. For in the first place he is a personality, which by itself already counts for something with women, and in the second place he is not a civilian, like me, but a kind of military man, like my poor cousin; that is to say, he has a _point d’honneur_, a plume of honour, and that is feeling, that is life ... I am talking nonsense, but I would rather babble a little and in doing so manage to express something difficult after a fashion than forever utter nothing but faultless conventionalities—and perhaps that too is something of a military trait in my character, if I may put it so ...”

“By all means put it so,” Herr Settembrini said with a nod. “That would unquestionably be a trait deserving of praise. The courage of perception and expression—that is literature, it is humanity ...”

Thus, on such occasions, they parted on tolerable terms; Herr Settembrini brought the conversation to a conciliatory close, for which he had good reasons as well. His position was by no means so invulnerable that it would have been advisable for him to carry severity too far; a conversation dealing with jealousy was rather slippery ground for him; at a certain point he ought really to have replied that, in view of his pedagogical bent, his own relation to the masculine was not altogether of the social and cocklike kind either, and that consequently the mighty Peeperkorn disturbed his circles just as Naphta and Frau Chauchat did; and ultimately he could not hope to argue his pupil out of acknowledging a personal effect and natural superiority from which he himself was no more able to escape than was his partner in cerebral affairs.

They fared best when intellectual breezes blew, when they could dispute—could rivet the attention of the promenaders upon one of those debates of theirs, elegant and impassioned at once, academic and yet conducted in a tone suggesting that the most burning questions of the day and of life were at stake; debates whose costs they bore almost entirely themselves, and for the duration of which the “magnitude” present was neutralized, as it were, since it could accompany them only with furrow-browed astonishment and obscurely mocking fragments. Yet even under these circumstances it exerted its pressure, cast a shadow upon the conversation, so that the latter seemed to lose its brilliance, deprived it somehow of its essence, opposed to it—palpably to all, though on its own part surely unconsciously, or God knows to what degree consciously—something that benefited neither cause and by which the dispute faded in its decisive importance, indeed acquired—we hesitate to say it—the stamp of idleness. Or, to attempt it differently: the witty feud to the death secretly and continually referred, in some subterranean and indeterminate fashion, to the magnitude walking beside it, and lost its nerve under this magnetism. There was no other way to characterize this mysterious process, so vexatious to the disputants. One can only say that, had there been no Pieter Peeperkorn, one would have been far more strictly obliged to take sides when, for example, Leo Naphta defended the arch- and fundamentally revolutionary nature of the Church against the doctrine of Herr Settembrini, who could see in that historic power nothing but the patroness of dark persistence and preservation, and wished all friendliness toward life and the future, all readiness for transformation and renewal, to be understood as bound to the opposite principles of enlightenment, science, and progress, principles born of a glorious epoch that had witnessed the rebirth of classical culture—and who upheld this profession of faith with the most splendid sweep of word and gesture. Naphta then undertook, coldly and incisively, to demonstrate—and did in fact demonstrate, almost to the point of dazzling incontrovertibility—that the Church, as the embodiment of the religious-ascetic idea, was in its innermost nature far from being the partisan and support of whatever wished to endure, that is, of secular culture and the legal orders of the state; that, on the contrary, it had from time immemorial inscribed upon its banner the most radical revolution, the utter overthrow of root and branch; that absolutely everything which deemed itself worthy of preservation and which the faint-hearted, the cowardly, the conservatives, the bourgeois sought to preserve—state and family, secular art and science—had always maintained itself only in conscious or unconscious opposition to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and inviolable goal was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.

Herr Settembrini then had the floor, and by heaven! he knew how to make use of it. Such a confusion of the Luciferian idea of revolution with the general revolt of every base instinct, he said, was deplorable. Throughout the centuries the Church’s love of innovation had consisted in subjecting the life-begetting idea to inquisition, strangling it, suffocating it in the smoke of her pyres; and today she had herself proclaimed by her emissaries as a friend of revolution, on the grounds that her aim was to replace freedom, cultivation, and democracy with mob dictatorship and barbarism. Eh, indeed, a ghastly species of contradictory consistency, of consistent contradiction ...

His opponent, Naphta replied, was by no means deficient in such contradiction and consistency. A democrat in his own estimation, he expressed himself with little friendliness toward the people or equality; indeed, he displayed a culpably aristocratic arrogance by describing as a mob the world proletariat called to exercise a representative dictatorship. But as a democrat, in truth, his attitude toward the Church was perfectly evident—the Church which, admittedly, and this must be acknowledged with pride, represented the most aristocratic power in the history of mankind: aristocratic in the ultimate and highest sense, that of the spirit. For the ascetic spirit—if one might be permitted to speak in pleonasms—the spirit of denial and annihilation of the world, was aristocracy itself, the aristocratic principle in its purest form; it could never be popular, and at all times the Church had been fundamentally unpopular. A little literary study of the culture of the Middle Ages would make Herr Settembrini aware of this fact—of the robust aversion that the people, and indeed the people in the broadest sense, had displayed toward the ecclesiastical nature; witness certain figures of monks, for example, inventions of the popular poetic imagination, who had opposed wine, women, and song to the ascetic idea in a manner already distinctly Lutheran. All the instincts of worldly heroism, the entire warrior spirit, together with courtly poetry, had stood in more or less open opposition to the religious idea and therefore to the hierarchy. For, compared with the nobility of the spirit represented by the Church, all this had been “world” and rabblehood.

Herr Settembrini thanked him for refreshing his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan from the “Rose Garden” retained much that was refreshing beside the aristocracy of the grave here being extolled; and though he, the speaker, was no friend of the German Reformer to whom allusion had been made, he would nevertheless be found ardently prepared to defend all the democratic individualism underlying that man’s doctrine against every clerical-feudal lust for dominion over the human personality.

“Indeed!” Naphta suddenly cried. Did one actually intend to accuse the Church of a want of democracy, of a want of regard for the value of the human personality? And what of the humane freedom from prejudice of canon law, which—whereas Roman law had made legal capacity dependent upon the possession of citizenship, and Germanic law had bound it to membership of the people and personal freedom—had required only communion with the Church and orthodoxy, had cast off all considerations of state and society, and had upheld the testamentary and hereditary capacity of slaves, prisoners of war, and bondsmen?!”

This assertion, Settembrini remarked caustically, had perhaps not been maintained without a sidelong glance at the “canonical portion” that had had to accrue from every testament. For the rest, he spoke of “clerical demagoguery,” called it the affability of an unconditional lust for power to set the underworld in motion when the gods, understandably enough, wanted nothing to do with one, and opined that the Church had evidently cared more for the quantity of souls than for their quality, which suggested a profound lack of spiritual nobility.

Lacking in nobility—the Church? Herr Settembrini’s attention was drawn to the implacable aristocratism underlying the idea that infamy was hereditary: the transmission of grave guilt to descendants who—democratically speaking—were surely innocent; the lifelong taint and deprivation of rights suffered by natural children, for example. But he begged that nothing more be said of it—firstly, because his humane feelings revolted against it, and secondly, because he was weary of evasions and recognized in the artifices of his opponent’s apologetics that thoroughly infamous and diabolical cult of nothingness which wished to be called spirit, and which made the acknowledged unpopularity of the ascetic principle seem something so legitimate, so sacred.

At this point Naphta really did ask leave to laugh aloud outright. People spoke of the nihilism of the Church! Of the nihilism of the most realistic system of dominion in the history of the world! Had Herr Settembrini, then, never been touched by so much as a breath of the humane irony with which the Church constantly made concessions to the world, to the flesh, prudently veiling the ultimate consequences of its principle and allowing the spirit to exert a regulating influence without treating nature with excessive severity? Had he consequently never heard, either, of the priestly and subtle concept of indulgence, under which there fell even a sacrament, namely that of marriage, which was not a positive good at all, like the other sacraments, but merely a safeguard against sin, bestowed solely to restrict sensual desire and excess, so that the ascetic principle, the ideal of chastity, asserted itself therein without confronting the flesh with impolitic harshness?

How could Herr Settembrini refrain from protesting against so abhorrent a conception of the “political,” against the gesture of conceited forbearance and prudence which the spirit—what called itself spirit here—presumed to adopt toward its supposedly culpable opposite, an opposite which in truth had no need whatever of its poisonous indulgence; against the accursed duality of an interpretation of the world which demonized the universe, both life itself and, at the same time, its presumptuously imagined opposite, the spirit: for if the former were evil, then the latter, being pure negation, must be so as well! And he broke a lance for the innocence of lust—at which Hans Castorp could not help thinking of the humanist’s little attic room with its standing desk, straw-bottomed chairs, and water bottle—while Naphta, maintaining that lust could never be without guilt and that nature ought, in the presence of the spiritual, to have the decency to suffer a bad conscience, defined the Church’s policy and the spirit’s indulgence as “love,” in order to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle—at which Hans Castorp thought that the word “love” sat very strangely indeed upon the sharp, meagre little Naphta ...

So it went on; we know the game, and Hans Castorp knew it. We have listened with him for a moment in order to observe how, for example, such a peripatetic passage-at-arms appeared in the shadow of the personality walking beside them, and in what manner that presence secretly robbed it of its nerve: namely, by imposing a covert compulsion to refer to itself, which extinguished the spark leaping to and fro and forced upon one the memory of that feeling of dull lifelessness which overcomes us when an electric wire proves to have no contact. Good! That was how it was. There was no longer any crackling between the contradictions, no lightning leapt, no current flowed—the presence, neutralized by the spirit, as the latter would have had it, instead neutralized the spirit; Hans Castorp became aware of it with astonishment and curiosity.

Revolution and conservation—one looked at Peeperkorn, saw him striding along, not especially imposing on foot, with his sideways-nodding gait and his hat down over his brow; saw his broad lips, irregularly and deeply rent, and heard him say, pointing his head jocularly toward the disputants: “Yes—yes—yes! Cerebrum, cerebral, you understand! That is—There we see, after all—”: and behold, the plug contact was dead as a doornail! They tried another, resorted to stronger conjurations, came to the “aristocratic problem,” to popularity and nobility. Not a spark. As though by magnetic force, the conversation assumed a personal reference; Hans Castorp saw Clawdia’s travelling companion lying in bed beneath the quilted red-silk coverlet, in his collarless knitted shirt, half ageing workman, half royal bust—and with a feeble twitch the nerve of the controversy expired. Stronger tensions! Negation on the one side and the cult of nothingness—on the other, the eternal Yes and the spirit’s loving inclination toward life! What became of nerve, lightning, and current when one looked at Mynheer—as inevitably occurred, by virtue of some secret attraction? In short, they _failed to appear_, and that, in Hans’s words, was neither more nor less than a mystery. For his collection of aphorisms he might note that a mystery is uttered in the simplest possible words—or left unuttered. If one wished to utter this one at all, one could say only, yet say quite directly, that Pieter Peeperkorn, with his kingly mask deeply scored by folds and his bitterly rent mouth, was always both things at once, that both seemed to fit him and to cancel each other in him whenever one looked at him: this and that, the one and the other. Yes, that stupid old man, that sovereign Zero! He did not paralyse the nerve of contradictions through confusion and obstruction, as Naphta did; he was not ambiguous as Naphta was, but in an altogether contrary, a positive fashion—this staggering mystery which manifestly transcended not only stupidity and cleverness but so many other oppositions besides, invoked by Settembrini and Naphta in order to generate high tension for educational purposes. Personality, it seemed, was not educational—and yet what an opportunity it presented to a traveller in search of cultivation! How strange it was to contemplate this ambiguity of a king when the combatants came to marriage and sin, to the sacrament of indulgence, to the guilt and innocence of lust! He inclined his head toward shoulder and breast, the aching lips parted, the mouth sagged open in languid lamentation, the nostrils tensed and widened as though in pain, the folds of the brow rose and enlarged the eyes into a pale gaze of suffering—an image of bitterness. And behold, in that same instant the martyr’s expression blossomed into voluptuousness! The oblique inclination of the head was transfigured into roguery, the lips, still parted, smiled indecently, the sybaritic dimple, familiar from earlier occasions, appeared in one cheek—the dancing pagan priest was there, and while he pointed his head jocularly in that cerebral direction, one heard him say: “Ah, yes, yes, yes—perfect. That is—Those are—There we see now—The sacrament of lust, you understand—”

Nevertheless, as we have said, Hans Castorp’s diminished friends and teachers were still best off when they could quarrel. They were then in their element, whereas the man of stature was not, and opinions might at least differ as to the part he played in it. Quite beyond doubt, however, the situation turned to their disadvantage whenever it was no longer a matter of wit and words and spiritus, but of things, of earthly practicalities—in short, of questions and affairs in which natures born to rule properly prove themselves: then they were done for, they receded into shadow, became inconspicuous, and Peeperkorn seized the sceptre, determined, decided, directed, ordered, and commanded ... Small wonder that he sought this condition and strove to pass from logomachy into it. He suffered while the former prevailed, or at least when it prevailed too long; yet it was not from vanity that he suffered—Hans Castorp felt certain of that. Vanity has no stature, and greatness is not vain. No, Peeperkorn’s desire for concrete things sprang from other causes: from “fear,” to put it very coarsely and bluntly, from that zeal for duty and transport of honour which Hans Castorp had tentatively mentioned to Herr Settembrini and had wished to describe as a military trait of sorts.

“My gentlemen—” said the Dutchman, raising his captain’s hand with its lance-like nails in a gesture at once adjuring and commanding. “Good, my gentlemen, perfect, excellent! Asceticism—indulgence—sensual pleasure—I should like to—Entirely! Most important! Most contentious! But permit me—I fear that we are making ourselves guilty of a grave—We are withdrawing, ladies and gentlemen, in an irresponsible manner, from the most sacred—” He drew a deep breath. “This air, ladies and gentlemen, the air of this day’s Föhn, so rich in character, with its delicately enervating admixture of spring fragrance, laden with foreboding and remembrance—we ought not to inhale it only to return it in the form of—I earnestly beg you: we ought not. It is an insult. To it alone should we devote our full and entire—oh, our highest and most keenly attentive—Done with it, ladies and gentlemen! And only as pure praise of its qualities should we breathe it forth again from our breasts—I interrupt myself, ladies and gentlemen! I interrupt myself in honour of this—” He had stopped, leaning backward and shading his eyes with his hat, and all the others followed his example. “I direct,” he said, “your attention aloft, to a great height, to that black, circling point up there, beneath the extraordinarily blue sky shading almost into black—That is a bird of prey, a great bird of prey. That is, unless everything deceives me—My gentlemen, and you, my child, that is an eagle. To it I most decidedly direct—Look! That is no buzzard and no vulture—if you were as far-sighted as I am with advancing—Yes, my child, certainly, with advancing years. My hair is pale, certainly. Then you would perceive as clearly as I do, by the blunt curvature of the wings—An eagle, ladies and gentlemen. A golden eagle. He is circling directly above us in the blue, soaring without a beat of his wings at a magnificent height to our—and assuredly scanning with his mighty, far-seeing eyes beneath the projecting brow-bones—The eagle, ladies and gentlemen, Jupiter’s bird, the king of his kind, the lion of the air! He wears feathered breeches and has a beak of iron, curving abruptly into an iron hook only at the tip, and talons of prodigious strength, inward-turned claws, the front ones clasped as though in iron by the long hind claw. Look, like this!” And with his long-nailed captain’s hand he attempted to represent an eagle’s claw. “Cousin, why do you circle and spy?” he addressed the heights once more. “Plunge down! Strike it on the head and in the eyes with your iron beak, tear open the belly of the creature God has given you—Perfect! Done with it! Your talons must be entangled in entrails and your beak drip with blood—”

He was enraptured, and the walkers’ interest in Naphta’s and Settembrini’s antinomies was at an end. The apparition of the eagle continued to exert its wordless influence upon the resolutions and undertakings that followed under Mynheer’s direction: there was a halt at an inn, there was eating and drinking, quite out of season, but with an appetite inflamed by silent recollection of the eagle; a feasting and carousing such as Mynheer so often contrived even beyond the Berghof, wherever opportunity offered, in “Platz” and “Dorf,” at an inn in Glaris or Klosters, whither they had gone on an excursion by the little train. Under his sovereign direction they enjoyed classical gifts: coffee with cream and country baking, or succulent cheese upon fragrant Alpine butter, which also tasted marvellous with hot roasted chestnuts, accompanied by as much red Veltliner as the heart desired; and Peeperkorn accompanied the impromptu repast with grand fragmentary utterances, or called upon Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to speak—that good-natured sufferer to whom all higher things were entirely foreign, but who knew how to speak very concretely about the manufacture of Russian rubber shoes: sulphur and other substances were mixed into the rubber compound, and the finished, lacquered shoes were “vulcanized” at a heat of more than one hundred degrees. He spoke of the Arctic Circle as well, for his business journeys had taken him even there several times: of the midnight sun and the eternal winter at the North Cape. There, he said from his knotted throat and beneath his overhanging moustache, the steamer had appeared quite tiny beside the enormous rock and the steel-grey expanse of sea. And yellow fields of light had spread across the sky; that had been the Northern Lights. And everything had seemed ghostly to him, Anton Karlowitsch—the entire scene, and he himself along with it.

So much for Herr Ferge, the only member of the little company who stood outside all the relationships running to and fro among the others. As for those relationships, however, two brief interviews must be recorded, two curious private conversations conducted at that time by our unheroic hero with Clawdia Chauchat and her travelling companion: with each separately, the one in the hall at an evening hour, while the “disturbance” lay upstairs in a fever, the other one afternoon at Mynheer’s bedside ...

Half-darkness prevailed in the hall that evening. The customary sociability had been listless and fleeting, and early on the guests had withdrawn to their balcony boxes for the late rest cure, insofar as they were not pursuing paths contrary to the cure, down into the world for dancing and gaming. Only one lamp burned somewhere on the ceiling of the deserted room, and the adjoining common rooms were scarcely illuminated either. Yet Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had dined without her master, had not yet returned to the first floor, but was lingering alone in the writing-and-reading room, and for that reason he too had delayed going upstairs. He sat in the rear portion of the hall, raised by a shallow step and separated from the main room by a pair of white arches with wood-panelled pillars, sat beside the tiled fireplace in a rocking-chair like the one in which Marusja had rocked herself that time when Joachim had held his one and only conversation with her, and smoked a cigarette, as was just barely permissible here at this hour.

She came; he heard her footsteps, heard her dress behind him; she was beside him, waving a letter to and fro through the air by one corner, and said in her Pribislav voice:

“The concierge has gone. Do give me a _timbre poste_!”

She wore light, dark silk that evening, a dress with a round neckline and loose sleeves that ended below in buttoned cuffs fitting closely about the wrists. He liked the sight of that. She had adorned herself with the string of pearls, which shimmered pale in the dusk. He looked up into her Kirghiz face. He repeated:

“_Timbre?_ I haven’t one.”

“What, none? _Tant pis pour vous._ Not prepared to oblige a lady?” She thrust out her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “That disappoints me. You people are supposed to be precise and reliable, after all. I had imagined that in one compartment of your wallet you would have little folded sheets of every kind, arranged according to denomination.”

“No, what for?” he said. “I never write letters. To whom, indeed? Very rarely a card, perhaps, and that is already stamped. To whom should I write letters? I have no one. I no longer have any contact at all with the flatlands; it has slipped away from me. We have a song in our book of folk songs in which the words run: ‘I have slipped away from the world.’ That is how it is with me.”

“Well then, at least give me a papyros, you lost soul!” she said, seating herself opposite him beside the fireplace, on the bench furnished with a linen cushion, crossing one leg over the other and holding out her hand. “You seem to be provided with those.” And carelessly, without thanking him, she took from his silver case the cigarette he offered her, and availed herself of the pocket-lighter whose flame he made play before her inclined face. In this indolent “Come, give me one!”, this taking without thanks, there lay the voluptuousness of the spoiled woman, but beyond that the sense of human—or, better said, “hyuman”—community and common ownership, a wild and tender matter-of-course in giving and taking. In the spirit of a man in love, he took inward note of it. Then he said:

“Yes, always with those. With those I am indeed always provided. One must have them. How could one possibly do without? When a man asks like that, I suppose one calls it a passion. Frankly, I am not at all a passionate man, but I have passions—phlegmatic passions.”

“It reassures me extraordinarily,” she said, speaking through the smoke she exhaled, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. Besides, how could you be? You would have to be a throwback. Passion means living for the sake of life. But it is well known that you people live for the sake of experience. Passion is self-forgetfulness. But what you seek is self-enrichment. _C’est ça._ Have you no notion that this is loathsome egoism, and that one day it will cause you to stand revealed as enemies of mankind?”

“Hallo, hallo! Enemies of mankind straight away?—What are you saying there in such general terms, Clawdia? What particular and personal thing have you in mind when you say that we care not for life but for enrichment? You women surely do not moralize so much at random. Ah, morality, you know. That is a point of contention for Naphta and Settembrini. It belongs to the realm of the great confusion. Whether a man lives for his own sake or for the sake of life, he does not know himself, and no one can know it precisely and with certainty. I mean, the boundary is fluid. There is egoistic devotion and devoted egoism... I believe that, on the whole, it is as it is in love. Of course it is probably immoral that I cannot properly attend to what you are telling me about morality, but am chiefly glad that we are sitting together, as only once before and never yet since you came back. And that I can tell you how incomparably well these close cuffs become your wrists, and this thin silk flowing loosely about your arms—about your arms, which I know...”

“I am going.”

“Please, do not go! I shall take the circumstances and the persons concerned into consideration.”

“That, at least, one may surely be entitled to expect from a man without passion.”

“There, you see! You mock and scold me when I... And you want to go when I...”

“One is requested to speak less fragmentarily if one wishes to be understood.”

“And am I, then, to have no share at all, not even the smallest, in your practice of divining fragmentary utterances? That is unjust—I should say, if I did not perceive that justice is not what is at issue here...”

“Ah, no. Justice is a phlegmatic passion. Unlike jealousy, with which phlegmatic people would inevitably make themselves ridiculous.”

“You see? Ridiculous. Then allow me my phlegm! I repeat: how could I possibly do without it? How, for example, should I have endured the waiting without it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Waiting for you.”

“_Voyons, mon ami._ I shall not dwell further upon the form in which you persist, with foolish obstinacy, in speaking to me. You will tire of it soon enough, and after all I am no prude, no outraged bourgeois wife...”

“No, because you are ill. Illness gives you freedom. It makes you—wait, a word occurs to me that I have never used before! It makes you a genius!”

“We shall speak of genius another time. That is not what I meant to say. I demand one thing. You will not pretend that I had anything whatever to do with your waiting—if you did wait—that I encouraged you to it, or even permitted it. You will confirm to me at once, and expressly, that the contrary is the case...”

“Gladly, Clawdia, certainly. You did not ask me to wait; I waited of my own free will. I understand perfectly that you attach importance to the point...”

“Even your concessions have something impertinent about them. Indeed, you are an impertinent person altogether, God knows why. Not only in your dealings with me, but otherwise as well. Even your admiration, your submission, has something impertinent about it. Do not suppose I fail to see that! For that reason alone I ought not to speak to you at all, and likewise because you dare to speak of waiting. It is irresponsible that you are still here. You ought long ago to have returned to your work, _sur le chantier_, or wherever it was...”

“Now you are speaking without genius and quite conventionally, Clawdia. That is merely a phrase. You cannot mean it as Settembrini does, and how else could you mean it? It is said for saying’s sake; I cannot take it seriously. I shall not make a wild departure like my poor cousin, who, as you foretold, died when he attempted to perform his duty in the flatlands, and who probably knew himself that he would die, but preferred death to continuing his duty to the cure up here. Very well, he was a soldier. But I am not; I am a civilian, and for me it would be desertion to act as he did and insist, in defiance of Rhadamanthus’s prohibition, upon serving utility and progress so very directly in the flatlands. It would be the greatest ingratitude and disloyalty toward illness and genius, and toward my love for you, of which I bear old scars and fresh wounds, and toward your arms, which I know—even if I admit that it was only in a dream, in a dream of genius, that I came to know them, so that naturally no consequences, obligations, or restrictions upon your freedom arise from it...”

She laughed, the cigarette in her mouth, so that her Tatar eyes narrowed, and, leaning back against the boiserie, her hands braced on the bench beside her and one leg crossed over the other, she let her foot in its black patent-leather shoe swing to and fro.

“_Quelle générosité! Oh là, là, vraiment_, that is precisely how I have always imagined a _homme de génie_, my poor little one!”

“Let that pass, Clawdia. By birth and upbringing, of course, I am no _homme de génie_, any more than I am a man of stature—good God, no. But then, by chance—call it chance—I was driven so far up into these regions of genius... In a word, you probably do not know that there is such a thing as alchemical-hermetic pedagogy, transubstantiation, and indeed into something higher: an enhancement, that is, if you wish to understand me correctly. But of course a substance fit to be driven and forced upward into something higher by external influences must presumably possess some little aptitude for it beforehand. And what I possessed within me was—I know it precisely—that from far back I had been on intimate terms with illness and death, and that even as a boy I unreasonably borrowed a pencil from you, just as I did here on Carnival night. But unreasonable love is genius, for death, you know, is the principle of genius, the _res bina_, the _lapis philosophorum_, and it is also the pedagogic principle, because love of death leads to love of life and of mankind. That is how it is; it dawned upon me in my balcony box, and I am delighted to be able to tell you. There are two ways to life: one is the ordinary, direct, and respectable way. The other is bad; it leads through death, and that is the way of genius!”

“You are a foolish philosopher,” she said. “I will not claim to understand everything in your convoluted German thoughts, but what you say sounds hyuman, and you are unquestionably a good boy. Besides, you have in fact behaved _en philosophe_; one must grant you that...”

“Too much _en philosophe_ for your taste, Clawdia, is that it?”

“Leave off your impertinences! It is becoming tedious. Your waiting was foolish and impermissible. But you are not angry with me because you waited in vain?”

“Well, it was rather hard, Clawdia, even for a man of phlegmatic passions—hard for me and hard of you, that you took up with him, for naturally you knew through Behrens that I was here and waiting for you. But I told you that I regard our night as nothing but a dream-night and that I concede you your freedom. After all, I did not wait in vain, for you are back; we are sitting together as we did then; I hear the marvellous incisiveness of your voice, familiar to my ear from far back; and beneath this flowing silk are your arms, which I know—even though upstairs your travelling companion lies in a fever, the great Peeperkorn, who gave you those pearls...”

“And with whom you cultivate so close a friendship for the sake of enriching yourself.”

“Do not take it amiss, Clawdia! Settembrini has scolded me for it too, but that is merely a social prejudice. The man is a gain—God in heaven, he is a personality! That he is advanced in years—well, yes. Nevertheless, I should understand perfectly if you, as a woman, loved him tremendously. So you love him very much?”

“With all due respect to your philosophy, little German Hans,” she said, stroking his hair, “I should not consider it hyuman to speak to you of my love for him!”

“Ah, Clawdia, why not? I believe humanity begins where people without genius think it ends. Let us speak quite calmly about him! Do you love him passionately?”

She bent forward to toss the spent cigarette sideways into the fireplace, then sat with her arms folded.

“He loves me,” she said, “and his love makes me proud and grateful and devoted to him. You will understand that, or else you are unworthy of the friendship he accords you... His feeling compelled me to follow him and serve him. How could it possibly be otherwise? Judge for yourself! Is it hyumanly possible to disregard his feeling?”

“Impossible!” Hans Castorp confirmed. “No, that was of course quite out of the question. How could a woman possibly bring herself to disregard his feeling, his anxiety for feeling—to abandon him, so to speak, in Gethsemane...”

“You are not stupid,” she said, and her slanting eyes stared fixedly, lost in thought. “You have understanding. Anxiety for feeling...”

“It requires no great understanding to see that you had to follow him, although—or rather because—his love must contain much that is frightening.”

“_C’est exact_... Frightening. He causes one much anxiety, you know, many difficulties...” She had taken his hand and was unconsciously playing with its joints, but suddenly she looked up with knitted brows and asked:

“Wait! Is it not contemptible of us to speak of him as we are doing?”

“Certainly not, Clawdia. No, far from it. It is surely no more than human! You love the word; you draw it out so rapturously, and I have always heard it from your lips with interest. My cousin Joachim did not like it, for soldierly reasons. He thought it signified universal slackness and slovenliness, and understood in that sense, as a boundless _guazzabuglio_ of tolerance, I too have my reservations about it, I admit. But when it bears the meaning of freedom and genius and goodness, then there is something great in it after all, and we may safely invoke it in favour of our conversation about Peeperkorn and the anxieties and difficulties he causes you. They naturally result from his plume of honour, from his fear of the failure of feeling, which makes him so fond of the classic means of relief and restoration—we may speak of it with all reverence, for everything about him has stature, magnificent royal stature, and we degrade neither him nor ourselves by bringing it humanly into speech.”

“It is not a question of us,” she said, and had folded her arms again. “One would be no woman if, for the sake of a man—a man of stature, as you call it—for whom one is an object of feeling and of anxiety for feeling, one were not also willing to accept humiliations.”

“Unquestionably, Clawdia. Very well said. Then even the humiliation has stature, and from the height of her humiliation the woman may speak as disdainfully to those who possess no royal stature as you spoke to me earlier regarding the _timbres poste_, in the tone in which you said: ‘At least you people ought to be precise and reliable!’”

“Are you sensitive? Let that go. Let us send sensitivity to the devil—do you agree? I too have sometimes been sensitive, I will admit it, since we are sitting together like this tonight. I was vexed by your phlegm, and by your establishing yourself on such good terms with him for the sake of your egoistic experience. Nevertheless, it pleased me, and I was grateful to you for showing him reverence... There was much loyalty in your behaviour, and though a certain impertinence entered into it as well, in the end I was obliged to count that in your favour.”

“That was very kind of you.”

She looked at him. “It seems you are incorrigible. I shall tell you what you are: a crafty boy. I do not know whether you possess wit; but craftiness you unquestionably possess. Well, one can live with that. One can maintain a friendship with it. Shall we maintain a friendship, make an alliance for his sake, as one ordinarily makes an alliance against someone? Will you give me your hand upon it? I am often afraid... Sometimes I am frightened of being alone with him, inwardly alone, _tu sais_... He is frightening... At times I fear that things may not end well with him... Sometimes I am filled with dread... I should like to have a good man at my side... _Enfin_, if you wish to hear it, perhaps that is why I came here with him...”

They sat knee to knee, he in the chair tilted forward, she on the bench. She had pressed his hand at her last words, spoken close before his face. He said:

“To me? Oh, that is beautiful. Oh, Clawdia, that is quite extraordinary. You came here with him to me? And you would say that my waiting was foolish and impermissible and entirely in vain? It would be awkward in the highest degree if I failed to appreciate the offer of your friendship—friendship with you, for his sake ...”

Then she kissed him on the mouth. It was a Russian kiss, of the kind exchanged in that vast and soulful country on the great Christian feast-days, as a seal of love. But since it was exchanged by a notoriously “cunning” young man and a likewise still-young, charmingly slinking woman, we cannot help, as we tell of it, being reminded from afar of Doctor Krokowski’s artful, if not altogether irreproachable, manner of speaking of love in a subtly shifting sense, so that no one had ever been quite certain whether something devout or something passionately carnal was meant. Are we doing as he did, or was that how Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat conducted their Russian kiss? But what would be said if we simply refused to get to the bottom of this question? In our opinion it may be analytical, but—to repeat Hans Castorp’s turn of phrase—it is “awkward in the highest degree,” and indeed downright unfriendly to life, to distinguish “cleanly,” in matters of love, between the devout and the passionate. Cleanly, indeed! Shifting sense and ambiguity! We make no secret of our amusement at the notion. Is it not great and good that language has only _one_ word for everything that may be understood by it, from the most devout to the most carnally desirous? That is perfect unambiguity within ambiguity; for love cannot be incorporeal in its utmost devotion, nor impious in its utmost carnality. It is always itself, as cunning friendliness toward life no less than as supreme passion; it is sympathy with the organic, the touchingly voluptuous embrace of that which is destined for decay—Charitas is assuredly present even in the most admiring or most furious passion. A shifting sense? But in God’s name, let the sense of love shift! Its shifting is life and humanity, and to trouble oneself over it would betray an utterly desolate want of cunning.

While the lips of Hans Castorp and Frau Chauchat thus meet in the Russian kiss, we darken our little theatre for a change of scene. For we now come to the second of the two conversations whose communication we promised; and when the lights return—the dim light of a declining spring day, in the season of melting snow—we behold our hero in an already familiar situation in life, seated at the bedside of the great Peeperkorn and engaged with him in respectfully friendly conversation. After four-o’clock tea in the dining-room, at which Frau Chauchat, as at the three preceding meals, had appeared alone, intending immediately afterward to undertake a _shopping_ expedition down to the “Platz,” Hans Castorp had had himself announced for one of his customary sick-room visits to the Dutchman—partly to show him attention and entertain him a little, partly to edify himself in turn by the effect of his personality: in short, from motives that shifted with all the vitality of life. Peeperkorn laid aside the “Telegraaf,” tossed his pince-nez upon it after lifting it from his nose by the bridge, and extended his captain’s hand to his visitor, while his broad, fissured lips moved indistinctly with a wounded expression. Red wine and coffee stood ready to hand as usual: the coffee service rested on the chair beside the bed, stained brown from use—Mynheer had taken his afternoon draught, strong and hot, with sugar and cream as usual, and it had made him perspire. His kingly face, framed in white flame, was flushed, and small beads stood upon his forehead and upper lip.

“I am perspiring a little,” he said. “Welcome, young man. On the contrary. Take a seat! It is a sign of weakness when, immediately after taking a warm beverage, one—Would you kindly—Quite so. The handkerchief. Many thanks.” The flush, however, soon subsided and gave way to the yellowish pallor that commonly covered the magnificent man’s face after a malignant attack. The quartan fever had been severe that morning, in all three of its stages—the cold, the burning, and the moist—and Peeperkorn’s small, pale eyes looked weary beneath the idol-like lineaments of his brow. He said:

“It is—altogether, young man. I should most decidedly like to use the word ‘commendable’—Absolutely. It is very kind of you, a sick old man—”

“To visit?” Hans Castorp asked ... “But no, Mynheer Peeperkorn. It is I who have every reason to be grateful that I am permitted to sit here a little; I gain incomparably more from it than you do, and come from purely selfish motives. And what a misleading description of your person that is—‘a sick old man.’ No one would ever imagine that it was meant to describe _you_. It gives an entirely false picture.”

“Good, good,” Mynheer replied, closing his eyes for a few seconds, his majestic head resting against the pillow with chin raised, the long-nailed fingers folded upon the broad, kingly breast outlined beneath his jersey shirt. “It is good, young man—or rather, your intentions are good, I am convinced of that. It was pleasant yesterday afternoon—yes indeed, only yesterday afternoon—at that hospitable place—I have forgotten its name—where we had the excellent salami with scrambled eggs and that wholesome country wine—”

“It was magnificent!” Hans Castorp confirmed. “Every one of us enjoyed it quite impermissibly—the chef here at the Berghof would rightly have been offended if he had seen us—in short, without exception we entered intensely into the spirit of the occasion! That was salami of the genuine article, through and through; Herr Settembrini was quite moved by it and ate it, so to speak, with tears in his eyes. He is a patriot, as you will know, a democratic patriot. He has consecrated his citizen’s pike upon the altar of humanity, so that in future salami may pay customs duty at the Brenner frontier.”

“That is immaterial,” Peeperkorn declared. “He is a chivalrous man and a cheerful conversationalist, a cavalier, although it is evidently not granted him to change his clothes frequently.”

“Not at all!” said Hans Castorp. “Not granted him at all! I have known him for a long time now and am very friendly with him—that is to say, he has most commendably taken me in hand, because he decided I was a ‘problem child of life’—that is a turn of phrase between us, and its meaning is not immediately obvious—and he takes pains to exert a corrective influence upon me. But I have never seen him otherwise, in summer or in winter, than in those checked trousers and that threadbare double-breasted coat. He wears the old things with outstanding dignity, incidentally, quite like a cavalier; there I agree with you most decidedly. The way he wears them is a triumph over poverty, and I even prefer his poverty to little Naphta’s elegance, which never feels quite trustworthy; it is diabolical, so to speak, and the means for it reach him by backstairs channels—I have a certain insight into the circumstances.”

“A chivalrous and cheerful man,” Peeperkorn repeated, without taking up the remark about Naphta, “although—not without, permit me this qualification—although not without prejudices. Madame, my travelling companion, does not esteem him particularly, as you may perhaps have noticed; she speaks of him without sympathy, doubtless because she infers prejudices of that kind from his conduct toward her—Not a word, young man. I am far from wishing to impugn Herr Settembrini and your friendly sentiments toward him—Settled! I have no thought of asserting that, in the matter of the courtesy which a cavalier owes a lady, he has ever—Perfect, my dear friend, entirely beyond reproach! Yet there is nevertheless a boundary, a reserve, a certain re-cu-sa-tion, which renders Madame’s feelings toward him, in human terms and to the highest degree—”

“Comprehensible. Understandable. Justified in the highest degree. Forgive me, Mynheer Peeperkorn, for taking it upon myself to finish your sentence. I can risk doing so in the consciousness of complete agreement with you. Particularly when one considers how greatly women—you may smile at my speaking so generally of women at my tender age—how greatly their conduct toward a man depends upon the man’s conduct toward them, there is nothing surprising in it. Women, as I should like to express it, are reactive creatures, without independent initiative, indolent in the sense of passive ... Allow me, please, difficult though it may be, to try to develop that a little further. A woman, so far as I have been able to determine, regards herself in matters of love primarily and entirely as an object; she lets things come to her, she does not choose freely, she becomes the choosing subject of love only by virtue of the man’s choice—and even then, permit me to add, her freedom of choice—provided only that the man is not too sorry a specimen, though even that cannot be regarded as a strict condition—her freedom of choice, then, is greatly impaired and suborned by the fact _that_ she has been chosen. Good Lord, what I am saying will doubtless be platitudes, but when one is young, naturally everything is new, new and astonishing. You ask a woman: ‘Do you love him, then?’ ‘He loves me so much!’ she answers you, raising her eyes—or lowering them, for that matter. Now imagine such an answer on the lips of one of us—forgive the collective form! Perhaps there are men who would have to answer in that way, but they are decidedly ridiculous, love’s henpecked heroes, to put it epigrammatically. I should like to know what estimate of herself that feminine answer actually reveals. Does the woman believe that she owes boundless devotion to the man who has graced so lowly a creature as herself by choosing her for his love, or does she see in the man’s love for her person an infallible sign of his excellence? That is a question I have occasionally asked myself, here and there, in quiet hours.”

“Primal things, classical facts—you touch upon sacred verities, young man, with your nimble little words,” Peeperkorn replied. “The man is intoxicated by his desire; the woman demands and expects to be intoxicated by his desire. Hence our obligation to feeling. Hence the terrible shame of insensibility, of the impotence to awaken the woman to desire. Will you drink a glass of red wine with me? I shall drink. I am thirsty. This day’s loss of moisture has been considerable.”

“Many thanks, Mynheer Peeperkorn. It is not, to be sure, my usual hour, but I am always ready to drink a sip to your health.”

“Then take the wineglass. There is only one at hand. I shall make shift with the water tumbler. I think one does this little young wine no indignity by drinking it from a plain vessel—” Assisted by his guest, he poured with a captain’s hand that trembled slightly, and thirstily sent the red wine from the stemless glass down his bust-like gullet, exactly as though it were clear water.

“That revives one,” he said. “You will drink no more? Then permit me to pour myself another—” He spilled a little wine as he refilled the glass. The turned-down sheet over his blanket was stained dark red. “I repeat,” he said, raising a finger like a lance while the wineglass trembled in his other hand, “I repeat: hence our obligation, our _religious_ obligation, to feeling. Our feeling, you understand, is the virile power that awakens life. Life slumbers. It wishes to be awakened to its drunken wedding with divine feeling. For feeling, young man, is divine. Man is divine insofar as he feels. He is the feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing but the organ through which God consummates His wedding with awakened and intoxicated life. If man fails in feeling, divine disgrace breaks upon us; it is the defeat of God’s virile power, a cosmic catastrophe, an inconceivable horror—” He drank.

“Permit me to take the glass from you, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” said Hans Castorp. “I follow your train of thought with the greatest edification. You are developing a theological theory in which you assign to man a religious function that is highly honourable, though perhaps somewhat one-sided. If I may be permitted to remark upon it, there is a certain rigor in your way of looking at things which has an oppressive quality—forgive me! All religious severity is naturally oppressive to people of more modest stature. I have no thought of correcting you; I merely wish, by way of a tactful return, to take up your observation concerning certain ‘prejudices’ which, as you have noticed, Herr Settembrini entertains toward Madame, your travelling companion. I have known Herr Settembrini a long time, a very long time, for a year and a day, for years and days. And I can assure you that his prejudices, insofar as they exist at all, are by no means of a petty or philistine character—it would be ridiculous to suppose such a thing. They can only be prejudices on a grander scale, and therefore impersonal in nature: general pedagogical principles, in asserting which Herr Settembrini has, to speak frankly, treated me in my capacity as a ‘problem child of life’—But that would take us too far. It is an exceedingly extensive matter, which I could not possibly explain in two words—”

“And you love Madame?” Mynheer asked suddenly, turning upon his visitor his royal countenance with its painfully fissured mouth and the small, pale eyes beneath the arabesque tracery of his brow ... Hans Castorp started. He stammered:

“Whether I ... That is ... I naturally revere Frau Chauchat, if only in her capacity as—”

“I beg you!” Peeperkorn said, extending his hand in a cultured gesture of restraint. “Allow me,” he continued, after thus making room for what he had to say, “allow me to repeat that I am far from accusing this Italian gentleman of ever having committed a genuine transgression against the commandments of chivalry—I bring that accusation against no one, no one. Yet it strikes me—At this present moment, for example, I enjoy—Good, young man. Entirely good and admirable. I enjoy your company, there is no doubt of it; it affords me real pleasure. Nevertheless I say to myself—I say to myself, in short: your acquaintance with Madame is older than ours. You shared her previous stay at this place. Moreover, she is a woman of the most charming qualities, while I am only a sick old man. How does it happen—Since I am indisposed, she has gone down to the health resort alone and unaccompanied this afternoon to make purchases—No calamity! Far from it! Only it would undoubtedly have been—Am I to ascribe it to the influence of—what did you call them?—Signor Settembrini’s pedagogical principles, that you have failed to obey the chivalrous impulse—Please understand me to the letter ...”

“To the letter, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Oh no. Not in the least. I act with absolute independence. On the contrary, Herr Settembrini has even, on occasion— —I regret to see wine stains on your sheet, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Ought we not—We used to pour salt on them while they were still fresh—”

“That is immaterial,” Peeperkorn said, keeping his guest in view.

Hans Castorp changed colour.

“Things,” he said with a false smile, “are rather different here from what they ordinarily are. The spirit of the place, if I may put it so, is not conventional. The privilege belongs to the invalid, whether man or woman. The precepts of chivalry must yield to it. You are temporarily indisposed, Mynheer Peeperkorn—an acute indisposition, an indisposition of immediate concern. Your travelling companion is comparatively well. I therefore believe myself to be acting entirely in accordance with Madame’s wishes if, in her absence, I represent her a little at your bedside—insofar as one can speak of representation here, ha, ha—instead of representing you to her and offering to accompany her down into the town. Besides, how could I presume to press my knightly services upon your travelling companion? I possess neither legal title nor mandate to do so. I may say that I have a strong sense of positive legal relations. In short, I find my position correct; it corresponds to the general state of affairs and, in particular, to my sincere feelings for your person, Mynheer Peeperkorn, and thus I believe I have given a satisfactory answer to your question—for I believe you did address a question to me.”

“A very agreeable one,” Peeperkorn replied. “I listen with involuntary pleasure to your nimble little discourse, young man. It skips over stock and stone and rounds everything off into agreeableness. But satisfactory—no. Your answer does not entirely satisfy me—forgive me if I disappoint you by saying so. ‘Rigorous,’ my dear friend: you used that word a moment ago with reference to certain views I had expressed. But there is a certain rigorousness in your remarks as well, a severity and constraint which do not seem to accord with your nature, although I already know them from your conduct in one particular respect. I recognize them. It is the very same constraint you display during our common undertakings, our walks, toward Madame—and toward no one else—and for which you owe me an explanation: it is a debt, an obligation, young man. I am not mistaken. The observation has been confirmed too often, and it is unlikely that it should not also have forced itself upon others, with the difference that those others may, indeed probably do, possess the explanation of the phenomenon.”

Mynheer spoke that afternoon in an unusually precise and coherent style, despite the exhaustion caused by his malignant attack. There was scarcely any brokenness in his speech. Half sitting in bed, his mighty shoulders and magnificent head turned toward his visitor, he held one arm extended over the bedclothes, and his freckled captain’s hand, standing upright at the end of the woollen sleeve, formed the ring of exactitude surmounted by its finger-lances, while his mouth shaped the words as sharply and accurately, indeed as plastically, as Herr Settembrini could possibly have wished, with a rolled guttural r in such words as “probably” and “obtruded itself.”

“You smile,” he continued, “you turn your head from side to side, blinking; you appear to be applying yourself to fruitless reflection. And yet there is no doubt whatever that you know what I mean and what is at issue. I do not claim that you never address a word to Madame, or that you fail to answer her when the conversation brings about the reverse. But I repeat: it is done with a particular constraint—or, more precisely, with an evasion, an avoidance, and, on closer inspection, the avoidance of _one_ form. So far as you are concerned, one receives the impression that a wager is involved, as though you and Madame had eaten a philopena and, by agreement, you were forbidden to employ the form of address in speaking to her. You consequently and invariably avoid addressing her. You do not say ‘you’ to her.”

“But Mynheer Peeperkorn... What sort of philopena could there be...”

“I may draw your attention to a circumstance of which you yourself can hardly be unaware: you have this instant turned pale to the very lips.”

Hans Castorp did not look up. Bent over, he busied himself intently with the red stains on the sheet. “It had to come to this!” he thought. “This was what it was tending toward. I believe I myself have done my part to make it tend this way. To a certain degree I have deliberately brought it about, as I realize at this moment. Have I truly turned so pale? That may well be, for now it is a matter of break or bend. One does not know what will happen. Can I still lie? I probably could, but I have no wish to. For the present I shall keep to these bloodstains, these red-wine stains here on the sheet.”

Silence reigned above him as well. It lasted perhaps two or three minutes—a fact that afforded occasion to observe what dimensions these minute units can assume under such circumstances.

It was Pieter Peeperkorn who reopened the conversation.

“It was on that evening which brought me the privilege of your acquaintance,” he began in a singsong tone, letting his voice fall at the close as though this were the first sentence of a longer narrative. “We had celebrated a little feast, partaken of food and drink, and, in an elevated mood, in a humanly relaxed and daring condition, sought our nocturnal quarters at an advanced hour, arm in arm. It was then, here before my door, as we took leave of one another, that the inspiration came to me to invite you to touch with your lips the brow of the woman who had presented you to me as a good friend from an earlier stay, and to leave it to her to return this solemnly cheerful act before my eyes as a token of the exalted hour. You rejected my suggestion outright, rejected it on the ground that you considered it absurd to exchange kisses upon the brow with my travelling companion. You will not deny that this was an elucidation which itself required explanation—an explanation you have owed me to this hour. Are you willing to discharge that debt now?”

“So he noticed that as well,” Hans Castorp thought, bending still closer over the wine stains and scratching at one of them with the curved tip of his middle finger. “At bottom, I suppose I wanted him to notice it then and remember it, or I should not have said it. But what now? My heart is beating rather violently. Will there be a royal fit of the first order? Perhaps I should do well to glance at his fist, which may already be hovering over me? A most singular and extremely perilous situation I find myself in!”

Suddenly he felt Peeperkorn’s hand close around his right wrist.

“Now he has seized me by the wrist!” he thought. “Well, this is ridiculous—why am I sitting here like a drenched poodle? Have I culpably wronged him? Not in the least. First the man in Daghestan has cause for complaint. Then this man and that. And then I. And _he_, so far as I know, has no cause for complaint at all as yet. Why, then, is my heart pounding? It is high time I straightened myself and looked him frankly, though respectfully, in his mightily imposing countenance!”

And so he did. The mightily imposing countenance was yellow; the eyes looked pale beneath the contracted tracery of the brow; the expression of the torn lips was bitter. They read in one another’s eyes, the great old man and the insignificant young one, while the former continued to hold the latter by the wrist. At last Peeperkorn said softly:

“You were Clawdia’s lover during her previous stay.”

Hans Castorp lowered his head once more, but immediately raised it again and, after drawing a deep breath, said:

“Mynheer Peeperkorn! It is repugnant to me in the highest degree to lie to you, and I am searching for some means of avoiding it. That is not easy. I boast if I confirm your assertion, and I lie if I deny it. This is how the matter must be understood. For a long time, a very long time, I lived together in this house with Clawdia—forgive me—with your present travelling companion, without knowing her socially. The social element played no part in our relations, or in my relations with her, whose origin, I should say, lies in darkness. In my thoughts I never addressed Clawdia otherwise than as ‘thou,’ nor did I ever do otherwise in reality. For the evening on which I cast off certain pedagogical fetters, already briefly mentioned, and approached her—under a pretext that lay ready to hand from earlier days—was a masked evening, a Carnival evening, an irresponsible evening, an evening of ‘thou,’ in the course of which the ‘thou’ acquired its full meaning in a dreamlike and irresponsible fashion. But it was at the same time the eve of Clawdia’s departure.”

“Its full meaning,” Peeperkorn repeated. “You have put that very prettily—” He released Hans Castorp and began massaging both halves of his face with the palms of his long-nailed captain’s hands: eye sockets, cheeks, and chin. Then he folded his hands upon the wine-stained sheet and inclined his head to one side, the left side, away from his guest, so that it amounted to turning his face aside.

“I have answered you as accurately as possible, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp said, “and have conscientiously endeavoured to say neither too much nor too little. My chief concern was to make you see that one is, so to speak, at liberty either to count that evening of the full ‘thou’ and of farewell or not to count it—that it was an evening outside every established order and almost outside the calendar, a _hors d’œuvre_, so to speak, an extra evening, an intercalary evening, the twenty-ninth of February—and that it would therefore have been only half a lie if I had denied your assertion.”

Peeperkorn did not reply.

“I preferred,” Hans Castorp began again after a pause, “to tell you the truth at the risk of forfeiting your goodwill—which, quite frankly, would be a grievous loss to me, I may even say a blow, a genuine blow, comparable perhaps to the blow I suffered when Frau Chauchat returned here not alone, but as your travelling companion. I accepted that risk because it has long been my wish that there should be clarity between us—between you, for whom I entertain such extraordinarily reverential feelings, and myself—that seemed to me finer and more human—you know how Clawdia pronounces that word in her magically veiled voice, drawing it out so charmingly—than concealment and dissimulation; and to that extent a weight fell from my heart when you made your assertion a moment ago.”

No answer.

“One thing more, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp continued. “There was one further reason why I wished to pour you pure wine, namely my personal experience of how exasperating uncertainty can be in this direction, the need to depend upon half-formed conjectures. _You_ now know who it was with whom Clawdia, before the present positive legal relation was established—a relation which it would of course be sheer madness not to respect—experienced, spent, observed—a twenty-ninth of February; committed it, then. For my part, I was never able to attain such clarity, although I understood perfectly well that anyone who finds himself obliged to reflect upon it must reckon with such occurrences—I mean, more precisely, predecessors—and although I also knew that Hofrat Behrens, who, as you may know, dabbles in oils, had produced in the course of many sittings an excellent portrait of her, with a vividness in its rendering of the skin which, between ourselves, gives occasion for grave astonishment. That has caused me much anguish and head-racking, and continues to do so to this day.”

“Do you still love her?” Peeperkorn asked without changing his position—that is, with his face averted... The great room sank more and more deeply into twilight.

“Forgive me, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp replied, “but my feelings for you, feelings of the highest esteem and admiration, would not permit me to regard it as seemly to speak to you of my feelings for your travelling companion.”

“And does she,” Peeperkorn asked in a quiet voice, “still share those feelings today?”

“I do not say,” Hans Castorp returned, “I do not say that she ever shared them. That is scarcely credible. We touched upon this subject theoretically a little while ago, when we spoke of the reactive nature of women. There is naturally not much about me to love. What stature have I, after all—judge for yourself! If a—a twenty-ninth of February could ever come about, that must be ascribed solely and entirely to woman’s susceptibility to corruption by the man’s primary choice—and I should like to remark that I feel boastful and tasteless in calling myself a ‘man,’ but Clawdia is, at any rate, a woman.”

“She followed feeling,” Peeperkorn murmured through his torn lips.

“As she did far more obediently in your case,” Hans Castorp said, “and as in all probability she has already done many and many a time—of that anyone who finds himself in the position must be aware—”

“Stop!” Peeperkorn said, still turned away, but making a gesture toward his interlocutor with his open hand. “Might it not be base of us to speak of her in this way?”

“Surely not, Mynheer Peeperkorn. No, on that score I believe I can set your mind entirely at rest. We are speaking of human things—the word ‘human’ being taken in the sense of freedom and genius—forgive the possibly somewhat affected expression, but a recent occasion of need led me to adopt it.”

“Good, go on!” Peeperkorn commanded softly.

Hans Castorp too spoke softly, sitting on the edge of his chair beside the bed, inclined toward the kingly old man, his hands between his knees.

“For she is an existence of genius,” he said, “and the husband beyond the Caucasus—you do know, I trust, that she has a husband beyond the Caucasus—grants her her freedom and genius, whether from obtuseness or intelligence I cannot say, for I do not know the fellow. In any event, he does well to grant them to her, for it is illness that bestows them upon her, the principle of genius inherent in illness, to which she is subject; and anyone who finds himself in the position will do well to follow his example and make no complaint, either backward or forward...”

“You do not complain?” Peeperkorn asked, turning his countenance toward him.... It looked pallid in the twilight; the eyes gazed pale and weary beneath the idol-like lineaments of the brow, the great, torn mouth stood half open, as on a tragic mask.

“I did not think,” Hans Castorp replied modestly, “that the matter concerned me. The purpose of my words is that _you_ should not complain, Mynheer Peeperkorn, and should not withdraw your goodwill from me on account of former occurrences. That is what matters to me at this hour.”

“Nevertheless,” said Peeperkorn, “it must have been a great pain that I unwittingly inflicted upon you.”

“If that is a question,” Hans Castorp returned, “and if I answer it in the affirmative, that must above all not be taken to mean that I fail to appreciate the extraordinary privilege of your acquaintance; for that privilege is, after all, inseparably bound up with the disappointment of which you speak.”

“I thank you, young man, I thank you. I appreciate the courtesy of your little speech. But leaving our acquaintance aside—”

“It is difficult to leave it aside,” said Hans Castorp, “nor would it be at all advisable for me to do so if I am to answer your question in all humility. For the fact that it was a personality of your stature in whose company Clawdia returned could naturally only intensify and complicate the distress it caused me that she returned in another man’s company at all. It has weighed heavily upon me and still does today, I do not deny it; and I have deliberately done my utmost to hold fast to the positive side of the matter—that is, to my feelings of sincere veneration for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn—which, incidentally, also contained a small touch of malice toward your travelling companion; for women are not particularly fond of seeing their lovers make common cause.”

“Indeed—” said Peeperkorn, concealing a smile by passing his cupped hand over his mouth and chin, as though there were danger of Frau Chauchat’s seeing him smile. Hans Castorp too smiled discreetly, and then they both nodded before them in mutual understanding.

“This little revenge,” Hans Castorp continued, “might surely be allowed me in the end, for so far as I am concerned I truly have some cause for complaint—not against Clawdia and not against you, Mynheer Peeperkorn, but for complaint in general, on account of my life and fate; and since I enjoy the honour of your confidence, and since this is so thoroughly peculiar an hour of twilight, I should like to attempt at least to speak of it by way of suggestion.”

“I beg you to do so,” Peeperkorn said courteously, whereupon Hans Castorp continued:

“I have been up here a long time, Mynheer Peeperkorn, for years and days—I do not know precisely how long, but they are years of life, which is why I spoke of ‘life’; and I shall return to ‘fate’ as well when the proper moment comes. My cousin, whom I thought to visit for a little while, a military man who meant honestly and bravely, though that availed him nothing, died away from me here, and I am still here. I was not a military man; I had a civilian profession, as you may perhaps have heard, a solid and sensible profession which is even said to work toward uniting the nations; but I was never particularly attached to it, I admit, and for reasons of which I shall say only that they lie in darkness: they lie there together with the origins of my feelings for your travelling companion—I expressly call her that to show that it has never entered my mind to tamper with the established legal position—my feelings for Clawdia Chauchat, and my relation of ‘thou’ with her, which I have never denied since her eyes first encountered mine and bewitched me—bewitched me in an unreasonable sense, you understand. For her sake and in defiance of Herr Settembrini, I submitted myself to the principle of unreason, the inspired principle of illness, to which, admittedly, I had probably been subject long beforehand and from the very first, and I remained up here—I no longer know precisely how long; I have forgotten everything and broken with everything, with my relatives and my profession in the flatlands and all my prospects. And when Clawdia departed, I waited for her, waited always up here, so that by now I have been utterly lost to the flatlands and am as good as dead in their eyes. That was what I had in mind when I spoke of ‘fate’ and permitted myself to suggest that I might perhaps be entitled to complain of the present legal position. I once read a story—no, I saw it at the theatre—about a good-natured lad, incidentally a military man like my cousin, who becomes involved with a charming gypsy girl—she was charming, with a flower behind her ear, a wild, fatal creature—and she so bewitched him that he went completely off the rails, sacrificed everything to her, deserted, went with her among the smugglers, and dishonoured himself in every conceivable respect. Once he had gone that far, she had had enough of him and came along with a matador, a compelling personality with a magnificent baritone. It ended with the little soldier, chalk-white in the face and with his shirt open, stabbing her with his knife outside the circus—which, incidentally, was precisely what she had been courting. It is a rather irrelevant story for me to have brought up. But then, why does it occur to me?”

At the mention of the “knife,” Mynheer Peeperkorn had shifted his position somewhat in the bed, moving abruptly to one side as he quickly turned his face toward his guest and looked searchingly into his eyes. Now he raised himself more fully, propped himself upon his elbow, and spoke:

“Young man, I have heard, and I now comprehend the situation. Permit me, on the strength of what you have told me, to make a loyal declaration! Were my hair not white, and were I not stricken with malignant fever, you would see me prepared, man to man and weapon in hand, to give you satisfaction for the injury I unwittingly did you, and at the same time for that inflicted upon you by my travelling companion, for which I too must answer. Perfect, sir—you would see me prepared. But as matters stand, permit me to substitute another proposal. It is as follows. I recall an elevated moment, at the very beginning of our acquaintance—I recall it although I had drunk deeply of the wine at the time—a moment, then, when, agreeably moved by your nature, I was on the point of offering you the brotherly ‘thou,’ but subsequently bowed to the realization that the step would have been somewhat precipitate. Good. Today I refer back to that moment; I return to it; I declare the postponement then resolved upon to have expired. Young man, we are brothers; I declare us to be so. You spoke of a ‘thou’ full of meaning—ours too shall possess its full meaning, the meaning of brotherhood in feeling. The satisfaction that age and indisposition prevent me from giving you with a weapon, I offer you in this form; I offer it to you in the form of a fraternal compact, such as men otherwise conclude against a third party, against the world, against someone—and which we intend to conclude in our feeling for someone. Take your wineglass, young man, while I return to my glass of water, by which no further wrong is done to this little new wine—”

And with a captain’s hand that trembled slightly, he filled the glasses, Hans Castorp assisting him in reverential consternation.

“Take it!” Peeperkorn repeated. “Link your arm with mine! And drink in this fashion! Drain it!—Perfect, young man. Settled. Here is my hand. Art thou satisfied?”

“Satisfied is, of course, no word for it, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” said Hans Castorp, who had found it somewhat difficult to drain the full glass at one draught, and dried his knees with his handkerchief, since wine had run down upon them. “I am supremely happy, I should rather say, and cannot yet comprehend how all this has so suddenly been bestowed upon me—it feels, frankly, like a dream. It is a tremendous honour for me—I do not know how I can have earned it, except perhaps in a passive fashion, certainly in no other; and you must not be surprised if at first it seems adventurous to me to bring the new form of address across my lips, if I stumble over it—especially in Clawdia’s presence, since she may perhaps, in the manner of women, not be altogether in agreement with this arrangement....”

“Leave that to me,” Peeperkorn replied, “and the other matter to practice and habit! And now go, young man! Leave me, my son! It is dark, evening has completely fallen, our beloved may return at any moment, and a meeting between you just now might perhaps not be the most seemly thing.”

“Farewell, Mynheer Peeperkorn!” said Hans Castorp, and rose. “You see, I am overcoming my justified timidity and already practising the audacious form of address. True, it has grown dark! I could imagine Herr Settembrini suddenly coming in and turning on the light, so that reason and sociability might prevail—he simply has that weakness. Until tomorrow! I leave here so delighted and proud that I could never have dreamed of anything remotely like it. A very speedy recovery! There will now be at least three fever-free days for thee, on which you will be equal to every demand. That gladdens me as though I were you. Good night!”

Mynheer Peeperkorn (Conclusion)

A waterfall is always an attractive destination for an excursion, and we can scarcely justify the fact that Hans Castorp, who even cherished a particular heartfelt fondness for falling water, had never yet visited the picturesque cascade in the woods of the Flüela valley. During the period of his life with Joachim he might be excused by his cousin’s strict devotion to duty, for Joachim had not been here for pleasure, and his practical, purposeful cast of mind had restricted their horizon to the immediate surroundings of the Berghof. And after his departure—well, even afterward Hans Castorp’s relation to the landscape here, if we disregard his skiing expeditions, had retained the character of a conservative monotony, whose contrast with the range of his inward experiences and “governmental” obligations had indeed possessed a certain conscious charm for the young man. Nevertheless, his assent was lively when, within his more intimate circle, this little company of seven persons including himself, the plan of a carriage excursion to that recommended locality came under consideration.

It was now May, the month of delight according to the artless little songs of the flatlands—quite fresh and not very ingratiating in the quality of its air up here, though the thaw could be regarded as complete. True, on several occasions during the past few days snow had fallen in great flakes, but it had not remained; it had merely left a little wetness behind. The accumulated masses of winter had seeped away, evaporated, dwindled to scattered remnants; the green passability of the world constituted an invitation to every spirit of enterprise.

In any event, the group’s social intercourse during the past few weeks had suffered from the indisposition of its chief, the magnificent Pieter Peeperkorn, whose malignant tropical legacy had refused to yield either to the effects of the extraordinary climate or to the antidotes of so eminent a physician as Hofrat Behrens. He had been confined to bed a great deal, and not only on days when the quartan fever asserted its baleful rights. His spleen and liver were troubling him, as the Hofrat privately informed those close to the patient; his stomach too was said not to be in classical condition, and Behrens did not fail to point out the danger—one not entirely to be dismissed under such circumstances, even in a nature so powerful—of chronic exhaustion.

During these weeks Mynheer had presided over only one evening of eating and drinking, and the communal walks too had been abandoned, apart from one that was not very extensive. Incidentally, between ourselves, Hans Castorp experienced this loosening of the clique’s fellowship in certain respects as a relief, for the pledge of brotherhood drunk with Frau Chauchat’s travelling companion caused him difficulties; it introduced into his public conversation with Peeperkorn the same “constraint,” the same “evasion,” and the same “avoidance,” as though governed by a philopena wager, that Peeperkorn had noticed in his dealings with Clawdia. By curious expedients he circumlocuted the form of address whenever it could not simply be swallowed—from the same dilemma, or its opposite, that governed his conversation with Clawdia in the presence of others, even in the sole presence of her master, and which, thanks to the satisfaction received from the latter, had now been completed into a formal double bind.

Thus the plan of an excursion to the waterfall was now on the order of the day—Peeperkorn himself had determined the destination, and he felt vigorous enough for the undertaking. It was the third day after an attack of quartan fever; Mynheer gave it to be known that he wished to make use of it. True, he had not appeared in the dining hall for the first meals of the day, but had taken them, as very frequently of late, together with Madame Chauchat in his salon; yet already at first breakfast Hans Castorp had received orders through the limping concierge to hold himself ready for a carriage excursion one hour after luncheon; furthermore, to pass this command on to Messrs. Ferge and Wehsal, to notify Settembrini and Naphta that the party would call for them, and finally to see to the ordering of two landaus for three o’clock.

At that hour they assembled before the portal of the Berghof: Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal waited there for the occupants of the princely apartments, amusing themselves meanwhile by patting the horses, which took lumps of sugar from their flattened palms with black, moist, clumsy lips. The travelling companions appeared upon the broad outside staircase only slightly late. Peeperkorn, whose royal head seemed to have grown narrower, stood up there beside Clawdia in a long, somewhat worn ulster, raised his soft, round hat, and silently formed a general word of greeting with his lips. Then he exchanged a handshake with each of the three gentlemen, who had come to meet the pair at the foot of the steps.

“Young man,” he said to Hans Castorp as he laid his left hand upon his shoulder, “... how goes it, my son?”

“My most obliged thanks! And on the other hand?” replied the one addressed....

The sun was shining; it was a fine, bright day, yet they had done well to put on light overcoats: there could be no doubt that they would find it cool while driving. Madame Chauchat, too, wore a warm belted coat of fibrous, boldly checked material, and even a little fur about her shoulders. She had bent down the brim of her felt hat at the sides with an olive-coloured veil tied beneath her chin, which became her so charmingly that it positively pained most of those present—though not Ferge, the only one who was not in love with her; and this freedom of his had the consequence that, in the provisional distribution of seats, until the outsiders should join the party, the rear seat opposite Mynheer and Madame in the first landau fell to him, while Hans Castorp, not without having caught a mocking smile from Clawdia, entered the second carriage with Ferdinand Wehsal. The slight person of the Malay valet was taking part in the excursion. Carrying a capacious basket, from beneath whose lid the necks of two wine bottles protruded, and which he stowed under the rear seat of the foremost landau, he had appeared behind his master and mistress; and at the moment when he had folded his arms beside the coachman, the horses received their signal, and, with the brakes applied, the carriages began moving down the looping road.

Wehsal, too, had noticed Frau Chauchat's smile, and, displaying his decayed teeth, commented upon it to his travelling companion.

“Did you see,” he asked, “how she made fun of you because you have to ride alone with me? Yes, yes, misfortune never lacks for mockery. Does it anger and disgust you very much to be sitting beside me?”

“Pull yourself together, Wehsal, and do not talk so abjectly!” Hans Castorp rebuked him. “Women smile at every opportunity, merely for the sake of smiling; it is useless to trouble one's head about it every time. Why are you forever writhing like that? Like all of us, you have your advantages and disadvantages. For example, you play the music from the ‘Midsummer Night's Dream’ very prettily; not everyone can do that. You ought to do it again one of these days.”

“Yes, there you are, talking down to me from your height,” the wretched man replied, “without knowing how much insolence there is in your consolation, and that you only humiliate me still more deeply by it. It is easy for you to talk and offer comfort from your high horse; for although at present you may cut a fairly ridiculous figure, you once had your turn and were in seventh heaven, almighty God, and felt her arms about your neck and all the rest of it, almighty God, it burns in my throat and in the pit of my heart when I think of it—and, in the full consciousness of what was granted you, you look down upon my beggarly torments...”

“There is nothing admirable in the way you express yourself, Wehsal. In fact, it is repulsive in the highest degree, and I need not conceal that from you, since you accuse me of insolence; and no doubt it is meant to be repulsive, for you positively set out to make yourself loathsome and writhe about without ceasing. Are you really so tremendously in love with her?”

“Terribly!” Wehsal answered, shaking his head. “There are no words for what I suffer from my thirst and desire for her; I wish I could say it would be the death of me, but one can neither live nor die with it. While she was away, it began to grow a little better; gradually she passed out of my thoughts. But since she has been back and I see her before me every day, it sometimes reaches such a pitch that I bite my arm and clutch at the air and do not know what to do with myself. Such a thing ought not to exist at all, yet one cannot wish it away—whoever is possessed by it cannot wish it away; one would have to wish away one's life, with which it has amalgamated, and that is precisely what one cannot do—for what would be gained by dying? Afterwards—with pleasure. In her arms—with all my heart. But beforehand, that is nonsense, for life is longing, and longing is life, and cannot turn against itself: that is the God-damned dilemma. And when I say ‘God-damned,’ I say it merely as a manner of speech, and as though I were someone else; I myself cannot mean it. There are many kinds of torture, Castorp, and whoever is subjected to one wishes to be free of it, simply and unconditionally free of it—that is his goal. But of the torture of carnal desire one can wish to be free solely by the path and upon the condition that it be satisfied—there is no other way, not at any price! Such is the arrangement; and whoever is not possessed by it gives the matter no further thought, but whoever is possessed by it learns to know our Lord Jesus Christ, and his eyes start from his head. God in heaven, what an arrangement and affair it is, that flesh should so desire flesh merely because it is not its own, but belongs to another soul—how strange, and yet, rightly considered, how modest again in its bashful friendliness! One might say: If that is all it wants, then in God's name let it be granted! What do I want, Castorp? Do I want to murder her? Do I want to shed her blood? I only want to caress her! Castorp, dear Castorp, forgive me for whimpering, but in God's name she might yield to me! There is something higher in it too, Castorp; I am no brute, in my fashion I too am a human being! Carnal desire goes hither and thither, it is neither bound nor fixed, and therefore we call it bestial. But if it be fixed upon a human person with a face, then does our mouth speak of love. It is not merely for the trunk of her body and the flesh-doll of her form that I long; for if even the smallest thing in her face were differently fashioned, behold, I might perhaps feel no longing whatever for her whole body, and thus it is shown that I love her soul, and that I love her with my soul. For love of the face is love of the soul...”

“What has come over you, Wehsal? You are quite beside yourself, striking up God knows what sort of tones here...”

“But that is precisely it, precisely the misfortune once again,” the poor man continued, “that she has a soul, that she is a human being of body and soul! For her soul will have nothing to do with mine, and therefore her body nothing with mine—O misery and great tribulation!—and for that reason my desire is condemned to shame, and my body must writhe eternally! Why will she, body and soul, have nothing to do with me, Castorp, and why is my longing an abomination to her?! Am I not a man? Is a repulsive man not a man? I am one to the highest degree, I swear to you; I should surpass all precedent if she opened to me the blissful kingdom of her arms, which are so beautiful because they belong to the face of her soul! I would inflict upon her all the voluptuousness in the world, Castorp, if only it were a matter of bodies and not also of faces, if it were not for her accursed soul, which will have nothing to do with me, yet without which I should feel no longing for her body either—that is the devil's shitty dilemma in which I writhe eternally!”

“Wehsal, hush! Do be quiet! The coachman understands you! He is deliberately keeping his head still, it is true, but I can tell from his back that he is listening.”

“He understands and listens—there you have it, Castorp! There once again you have the arrangement and affair in all its peculiar nature and character! If I were speaking of palingenesis, or of... hydrostatics, he would not understand, would have no notion of it, would not listen and would feel no interest whatever. For that is not popular. But the highest and ultimate and most dreadfully secret affair, the affair of flesh and soul—behold, that is at the same time the most popular affair, and everyone understands it and can make mock of him who is possessed by it, for whom it turns the day into a torture of lust and the night into a hell of shame! Castorp, dear Castorp, let me whimper a little, for what nights I endure! Every night I dream of her—ah, what do I not dream of her!—it burns in my throat and in the region of my stomach when I think of it! And it always ends with her slapping me, striking me in the face, and sometimes spitting upon me as well—with the face of her soul distorted by disgust she spits upon me, and then I awaken covered in sweat and shame and lust...”

“There, Wehsal, now let us be quiet and resolve to keep our mouths shut until we reach the grocer's and someone joins us. That is my proposal and my injunction. I do not wish to hurt you, and I admit that you are in dire straits; but at home we had a story about a person who was punished by having snakes and toads come out of her mouth whenever she spoke—a snake or a toad with every word. The book did not say how she conducted herself in the face of this, but I always assumed that she must have taken to keeping her mouth shut.”

“But it is a human need,” Wehsal said piteously, “a human need, dear Castorp, to speak and unburden one's heart when one is in such dire straits as I am.”

“It is even a human _right_, Wehsal, if you like. But there are rights, in my opinion, which under certain circumstances one sensibly refrains from exercising.”

Thus they fell silent in accordance with Hans Castorp's injunction; and meanwhile the carriages had swiftly reached the grocer's little house, overgrown with vine leaves, where there was not a moment's need to wait: Naphta and Settembrini were already in the road, the latter in his shabby fur jacket, the former, by contrast, in a whitish-yellow spring overcoat, quilted all over and rather foppish in appearance. They waved and exchanged greetings while the carriages turned, and the gentlemen climbed in: Naphta took the fourth place in the foremost landau beside Ferge, while Settembrini, in sparkling spirits and bubbling with lucid jests, joined Hans Castorp and Wehsal, the latter yielding him his seat at the rear of the carriage—a seat which Herr Settembrini knew how to assume with the bearing of a boulevard carriage-rider and an exquisite nonchalance.

He extolled the pleasure of driving, this transportation of the body while it remained in comfortable repose and the scenery changed; showed himself cordially paternal toward Hans Castorp, and even patted poor Wehsal on the cheek, exhorting him to forget his own uncongenial self in admiration of the radiant world, toward which he pointed with a sweeping gesture of his right hand in its shabby leather glove.

They had an excellent drive. The horses, all four lively beasts with white blazes, compact, sleek, and well-fed, struck the good road, which had not yet grown dusty, in a firm rhythm. Fragments of rock, with grass and flowers sprouting in their crevices, sometimes pressed close to its edge; telegraph poles fled backward, mountain forests rose, graceful curves which they approached and left behind entertained their curiosity about the road, and mountains still partly covered with snow were always looming in the sunny distance. They had left the familiar valley region; the displacement of the everyday scene refreshed the spirits. Before long they halted at the edge of the forest: from here they meant to continue the excursion on foot and attain their destination—a destination with which, for some time already and without at first having become aware of it, they had stood in faint but steadily intensifying sensory contact. A distant sound became apparent to them all as soon as the drive had ceased: a soft hissing, shuddering, and roaring, still at times eluding perception once more, which they urged one another to distinguish, and to which they listened rooted to the spot.

“At present,” said Settembrini, who had often been here, “it is beginning timidly. But on the spot it is brutal at this season—prepare yourselves; we shall not be able to hear our own words.”

And so they walked into the forest, along a path strewn with damp pine needles: Pieter Peeperkorn at the head, leaning upon his companion's arm, his soft black hat low over his brow, advancing with a sidewise-nodding gait; directly behind them Hans Castorp, hatless like all the other gentlemen, his hands in his pockets, looking about him with his head tilted and whistling softly; then Naphta and Settembrini, then Ferge with Wehsal, and last of all the Malay alone, the supper basket on his arm. They spoke about the forest.

The forest was unlike others; it presented a picturesquely peculiar, indeed exotic, yet uncanny sight. It bristled with a species of mossy lichen, was hung with it, laden with it, wrapped entirely in it; in long, discoloured beards the matted fabric of the parasitic plant dangled from its swathed and padded branches: scarcely any needles were to be seen, nothing but hanging moss—a heavy, bizarre disfigurement, an enchanted and morbid sight. The forest was not well; it was diseased with this rank lichen, which threatened to suffocate it: such was the general opinion as the little procession advanced along the needled path, with the sound of their approaching destination in their ears, that rumbling and hissing which gradually swelled into a din and promised to fulfil Settembrini's prediction.

A bend in the path opened the view upon the bridged ravine of forest and rock into which the waterfall descended; and as it came into sight, its effect upon the hearing likewise reached its climax—it was an infernal spectacle. The masses of water plunged vertically in a single cascade, whose height, however, must have been seven or eight metres and whose breadth was likewise considerable, and then shot onward white over the rocks. They fell with a senseless uproar in which every conceivable species and pitch of sound seemed to mingle: thunder and hissing, roaring, whooping, fanfare, crashing, rattling, booming, and the pealing of bells—truly, one's senses threatened to desert one. The visitors had ventured close upon the slippery rocky ground and, breathed upon and sprayed with moisture, enveloped in water-mist, their ears crammed and thickly padded with noise, exchanging glances as they shook their heads with intimidated smiles, contemplated the spectacle, this perpetual catastrophe of foam and crashing, whose mad and excessive roar stunned them, inspired fear, and caused auditory illusions. One imagined one heard, behind, overhead, and on every side, threatening and warning cries, trombones and coarse male voices.

Grouped behind Mynheer Peeperkorn—Frau Chauchat among the other five gentlemen—they gazed with him into the torrent. They could not see his face, but saw him bare his white, flaming head and expand his chest in the freshness. They communicated among themselves by glances and signs, for words, even shouted directly into the ear, would probably have been drowned by the thunder of the fall. Their lips formed words of astonishment and admiration which remained soundless. Hans Castorp, Settembrini, and Ferge agreed by nods to climb to the top of the ravine in whose depths they stood, gain the upper footbridge, and view the waters from there. It was not difficult: a steep row of narrow steps hewn into the rock led upward, as it were, to a higher storey of the forest; they climbed them one behind another, stepped onto the bridge, and from its middle, poised above the curve of the fall and leaning upon the railing, waved to their friends below. Then they crossed all the way over, descended laboriously on the other side, and came into view of those who had remained behind, on the far side of the wild water, which was bridged down here as well.

The signaling now concerned the taking of the afternoon refreshments. From several quarters came the suggestion that, for this purpose, they should withdraw a little from the zone of noise, so that, with their hearing relieved and without being deaf and dumb, they might enjoy their open-air repast. But it had to be recognized that Peeperkorn’s sovereign will was opposed to this. He shook his head, repeatedly jabbed his forefinger toward the ground, and his torn lips, drawing apart with an effort, formed the word: “Here!” What was to be done? In matters of stage management such as these, he was lord and commander. The weight of his personality would have decided the issue even if, as always, he had not been the organizer and master of the undertaking. Stature of this kind has always been tyrannical and autocratic, and so it will remain. Mynheer wished to take his refreshment in sight of the fall, amid the thunder—that was his grand and mighty caprice—and whoever did not wish to go without had to remain here. The majority were displeased. Herr Settembrini, seeing the possibility of human interchange, of democratically distinguished conversation or even disputation, cut off, flung his hand above his head with that gesture of despair and resignation. The Malay hastened to carry out his master’s command. There were two folding chairs, which he set up for Mynheer and Madame against the rock wall. Then, upon a cloth at their feet, he spread the contents of the basket: coffee things and glasses, Thermos flasks, pastries, and wine. They crowded forward to receive their portions. Then they sat upon loose stones and on the railing of the footbridge, cups of hot coffee in their hands, plates of cake upon their knees, and took their refreshment in silence amid the din.

Peeperkorn, the collar of his coat turned up, his hat on the ground beside him, drank port from a monogrammed silver goblet, which he emptied several times. And suddenly he began to speak. The extraordinary man! It was impossible that he should hear his own voice, much less that the others should understand a syllable of what he uttered without its becoming audible. Yet he raised his forefinger, stretched out his left arm while holding the goblet in his right, the flat hand lifted obliquely, and they saw his royal countenance moving in speech, his mouth shaping words that remained soundless, as though spoken in a vacuum. No one supposed otherwise than that he would immediately cease his futile performance, which they watched with embarrassed smiles—but he continued to express himself into the all-devouring tumult, accompanying his utterance with compelling, attention-commanding gestures of cultivation from his left hand, while beneath tensely furrowed brows he directed his small, weary, pallid eyes, forced violently wide, by turns upon one and another of his audience, so that the person addressed at each moment was constrained to nod to him with raised eyebrows and, open-mouthed, cup a hollow hand about his ear, as though that could in any way have remedied the hopelessness of the affair. Now he even rose to his feet! Goblet in hand, in his crushed traveling coat that reached almost to his feet, its collar standing upright, bareheaded, his high, idol-like folded brow aflame with white hair, he stood against the rock and moved his countenance in speech, holding before it, in a didactic manner, the ring of his fingers surmounted by the lance of his forefinger, and investing the indistinctness of his deaf toast with the compelling sign of precision. From his gestures, and upon his lips, they recognized isolated words they were accustomed to hear from him: “Perfect” and “Concluded”—nothing more. They saw his head incline awry, the torn bitterness of his lips, the image of the Man of Sorrows. Then once more the voluptuous dimple blossomed, sybaritic roguery, a dancing gathering-up of robes, the sacred indecency of the pagan priest. He raised the goblet, swept it in a semicircle before the eyes of the guests, and drained it in two or three draughts so completely that its bottom pointed straight upward. Then, arm extended, he handed it to the Malay, who received the vessel with one hand upon his breast, and gave the signal for departure.

They all bowed to him in thanks as they prepared to obey. Those crouching on the ground sprang to their feet; those seated upon the railing of the footbridge let themselves down. The slight Javanese in his stiff hat and fur collar gathered together the remains of the meal and the crockery. In the same narrow order in which they had come, they returned along the damp needle-strewn path, through the forest rendered unrecognizable by its hanging lichens, to the road where the carriages waited.

This time Hans Castorp joined the master and his companion. Beside the good Ferge, to whom everything lofty was utterly alien, he sat facing the pair. Almost nothing was said during the homeward drive. Mynheer sat with his flat hands upon the plaid that covered his knees together with Clawdia’s, and let his lower jaw hang. Settembrini and Naphta alighted and took their leave before the carriages crossed the railway tracks and watercourse. Wehsal rode alone in the second carriage up the loop of the road and to the portal of the Berghof, where they parted.—

Had Hans Castorp’s sleep that night been kept light and fleeting by some inward preparedness of which his soul knew nothing, so that the slightest deviation from the customary nocturnal peace of the Berghof, the faintest muffled unrest, the scarcely perceptible tremor caused by distant running footsteps, sufficed to make him alert and fully awake and to cause him to sit up among his pillows? In fact, he awoke a considerable time before the knock came at his door, which happened shortly after two o’clock. He answered at once, without drowsiness, collectedly and energetically. It was the high, unsteady voice of a nursing sister employed in the house, who, on Frau Chauchat’s instructions, requested him to present himself immediately on the first floor. With heightened energy he declared his obedience, sprang up, thrust himself into his clothes, smoothed the hair back from his forehead with his fingers, and went downstairs neither quickly nor slowly, uncertain less as to the what than as to the how of the hour.

He found the door to Peeperkorn’s salon standing open, and likewise that of the Dutchman’s bedroom, where all the lights were burning. The two physicians, the matron von Mylendonk, Madame Chauchat, and the Javanese valet were present. The last, dressed not as usual but in a kind of national costume—a broadly striped, shirtlike jacket with very long and ample sleeves, a brightly colored skirt in place of trousers, and a conical cap of yellow cloth upon his head, and adorned besides with a breastpiece of amulets—stood motionless, arms crossed, to the left at the head of the bed in which Pieter Peeperkorn lay on his back with his hands extended. The newcomer surveyed the scene with a pallid face. Frau Chauchat had her back turned to him. She sat in a low armchair at the foot of the bed, her elbow resting on the quilt, her chin in her hand, her fingers buried in her lower lip, and gazed into the face of her traveling companion.

“Evening, my boy,” said Behrens, who had been standing in low-voiced conversation with Doctor Krokowski and the matron, and nodded mournfully, pursing his little white moustache. He wore his clinical coat, from whose breast pocket the stethoscope protruded, embroidered slippers, and no collar. “Nothing to be done,” he added in a whisper. “A thorough job. Just step closer. Cast an expert eye over him. You will admit that medical art has been most effectually forestalled here.”

Hans Castorp approached the bed on tiptoe. The Malay’s eyes watched him as he moved, following him without a turn of the head, so that their whites showed. With a sidelong glance he established that Frau Chauchat paid him no attention, and stood beside the couch in his characteristic posture, resting upon one leg, his hands folded over his abdomen, his head inclined, in reverently meditative contemplation. Peeperkorn lay beneath the red silk coverlet in his knitted undershirt, as Hans Castorp had so often seen him. His hands had turned a blackish blue, as had parts of his face. This produced considerable disfigurement, although his royal features were otherwise unchanged. The idol-like tracery of folds upon the high brow wreathed in white flame, drawn horizontally in four or five rows and then descending at right angles on either side toward the temples, deeply stamped there by the habitual tension of a lifetime, stood out strongly even now, with the eyelids lowered, in a state of repose. The bitterly torn lips were slightly parted. The blue discoloration indicated a sudden stoppage, a violent, apoplectic arrest of the vital functions.

Hans Castorp remained for a while in a state of reverence that informed itself of the facts; he hesitated to relax his posture, expecting to be addressed by the “widow.” As no address came, he did not wish to intrude for the present and looked around at the group of the other persons behind him. The Hofrat motioned with his head toward the salon. Hans Castorp followed him there.

“_Suicidium?_” he asked in subdued, professional tones ...

“And how!” Behrens replied with a dismissive gesture, and added: “Through and through. In the superlative. Have you ever seen anything of this sort among fancy goods?” he asked, drawing an irregularly shaped case from the pocket of his coat and taking from it a small object, which he presented to the young man ... “I haven’t. But it is worth seeing. One never stops learning. Capricious and inventive. I took it from his hand. Careful. If any of it drips onto your skin, you’ll get blisters.”

Hans Castorp turned the enigmatic thing between his fingers. It was made of steel, ivory, gold, and rubber, and was exceedingly strange to look upon. It displayed two curved, bright-steel prongs with extremely sharp points; a slightly twisted central piece of ivory inlaid with gold, within which the prongs possessed a certain degree and a certain elastic manner of mobility—namely, inward; and it terminated in a balloon-like swelling of semi-rigid black rubber. Its total size was only a few inches.

“What is it?” Hans Castorp asked.

“That,” Behrens answered, “is an organized injection syringe. Or, viewed the other way round, a mechanical copy of the cobra’s biting apparatus. You understand?—You don’t seem to understand,” he said, as Hans Castorp continued to stare down dazedly at the bizarre instrument. “These are the teeth. They are not quite solid; they are traversed by a capillary tube, an exceedingly fine channel, whose outlet you can see quite distinctly here in front, a little above the points. Naturally the little tubes are open here at the roots of the teeth as well, and there they communicate with the excretory duct of the rubber gland, which runs through the ivory central piece. When it bites, the teeth yield inward a little—that is plain—and exert pressure upon the reservoir, forcing its contents into the channels, so that at the very instant the points take hold in the flesh, the dose shoots into the bloodstream. It is perfectly simple once you have it before your eyes. One need only have thought of it. It was probably made according to his personal specifications.”

“Certainly!” said Hans Castorp.

“The charge cannot have been very large,” the Hofrat continued. “What it lacked in quantity, it must have made up in—”

“Dynamic force,” Hans Castorp supplied.

“There you are. We shall ascertain soon enough what it is. One may await the result with a certain curiosity; there is undoubtedly something to be learned from it. Shall we wager that the exotic fellow on watch back there, who has decked himself out so finely tonight, could tell us all about it? I assume there is a combination of animal and vegetable matter—the best of each good thing, at any rate, for the effect must have been fulminating. Everything indicates that it stopped his breath at once—paralysis of the respiratory center, you know, rapid death by asphyxiation, probably without struggle or torment.”

“God grant it!” said Hans Castorp devoutly, and with a sigh returned the sinister little implement to the Hofrat before going back into the bedroom.

Only the Malay and Madame Chauchat were still present there now. This time Clawdia raised her head toward the young man as he approached the bed once more.

“You had a right to have me send for you,” she said.

“It was very kind of you,” he said, “and you are right. We were friends on familiar terms. I am ashamed to the depths of my soul that I was ashamed of it before other people and resorted to circumlocutions.—You were with him in his last moments?”

“The servant notified me when everything was over,” she answered.

“He possessed such stature,” Hans Castorp began again, “that he experienced the failure of feeling in the face of life as a cosmic catastrophe and a disgrace before God. For he regarded himself as the nuptial organ of God, you must know. That was a royal folly ... When one is deeply moved, one has the courage to use expressions that sound crude and irreverent, but are more solemn than officially sanctioned words of devotion.”

“_C’est une abdication_,” she said. “Did he know of our folly?”

“It was impossible for me to deny it to him, Clawdia. He had guessed it from my refusal to kiss you on the forehead in his presence. His presence is more symbolic than real at this moment, but will you permit me to do it now?”

She moved her head briefly toward him, her eyes closed, as though with a little signal. He brought his lips to her forehead. The Malay’s brown animal eyes watched the scene, rolled sideways so that their whites showed.

The Great Stupor

Once more we hear Hofrat Behrens’s voice—let us listen closely! Perhaps we hear it for the last time! Even this story comes to an end one day; the greater part of its course has elapsed—or rather: its time as content has gathered such momentum that there is no stopping it now, that its musical time too is drawing to a close, and that perhaps no further opportunity will arise to overhear the sprightly cadence of the phrase-making Rhadamanthus’s speech. He said to Hans Castorp:

“Castorp, old fellow, you are bored. You let your jaw hang; I see it every day, the disgruntlement is written on your brow. You’re a blasé brat, Castorp, you’ve been pampered with sensations, and if you aren’t offered something first-rate every day, you sulk and grumble over the dead season. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Hans Castorp was silent, and since he was so, darkness must indeed have reigned within him.

“I am right, as always,” Behrens answered himself. “And before you spread the poison of disaffection with the realm around here, you disgruntled citizen, you shall see that you are by no means forsaken by God and the world, but that the authorities have their eye upon you—an unwavering eye, my dear fellow—and are tirelessly intent upon your diversion. Old Behrens is still here too. But now, joking aside, my boy! Something has occurred to me in your case; God knows, I have devised something for you in sleepless nights. One might speak of an illumination—in fact, I expect a great deal from my idea, nothing less than your detoxification and triumphant return home with undreamed-of speed.”

“That makes you open your eyes,” he continued after an artful pause, although Hans Castorp opened no eyes at all, but regarded him rather sleepily and abstractedly, “and you have no notion what old Behrens can mean. But this is what I mean. Something is not right with you, Castorp; that can hardly have escaped your valued apperception. It is not right inasmuch as your symptoms of intoxication have for some time ceased to accord properly with the local condition, which has undoubtedly improved considerably—I have not begun meditating upon it only since yesterday. Here we have your latest photograph ... let us hold the magic up to the light. You see, even the worst fault-finder and prophet of gloom, as our imperial master is always saying, would find very little left to object to there. A few foci have been completely reabsorbed, the nest has grown smaller and is more sharply delimited, which, as you learnedly know, points to healing. These findings do not properly account for the instability of your temperature regulation, man; the physician finds himself compelled to seek out new causes.”

Hans Castorp’s movement of the head expressed a tolerably polite curiosity.

“Now you will be thinking, Castorp, that old Behrens has to admit he got the treatment wrong. But there you would have made a howling blunder and done justice neither to the facts nor to old Behrens. Your treatment was not wrong; it may merely have been too one-sided in its orientation. It has dawned upon me as a possibility that your symptoms were never exclusively attributable to _tuberculosis_, and I derive this possibility from the probability that today they are no longer attributable to it at all. There must be another source of disturbance. In my opinion, you have cocci.”

“It is my profoundest inner conviction,” the Hofrat repeated for emphasis, after receiving the movement of the head that had now fallen due on Hans Castorp’s part, “that you have streptos—which, incidentally, need not horrify you at once.”

(There could be no question whatever of horror. Hans Castorp’s expression conveyed, rather, a kind of ironic acknowledgement, whether of the perspicacity being brought to bear upon him or of the new rank and dignity to which the Hofrat was hypothetically elevating him.)

“No cause for panic!” the latter varied his reassurance. “Everyone has cocci. Every donkey has streptos. You need not fancy yourself anything special. It is only recently that we have learned a person can have streptococci in the blood without producing any impressive symptoms of infection. We are confronted with a finding still wholly unknown to many colleagues: that tubercle bacilli too can occur in the blood, entirely without consequences. We are not three steps away from the conception that tuberculosis is actually a disease of the blood.”

Hans Castorp found that quite remarkable.

“So when I say streptos,” Behrens began again, “you must naturally not think of the familiar grave clinical picture. Whether these little friends of mine have settled in you at all must be shown by a bacteriological examination of the blood. But whether your febrility proceeds from them, supposing they are present, can be taught us only by the effect of the streptovaccine cure that we shall then have to institute. That is the way, my dear fellow, and, as I have said, I expect the most unforeseen results from it. As protracted as tuberculosis is, illnesses of this kind can be cured with corresponding rapidity nowadays, and if you react to the injections at all, you will be bursting with health in six weeks. What do you say to that? Is old Behrens at his post, eh?”

“For the present it is only a hypothesis,” Hans Castorp said listlessly.

“A demonstrable hypothesis! A most fruitful hypothesis!” the Hofrat retorted. “You will see how fruitful it is when the cocci grow in our cultures. Tomorrow afternoon we shall tap you, Castorp; in strict accordance with the village barber’s art, we shall bleed you. That is an entertainment in itself and may all by itself produce the most salutary effects upon body and soul ...”

Hans Castorp declared himself ready for the diversion and thanked him very prettily for the attention devoted to him. His head inclined towards his shoulder, he watched the Hofrat row away. The chief’s address had come at precisely a critical moment; Rhadamanthus had interpreted the mountain guest’s expression and state of mind with considerable accuracy, and his new undertaking was intended—expressly intended, for the purpose had not been denied at all—to carry him past the dead point at which this guest had lately found himself arrived, as could indeed be inferred from his countenance, which distinctly recalled that of the late Joachim at the time when certain wild and defiant resolutions had been ripening within him.

There is more to be said. It was not only he himself, Hans Castorp, who seemed to have arrived at such a dead point; he felt as though the world, everything, “the whole,” were in precisely the same case—or rather, he found that here it was difficult to distinguish the particular from the general. Since the eccentric termination of his association with a personality; since the manifold commotion that termination had brought upon the house, and since Clawdia Chauchat’s renewed withdrawal from the community of those up here—the farewell which, overshadowed by the tragedy of great failure, had been exchanged in a spirit of deferential consideration between her and her lord’s surviving brother in the familiar “thou”—since that turn, it had seemed to the young man that all was not quite well with the world and with life; that things stood in some peculiar and increasingly awry and alarming state; that a demon had seized power who, malign and foolish, had indeed long exercised considerable influence, but had now proclaimed his dominion so openly and without restraint that it might well inspire mysterious terror and suggest thoughts of flight—the demon whose name was Stupor.

It will be judged that the narrator lays it on thickly and romantically in associating the name of stupor with that of the demonic and ascribing to it the effect of mystical dread. And yet we are not telling fables, but adhering exactly to the personal experience of our simple hero, knowledge of which has been granted us in a manner that admittedly eludes investigation, and which furnishes outright proof that stupor can under certain circumstances assume such a character and inspire such feelings. Hans Castorp looked about him ... What he saw was thoroughly uncanny, malignant, and he knew what he was seeing: life without time, life without care or hope, life as stagnantly bustling dissoluteness, dead life.

Busyness reigned within it; activities of every kind proceeded side by side; yet from time to time one of them degenerated into a furious fashion craze, to which everything fanatically succumbed. Thus amateur photography had always played a significant part in the world of the Berghof; twice already, however—for anyone who remained up here long enough could witness the periodic recurrence of such epidemics—the passion for it had become, for weeks and months, a universal folly, so that there was no one who did not, with an anxious expression and head bent over a camera braced against the pit of the stomach, make the aperture blink, while the passing around of prints at table knew no end. Suddenly it became a point of honour to do one’s own developing. The darkroom provided was nowhere near sufficient to meet demand. The windows and balcony doors of the rooms were fitted with black curtains; and by red light people busied themselves with chemical baths until a fire broke out and the Bulgarian student at the Good Russian table came within an ace of being reduced to ashes, whereupon the sanatorium authorities issued a prohibition. Soon the simple photograph was found insipid; flash photography and Lumière colour photographs came into vogue. People feasted their eyes upon pictures in which persons, abruptly struck by the magnesium flash, stared with fixed eyes out of pallid, contorted faces, like the corpses of murder victims propped upright with their eyes open. And Hans Castorp preserved a glass plate framed in cardboard which, when held against the light, showed him between Frau Stöhr and the ivory-coloured Levi—the former wearing a sky-blue sweater, the latter a blood-red one—with a coppery face, amid tin-yellow buttercups, one of which shone in his buttonhole, upon a poisonous-green woodland meadow.

There was stamp collecting too, which, practised at all times by individuals, would periodically spread into a universal obsession. Everyone pasted, bargained, exchanged. Philatelic journals were subscribed to; correspondence was maintained with specialist dealers at home and abroad, with professional societies and private collectors; and astonishing sums were expended upon the acquisition of rare stamps even by those whose domestic circumstances only just permitted them a stay of months or years at the luxurious sanatorium.

This continued until some other piece of foolery gained ascendancy, and the accumulation and incessant consumption of chocolates of every conceivable variety, for example, became the proper thing. Everyone had a brown mouth, and the most delectable offerings of the Berghof kitchen found listless and captious consumers, because their stomachs were crammed with Milka-Nut, _Chocolat à la crème d’amandes_, Marquis-Napolitains, and gold-speckled cats’ tongues, and had been upset by them.

Drawing a little pig with closed eyes, inaugurated in the highest quarter on a past Carnival evening and much cultivated ever since, had gone on to engender geometrical exercises in patience, to which at times belonged the mental powers of all the Berghof guests and even the last thoughts and manifestations of energy of the moribund. For weeks the house stood under the sign of an intricate figure composed of no fewer than eight large and small circles and several interlocking triangles. The task was to trace this manifold plane figure freehand and in a single stroke; the highest goal, however, was finally to accomplish the feat while securely blindfolded as well—which, in the end, if minor blemishes were indulgently overlooked, was achieved only by Public Prosecutor Paravant, the chief exponent of this obsession with ingenuity.

We know that he devoted himself to mathematics; we know it from the Hofrat himself, and we also know the chaste mainspring of this devotion, whose cooling power to blunt the sting of the flesh we have heard extolled, and whose more general emulation would probably have rendered unnecessary certain measures which the authorities had lately found themselves compelled to take. These consisted chiefly in blocking all passage from balcony to balcony, past the frosted-glass partitions that did not quite reach the balustrade, by means of little doors which the bath attendant locked at night with a knowing grin. Since then the rooms on the first floor above the veranda had been greatly sought after, for there, by climbing over the balustrade and crossing the projecting glass roof, one could pass from compartment to compartment while avoiding the little doors. On the public prosecutor’s account, however, the new disciplinary measure need never have been introduced at all. The grievous temptation to which the apparition of that Egyptian Fatme had subjected Paravant had long since been overcome, and it had been the last to trouble his natural part. Since then he had flung himself with redoubled fervour into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of whose calming power the Hofrat knew such edifying things to say; and the problem to which all his thoughts belonged by day and night, upon which he expended all that persistence, all the sporting tenacity with which, in former days, before his repeatedly prolonged leave of absence—which threatened to pass into complete retirement—he had prosecuted the conviction of poor sinners, was none other than the squaring of the circle.

In the course of his studies, the derailed official had become imbued with the conviction that the proofs by which science purported to establish the impossibility of the construction were unsound, and that ordering Providence had removed him, Paravant, from the lower world of the living and transferred him here because it had chosen him to wrest the transcendental goal into the realm of exact earthly fulfilment. Such was his condition. Wherever he went or stood, he drew circles and calculated, covering immense quantities of paper with figures, letters, numbers, algebraic symbols; and his bronzed face, the face of a man seemingly in the rudest health, bore the visionary and dogged expression of mania. His conversation concerned, exclusively and with dreadful monotony, the ratio _pi_, that desperate fraction which the humble genius of a mental calculator named Zacharias Dase had one day computed to two hundred decimal places—and purely as a luxury, since even two thousand places would have been so far from exhausting the possibilities of approximation to the unattainably exact that they might have been declared undiminished. Everyone fled the tormented thinker, for whoever he succeeded in seizing by the lapels was forced to endure torrents of impassioned speech designed to awaken his humane sensibility to the shame of the human mind's defilement by the pernicious irrationality of this mystical ratio. The fruitlessness of eternally multiplying the diameter by pi in order to find the circumference, or the square upon the radius in order to find the area of the circle, subjected the public prosecutor to fits of doubt as to whether mankind had not made the solution of the problem far too difficult for itself ever since the days of Archimedes, and whether that solution might not in truth be simplicity itself. What, could the circumference not be straightened, and therefore every straight line bent into a circle? At times Paravant believed himself close to a revelation. He was often seen late in the evening, seated at his table in the deserted, poorly lighted dining-room, carefully laying a piece of string in a circle upon its bare top, only suddenly, with a startling gesture, to stretch it into a straight line, and then, leaning heavily on his arms, to sink into bitter brooding. The Hofrat would occasionally lend him a hand in such melancholy trifling, and in general encouraged him in his obsession. And the sufferer more than once approached Hans Castorp too with his cherished grief—once, and then repeatedly, since he encountered much kindly understanding, a sympathetic feeling for the mystery of the circle. He illustrated the despair of pi to the young man by showing him a drawing of hairbreadth precision in which, with the utmost exertion, a circumference had been caught between two polygons with infinitesimally numerous sides, one inscribed and one circumscribed, to the last degree of approximation humanly possible. But the remainder, the curvature which in an ethereal-spiritual manner eluded rationalization by that calculable embrace—that, said the public prosecutor, his lower jaw trembling, was pi! Hans Castorp, for all his receptiveness, proved less excitable about pi than his interlocutor. He called it a piece of Eulenspiegel foolery, advised Herr Paravant not to grow too seriously heated over his game of tag, and spoke of the extensionless turning-points of which the circle consisted from its nonexistent beginning to its nonexistent end, and of the high-spirited melancholy residing in an eternity that ran into itself without persistence of direction, with such serene religiosity that for a time it exercised a soothing effect upon the public prosecutor.

Moreover, his nature marked good Hans Castorp out as the confidant of more than one inmate of the house who had been possessed by some fixed idea and suffered because he could find no hearing for it among the light-minded majority. A former sculptor from the Austrian provinces, a man already advanced in years, with a white moustache, a hooked nose, and blue eyes, had conceived a plan of financial policy—and had set it down in a fair hand, marking decisive passages with brushstrokes of sepia wash—whose purpose was to require every newspaper subscriber to deliver a daily portion of forty grams of waste newspaper, collected on the first of each month; this would amount to some 14,000 grams a year, and in twenty years to no less than 288 kilograms, representing, at twenty pfennigs per kilogram, a value of 57.60 German marks. Five million subscribers, the memorandum continued, would thus deliver in twenty years the enormous sum of 288 million marks in waste-paper value, two thirds of which might be credited to them against their renewed subscriptions, thereby making these cheaper, while the remaining third, nearly 100 million marks, would be released for humanitarian purposes, for the financing of popular pulmonary sanatoriums, the support of distressed talents, and so forth. The plan had been worked out down to a graphic representation of the ruler calibrated in value per centimetre, from which the waste-paper collecting agency was each month to read off the value of the quantity of paper amassed, and of the perforated forms on which compensation payments were to be receipted. It was justified and substantiated in every direction. The reckless waste and destruction of newspaper paper, consigned by the unenlightened to dishwater or the fire, constituted high treason against our forests, against our national economy. To conserve paper, to save paper, meant conserving and saving cellulose, forest reserves, human material consumed in the manufacture of cellulose and paper, and no less human material and capital. Since, furthermore, waste newspaper could readily be increased fourfold in value through the production of wrapping paper and cardboard, it would become an economic factor of consequence and a basis for lucrative taxation by state and municipality, relieving newspaper readers as taxable persons. In short, the plan was good, indeed virtually unanswerable; and if there clung to it something uncannily futile, even darkly lunatic, this was solely on account of the warped fanaticism with which the former artist pursued and championed an economic idea, and this one alone—an idea about which, in his innermost heart, he was evidently so little in earnest that he made not the slightest attempt to put it into practice... Hans Castorp would listen to the man with his head inclined, nodding, while in feverishly winged words he propagated his saving conception before him; and meanwhile he examined the nature of the contempt and repugnance that impaired his own partisanship for the inventor against the unthinking world.

Several inmates of the Berghof practised Esperanto and prided themselves on conversing at table in that artificial gibberish. Hans Castorp regarded them darkly, though privately he held that they were not the worst. There had recently appeared a group of English people who had introduced a parlour game consisting of nothing more than one participant putting to his neighbour in the circle the question, “_Did you ever see the devil with a night-cap on?_”, to which the person addressed replied, “_No! I never saw the devil with a night-cap on_”, and then passed the question on to the next—and so it went round and round. That was appalling. Yet poor Hans Castorp felt still worse at the sight of the patience-players who could be observed everywhere in the house and at every hour of the day. For the passion for this diversion had lately become so rampant that it literally turned the house into a den of vice; and Hans Castorp had all the more cause to be horribly affected by it because he himself was at times a victim—perhaps, indeed, the most resigned victim—of the plague. It was Elevens Patience that had bewitched him: the form in which one lays out a whist pack, three cards at a time, in three rows, and covers afresh any two cards whose sum is eleven, as well as the three court cards when they lie exposed, until, with gracious luck, the game comes out. One would scarcely think it possible that a procedure so simple could exert charms upon the soul capable of leading to bewitchment. Yet Hans Castorp, like so many others, put that possibility to the test—and, since dissipation is never cheerful, tested it with darkened brows. Abandoned to the caprices of the card-goblin, enthralled by its fantastically mutable favour, which sometimes, borne buoyantly upon easy fortune, allowed pairs of elevens and the jack-queen-king trio to accumulate from the very outset, so that the game was already decided before even the third tier had been completed—a fleeting triumph that at once goaded the nerves to fresh attempts—and which at other times refused, down to the ninth and final card, every single possibility of covering anew, or let an apparently certain success flutter away through a sudden standstill at the last moment, he played patience everywhere and at all hours of the day: at night beneath the stars, in the morning in his bare pyjamas, at table, and even in dreams. He shuddered at it, but he did it. And thus, on one visit, Herr Settembrini came upon him and “disturbed” him, as it had ever been his mission to do.

“_Accidenti!_” he said. “You are telling your fortune with cards, Engineer?”

“That is not quite what I mean by it,” Hans Castorp replied. “I simply lay them out; I grapple with abstract chance. Its weathercock antics intrigue me, its obsequiousness and then again its incredible recalcitrance. This morning, immediately after rising, the patience came out smoothly three times in succession, once in two rows, which is a record. Would you believe that I am now laying it out for the thirty-second time without once having advanced even halfway through the game?”

Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often during the course of those little years, with mournful black eyes.

“In any event, I find you preoccupied,” he said. “It does not appear that I shall find here any consolation for my cares, any balm for the inward conflict that torments me.”

“Conflict?” Hans Castorp repeated, and laid...

“The state of the world confounds me,” sighed the Freemason. “The Balkan League will come into being, Engineer; all my information points to it. Russia is working feverishly toward that end, and the point of the combination is directed against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, without whose destruction not one item of the Russian programme can be realized. Do you understand my scruples? I hate Vienna with all my strength, as you know. But must I therefore lend the support of my soul to Sarmatian despotism, which is preparing to lay the incendiary torch to our most nobly born continent? On the other hand, even an occasional diplomatic collaboration between my country and Austria would strike me as a dishonour. These are questions of conscience which—”

“Seven and four,” said Hans Castorp. “Eight and three. Jack, queen, king. It is coming out after all. You bring me luck, Herr Settembrini.”

The Italian fell silent. Hans Castorp felt his black eyes, the gaze of reason and morality, resting upon him in profound sorrow; yet he continued laying cards for a while before, his cheek propped in his hand, he looked up at the mentor standing before him with the false and stubbornly innocent expression of a naughty child.

“Your eyes,” the latter said, “seek quite vainly to conceal that you know how matters stand with you.”

“_Placet experiri_,” Hans Castorp had the effrontery to reply, and Herr Settembrini left him—whereupon, to be sure, the solitary man remained sitting for some considerable time at his table in the midst of the white room, without laying another card, his head supported in his hand, brooding and in his innermost being horribly affected by the monstrous and lopsided condition in which he saw the world ensnared, by the grin of the demon and ape-god beneath whose witless and unbridled dominion he found it fallen, and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”

An evil, apocalyptic name, perfectly calculated to inspire secret dread. Hans Castorp sat rubbing his forehead and the region of his heart with the flats of his hands. He was afraid. It seemed to him that “all this” could not come to a good end, that its end would be a catastrophe, a revolt of patient nature, a thunderstorm and cleansing gale that would break the spell upon the world, tear life beyond the “dead point,” and visit a terrible Last Judgment upon the “silly season.” He felt an urge to flee, as we have already said—and it was fortunate indeed that the authorities kept the aforesaid “unwavering eye” upon him, that they knew how to read his expression and were intent upon diverting him with new and fruitful hypotheses!

In the accents of a university corps student, the authorities had declared that they were on the track of the true causes underlying the instability of Hans Castorp's heat economy—causes which, according to their scientific pronouncement, could be dealt with so readily that recovery and legitimate discharge to the flatlands suddenly seemed close at hand. The young man's heart beat high, assailed by manifold emotions, as he extended his arm for the bloodletting. Blinking and turning slightly pale, he admired the magnificent ruby red of his life's fluid as it rose to fill the transparent vessel. The Hofrat himself, assisted by Doctor Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, performed the small but far-reaching operation. There followed a succession of days dominated for Hans Castorp by the question of how that which he had surrendered, outside himself and beneath the eyes of science, would prove its worth.

Naturally nothing could yet have grown, the Hofrat said at first. Unfortunately nothing had yet shown any inclination to grow, he said later. But the morning came when, during breakfast, he approached Hans Castorp, who at that time had his place at the Good Russian table, at its upper end, where once his great intimate companion had sat, and informed him, amid conventional felicitations, that the chain coccus had now been established beyond doubt in one of the cultures they had prepared. It was now a problem in the calculus of probabilities whether the symptoms of poisoning were attributable to the minor tuberculosis, which undoubtedly existed, or to the streptos, which were also present only to a modest degree. He, Behrens, would have to observe the matter more closely and for longer. The culture was not yet fully grown.—He showed it to him in the “laboratory”: a red jelly of blood in which grey specks could be discerned. Those were the cocci. (Every donkey, however, had cocci, just as he had tubercles; and if the symptoms had not been present, no particular weight would have been attached to this finding.)

Outside himself, beneath the eyes of science, Hans Castorp's coagulated heart's blood continued to prove its worth. The morning came when the Hofrat reported, in words of formulaic emotion, that cocci had subsequently grown not only upon the one culture but upon all the others as well, and in great quantities. It was uncertain whether they were all streptos; but it was now more than probable that the symptoms of poisoning derived from them—even though, of course, it was impossible to know how much of the blame should be laid upon the tuberculosis that had undoubtedly existed and had not been wholly overcome. The conclusion to be drawn? A course of streptovaccine! The prognosis? Extraordinarily favourable—especially since the experiment was wholly without risk and could under no circumstances do harm. For since the serum was to be produced from Hans Castorp's own blood, the injection would introduce into his body no morbid substance that was not already there. At worst it would prove useless, its effect nil—but since the patient must remain in any case, could one really describe that as the worst of cases!

No, Hans Castorp would not go so far as that. He submitted to the cure, although he found it ridiculous and dishonourable. These inoculations of himself with himself seemed to him an odiously joyless diversion, an incestuous abomination from self to self, barren and hopeless in its very nature. Such was the judgement of his incorrigible hypochondria, which was right only on the point of barrenness—though on that point, admittedly, entirely right. The diversion extended over weeks. At times it seemed to do harm—which must of course have been an error—and at times to do some good, though this likewise proved an error. The result was nil, without ever being called by its name or expressly proclaimed. The enterprise petered out, and Hans Castorp went on laying out games of patience—eye to eye with the demon whose unbridled dominion, so he felt, was destined to end in terror.

Fullness of Harmony

What acquisition and innovation at the Berghof was it that delivered our friend of many years from his card-table tic and led him into the arms of another, nobler passion, though one at bottom no less strange? We are about to relate it, filled with the subject's secret charms and sincerely eager to communicate them.

It was an addition to the entertainment equipment of the principal common room, devised and resolved upon by the institution's governing body in its unremitting solicitude, and procured by the supreme management of this establishment—which must be recommended without reserve—at a cost we shall not attempt to calculate, but which we may certainly call munificent. An ingenious toy, then, of the order of the stereoscopic peep-box, the telescope-shaped kaleidoscope, and the cinematographic drum? Assuredly—and yet by no means. For in the first place, what they found set up one evening in the piano salon—and at sight of which some clasped their hands above their heads, others before their laps in a stooping posture—was not an optical contrivance, but an acoustic one; and furthermore, those slight attractions were not to be compared with it at all in class, rank, or value. This was no childish and monotonous piece of trickery of which one grew weary and which no one touched again once it had been there a mere three weeks. It was a streaming cornucopia of artistic delight, now cheerful, now heavy with soul. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.

Our grave concern is that this word may be misunderstood in an unworthy and obsolete sense, and that notions may attach themselves to it which do justice only to an antiquated precursor of what we have in mind as the truth, and not to that truth itself, brought to the noblest perfection through the tireless experiments of a technology devoted to the Muses. Good people! This was not the wretched little hand-cranked box which in former days, with turntable and stylus uppermost and encumbered by a shapeless brass trumpet-horn, filled unexacting ears from the top of an alehouse table with nasal bellowing. The shrine of matt-black stained wood that stood here in simple distinction upon a compartmented little table, slightly deeper than it was wide and connected by a silken cable to an electric socket in the wall, no longer bore the least resemblance to that crude and antediluvian machinery. One opened the gracefully tapering lid, whose brass support, rising from the base within, automatically secured it in an obliquely sheltering position, and perceived, in a shallow recess, the turntable lined with green cloth, with its nickel rim and likewise nickel-plated central spindle, over which the hole in the hard-rubber disc was to be fitted. One noticed further, to the right and toward the front, a clocklike numbered device for regulating the tempo; to the left, the lever by which the mechanism was set in motion or stopped; and at the rear on the left, the curved, club-shaped hollow arm of nickel, movable on supple joints, with the flat, round sound-box at its end, whose screw fitting was designed to hold the tracing needle. One also opened the leaves of the double door in front and saw behind them a louvred arrangement of slanting strips of black-stained wood—nothing more.

“It is the newest model,” said the Hofrat, who had entered with them. “Latest achievement, children, first-rate, extra-fine; there is nothing better in the whole zhonner.” He pronounced the word with comic impossibility, rather as a less cultivated salesman might have done while praising his wares. “This is no apparatus and no machine,” he continued, taking a needle from one of the brightly coloured little metal boxes arranged upon the table and fastening it in place; “this is an instrument, this is a Stradivarius, a Guarneri; here you have conditions of resonance and vibration refined to the most exquisite degree! ‘Polyhymnia’ is the make, as the inscription inside the lid informs you. German manufacture, you understand. We do this incomparably better than anyone else. The faithful musical spirit in modern mechanical form. The German soul _up to date_. And there you have the literature!” he said, pointing to a little wall-cabinet in which broad-spined albums stood in rows. “I hand over the whole enchantment to you for your unrestricted pleasure, but commend it to the public's protection. Shall we let one roar forth by way of a trial?”

The patients implored him to do so, and Behrens drew out one of the mute yet richly laden books of magic, turned the heavy leaves, took a record from one of the cardboard pockets whose circular apertures revealed the coloured labels, and put it on. With a turn of the hand he supplied current to the turntable, waited two seconds until it had attained full speed, and carefully lowered the fine point of the steel stylus onto the record's rim. A faint whetting sound became audible. He lowered the lid over it, and at that same instant there burst through the open double doors, from between the slats of the louvre—no, from the entire body of the chest—a tumult of instruments, a merrily clamorous and urgent melody, the first limb-flinging measures of an overture by Offenbach.

They listened smiling, their mouths open. They could scarcely believe their ears, so surpassingly pure and natural were the coloraturas of the woodwinds. A violin, entirely alone, preluded fantastically. One heard the stroke of the bow, the tremolo of the fingering, the sweet gliding from one position to another. It found its melody, the waltz, the “Ah, I Have Lost Her.” The harmony of the orchestra lightly bore the caressing air, and it was enchanting to hear it, honourably received by the ensemble, repeated as a resounding tutti. Naturally it was not as though a real orchestra were giving a concert here in the room. The body of sound, otherwise undistorted, suffered a diminution of perspective; if we may be permitted to introduce into the realm of hearing a simile drawn from that of sight, it was as though one viewed a painting through an opera glass held the wrong way round, so that it appeared remote and reduced without losing anything of the sharpness of its drawing or the luminosity of its colours. The piece of music, taut with talent and tingling with life, ran its course in all the wit of its frivolous invention. Sheer abandon supplied the conclusion: a galop beginning with droll hesitation, an impudent cancan that conjured a vision of top hats shaken in the air, flinging knees, and skirts flying upward, and that in its comic-triumphant ending could find no end. Then the mechanism stopped automatically. It was over. They applauded from the heart.

They called for more, and more they received: a human voice streamed from the shrine, masculine, soft and mighty all at once, accompanied by an orchestra—an Italian baritone of celebrated name—and now there could be no further question whatever of veiling or remoteness: the magnificent organ rang forth in the full compass and power of its nature; and particularly if one stepped into one of the adjoining open rooms and could not see the apparatus, it was precisely as though the artist stood there in the salon in bodily person, the score in his hand, and sang. He sang a bravura aria from an opera in his own language—_eh, il barbiere. Di qualità, di qualità! Figaro qua, Figaro là, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!_ The listeners thought they would die laughing at his falsetto _parlando_, at the contrast between that bear's voice and this tongue-twisting agility of speech. Experienced ears might follow and admire the artistry of his phrasing and his breathing technique. A master of the irresistible, a virtuoso of the Italian _Da capo_ taste, he sustained the penultimate note before the final tonic—advancing to the footlights, it seemed, and plainly with one hand raised in the air—in such a fashion that prolonged cries of bravo broke out before he had finished. It was excellent.

And there was more. A French horn performed variations on a folk song with beautiful circumspection. A soprano blazed, staccatoed, and trilled her way through an aria from _La Traviata_ with the loveliest coolness and precision. The spirit of a violinist of world-wide fame played, as though behind veils, a romance by Rubinstein to a piano accompaniment that sounded dry as a spinet. From the softly simmering wonder-chest came the sound of bells, glissandos of the harp, trumpet blasts, and rolls of the drum. Finally, dance records were put on. There were even one or two examples of the new import, with its exotic harbour-tavern flavour: the tango, destined to turn the Viennese waltz into a grandfather's dance. Two couples who had mastered the fashionable step demonstrated it upon the carpet. Behrens had withdrawn after admonishing them to use each needle only once and to treat the records “very much like raw eggs.” Hans Castorp attended to the apparatus.

Why he in particular? It had simply come about so. With curt words spoken under his breath, he had confronted those who, after the Hofrat's departure, wished to take charge of changing the needles and records and switching the driving current on and off. “Let me do that!” he had said, thrusting them aside; and they had yielded to him with equanimity, first because he bore the look of one who had long been versed in the matter, and secondly because they cared very little to labour at the source of their pleasure instead of allowing themselves to be served with it in comfort and without obligation, for as long as it did not bore them.

Not so Hans Castorp. During the Hofrat's demonstration of the new acquisition he had kept silently in the background, neither laughing nor calling out his approval, but following the performances intently while, in accordance with an occasional habit of his, he twisted one eyebrow between two fingers. With a certain restlessness he had several times changed his position behind the audience, had stepped into the library to listen from there, and later had stationed himself beside Behrens, his hands behind his back and his expression closed, keeping his eye upon the shrine and studying the simple service it required. Within him a voice was saying: “Halt! Attention! An epoch! This has come to me.” The most definite foreboding of a new passion, of enchantment and love's burden, filled him. The youth in the flatlands whom, at his first sight of a girl, Cupid's barbed arrow strikes unawares in the very heart does not feel so very differently. Jealousy immediately governed Hans Castorp's steps. Public property? Languid curiosity possessed neither the right nor the power to own. “Let me do that!” he said between his teeth, and they were perfectly content. They danced a little longer to some light-skirted pieces he set playing, then asked for another vocal number, an operatic duet, the barcarolle from _The Tales of Hoffmann_, which fell sweetly enough upon the ear; and when he closed the lid, they departed, lightly stimulated and chattering, to their rest cure, to repose. That was what he had been waiting for. They left everything behind just as it stood or lay—the open needle boxes and albums, the scattered records. It was like them. He pretended to join them, but secretly slipped away from their procession on the stairs, returned to the salon, locked all the doors, and remained there for half the night, deeply occupied.

He made himself familiar with the new acquisition and, undisturbed, surveyed the accompanying treasury of performance, the contents of the heavy albums. There were twelve of them, in two different sizes, each containing twelve records; and since many of the black discs, closely scored in circles, were double-sided—not only because some pieces also required the reverse side, but because a whole series of tablets had two different performances inscribed upon them—it formed a territory of beautiful possibilities at first difficult to survey, indeed bewildering, and awaiting conquest. He played perhaps twenty-five of them, using, so as not to disturb anyone or be heard in the night, certain softly tracing needles that reduced the volume; but this was scarcely an eighth part of what offered itself alluringly for trial on every hand. For the present it had to suffice to skim through the titles and only now and then, by way of sampling, to incorporate an example of the mute circular script into the shrine and cause it to sound. The hard-rubber discs were distinguished by the coloured label at their centre, and by nothing else visible to the eye. One looked like another, densely covered wholly or almost to the centre with concentric circles; and yet their delicate linear impressions concealed every kind of music imaginable, the happiest inspirations from every province of art, in performances of choice distinction.

There were numerous overtures and individual movements from the world of sublime symphonic music, played by famous orchestras whose conductors were named. Then came a long series of songs, performed with piano accompaniment by members of great opera houses—songs that were the lofty and conscious creations of individual art, as well as simple folk songs, and finally others which held, as it were, a middle place between these two kinds, inasmuch as, though products of cultivated art, they had been felt and invented with profound authenticity and piety in the mind and spirit of the people: artistic folk songs, if one might so call them without allowing the word “artistic” to do injury to their inwardness—one in particular which Hans Castorp had known from childhood, but for which he now conceived a mysterious love rich in associations, and of which there will be more to say.—What else was there—or rather, what was there not? There was opera in abundance. An international chorus of celebrated male and female singers, discreetly accompanied by an orchestra that kept itself in the background, applied the highly trained, God-given gift of their voices to the performance of arias, duets, and entire ensemble scenes drawn from the various regions and epochs of musical theatre: the southern sphere of beauty, with its rapture at once high-hearted and light; a German folk-world of roguery and demonism; French grand and comic opera. Was that the end? Oh no. For there followed the series of chamber music, the quartets and trios, the instrumental solos for violin, cello, and flute, the concert songs with obbligato violin or flute, the pieces purely for piano—not to mention the mere entertainments, the couplets, and the records for practical amusement upon which small dance orchestras had impressed their tunes and which called for a coarse needle.

Hans Castorp sifted through it, arranged it, and, working alone, consigned a small portion of it to the instrument, which awakened it to sounding life. He went to bed with a heated head at an hour as advanced as after the first carousal with Pieter Peeperkorn, of majestically brotherly and familiar memory, and from two until seven dreamed of the magic box. In his dream he saw the turntable revolving about its spindle, so swiftly as to become invisible and yet noiselessly, in a motion consisting not merely of its whirling circular course but also of a peculiar lateral undulation, so that the jointed arm bearing the needle, beneath which it passed, was made to sway with an elastic, breathing movement—highly conducive, one might suppose, to the _vibrato_ and _portamento_ of strings and human voices; yet it remained incomprehensible, no less in sleep than in waking life, how the mere tracing of a hair-fine line above an acoustic cavity, solely by means of the vibrating membrane of the sound-box, could reproduce the richly composite bodies of sound that filled the sleeper’s inward ear.

Early the next morning, even before breakfast, he was back in the salon, seated in an armchair with folded hands while a magnificent baritone sang from the shrine to the accompaniment of a harp: “As I look round upon this noble circle—”. The harp sounded perfectly natural; what the shrine released from within itself, besides the swelling, breathing, articulating human voice, was genuine and undiminished harp-playing—a matter for unqualified astonishment. And nothing on earth was more tender than the duet from a modern Italian opera which Hans Castorp played next—than this modest, intimate approach of feeling between the world-famous tenor voice, so frequently represented in the albums, and a little soprano of glass-clear sweetness—than his “_Da mi il braccio, mia piccina_” and the simple, sweet, closely melodic little phrase she gave him in reply ...

Hans Castorp started when the door moved behind him. It was the Hofrat, looking in upon him; dressed in his clinical coat, with the stethoscope in its breast pocket, he stood there for a moment, one hand on the door handle, and nodded to the laboratory assistant. The latter returned the nod over his shoulder, whereupon the chief’s blue-cheeked face, with its little moustache curled up on one side, disappeared behind the closing door, and Hans Castorp turned back to his invisible, melodious pair of lovers.

Later in the course of the day, after the midday meal, after dinner, he had listeners at his activity, a shifting audience—if one chose to regard not Hans Castorp himself as the audience, but rather as the dispenser of pleasure. Personally he inclined to this view, and the company of the house conceded it to him, inasmuch as from the beginning they tacitly assented to his resolute self-appointment as administrator and custodian of the public institution. It cost these people nothing; for notwithstanding their superficial rapture whenever that tenor idol revelled in lustre and melting sweetness, pouring forth his world-delighting voice in cantilenas and lofty arts of passion—notwithstanding this loudly proclaimed rapture, they were without love, and therefore perfectly willing to leave the care of it all to anyone who desired it. It was Hans Castorp who kept the treasure of records in order, who wrote the contents of each album on the inside of its cover, so that every piece was immediately at hand upon request and summons, and who operated the instrument: one saw him do so with movements soon practised, concise, and delicate. What, indeed, would the others have done? They would have profaned the records by working them with worn-out needles, would have left them lying uncovered on chairs, would have played witless pranks with the apparatus by running a noble piece at a tempo and pitch of one hundred and ten, or setting the pointer to zero, so that the result was a hysterical twittering or a sunken groan ... They had already done all that. They were ill, to be sure, but they were coarse. And so, after a short while, Hans Castorp simply carried in his pocket the key to the little cabinet in which the albums and needles were kept, with the result that he had to be summoned whenever anyone wished to have something played.

Late at night, after the evening sociability, when the crowd had withdrawn, came his best time. Then he remained in the salon, or returned there secretly, and made music alone until deep into the night. He had less need to fear disturbing the repose of the house than he had at first believed; for the carrying power of his spirit-music had proved to be of slight range: astonishing as were the effects produced by its vibrations near their source, they soon languished at a distance from it, feeble and potent only in appearance, like all things spectral. Hans Castorp was alone within his four walls with the marvels of the chest—with the flourishing performances of this little truncated coffin of violin wood, this dull-black miniature temple, before whose open folding door he sat in his armchair, hands folded, head inclined upon his shoulder, mouth open, letting floods of harmony pour over him.

The singers, men and women, whom he heard, he did not see; their humanity abode in America, in Milan, in Vienna, in Saint Petersburg—and there it might very well abide, for what he possessed of them was their best part, their voices; and he prized this purification or abstraction, which remained sensuous enough to permit him, with all the disadvantages of excessive personal proximity removed, a sound human appraisal, particularly where compatriots, Germans, were concerned. The artists’ pronunciation, dialect, and more immediate regional origin could be distinguished; the character of their voices revealed something of each individual’s spiritual stature, and the degree of their intelligence showed itself in the way they exploited or neglected possibilities of intellectual effect. Hans Castorp was vexed when they fell short. He suffered, too, and bit his lips in shame when imperfections of technical reproduction intruded, sat upon coals whenever, in the course of an often-played record, a sung note emerged sharp or bawling, as happened so easily with the delicate female voices in particular. Yet he accepted it, for love must suffer. At times he bent over the breathing, circling mechanism as over a bouquet of lilac, his head enveloped in a cloud of sound; or stood before the open shrine, savouring the sovereign happiness of the conductor as, with uplifted hand, he gave a trumpet its punctual entrance. He had favourites in his store, certain vocal and instrumental pieces of which he never tired. We must not omit to name them.

A small group of records offered the closing scenes of that pompous operatic work, overflowing with melodic genius, which a great compatriot of Herr Settembrini, the venerable master of the dramatic music of the South, had created in the latter half of the previous century for a solemn occasion, upon the presentation to mankind of a work of technology linking the nations, and at the commission of an Oriental prince. Hans Castorp knew roughly what there was to know about it by way of cultivation; he was acquainted in broad outline with the fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida, who sang to him in Italian from the box, and thus understood more or less what they were singing—the incomparable tenor, the princely contralto with the magnificent break in the middle of her range, and the silvery soprano—not every word, but one here and there, aided by his knowledge of the situations and his sympathy with them, an intimate participation which increased each time he played the four or five records, and had already become genuine infatuation.

First Radames and Amneris had their reckoning with one another: the king’s daughter had the prisoner brought before her, the man she loved and ardently wished to save for herself, although for the sake of the barbarian slave-girl he had surrendered country and honour—while, to be sure, as he declared, “in the depths of his heart honour had remained inviolate.” This intactness of his innermost being, despite all his burden of guilt, availed him little, however; for through his manifest crime he had fallen into the hands of the sacerdotal tribunal, to which all humanity was alien and which would assuredly show no mercy unless, at the final moment, he came to his senses, renounced the slave-girl, and flung himself into the arms of the royal contralto with the break in her voice, who, considered purely acoustically, so fully deserved it. Amneris exerted herself with the utmost fervour over the melodious but tragically deluded tenor, so estranged from life, who would sing nothing but “I cannot!” and “In vain!” whenever she assailed him with desperate entreaties to renounce the slave-girl, since his life was at stake. “I cannot!”—“Hear me once more: renounce her!”—“In vain!” Death-bent delusion and the warmest anguish of love combined in a duet of extraordinary beauty, but one that left no hope. And then Amneris accompanied with cries of grief the dread, formulaic responses of the sacerdotal tribunal, which sounded hollowly from the depths and in which the ill-fated Radames took no part whatever.

“Radames, Radames,” the High Priest sang insistently, presenting his crime of betrayal to him in pointed terms.

“Defend yourself!” all the priests demanded in chorus.

And since the supreme priest was able to point out that Radames remained silent, they all pronounced him guilty of treason in hollow unanimity.

“Radames, Radames!” the presiding priest began again. “You deserted the camp before the battle.”

“Defend yourself!” came the cry once more. “Behold, he is silent,” the strongly prejudiced director of proceedings was permitted to establish for the second time, and thus on this occasion too all the judges’ voices united with his in the verdict: “Treason!”

“Radames, Radames!” the implacable accuser was heard for the third time. “To country, honour, and king you broke your oath.”—“Defend yourself!” rang out anew. And “Treason!” the priesthood finally and shudderingly adjudged, after their attention had been drawn to the fact that Radames remained absolutely silent. Thus the inevitable could not fail to occur: the chorus, whose voices had remained closely united, pronounced the culprit’s lawful sentence—his doom was sealed; he should die the death of the accursed, and beneath the temple of the wrathful deity enter living into the grave.

Amneris’s indignation at this priestly harshness had, as best one could, to be supplied by the imagination, for at this point the reproduction broke off and Hans Castorp had to change the record, which he did with quiet, concise movements, as though with downcast eyes; and when he had seated himself again to listen, it was already the final scene of the melodrama that he heard: the concluding duet of Radames and Aida, sung from the depths of their cellar-grave, while above their heads bigoted and cruel priests celebrated their cult in the temple, spreading their hands and indulging in muffled murmuration ... “_Tu—in questa tomba?!_” rang out the indescribably appealing voice of Radames, sweet and heroic at once, in terror and delight ... Yes, she had found her way to him, the beloved for whose sake he had forfeited honour and life; she had awaited him here, had allowed herself to be shut in with him, that she might die with him; and the songs they exchanged in this matter, at times interrupted by the dull chanting of the ceremonial on the floor above, or in which their voices united—these were what had truly captivated the solitary nocturnal listener to the depths of his soul, in respect both of the circumstances and of their musical expression. Heaven was spoken of in these songs, but they themselves were heavenly, and heavenly was their performance. The melodic line which the voices of Radames and Aida traced insatiably, first separately and then united—that simple and blissful curve playing about tonic and dominant, rising from the fundamental note to a long-accented suspension a semitone below the octave and, after fleetingly touching the latter, turning towards the fifth—appeared to the listener the most transfigured and admirable thing he had ever encountered. Yet he would have been less enamoured of its sound without the underlying situation, which rendered his heart all the more receptive to the sweetness arising from it. How beautiful it was that Aida had found her way to the lost Radames, to share his sepulchral fate with him for all eternity! The condemned man rightly protested against the sacrifice of so lovely a life, yet in his tenderly despairing “_No, no! troppo sei bella_” one could unmistakably hear his rapture at final union with her whom he had thought never to see again; and Hans Castorp required no great exertion of the imagination to feel distinctly along with him this rapture, this gratitude. But what he ultimately felt, understood, and enjoyed as he gazed with folded hands at the little black grille between whose slats all this came blossoming forth, was the triumphant ideality of music, of art, of the human heart—the lofty and irrefutable beautification they bestowed upon the base horror of actual things. One had only to picture what, soberly considered, was happening here! Two people buried alive, their lungs full of mine gas, would perish here together—or, worse still, one after the other—in convulsions of hunger; and then corruption would perform its unspeakable work upon their bodies until two skeletons lay beneath the vault, each of them utterly indifferent and insensible as to whether it lay there alone or in company. That was the real and objective side of things—a side and a matter unto itself, which counted for nothing whatever before the idealism of the heart and was most triumphantly cast into shadow by the spirit of beauty and music. For the operatic souls of Radames and Aida, the objectively impending event did not exist. Their voices soared in unison to the blissful suspension below the octave, declaring that heaven was now opening and the light of eternity shining upon their yearning. The consoling power of this beautification did the listener extraordinary good and contributed not a little to making this number in his favourite programme so especially dear to his heart.

He was accustomed to rest from its terrors and transfigurations with a second _pièce_, brief in duration but concentrated in its enchantment—far more peaceful in content than the first, an idyll, but a sophisticated idyll, painted and fashioned with the at once economical and intricate resources of the newest art. It was a purely orchestral piece, without song, a symphonic prelude of French origin, accomplished with an ensemble small by contemporary standards, yet versed in every art of modern tonal technique and cunningly equipped to spin the soul into dream.

The dream Hans Castorp dreamed to it was this: he lay on his back upon a meadow strewn with many-coloured starry flowers and radiant with sunshine, a little mound of earth beneath his head, one leg slightly drawn up, the other laid across it—except that the legs he crossed were goat’s legs. His hands, solely for his own pleasure, since the solitude over the meadow was complete, fingered a little woodwind instrument that he held in his mouth, a clarinet or shepherd’s pipe, from which he coaxed peaceful, nasal notes: one after another, just as they chose to come, yet forming a successful roundelay; and thus the carefree piping rose towards the deep-blue sky, beneath which the delicate foliage of solitary birches and ashes, lightly stirred by the wind, shimmered in the sun. Yet his contemplative and irresponsibly half-melodious tootling did not long remain the only voice of solitude. The humming of insects in the summer-hot air above the grass, the sunshine itself, the light wind, the swaying of the treetops, the glitter of the foliage—the whole gently stirring summer peace around him became a mingled sound that lent his simple piping an ever-changing and ever-surprisingly chosen harmonic interpretation. At times the symphonic accompaniment receded and fell silent; but Hans with the goat’s legs went on blowing and, by the naïve monotony of his playing, lured forth anew the exquisitely coloured tonal magic of nature—which at last, after another pause, in sweet self-transcendence, through the accession of ever new and higher instrumental voices entering in rapid succession, attained all its available fullness, until then held in reserve, for one fleeting instant whose blissfully perfect fulfilment nevertheless contained eternity within it. The young faun was very happy upon his summer meadow. Here there was no ‘Justify yourself!’, no responsibility, no priestly court-martial over one who had forgotten honour and gone astray. Here oblivion itself held sway, blessed suspension, the innocence of timelessness: it was dissoluteness with the clearest of consciences, the dreamlike apotheosis of each and every denial of the Western commandment of activity; and the soothing influence that emanated from it made the record precious to the nocturnal musician above many others.—

There was a third... Actually, once again, there were several of them, belonging together and merging into one another, three or four, for the tenor aria that occurred among them took up by itself one side grooved as far as the middle. Once again it was something French, from an opera Hans Castorp knew well, which he had repeatedly heard and seen in the theatre and to whose plot he had even once alluded in conversation—and indeed in a most decisive conversation... It was in the second act, in the Spanish tavern, a spacious den, barnlike, hung with cloths and displaying a dilapidated Moorish architecture. Carmen’s warm, slightly rough, yet racily engaging voice announced that she would dance for the sergeant, and already one heard her castanets clattering. But at that same moment, from some distance away, trumpets and clairons sounded, a repeated military signal that sent no slight tremor through the little fellow’s limbs. ‘Stop! One moment!’ he cried, pricking up his ears like a horse. And when Carmen asked ‘Why?’ and ‘What was the matter?’—‘Do you not hear?’ he exclaimed, utterly astonished that she did not comprehend it as he did. Why, those were the trumpets from the barracks giving the signal. ‘The hour of return draws near,’ he said operatically. But the gypsy could not understand this, and above all had no wish whatever to understand it. So much the better, she declared, half foolishly and half impudently; then they needed no castanets, heaven itself was sending them music for their dance, and therefore: Lalalala!—He was beside himself. His own pain of disappointment receded entirely behind his efforts to make clear to her what was at issue, and that no infatuation in the world could prevail against that signal. How was it possible that she should fail to understand something so fundamental and unconditional! ‘I must go now—home, to quarters, to roll-call!’ he cried, despairing at an incomprehension that made his heart twice as heavy as it would have been in any case. But then one had to hear Carmen! She was furious, outraged to the depths of her soul; her voice was betrayed and insulted love through and through—or so she pretended. ‘To quarters? To roll-call?’ And her heart? And her good, tender heart, which in its weakness—yes, she admitted it: in its weakness!—had been prepared to beguile the time for him with song and dance? ‘Traterata!’ and with savage mockery she raised her curled hand to her mouth to imitate the clairon. ‘Traterata!’ And that was enough. Up sprang the fool and wanted to leave. Very well, then—away with him! Here were his helmet, his sabre and his straps! Hurry, hurry, hurry, and get himself back to the barracks!—He begged for mercy. But she continued in her blazing scorn, pretending to be he, who at the sound of the horns had lost the little wit he possessed. Traterata, to roll-call! Merciful heavens, he would be late! Away with him, then, for roll-call was summoning him, and naturally he started up like a madman at the very moment when she, Carmen, had meant to dance for him. That, that, that was his love for her!—

An agonizing situation! She did not understand. The woman, the gypsy, could not and would not understand. She would not—for beyond all doubt there was in her rage, in her mockery, something that reached beyond the moment and the personal: a hatred, a primordial enmity towards the principle that, through these French clairons—or Spanish horns—was calling the enamoured little soldier, and over which it was her highest, inborn and suprapersonal ambition to triumph. She possessed a very simple means of doing so: she asserted that if he went, he did not love her; and that was precisely what José, there inside the cabinet, could not bear to hear. He implored her to let him speak. She refused. Then he compelled her—it was a devilishly grave moment. Fatal strains issued from the orchestra, a darkly threatening motif which, as Hans Castorp knew, ran through the entire opera to its catastrophic conclusion and also formed the introduction to the little soldier’s aria, the new record that must now be put on.

‘Here, faithfully sheltered upon my heart’—José sang it most beautifully; Hans Castorp often played the disc by itself as well, apart from its familiar context, and always listened with the most attentive sympathy. In point of content there was not much to the aria, but its pleading emotional expression was moving in the highest degree. The soldier sang of the flower Carmen had thrown to him at the beginning of their acquaintance, and which, during the severe confinement into which he had fallen on her account, had been his all in all. Deeply shaken, he confessed that at moments he had cursed fate for ever having allowed his eyes to behold Carmen. But at once he had bitterly repented the blasphemy and, upon his knees, prayed to God that he might see her again. _Then_—and this ‘then’ was the same high note with which, immediately before, he had begun his ‘Ah, dearest maiden’—_then_—and now every instrumental enchantment was loosed in the accompaniment that might in any way serve to depict the little soldier’s pain, longing, forlorn tenderness, and sweet despair—_then_ she had stood before his eyes in all her utterly fatal charm, so that he had felt one thing clearly and distinctly: that he was ‘done for’ (‘done’ with a sobbing whole-tone appoggiatura), and therefore done for ever. ‘You are my rapture, my delight!’ he sang despairingly to a recurring sequence of notes, which the orchestra too lamented once more on its own account, rising two degrees from the tonic and from there turning tenderly towards the lower fifth. ‘Yours is my heart,’ he superfluously protested in a manner at once more tasteless and more tender than anything imaginable, employing this same figure; he then traversed the scale to the sixth degree in order to add: ‘And yours I am eternally!’, after which he let his voice descend through ten notes and, profoundly shaken, confessed his ‘Carmen, I love you!’, whose close was painfully delayed by a changingly harmonized suspension before ‘you’ and the preceding syllable resolved into the tonic chord.

‘Yes, yes!’ Hans Castorp said, heavy-hearted and grateful, and put on the finale as well, in which they all congratulated young José because his encounter with the officer had cut off his retreat, so that he must now become a deserter, as Carmen, to his horror, had already demanded of him.

‘Oh, follow us into rocky clefts, where wild yet pure the breezes blow—’

they sang to him in chorus—and one could understand them perfectly well.

‘The world lies open—no cares oppress you; boundless is your fatherland; and ahead, the most blissful rapture—freedom laughs! Freedom laughs!’

‘Yes, yes!’ he said once more, and passed on to a fourth piece, something very dear and good.

That it was once again something French is no more our fault than it can be laid at our door that the military spirit once again prevailed. It was an interpolation, a solo vocal number, a ‘Prayer’ from Gounod’s Faust opera. Someone appeared, someone supremely congenial, whose name was Valentin, but whom Hans Castorp privately called by another, more familiar and melancholy name, identifying its bearer to a very high degree with the person whose voice issued from the cabinet, although the latter possessed a far more beautiful voice. It was a strong and warm baritone, and his song was in three parts; it consisted of two closely related outer stanzas, pious in character, indeed almost in the style of a Protestant chorale, and a middle stanza of bold, chivalric courage, warlike, light-hearted, yet pious as well; and therein, properly speaking, lay its French-military quality. The invisible singer sang:

‘Since I now must leave my beloved native land’—

and in these circumstances he addressed his supplication to the Lord of Heaven, asking Him to protect, in his absence, the lovely blood of his sister! He was going to war; the rhythm changed abruptly, became enterprising; grief and care might go to the devil, while he, the invisible man, intended boldly, piously, and Frenchly to hurl himself against the enemy wherever the battle raged hottest and the danger was greatest. But if God should summon him to the heights of heaven, he sang, then from there he would look protectively down upon ‘you’. This ‘you’ meant the blood of his sister; yet it moved Hans Castorp to the depths of his soul, and his emotion did not abate until the end, when the brave fellow inside the cabinet sang to mighty chorale chords:

‘O Lord of Heaven, hear my prayer; keep Margarete beneath Thy care!’

There was nothing more to this record. We thought it proper to speak briefly of it because Hans Castorp was so exceptionally fond of it, but also because, upon a later and strange occasion, it was still to play a certain part. For the present we come to a fifth and final piece from the group of his especial favourites—which, to be sure, was no longer in the least French, but something particularly and exemplarily German, nor anything operatic, but a song, one of those songs—at once a possession of the folk and a masterpiece, and receiving precisely from this conjunction its peculiar stamp of spirit and world-view... Why these circumlocutions? It was Schubert’s ‘Linden Tree’; it was nothing other than the universally familiar ‘By the Fountain Before the Gate’.

A tenor performed it to the piano, a fellow of tact and taste who knew how to treat his subject, at once simple and of the loftiest rank, with great intelligence, musical sensitivity, and care in declamation. We all know that the glorious song sounds rather different in the mouths of folk and children than it does as an art song. There it is generally sung throughout, in simplified form, strophically to the principal melody, whereas in the original this popular line is already varied in the minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, returning most beautifully to the major at the fifth line, but then, with the ensuing ‘cold winds’ and the hat flying from the head, being dramatically dissolved, and finding itself again only in the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated so that the melody may sing itself out. The truly irresistible turn of the melody appears three times, in its modulating second half—the third occurrence thus coming in the reprise of the final half-stanza, ‘Now I have journeyed many an hour’. This magical turn, which we would not profane by approaching too closely with words, lies upon the fragments ‘So many a loving word’, ‘As though they called to me’, ‘Far from that distant place’; and the tenor’s bright and warm voice, wise in its breathing and inclined towards a measured sob, sang it each time with such intelligent feeling for its beauty that it seized the listener’s heart in an unforeseen fashion, especially as the artist knew how to heighten the effect by extraordinarily intimate head tones in the lines ‘To _it_ I turned for evermore’, ‘Here _you shall find_ your rest’. But in the repeated final line, that ‘There you would find rest!’, he sang ‘would find’ the first time with a full and yearning breast voice, and only the second time as the tenderest flageolet.

So much for the song and its performance. We may perhaps flatter ourselves that on earlier occasions we have succeeded in imparting to our listeners some approximate understanding of the intimate sympathy Hans Castorp bestowed upon the favoured numbers in the programmes of his nocturnal concerts. But to make comprehensible what this last piece, this song, the old ‘Linden Tree’, meant to him is, to be sure, an undertaking of the most delicate kind, and the utmost caution of tone is required if more harm than good is not to be done.

Let us put it in this way: an intellectual—that is to say, a significant—object is ‘significant’ precisely because it points beyond itself, because it is the expression and exponent of something more universally spiritual, of an entire world of feeling and cast of mind that has found in it its more or less perfect symbol—and by this the degree of its significance is measured. Furthermore, love for such an object is likewise and in itself ‘significant’. It says something about the person who cherishes it; it characterizes his relation to that universal order, to that world which the object represents and which, consciously or unconsciously, is loved along with it.

Are we to believe that our simple hero, after so-and-so many little years of hermetic-pedagogical intensification, had entered deeply enough into the life of the mind to be _conscious_ of the ‘significance’ of his love and of its object? We assert and relate that he had. The song meant much to him, an entire world, and indeed a world he must surely have loved, since otherwise he could not have been so infatuated with the symbolic likeness that stood for it. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps somewhat obscurely—that his destiny would have taken a different shape had his heart not been receptive in the highest degree to the charms of the sphere of feeling, the universal spiritual attitude, which the song summed up in so intimate and mysterious a fashion. But that very destiny had brought with it intensifications, adventures, insights; it had raised within him problems of governance that had ripened him for an apprehensive criticism of this world, of this its admittedly and absolutely admirable symbolic likeness, and of this his love, and were accordingly calculated to place all three beneath the doubts of conscience.

He would have to understand nothing whatever of matters of love who imagined that such doubts detracted from love. On the contrary, they are its spice. They alone lend love the sting of passion, so that passion might be defined simply as love in doubt. But wherein, then, consisted Hans Castorp's doubts of conscience and governance concerning the higher legitimacy of his love for the enchanting song and its world? What was this world standing behind it, which, according to the foreboding of his conscience, was to be a world of forbidden love?

It was death.

But that was manifest madness! So wondrous and glorious a song! A pure masterpiece, born of the ultimate and holiest depths of the people's soul; a supreme treasure, the archetype of the inward and heartfelt, loveliness itself! What ugly slander!

Oh yes, yes, yes, that was all very fine; so every honest man must surely speak. And yet behind this lovely product stood death. It maintained relations with death which one might love, though not without rendering oneself, with the intuition proper to responsible governance, an account of a certain illegitimacy in such love. In its own original nature it might be, not sympathy with death, but something profoundly popular and full of life; yet spiritual sympathy with it was sympathy with death—pure piety, thoughtfulness itself at its beginning, and that was not to be disputed in the slightest; but in its train lay results of darkness.

What notions he was putting into his own head!—He would not have let any of you talk him out of them. Results of darkness. Dark results. The mentality of the torturer and hatred of mankind in Spanish black, with a platter ruff, and lust in place of love—as the result of faithful-eyed piety.

To be sure, the man of letters Settembrini was hardly the object of his unconditional trust; but he recalled certain instruction which that lucid mentor had once, in days gone by, at the beginning of his hermetic career, imparted to him concerning “backward inclination,” the spiritual “backward inclination” toward certain worlds, and he found it advisable to apply this teaching cautiously to his present subject. Herr Settembrini had described the phenomenon of that backward inclination as an “illness”—the image of the world itself, the spiritual epoch toward which it inclined, might well have appeared “morbid” to his pedagogic mind. But how now! Hans Castorp's lovely song of homesickness, the sphere of feeling to which it belonged, and the loving inclination toward that sphere—were these to be “ill”? By no means! They were the most heartily wholesome things in the world. Yet this was a fruit which, fresh and splendidly healthy at this very instant, or but a moment ago, possessed an extraordinary tendency toward decomposition and decay; which, the purest refreshment of the heart when enjoyed at the right moment, from the next, wrong moment onward spread rot and corruption through the humanity that partook of it. It was a fruit of life, begotten by death and pregnant with death. It was a miracle of the soul—perhaps the highest before the countenance of conscienceless beauty, and blessed by beauty; yet regarded with mistrust, for cogent reasons, by the eye of a responsibly governing friendship with life, of love for the organic, and made the object of self-conquest by the final verdict of conscience.

Yes, self-conquest—that might well be the essence of conquering this love, this enchantment of the soul with its dark consequences! Hans Castorp's thoughts, or foreboding half-thoughts, soared high as he sat by night and in solitude before his trimmed musical coffin—they soared higher than his understanding could reach; they were alchemically heightened thoughts. Oh, mighty was the enchantment of the soul! We were all its sons, and mighty things could we accomplish on earth by serving it. One required no more genius, merely far more talent than the author of the linden-tree song, in order, as an artist of soul-enchantment, to magnify the song to gigantic proportions and subjugate the world with it. One might probably even found empires upon it—earthly, all-too-earthly empires, very robust, delighting in progress, and in truth not homesick in the least—empires in which the song degenerated into electrically amplified gramophone music. Yet its best son might be the one who consumed his life in overcoming it and died with the new word of love upon his lips, the word he did not yet know how to utter. So well worth dying for was the magic song! But he who died for it no longer, in truth, died for it at all, and was a hero only because, at bottom, he already died for the New, for the new word of love and the future in his heart— —

Such, then, were Hans Castorp's favourite records.

The Most Questionable of All

In the course of the passing years, Edhin Krokowski's lectures had taken an unexpected turn. His researches, devoted to the analysis of the soul and to human dream-life, had always borne a subterranean and catacomb-like character; of late, however, in a gradual transition scarcely perceptible to the public, they had taken a direction toward the magical, toward the wholly mysterious; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall, the chief attraction of the establishment, the pride of its prospectus—those lectures delivered in frock coat and sandals, behind a little draped table, with exotically lingering accents, before the motionlessly attentive Berghof audience—no longer treated of disguised manifestations of love and the reconversion of illness into the affect brought to consciousness; they treated of the profound peculiarities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, the veridical dream and second sight, the wonders of hysteria, in the discussion of which the philosophical horizon widened to such a degree that riddles such as the relation of matter to the psychic, indeed that of life itself, suddenly shimmered before the eyes of his listeners—life, which there seemed more hope of approaching by the most uncanny, the pathological route, than by the way of health...

We say this because we hold it our duty to put to shame those frivolous spirits who claimed that Dr. Krokowski had turned to hidden things merely out of concern to preserve his lectures from hopeless monotony, and thus for purely emotional purposes. So spoke slanderous tongues, which are lacking nowhere. It is true that at the Monday lectures the gentlemen shook their ears more briskly than ever in order to make them keener, and that Fräulein Levi resembled, if possible, even more closely than formerly the wax figure with the mechanism in its breast. But these effects were as legitimate as the development through which the scholar's mind had passed, and for which he was entitled to claim not merely consistency, but downright necessity. Those dark and extensive regions of the human soul which are called the subconscious had always constituted his field of study, although it might perhaps be better to speak of a superconscious, since from those spheres there sometimes ghosts upward a knowledge far surpassing the individual's conscious knowledge, and suggesting the thought that connections and correspondences may exist between the lowest, lightless regions of the individual soul and an all-knowing universal soul. The realm of the subconscious, “occult” in the proper sense of the word, very soon proves occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources from which flow the phenomena that are provisionally so named. Nor is that all. Whoever sees in an organic symptom of illness the work of affects banished from conscious psychic life and rendered hysterical thereby acknowledges the creative power of the psychic within the material—a power which one is compelled to regard as the second source of magical phenomena. An idealist of the pathological, not to say a pathological idealist, he will find himself at the starting point of trains of thought which, after a very short course, debouch into the problem of Being as such—that is to say, into the problem of the relations between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of mere robustness, will never allow himself to be deprived of the explanation that the spiritual is a phosphorescent product of the material. The idealist, on the other hand, proceeding from the principle of creative hysteria, will be inclined, and very soon resolved, to answer the question of primacy in a completely opposite sense. All in all, what confronts us here is nothing less than the ancient controversy over which came first, the hen or the egg—a controversy plunged into such extraordinary confusion precisely by the twofold fact that no egg is conceivable which was not laid by a hen, and no hen which could have hatched otherwise than from a previously existing egg.

Such, then, were the matters Dr. Krokowski had lately been discussing in his lectures. He had arrived at them by an organic, legitimate, logical path—we cannot emphasize this sufficiently—and merely for good measure we add that he had entered upon such discussions long before the appearance of Ellen Brand upon the scene caused matters to pass into an empirical and experimental stage.

Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our listeners do not know, while the name is naturally familiar to us. Who was she? Almost nobody at first glance. A dear little thing of nineteen, called Elly, flaxen-haired, Danish, and not even from Copenhagen, but from Odense on Funen, where her father owned a butter business. She herself had entered practical life and had already spent a few years, an office sleeve over her right arm, sitting on a swivel stool above bulky ledgers as a clerk in the provincial branch of a bank from the capital—and in the course of it she had developed a temperature. The case was of no importance; in truth, it was scarcely more than a suspected one, although Elly was certainly delicate, delicate and manifestly chlorotic—yet thoroughly appealing, so that one would gladly have laid a hand upon the flaxen crown of her head, as indeed the Hofrat regularly did when he spoke with her in the dining hall. A Nordic coolness surrounded her, a glassily chaste, childishly virginal atmosphere, altogether lovable, like the full and candid childish gaze of her blue eyes and like her speech, which was thin, high, and fine: slightly fractured German, with small characteristic slips of sound, such as saying “flech” instead of “flesh.” There was nothing remarkable about her features. Her chin was too short. She sat at Kleefeld's table, where Kleefeld mothered her.

This young Fräulein Brand, then, this Elly, this friendly little Danish cyclist and office-stool sitter, had peculiarities about her which no one, at a first or second glance at her limpid person, could ever have dreamed of; but after only a few weeks of her stay up here they began to reveal themselves, and it became Dr. Krokowski's affair to lay them bare in all their strangeness.

Collective amusements during the evening gatherings first gave the scholar cause to prick up his ears. The company practised all manner of guessing games; they also sought hidden objects with the aid of piano music which swelled as one approached the hiding place, but grew softer when one took a wrong path; and after that they proceeded to require the person who, while the arrangement was being made, had been obliged to contemplate the door from outside, to execute correctly certain prescribed combinations of actions: for example, to exchange the rings of two specified persons; to invite someone to dance with three bows; to take a designated book from the library and present it to such-and-such a person; and other things of the kind. It should be noted that games of this sort had not otherwise belonged to the habits of Berghof society. Who had originally suggested them could no longer be established afterward. It had certainly not been Elly. Yet only in her presence had the idea occurred to them.

The participants—they were almost all old acquaintances of ours, and Hans Castorp was among them—displayed more or less aptitude in the trials, or failed altogether. But Elly Brand's proficiency proved extraordinary, conspicuous, improper. Her unfailing skill in seeking out hiding places might have passed amid applause and admiring laughter; but at the combined actions the company began to fall silent. Whatever had secretly been prescribed for her, she performed; she performed it as soon as she re-entered, with a gentle smile, without a moment's hesitation, and even without guiding music. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining hall, sprinkled it over the head of Public Prosecutor Paravant, then took him by the hand and led him to the piano, where, using his forefinger, she played the opening of the little song “A Bird Comes Flying.” Then she conducted him back to his place, made him a curtsy, drew up a footstool, and finally sat down upon it at his feet—exactly as, after much racking of brains, they had devised it for her.

So she had been listening, then!

She blushed; and with genuine relief at seeing her ashamed, they began to scold her in chorus when she protested: No, no, not like that; they must not believe such a thing! She had not listened outside, not at the door—certainly and truly she had not!

Not outside, not at the door?

“Oh no, ex-cuse me!” She listened here in the room when she came in; she could not help doing so.

Could not help it? In the room?

It whispered to her, she said. What she was to do was whispered to her, softly, but with perfect sharpness and clarity.

That was plainly a confession. Elly was conscious of guilt in a certain sense; she had cheated. She ought to have said that she was not fit for such a game, since everything was whispered to her. A contest loses all human meaning when one of the competitors possesses supernatural advantages. In the sporting sense Ellen was suddenly disqualified, but in such a fashion that her confession sent a chill down more than one spine. Several voices at once called for Dr. Krokowski. Someone ran to fetch him, and he came: stout and sturdy, smiling, grasping the situation at once, his whole being inviting cheerful confidence. They had breathlessly informed him that something grossly abnormal was afoot, that an omniscient one had appeared, a virgin who heard voices.—Well, well, and what next? Calm, my friends! We shall see. This was his own ground and soil—shifting, marshy, and yielding beneath everyone else, but terrain over which he moved with assured sympathy. He asked questions and had the story told to him. Well, well, just look at that! “So that is how matters stand with you, my child?” And he laid his hand, as everyone liked to do, upon the little one's head. Much cause for attention, but not the slightest for terror. He plunged his brown, exotic eyes into Ellen Brand's pale-blue ones while gently stroking his hand from the crown of her head, across her shoulder, and down her arm. Devoutly, and ever more devoutly, she returned his gaze—that is to say, increasingly from beneath, as her head slowly inclined toward her breast and shoulder. When her eyes began to lose their focus, the scholar made a casual upward pass of the hand before her little face, after which he declared all things to be in the best of order and sent the entire excited company off to evening service, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he intended to “chat” a little longer.

A “chat”! One could imagine it. No one felt easy at the word, characteristic as it was of the jovial comrade Krokowski. Everyone felt its cold touch in his innermost being, Hans Castorp included, when, belatedly installed in his excellent reclining chair, he remembered how the ground had seemed to sway beneath his feet at Elly’s improper feats and the shamefaced explanation she had given for them, so that he had been overtaken by a certain nausea and physical oppression, a mild seasickness. He had never experienced an earthquake, but told himself that it must involve similar sensations of unmistakable terror—apart from the curiosity with which Ellen Brand’s fatal abilities inspired him: a curiosity bearing within itself the sense of its own hopelessness on a higher plane, that is, the consciousness that the realm toward which it groped was intellectually inaccessible, and hence the doubt whether it was merely idle or also sinful; which did not, however, prevent it from remaining what it was—curiosity. Hans Castorp, like everyone else, had in the course of his years heard one thing and another about matters of a secret nature or supernatural kind—the clairvoyant great-aunt has, after all, been mentioned, from whom a melancholy tradition had descended to him. But never had this world, to which he had not denied a theoretical and disinterested recognition, pressed personally upon his flesh; never had he gained practical experience of it; and his resistance to such experiences—a resistance of taste, an aesthetic resistance, a resistance born of human pride, if we may employ such pretentious expressions in regard to our entirely unpretentious hero—was almost equal to the curiosity they vividly aroused in him. He felt beforehand, felt clearly and distinctly, that these experiences, however they might proceed, could never present themselves otherwise than as absurd, incomprehensible, and beneath human dignity. Nevertheless, he burned to undergo them. He understood that “idle or sinful,” bad enough even as an alternative, was no alternative at all, but that the two coincided, and that intellectual hopelessness was merely the extra-moral form in which forbiddenness expressed itself. Yet the _Placet experiri_, implanted in him by one who must assuredly have disapproved of _such_ experiments in the most emphatic terms, was firmly lodged in Hans Castorp’s mind; his morality had gradually come to coincide with his curiosity, and had probably always done so: with the unconditional curiosity of the traveller in search of cultivation, which perhaps, even when it tasted the mystery of personality, had already stood not far removed from the realm now emerging, and which displayed a kind of military character by not avoiding the forbidden when it offered itself. And so Hans Castorp resolved to remain at his post and not stand aside if Ellen Brand should lead them into further adventures.

Dr. Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any further amateur experiments with Fräulein Brand’s secret gifts. He had laid scientific claim to the child, held sessions with her in his analytical dungeon, hypnotized her, it was said, endeavoured to develop and discipline the possibilities dormant within her, and investigated her psychic antecedents. Hermine Kleefeld, her maternal friend and patroness, did the latter as well, and under the seal of secrecy learned various things which, under the same seal, she spread throughout the entire house, as far as the concierge’s lodge. She learned, for example, that the person—or thing—which had whispered the tasks to the child during the game was called Holger—it was the youth Holger, a _spirit_ well known to her, a departed, ethereal being and something like little Ellen’s guardian spirit. So it was he who had disclosed the pinch of salt and Paravant’s forefinger to her? Yes; he had breathed it into her ear, his shadowy lips caressing it so that it tickled gently and tempted her to smile. It must have been agreeable when Holger had prompted her with the answers at school whenever she had not prepared her lessons. At this Ellen had been silent. Holger had probably not been allowed to do that, she said later. He was forbidden to interfere in matters so serious, and besides, he probably had not known the school answers properly himself.

It further emerged that Ellen had experienced apparitions from her earliest youth, though at considerable intervals—visible and invisible ones. What was that supposed to mean: invisible apparitions? For example, this. At sixteen she had been sitting alone in the drawing room of her parents’ house, doing needlework at the round table in the bright afternoon, while beside her on the carpet lay her father’s Great Dane, the bitch Freia. The table had been covered with a brightly coloured cloth, one of those Turkish shawls which old women wore folded into a triangle: it lay diagonally across the tabletop, its corners hanging down a little. And suddenly Ellen had seen the corner opposite her begin slowly to roll itself up: silently, carefully, and evenly it had been rolled a considerable distance toward the centre of the table, until at last the roll had grown quite long; and while this was happening, Freia had started up wildly, sat back on her haunches with forelegs braced and coat standing on end, fled howling into the next room, crawled under the sofa, and thereafter could not be induced for a full year to set foot in the drawing room.

Had it been Holger, Fräulein Kleefeld asked, who had rolled up the shawl? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about the occurrence? But since it was absolutely impossible to think the very least thing about it, Elly had thought nothing further about it either. Had she told her parents? No. That was strange. Although there was so utterly nothing to be thought about it, Elly had nevertheless felt, in this instance and in similar ones, that she must keep it to herself and make of it a strict and shamefaced secret. Had it weighed heavily upon her? No, not especially heavily. After all, what great burden could there be in a cloth rolling itself up? But other things had weighed more heavily upon her. This, for example:

A year earlier, likewise in her parents’ house in Odense, she had left her ground-floor room early in the morning, fresh from sleep, and meant to cross the hall and climb the stairs to the dining room in order, as was her custom, to make coffee before her parents appeared. She had already almost reached the landing where the staircase turned when, on that very landing, at its edge close beside the steps, she had seen her elder sister Sophie, who was married and lived in America—bodily and in truth. Sophie had been wearing a white dress and, strangely enough, a wreath of water-lilies, reedy yellow pond-lilies, upon her head; she had clasped her hands at her shoulder and nodded to Ellen. “But Sophie, are you here?” the rooted Ellen had asked, half joyfully and half in alarm. At that Sophie had nodded once more and then dissolved. She had become transparent; soon she was visible only to the degree that a flowing current of hot air is visible, and then no longer visible at all, so that the way was clear for Ellen. But it later emerged that at that very hour of the morning Sister Sophie had died in New Jersey of an inflammation of the heart.

Well, Hans Castorp observed when Kleefeld told him of it, that at least made a certain amount of sense; one could accept it. The apparition here, the death there—after all, a certain respectable connection was discernible. And he consented to take part in a spiritualistic parlour game, a glass-moving séance which, out of impatience and in secret circumvention of Dr. Krokowski’s jealous prohibition, they had decided to conduct with Ellen Brand.

Only certain persons were confidentially invited to the sitting, which was held in Hermine Kleefeld’s room: besides the hostess, Hans Castorp, and little Brand, there were only Frau Stöhr, Frau Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel, and Dr. Ting-Fu. Not until the stroke of ten that evening did they assemble quietly and inspect in whispers the preparations Hermine had made. These consisted of a wineglass placed upside down, its stem uppermost, upon a bare round table of medium size in the centre of the room; while around it, at suitable intervals along the rim of the tabletop, lay small bone tablets—counters by their ordinary function—upon which the twenty-five letters of the alphabet had been drawn with pen and ink. To begin with, Kleefeld served tea, which was gratefully welcomed, since Frau Stöhr and Frau Levi, despite the childish harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold extremities and palpitations. Once they had enjoyed its warmth, they seated themselves around the little table and, in a dim rosy light—for the hostess, in deference to the mood, had extinguished the ceiling lamp and left only the shaded bedside light burning—each lightly placed a finger of the right hand upon the foot of the glass. Such was the prescribed method. They waited for the moment when the glass should begin to move.

That might easily happen, for the tabletop was smooth, the rim of the glass well polished, and the pressure exerted by the trembling fingers, however lightly they rested upon it, would naturally be uneven and might have a more vertical direction here, a more lateral one there, and in time would be quite sufficient to induce the glass to leave its central position. At the periphery of its field of movement it would encounter letters; and if those toward which it ran, when combined, produced words and some sort of meaning, this would constitute a phenomenon inwardly entangled to the point of uncleanness, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious elements, of the wish-driven assistance of individuals—whether or not they admitted such conduct even to themselves—and of the secret accord among the unillumined strata of the collective soul: an underground collaboration yielding apparently alien results in which the darknesses of each individual would participate to a greater or lesser degree, most powerfully, no doubt, those of the lovely little Elly. At bottom they all knew this beforehand, and Hans Castorp, in his fashion, even chattered about it as they sat waiting with trembling fingers. Indeed, the ladies’ cold extremities and palpitations, the gentlemen’s strained gaiety, arose solely from their knowing it—from their having joined together in the silent night for an unclean game with their own nature, for a fearfully curious testing of unknown regions of themselves, and from their awaiting those semblances or half-realities which are called magical. It was almost solely to give the matter a form, and thus merely by convention, that they assumed the spirits of the departed would speak to the gathering through the glass. Herr Albin offered to act as spokesman and negotiate with any intelligences that might appear, since he had already taken part in spiritualistic sittings here and there.

Twenty minutes and more passed. The supply of whispered conversation ran dry, and the first tension subsided. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was on the point of dozing off. Ellen Brand, her little finger resting lightly on the glass, kept her great, pure, childlike gaze directed beyond the objects close at hand and into the glow of the bedside lamp.

Suddenly the glass tilted, tapped the table, and darted away beneath the hands of those seated around it. They had difficulty following it with their fingers. It slid as far as the edge of the table, ran some distance along it, and then returned in a straight line to approximately the centre. There it tapped once more and remained still.

The alarm felt by all was partly joyful, partly apprehensive. Frau Stöhr tearfully declared that she would rather stop, but was informed that she ought to have examined herself beforehand and must now remain quiet. Things seemed to be getting under way. It was stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no, the glass need not go to the trouble of seeking out the letters, but might content itself with tapping once or twice.

“Is an intelligence present?” Herr Albin inquired with a severe expression, addressing the emptiness above their heads.... A hesitation followed. Then the glass tilted and answered in the affirmative.

“What is your name?” Herr Albin asked in an almost brusque tone, reinforcing the energy of his address with a shake of the head.

The glass moved. Resolutely and in zigzags it ran from counter to counter, each time returning partway toward the centre of the table; it went to _h_, to _o_, to _l_; after that it seemed to flag, to grow confused, to know no way forward, but it recovered itself and found the _g_, the _e_, and the _r_ as well. Had they not known it! It was Holger in person, the _spirit_ Holger, who had known about the pinch of salt and so forth, but had, to be sure, refrained from interfering in school matters. He was there, he floated through the air, he hovered about the little circle. What were they to do with him now? A certain sheepishness took possession of the company. In low voices and almost behind their hands they consulted as to what they should desire to learn from him. Herr Albin decided to ask what Holger’s station and occupation had been in life. He did so as before, in the tone of an interrogation, sternly and with knitted brows.

The glass was silent for a while. Then, tipping and stumbling, it made its way to the _p_, moved off, and indicated the _o_. What was this to become? The tension was immense. Dr. Ting-Fu giggled that Holger might have been a poacher. Frau Stöhr fell into hysterical laughter, without thereby bringing the glass’s labours to a halt: though limping and clattering, it glided onward to the _t_ and then, evidently through the erroneous omission of one letter, came to an end. It had spelled “pot.”

What the devil, Holger had been a poet? To remove any doubt, and apparently from pride alone, the glass tilted and tapped an affirmative. A lyric poet? Kleefeld asked, pronouncing the _y_ like an _i_, as Hans Castorp noted with displeasure.... Holger seemed disinclined to enter into such specifications. He gave no new answer. He spelled the former word once more, rapidly, surely, and clearly, adding the _e_ he had forgotten before.

Good, good, a poet, then. Their embarrassment grew—a peculiar embarrassment, directed toward the manifestations of uncontrolled regions within their own souls, yet given once more an outward, objective direction by the deceptively half-real nature of those manifestations. They wished to know whether Holger felt well and happy in his present condition. The glass dreamily traced the word “Serene.” Ah, so he was “serene.” Well, they would not have thought of it themselves; but since the glass had spelled it, they found it probable and well expressed. And how long had Holger been in this serene condition? Now came something else that would never have occurred to anyone, something dreamlike and self-bestowing. It read: “A hastening while.” Excellent! It might equally well have read “A lingering haste”; it was a ventriloquial poet’s maxim from without, and Hans Castorp in particular found it admirable. A hastening while was Holger’s element of time, naturally; he was obliged to dismiss his questioners in aphorisms, having evidently forgotten how to operate with earthly words and exact measures. What else, then, did they wish to learn from him? Frau Levi confessed her curiosity to know what Holger looked like—or rather, what he had once looked like. Had he been a handsome youth? She must ask him herself, Herr Albin ordered, considering this thirst for knowledge beneath his dignity. And so, addressing him familiarly, she asked whether _spirit_ Holger had fair curls.

“Beautiful brown, brown curls,” the glass drew out, spelling the word “brown” twice, at elaborate length. Delighted merriment prevailed in the circle. The ladies openly proclaimed themselves in love. They blew kisses upward at an angle toward the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu giggled that Mister Holger appeared to be rather vain.

At that the glass grew angry and frantic! It raced wildly and senselessly about the table, tilted furiously, fell over, and rolled into Frau Stöhr’s lap, where she stared down at it, deathly pale, her arms spread wide. It was returned carefully to its place amid apologies. The Chinese was roundly scolded. How could he have dared! Now he could see what such impertinence led to! And what if Holger had now gone off in anger and refused to utter another word? They coaxed his glass in the most ingratiating terms. Might he not perhaps care to compose something! After all, he had been a poet before he began weaving and hovering in the fleeting while. Ah, how they all longed for something poetical! They would enjoy it so heartily.

And behold, the good glass struck Yes. There was truly something good-natured and conciliatory in the way it did so. And then _spirit_ Holger began to compose, composing laboriously, expansively, and without reflection, for who knew how long—it seemed as though he would never be brought to silence again! It was an altogether astonishing poem that he delivered ventriloquially while those seated around repeated it aloud in admiration, a magical thinghood, boundless as the sea, with which it principally dealt—sea-mist lying in long banks along the narrow strand of the island country’s wide-curving bay, with its steep coast of dunes. O see how, dying green, the immense expanse fades into eternity, where beneath broad bands of veiling mist, in dusky crimson and softly milky radiance, the summer sun delays its setting! No mouth could say when or how the water’s silvery, restless reflection changed into sheer mother-of-pearl shimmer, into an ineffable play of colour, a pale, many-hued, opaline moonstone lustre that overspreads all things ... Ah, secretly as it arose, the quiet enchantment died away. The sea fell asleep. Yet the gentle traces of the sun’s farewell remain over there and far outside. It does not grow dark until deep into the night. A half-ghostly light reigns in the pine wood upon the summit of the dunes and makes the pale sand of the ground appear like snow. Deceptive winter forest in the silence, traversed with cracking sounds by the heavy flight of an owl! Let us abide there at this hour! How soft the tread, how high and mild the night! And slowly, far below, the sea breathes deeply and whispers at length in its dream. Do you long to see it once again? Then step forth upon the dune’s pallid glacial slope and climb all the way upward through the yielding softness that runs coolly into your shoes. Harsh and scrub-grown, the land falls steeply to the stony strand, and still, at the edge of the vanishing immensity, the remnants of the day linger like ghosts ... Sit down here above upon the sand! How deathly cool it is, how floury and silken-soft! It flows from your closed hand in a colourless, slender stream and forms a delicate little hillock beneath it on the ground. Do you recognize this fine trickling? It is the soundlessly narrow current through the straitness of the hourglass, that grave and fragile implement adorning the hermit’s dwelling. An open book, a skull, and, within its stand, its lightly fashioned frame, the slender double-bellied vessel, holding a little sand taken from eternity, while time performs within it its secret, sacred, and disquieting work ...

Thus, in the strange flight of thought of his “lirical” improvisation, _spirit_ Holger had passed from his native sea to a hermit and the instrument of his contemplation; and he went on to many another matter, to things human and divine, in dreamily audacious words at which the little company marvelled without bounds as it spelled them out, while scarcely any time could be found to interpose delighted applause, so swiftly did it zigzag onward from one thing to a thousand others, with no desire whatever to stop—even after an hour there was not the remotest prospect of an end to this composition, which discoursed inexhaustibly of maternal travail and the lovers’ first kiss, of the crown of sorrow and God’s grave paternal goodness, plunged into the weaving of created life, lost itself in ages and countries and among the stars, once even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac, and would certainly have continued throughout the night had not the conjurers at last removed their fingers from the glass and, with the warmest thanks to Holger, declared that this must suffice for the present; it had been of unsuspected magnificence, and it was an eternal pity that no one had taken it down, so that the poem would now inevitably be forgotten—indeed, unfortunately, the greater part of it had already been forgotten, owing to a certain evanescence proper to dreams. Next time they would appoint a recording secretary in good time and see how it might look preserved in black and white and delivered as a connected whole; for the moment, however, and before Holger returned to the equanimity of his fleeting while, it would be better, and in any case extraordinarily kind of him, if he would perhaps answer one or another factual question from the circle—not yet any question in particular, but would he, should the occasion arise, be prepared in principle and as a special favour to do so?

“Yes,” came the answer. But now they found themselves at a loss as to what to ask. It was like a fairy tale in which a fairy or little man grants one question, and one runs the risk of idly squandering the precious opportunity. There seemed much in the world and the future worth knowing, and the responsibility of making a choice was great. Since no one could reach a decision, Hans Castorp, one finger on the glass and his left cheek propped upon his fist, said that he would like to hear how long his stay up here was to be, in place of the three weeks he had originally intended to remain.

Very well; since they knew of nothing better, the spirit might proclaim this first chance question from the plenitude of its knowledge. After some hesitation, the glass moved. It moved out something altogether peculiar and, as it seemed, devoid of connection, something of which no one could make head or tail. It moved the syllable “Go,” and then the word “across,” which left them more bewildered than ever; and afterward it moved out something about Hans Castorp’s room, so that the whole terse instruction ran that the questioner was to “go across his room.”—Across his room? Across Number 34? What was the meaning of that? While they sat deliberating and shaking their heads, there suddenly came a heavy blow of a fist against the door.

They all froze. Was it a raid? Was Dr. Krokowski standing outside, ready to break up the forbidden séance? They exchanged dismayed looks and awaited the entrance of the man they had deceived. Then, with a crash, a blow fell squarely upon the table, again as though dealt with a clenched fist, and as if to make it clear that the first blow too had come not from outside but from within.

It had been a cheap jest on Herr Albin’s part!—He denied it upon his word of honour; and even without his word they were all but certain that no one in their circle had dealt the blow. Had Holger done it, then? They looked at Elly, whose quiet behaviour had simultaneously become conspicuous to them all. She sat back against her chair, her fingertips resting on the edge of the table and her wrists drooping, her head inclined toward one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, but her little mouth, drawn small, turned somewhat downward, with the tiniest smile, which had something at once secretive and innocent about it; and with blue child’s eyes that saw nothing, she gazed obliquely into vacancy. They called to her, but she gave no sign of being present. At that moment the bedside lamp went out.

Went out? Frau Stöhr, now past all restraint, shrieked and yelped, for she had heard it click. The light had not gone out; it had been switched off by a hand that was being described very indulgently when it was called a _strange_ hand. Was it Holger’s hand? He had been so gentle, so disciplined and poetical until then; but now his nature had begun to degenerate into roguery and horseplay. Who could guarantee that a hand which dealt blows with its fist against doors and furniture and mischievously switched off the light would not seize someone by the throat? In the darkness they called for matches, for a pocket lamp. Levi screamed that someone had pulled her by the hair at her forehead. In her terror Frau Stöhr was not ashamed to pray aloud to God. “O Lord, just this once!” she cried, whimpering that mercy might prevail over justice, though they had tempted hell itself. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who conceived the sensible idea of switching on the ceiling light, so that the room at once lay in brightness. While they established that the bedside lamp had indeed not gone out by accident but had been switched off, and that it was only necessary to repeat by human means the secretly performed turn of the switch to make it burn again, Hans Castorp personally and in silence experienced a surprise that he might regard as a special attention on the part of the childish powers of darkness manifesting themselves here. Upon his knees lay a light object, the “souvenir” that had once frightened his uncle when he took it from his nephew’s chest of drawers: the glass transparency showing Clawdia Chauchat’s interior portrait, which assuredly he, Hans Castorp, had not brought into this room.

He slipped it into his pocket without making any fuss over the apparition. Everyone was occupied with Ellen Brand, who still sat in the posture described, her gaze blind and her expression strangely affected. Herr Albin blew upon her and imitated before her little face Dr. Krokowski’s upward-fanning motion of the hand, whereupon she roused herself and—for no clear reason—wept a little. They stroked her, comforted her, kissed her on the forehead, and sent her to bed. Levi declared herself willing to spend the night with Frau Stöhr, since that vulgar woman, paralysed by horror, had no notion how she was to get herself into bed. Hans Castorp, his apport in his breast pocket, had no objection to concluding the degenerate evening with the other gentlemen over a cognac in Albin’s room; for he found that occurrences of this kind, though they affected neither the heart nor the mind, did affect the gastric nerves—and with lasting effect, just as a seasick man may still imagine for hours after reaching land that he feels the nauseating oscillations.

For the time being, his curiosity was satisfied. Holger’s poem had not been bad at the moment of its production, certainly; yet the inward hopelessness and absurdity of the whole affair, which he had foreseen, had impressed itself upon him so unmistakably that these few flakes of hellfire which had blown against him might, he thought, very well be the end of it. Herr Settembrini, as may be imagined, strengthened him in this resolution with all his might when Hans Castorp told him of his experiences. “That,” he cried, “was all that had still been lacking! O misery, misery!” And without more ado he declared little Elly a hardened impostor.

His pupil said neither yes nor no to that. Shrugging his shoulders, he observed that what reality was did not appear to have been established beyond ambiguity, and consequently neither had what constituted fraud. Perhaps the boundary was fluid. Perhaps there were transitions between the two, degrees of reality within nature, which was devoid of words and judgements of value, and which evaded a decision to which, it seemed to him, something rather strongly moral adhered. What did Herr Settembrini think of the word “legerdemain,” of this conception in which elements of dream and elements of reality entered into a mixture perhaps less foreign to nature than to our coarse waking thought? The mystery of life was literally bottomless, and what wonder, then, if now and again feats of legerdemain rose out of it which—and so forth, in our hero’s amiably concessive and decidedly lax manner.

Herr Settembrini gave him the scolding he deserved and did indeed produce an immediate strengthening of conscience and something resembling a promise never again to take part in such abominations. “Respect,” he exhorted him, “the human being within you, Engineer! Put your trust in lucid and humane thought, and abhor mental contortion, the spiritual morass! Legerdemain? Mystery of life? _Caro mio!_ Wherever the moral courage to decide and distinguish—as between fraud and reality—falls into dissolution, there life itself, judgement, value, and the act of betterment are at an end, and the process of decay brought on by moral scepticism begins its dreadful work.” Man was the measure of all things, he added. His right to pronounce discerning judgement upon good and evil, truth and the lying semblance of truth, was inalienable; and woe to him who presumed to unsettle man’s faith in this creative right! It were better for him to be drowned in the deepest well with a millstone about his neck.

Hans Castorp nodded and did in fact keep away from these enterprises for the time being. He heard that Dr. Krokowski was holding séances with Ellen Brand in his analytical basement, to which selected members of the company were admitted. But he indifferently declined to participate—though naturally not without learning one thing and another about the experimental results from the mouths of the participants and of Dr. Krokowski himself. Manifestations of force of the kind that had occurred in Kleefeld’s room in a wilder and more involuntary fashion—blows against table and walls, that is, the switching off of the lamp, and other, more far-reaching effects—were produced and practised systematically at these gatherings, with the greatest possible guarantee of their genuineness, after Comrade Krokowski had hypnotized little Elly according to the rules of the art and placed her in a waking-dream state. It had emerged that musical accompaniment facilitated the exercises, and so on those evenings the gramophone changed its station and was commandeered by the magic circle. But since the Bohemian Wenzel, who operated it on these occasions, was a musical man who would certainly neither maltreat nor damage the instrument, Hans Castorp could surrender it with tolerable equanimity. From his collection of records he made available for this special service an album in which he had arranged all manner of light pieces, dances, little overtures, and other such tuneful trifles, which, since Elly had no desire whatever for loftier strains, served their purpose perfectly.

To these strains, then, Hans Castorp heard, a handkerchief had risen from the floor of its own accord—or rather, guided by a “claw” concealed within its folds; the doctor’s waste-paper basket had floated upward to the ceiling; the pendulum of a wall clock had been alternately stopped and set in motion again “by no one”; a table bell had been “taken” and rung; and there had been more such dismal trivialities. The learned director of the experiments was in the fortunate position of being able to designate these performances, with full scientific decorum, by a Greek name. They were, as he explained in his lectures and in private conversation, “telekinetic” phenomena, instances of movement at a distance; and the doctor assigned them to a domain of phenomena which science had christened materialization, and toward which his thoughts and endeavours in the experiments with Ellen Brand were in fact directed.

In his terminology these were biopsychic projections of subconscious complexes into the objective realm, processes whose source was to be sought in the mediumistic constitution, the somnambulistic state, and which might be described as objectified dream-images, inasmuch as an ideoplastic power of nature manifested itself in them: a faculty accruing to thought under certain conditions, enabling it to attract matter to itself and impress its form upon it in an ephemeral reality. This matter streamed from the medium’s body in order to assume, outside it and for a time, the shape of biologically living terminal organs—prehensile limbs, hands—which performed precisely those astonishing trivialities witnessed in Dr. Krokowski’s laboratory. Under certain circumstances these limbs were visible and palpable and could have their forms preserved in paraffin and plaster. Under further circumstances, however, their development need not stop there. Heads, individual human countenances, full-bodied phantoms materialized before the experimenters’ eyes in order to enter into a certain limited intercourse with them—and here Dr. Krokowski’s doctrine began to develop a cast in the eye, began to squint and assume a similarly wavering and ambiguous character to that which had distinguished his disquisitions upon “love.” For now it was no longer unequivocally, and with scientific countenance maintained, a question of subjectivities belonging to the medium and her passive assistants mirrored into reality; now, at least in part, at least conceivably, identities from outside and beyond entered into the play; it was a question—possibly, though not quite avowedly—of non-vital beings, of entities that took advantage of the intricate and secret favour of the moment to return into matter and make themselves known to those who summoned them—in short, of the spiritualistic conjuration of the dead.

Such products, then, were what Comrade Krokowski ultimately sought in his work with his circle. He sought them smiling sturdily and heartily, inviting cheerful confidence, his squat person quite at home in the marshy-suspicious and subhuman, and for that very reason a true guide through those regions even for the timid and doubtful. And indeed, thanks to Ellen Brand’s extraordinary gifts, whose development and cultivation he made his particular concern, success appeared to smile upon him, according to all that Hans Castorp learned. Individual participants had been touched by materialized hands. Public Prosecutor Paravant had received a resounding slap in the face from transcendence and acknowledged it with scientific good humour; indeed, in his eagerness he had even offered the other cheek—regardless of his qualities as a gentleman, a jurist, and an alumnus of a duelling fraternity, all of which would have compelled him to behave quite differently had the blow been of vital origin. A. K. Ferge, that simple sufferer to whom all higher things were alien, had one evening held such a spirit-limb in his own hand and established by touch the correctness and completeness of its formation, whereupon it withdrew from his grasp—which had been hearty within the bounds of respect—in a manner not precisely to be described. A considerable time elapsed, perhaps two and a half months, with two sittings a week, before a hand of such otherworldly origin, reddish in the glow of a table-lamp dimmed with red paper—a young man’s hand, as it had seemed—appeared to every gaze, moving its fingers above the tabletop, and left its trace in an earthenware dish of flour. But only eight days later it happened that a group of Dr. Krokowski’s collaborators—Herr Albin, Stöhr, the Magnus couple—appeared in Hans Castorp’s balcony box toward midnight, bearing every sign of contorted enthusiasm and feverish rapture, and reported in a breathless jumble to Hans Castorp, as he lay there in the dusk amid biting frost, that Elly’s Holger had shown himself: his head had appeared above the somnambulist’s shoulder, he really had possessed “beautiful brown, brown curls,” and had smiled so unforgettably gently and melancholically before he vanished!

How, Hans Castorp wondered, did this noble sorrow accord with Holger’s conduct on other occasions—with his unimaginative childishness and simple schoolboy pranks, with the wholly unmelancholy paw, for example, that the public prosecutor had received from him? Consistent unity of character was plainly not to be demanded here. Perhaps his disposition resembled that of the little hunchback in the song, with its sorrowful malice so greatly in need of intercession. Holger’s admirers appeared to give the matter no thought. What lay close to their hearts was persuading Hans Castorp to abandon his abstinence. He absolutely must attend the next sitting, now that matters were proceeding so splendidly. For Elly, in her sleep, had promised that next time she would produce any deceased person whatsoever whom the circle might request.

Any deceased person whatsoever? Hans Castorp nevertheless remained unwilling. Yet the thought that it might be any departed person at all occupied him to such a degree that, over the course of the next three days, he arrived at the opposite decision. Strictly speaking, it was not those three days, but merely a few minutes of them, that brought him to it. His change of mind took place while, alone in the music-room one evening, he was once again playing the record upon which Valentin’s supremely winning personality had been impressed—while, seated in his chair, he listened to that soldier’s prayer of the gallant fellow taking his leave, eager to go forth to the field of honour, and singing:

“And if God calls me to heaven’s height, I shall watch over you from above, O Margaret!”

Then, as always at this song, but this time strengthened by certain possibilities and condensed into a wish, a great emotion arose in Hans Castorp’s breast, and he thought: “Futile and sinful or not, it would nevertheless be wonderfully strange, and a very dear adventure. He, if he has anything to do with it, will not take it amiss, knowing him as I do.” And he remembered the equable and liberal “Please, please!” that he had once received out of the darkness in the fluoroscopy laboratory, when he had believed it proper to request permission for certain optical indiscretions.

The following morning he announced that he would take part in the sitting scheduled for that evening, and half an hour after dinner joined those who, chatting without constraint, like habitués of the uncanny, made their way down to the basement. They were all deeply rooted old residents, or at least long-standing members of the community, whom he met on the staircase and then in Dr. Krokowski’s quarters: Dr. Ting-Fu and the Bohemian Wenzel, Herr Ferge and Herr Wehsal, the public prosecutor, the ladies Levi and Kleefeld—not to mention those who had reported the apparition of Holger’s head to him, and the intermediary, Elly Brand.

The Nordic child was already in the doctor’s keeping when Hans Castorp passed through the door adorned with his visiting card. At Krokowski’s side—he was dressed in his black working-smock and had placed an arm paternally about her shoulders—she stood at the foot of the steps that descended still farther from the basement level into the assistant’s quarters, awaiting the guests and greeting them together with him. On every side these greetings were marked by a cheerful, unconcerned cordiality. It seemed a deliberate intention to keep the atmosphere free of all solemn constraint. Everyone talked loudly and jestingly across everyone else, exchanged encouraging nudges in the ribs, and proclaimed their ease in every possible fashion. Dr. Krokowski’s yellow teeth continually showed in his beard with that hearty, confidence-inspiring expression as he repeated, “I grreet you!” and they did so with particular emphasis when he welcomed Hans Castorp, who was silent and whose expression wavered. “Courage, my friend!” the host’s upward-and-backward toss of the head appeared to say, while he shook the young man’s hand almost roughly. “Who would hang his ears? Here there is neither timorousness nor sanctimony, but only the manly good humour of unprejudiced research!” The man thus addressed in pantomime felt no better for it. We allowed him to recall his resolutions in the fluoroscopy laboratory, yet that association of ideas by no means suffices to characterize his state of mind. Rather, it vividly reminded him of that peculiar and unforgettable condition, compounded of high spirits and nervousness, curiosity, contempt, and reverence, in which he had found himself years before when, slightly the worse for drink, he and some comrades had first set out to visit a brothel in Sankt Pauli.

Since, moreover, everyone was present, Dr. Krokowski withdrew with two female assistants—Frau Magnus and the ivory-coloured Levi having been appointed to the office on this occasion—into the adjoining room to inspect the medium’s person, while Hans Castorp and the nine remaining participants awaited the conclusion of this act of scientific rigour, regularly and invariably repeated without result, in the doctor’s study and consulting-room. The room was familiar to him from certain conversational hours he had for a time spent here with the analyst behind Joachim’s back. With its writing-desk, armchair, and visitor’s fauteuil at the rear on the left by the window; its working library on either side of the adjoining door; its oilcloth-covered chaise longue, set obliquely in the right-hand background and separated from the group around the desk by a many-panelled screen; its glass instrument cabinet in the corner there; the bust of Hippocrates in another corner; and the engraving after Rembrandt’s Anatomy above the gas fireplace on the right-hand wall, it was ordinarily a physician’s consulting-room like many others; yet certain alterations made in its arrangement for the special purpose were discernible. The round mahogany table which usually stood in the centre, surrounded by armchairs, beneath the electric chandelier and upon the red carpet that covered nearly the entire floor, had been moved toward the left-hand corner in the foreground, where the plaster bust stood; and, off-centre and nearer the burning fireplace that radiated a dry heat, there stood a smaller, lightly draped table bearing a little lamp shaded in red, above which, suspended from the ceiling, hung another bulb likewise enveloped in red and, in addition, in black veiling. Upon and beside the little table stood several notorious objects: the table-bells, or rather two bells of different construction, a hand-bell and a push-bell meant to be struck from above; also the plate of flour and the waste-paper basket. Some dozen chairs and armchairs of various types surrounded the little table in a semicircle, one end of which lay near the foot of the chaise longue, while the other came almost exactly to the centre of the room beneath the ceiling chandelier. Here, close to the last seat and about halfway toward the adjoining door, the musical shrine had also found its place. The album of lighter pieces lay on a chair beside it. Such was the arrangement. The red lamps had not yet been lit. The ceiling fixture gave a daylight-white illumination. The window, toward which the desk standing before it presented its narrow side, was covered by a dark curtain, in front of which hung another, cream-coloured and pierced like lace, a so-called net curtain.

After ten minutes the doctor returned from the cabinet with the three ladies. Little Elly’s appearance had changed. She was no longer wearing her clothes, but a kind of séance costume, a dressing-gown-like garment of white crêpe, held together at the waist by a girdle-cord and leaving her slender arms bare. Since her virginal breast showed so softly and unconstrained beneath it, she appeared to be wearing little under the garment.

She was greeted with animation. “Hallo, Elly! How charming she looks again! A perfect fairy! Do your best, my angel!” She smiled at the cries, and at her costume, which she well knew became her. “Preliminary inspection negative,” Dr. Krokowski declared. “Then briskly to work, comrades!” he added, with his exotic tongue-r tapped only once; and Hans Castorp, unpleasantly affected by the form of address, was about to seek some place for himself like the others, who amid hallos, chatter, and claps on the shoulder had begun to occupy the semicircle of chairs, when the doctor addressed him personally.

“To you, my friend—my frriend,” he said, “who are present among us, as it were, in the capacity of a guest or novice, I should like to grant special privileges of honour for this evening. I entrust you with the control of our medium. We exercise it as follows.” And he invited the young man to one end of the open circle, the end adjoining the chaise longue and the screen, where Elly had seated herself upon an ordinary cane chair, her face turned more toward the entrance door and its steps than toward the centre of the room; then, sitting down upon a similar chair directly opposite her, he took her hands and clamped both her knees between his own. “Imitate that!” he commanded, and had Hans Castorp take his place. “You will concede that the restraint is complete. For good measure, you will receive assistance. My Fräulein Kleefeld, may I ask you?” And the lady thus summoned in courtly-exotic fashion joined the group, enclosing Elly’s frail wrists in both her hands.

It was not altogether possible for Hans Castorp to avoid looking into the face, so close to his own, of the virginal prodigy whom he held tightly fettered. Their eyes met, but Elly’s slipped away and downward in token of a modesty quite understandable under the circumstances, while she smiled a little affectedly, her head inclined and her lips slightly pursed, as she had done recently at the glass séance. This silent coyness, moreover, brought another and more far-flung recollection to her custodian. Karen Karstedt, he remembered, had smiled in something like that fashion when he, Joachim, and she had stood by the as yet unmade bed in the cemetery at “Dorf” ...

The semicircle had settled into its seats. There were thirteen persons, not counting the Bohemian Wenzel, who was accustomed to keep himself free to attend upon Polyhymnia and who, after placing the apparatus in readiness, took a stool beside it, behind those seated facing the centre of the room. He had his guitar with him as well. Beneath the central chandelier, at the point where the curved row ended on the other side, Dr. Krokowski seated himself after lighting both red illuminants with one movement and extinguishing the white ceiling light with another. A softly glowing darkness now lay over the room, whose remoter regions and corners had become wholly inaccessible to the eye. Strictly speaking, only the top of the little table and its immediate surroundings were faintly illumined in red. During the next few minutes one could scarcely see one’s neighbour. Only slowly did the eyes accommodate themselves to the darkness and learn to make use of the light allotted them, which received a certain reinforcement from the dancing little flames in the fireplace.

The doctor devoted a few words to the illumination and apologized for its scientific shortcomings. They must beware of interpreting it as an attempt to create an atmosphere or to mystify. Regrettably, even with the best will, no greater amount of light had thus far proved attainable. The nature of the forces here in question and under investigation simply entailed their inability to develop or become effective in white light. That was a determining fact with which they must for the present reconcile themselves.—Hans Castorp was content. The darkness was soothing; it mitigated the peculiarities of the situation as a whole. Moreover, in justification of it, he remembered that darkness in which they had devoutly composed themselves in the fluoroscopy room, and with which they had washed their daylight eyes before they “saw.”

The medium, Dr. Krokowski continued his preamble, which he was evidently addressing particularly to Hans Castorp, no longer required to be put to sleep by him, the physician. As the controller would presently observe, she fell into a trance of her own accord, and, once this had occurred, her guardian spirit, the well-known Holger, spoke out of her; it was to him—not to her—that one must address one's wishes. Moreover, it was a mistake, and might lead to failure, to suppose that will and thought must be forcibly concentrated upon the anticipated phenomenon. On the contrary, what was called for was a half-distracted, conversational attentiveness. Hans Castorp should above all take care to keep the medium's extremities under irreproachable guard.

“Let us form the chain!” Dr. Krokowski concluded; and they did so, laughing whenever, in the darkness, their neighbours' hands were not immediately to be found. Dr. Ting-Fu, seated next to Hermine Kleefeld, placed his right hand upon her shoulder and extended his left to Herr Wehsal, who came after him. Beside the doctor sat Herr and Frau Magnus, followed by A. K. Ferge, who, unless Hans Castorp was mistaken, held the hand of the ivory-coloured Levi on his right—and so on. “Music!” Dr. Krokowski commanded; and the Czech, behind the doctor and those nearest him, set the machine going and lowered the needle. “Conversation!” Krokowski commanded again, while the opening bars of an overture by Millöcker sounded; and obediently they bestirred themselves to set a conversation in motion, a conversation about nothing and less than nothing—here the snow conditions that winter, there the most recent bill of fare, elsewhere an arrivée, a wild or legitimate departure—which, half smothered by the music, breaking off and beginning anew, was kept artificially alive. Several minutes passed in this fashion.

The record had not yet run its course when Elly gave a violent start. A trembling ran through her; she sighed, her upper body sank forward until her forehead touched Hans Castorp's, and at the same time her arms, together with those of her controllers, began to execute strange pumping movements, thrusting backwards and forwards.

“Trance!” Kleefeld announced with expert assurance. The music fell silent. The conversation broke off. Into the sudden stillness came the doctor's softly drawling baritone, asking:

“Is Holger present?”

Elly shuddered anew. She swayed upon her chair. Then Hans Castorp felt her give both his hands a brief, firm pressure.

“She is pressing my hands,” he reported.

“He,” the doctor corrected him. “He pressed them. He is therefore present.—We greet you, Holger,” he continued with unction. “A heartfelt welcome among us, companion! And let me remind you! When last you sojourned among us, you promised to summon any departed soul, whether a brother or sister in humanity, whom someone in our circle might name, and to make that soul visible to our mortal eyes. Are you willing, and do you feel yourself able, to redeem that promise today?”

Again Elly shuddered. She sighed and hesitated before answering. Slowly she raised her hands, together with those of the sitters beside her, to her forehead, where she allowed them to rest for a while. Then, close against Hans Castorp's ear, she breathed a hot “Yes!”

The breath of speech directly in his ear produced in our friend that epidermal shiver popularly known as “gooseflesh,” whose nature the Hofrat had once explained to him. We speak of a shivering stimulus in order to distinguish the purely physical from the spiritual; for there could scarcely be any question of horror. What he thought was approximately: “Well, she certainly makes a bold claim!” Yet at the same time he was visited by emotion, indeed by a profound stirring—a confused emotion and stirring, a feeling born of confusion, born, that is, of the deceptive circumstance that young blood, whose hands he held, had breathed a “Yes” into his ear.

“He said yes,” he reported, and felt ashamed.

“Very well, then, Holger!” said Dr. Krokowski. “We take you at your word. We all trust that you will honestly do your part. The name of the dear one whose manifestation we desire will be given you at once. Comrades,” he said, turning to the company, “speak out! Who among you has a wish in readiness? Whom shall our friend Holger show us?”

Silence followed. Each waited for another to speak. Each individual had doubtless examined himself during the past few days to discover whither, and to whom, his thoughts inclined; yet the return of the dead—that is to say, the desirability of such a return—remains always an intricate and delicate matter. Fundamentally, and to speak plainly, this desirability does not exist; it is an error; viewed in the light, it is precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as would become evident if nature were for once to suspend the impossibility of the latter; and what we call grief is perhaps not so much the pain of being unable to see our dead return to life as the pain of being unable even to wish it.

All of them obscurely felt this; and although there was no question here of any serious and practical return to life, but only of a purely sentimental and theatrical arrangement in which the departed person was merely to be seen, so that the case involved no peril to life, they nevertheless feared the countenance of the one of whom they were thinking, and each would gladly have passed on to his neighbour the right to express a wish. Hans Castorp, too, although he heard the good-naturedly liberal “Please—please!” from that night, held back and at the final moment was quite prepared to yield precedence to another. But when the delay grew too long for him, he turned his head towards the director of the séance and said in a husky voice:

“I should like to see my late cousin Joachim Ziemßen.”

That brought relief to them all. Of everyone present, only Dr. Ting-Fu, the Czech Wenzel, and the medium herself had not known the person requested. The others—Ferge, Wehsal, Herr Albin, the public prosecutor, Herr and Frau Magnus, Stöhr, Levi, Kleefeld—voiced their approval loudly and gladly; and even Dr. Krokowski nodded with satisfaction, although his relations with Joachim had always been cool, since Joachim had shown little compliance where analysis was concerned.

“Very well,” said the doctor. “You heard, Holger? In life, the man named was a stranger to you. Do you recognise him beyond the realm of things, and are you prepared to bring him to us?”

The greatest expectancy prevailed. The sleeper swayed, sighed, and shuddered. She seemed to seek and struggle as, sinking from side to side, she whispered unintelligible things, now into Hans Castorp's ear, now into Kleefeld's. At last Hans Castorp received from both her hands the pressure that signified “Yes.” He reported it, and—

“Very well, then!” cried Dr. Krokowski. “To work, Holger! Music!” he called. “Conversation!” And he repeated his admonition that neither any cramp of thought nor any violent imagining of the thing expected could serve the purpose, but solely an unconstrained and hovering attentiveness.

There now followed the strangest hours our hero's young life had yet afforded; and although his later fate is not entirely clear to us, although at a certain point in our story we shall lose sight of him, we should like to assume that they remained the strangest hours he ever experienced.

They were hours—more than two of them, let us say so at once, including a brief interruption in the “work” now undertaken by Holger, or rather by the young maiden Elly—a work that dragged on appallingly, until at last everyone was on the point of despairing of any result, and was moreover often tempted, out of sheer compassion, to renounce it and cut it short; for it seemed truly pitifully arduous and beyond the delicate strength upon which it had been imposed. We men, if we have not evaded the human lot, know from a certain situation in life this unbearable compassion which, absurdly enough, no one accepts and which is probably quite out of place: this indignant “Enough!” that strives to tear itself from our breast, although “it” neither will nor may be enough, and must in one way or another be carried through to the end. It will already be understood that we are speaking of our state as husbands and fathers, of the act of birth, to which Elly's struggle bore so unequivocal and unmistakable a resemblance that even one who had never known it must have recognised it, as did the young Hans Castorp, who, since he too had not evaded life, thus came to know this act of consummate organic mysticism in such a form—in what a form! And to what purpose! And under what circumstances! One could not possibly describe as anything but scandalous the features and details of this animated lying-in chamber in red light: both the virginal person of the woman in labour, in her flowing dressing-gown and with her little arms bare, and all the surrounding circumstances—the incessant, frivolous gramophone music; the artificial chatter that the semicircle strove, on command, to maintain; the cheerfully encouraging cries that continually went up from it to the struggling girl: “Hallo, Holger! Courage! It will come! Don't give up, Holger—out with it, and you'll manage it!” Nor do we by any means exempt the person and situation of the “husband”—if we may regard Hans Castorp, who had made the wish, as the husband concerned—the husband, then, who held the “mother's” knees between his own and her hands in his: those little hands, which were as wet as little Leila's had once been, so that he was constantly obliged to renew his grasp lest they slip from him.

For the gas fire behind those seated there radiated heat.

Mysticism and consecration? Ah, no: things were noisy and preposterous in the red darkness, to which their eyes had gradually grown so well accustomed that they could survey the room fairly clearly. The music and shouting recalled the Salvation Army's methods of whipping up enthusiasm—even to someone who, like Hans Castorp, had never attended a religious festival of those high-spirited zealots. The scene exerted a mystical and mysterious effect, compelling the sensitive observer to reverence, in no spectral sense whatever, but solely in a natural, organic one—and through what close and intimate kinship we have already said. Elly's exertions came in the manner of labour pains, after intervals of repose during which she hung limply sideways from her chair, in a state of inaccessibility that Dr. Krokowski termed “deep trance.” Then she would start up again, groan, fling herself to and fro, strain, wrestle with her controllers, whisper hot and senseless words into their ears, seem, with sideways hurling movements, to be trying to drive something out of herself, grind her teeth, and once even bite Hans Castorp's sleeve.

This continued for an hour and longer. Then the director of the séance considered it advisable, in the interest of all concerned, to call a pause. The Czech Wenzel, who for the sake of relieving variety had lately spared the music machine and had made the guitar thrum and resound with great dexterity, set his instrument aside. With sighs of relief, they released one another's hands. Dr. Krokowski walked to the wall to switch on the ceiling light. The white brightness flamed up dazzlingly, so that everyone stupidly screwed up their night-accustomed eyes. Elly slumbered, bent far forward, her face almost in her lap. She could be seen oddly occupied, engaged in an action that seemed familiar to the others but which Hans Castorp watched with wonder and attention: for several minutes she passed her hollowed hand to and fro about the region of her hip—moved it away from herself and then brought it back again with a scooping or raking motion, as though drawing in and gathering something. Then, with several successive starts, she came to herself, blinked into the light, she too, with dull, sleep-laden eyes, and smiled.

She smiled—daintily and with a certain reserve. The compassion expended upon her labours did indeed appear to have been wasted. She did not look particularly exhausted by them. Perhaps she did not remember them at all. She was sitting in the doctor's visitor's chair at the rear broad side of the writing desk by the window, between him and the Spanish screen that enclosed the chaise longue; she had turned the chair so that she could rest one arm upon the desktop and look into the room. Thus she sat, touched by sympathetic glances and now and then favoured with an encouraging nod, silent throughout the entire pause, which lasted fifteen minutes.

It was a proper interval—relaxed and filled with gentle satisfaction in view of the work already accomplished. The gentlemen's cigarette cases snapped open. They smoked with enjoyment and, standing here and there in close groups, discussed the character of the séance. Far from despairing of that character, they had no need to contemplate a final lack of results. There were signs well suited to banish such faintheartedness altogether. Those who had been seated at the opposite end of the semicircle, near the doctor, agreed that several times, and distinctly, they had felt that cool breath which regularly, when phenomena were preparing themselves, issued from the person of the medium in a particular direction. Others claimed to have observed manifestations of light—white patches, wandering concentrations of force—which had appeared at various points before the Spanish screen. In short, no flagging! No faintness of heart! Holger had given his word, and they had no right to doubt that he would redeem it.

Dr. Krokowski gave the signal for the séance to resume. While the others likewise returned to their places, he himself escorted Elly back to her chair of torment, stroking her hair as he did so. Everything proceeded as before; Hans Castorp did, to be sure, request relief from his post as first controller, but the director of the séance denied his application. He attached importance, he said, to giving the person who had made the wish the immediate sensory assurance that any deceptive manipulation by the medium was practically excluded. And so Hans Castorp resumed his strange position with Elly. The light faded into red darkness. The music began again. After a few minutes came once more the sudden start, Elly's pumping movements; and this time it was Hans Castorp who announced “Trance.” The scandalous delivery continued.

How terribly difficult it was! It seemed unwilling to take place—but could it take place? What madness! Whence could motherhood come here? Delivery—how, and of what? “Help! Help!” the child groaned, as her labour pains threatened to pass into that unproductive and dangerous continuous convulsion which learned obstetricians call eclampsia. At intervals she called upon the doctor to lay his hands upon her. He did so, with vigorous words of encouragement. The magnetisation, if such it was, strengthened her for further struggle.

Thus the second hour passed, while by turns the guitar twanged and the gramophone flung the melodies of the light album into the room, to whose conditions of illumination their daylight-weaned eyes had again become tolerably accustomed. Then an incident occurred—Hans Castorp was the one who brought it about. He offered a suggestion, gave voice to a wish and an idea that he had long entertained, indeed from the very beginning, and which he might perhaps have done better to put forward earlier. Elly was just lying in “deep trance,” her face upon the hands that held it, and Herr Wenzel was about to change the record or turn it over, when our friend began resolutely and said that he had a proposal to make—an insignificant one, to be sure, and yet its acceptance might perhaps prove useful. He had there—that is to say, the house’s collection of records contained—a number from Gounod’s “Margarete,” Valentin’s Prayer, baritone with orchestra, very appealing. He, the speaker, thought they ought to try that record for once.

“And why is that?” the doctor asked through the red gloom...

“A matter of atmosphere, an affair of feeling,” the young man replied. The spirit of the piece in question was peculiar and distinctive. It was worth making the attempt. In his opinion, it was by no means impossible that this spirit and character might shorten the process with which they were concerned here.

“Is the record at hand?” the doctor inquired.

No, it was not. But Hans Castorp could fetch it without any difficulty.

“Whatever are you thinking of!” Krokowski rejected the notion unconditionally. What? Hans Castorp proposed to go out and return, fetch something, and then resume the interrupted work? Inexperience was speaking through him. No, that was simply impossible. Everything would be destroyed; they might as well begin again from the start. Scientific exactitude, too, forbade them even to contemplate such arbitrary coming and going. The door was locked. He, the doctor, carried the key in his pocket. In short, if the record was not immediately to hand, then they must— He was still speaking when the Czech interjected from beside the gramophone:

“The record is here.”

“Here?” Hans Castorp asked...

Yes, here. “Margarete,” Valentin’s Prayer. There it was. By way of exception, it had been put into the light album instead of the green Album of Arias Number II, where by the system of organization it belonged. By chance, extraordinarily, slovenly, fortunately, it had strayed among the frivolities and needed only to be put on.

What did Hans Castorp say to that? He said nothing. It was the doctor who said, “So much the better,” and several others repeated it. The needle scraped, the lid descended. And in manly tones, against chorale-like harmonies, it began: “Since now I must depart—”

No one spoke. They listened. As soon as the singing began, Elly had resumed her labour. She started up, trembled, groaned, pumped, and again carried her gliding, moist hands to her brow. The record ran on. The middle section came, with its shifting rhythm, the passage of battle and danger, bold, devout, and French. It passed; then came the close, the orchestrally reinforced reprise of the opening, mighty in sound: “O Lord of Heaven, hear my prayer—”

Hans Castorp had his hands full with Elly. She arched herself, drew breath through a constricted throat, then collapsed inward with one long sigh and lay still. He bent anxiously over her, when he heard Stöhr say in a squeaking, whimpering voice:

“Ziem—ßen—!”

He did not straighten up. A bitter taste entered his mouth. He heard another voice reply, deep and cold:

“I have seen him for some time.”

The record had run out, the final chord of the wind instruments had died away. But no one stopped the machine. Scratching emptily in the silence, the needle continued to run at the centre of the revolving disc. Then Hans Castorp raised his head, and his eyes, without needing to search, went the right way.

There was one person more in the room than before. There, apart from the company, in the background, where the remnants of the red light were almost lost in night, so that the eyes could scarcely penetrate so far, between the broad side of the writing desk and the Spanish screen, upon the doctor’s visitor’s chair turned toward the room, where Elly had sat during the interval, sat Joachim. It was Joachim, with the shadowed hollows of his cheeks and the martial beard of his last days, in which his lips curved so full and proud. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other. On his wasted face, although it was shaded by a head-covering, one recognized once more the stamp of suffering, and also the expression of gravity and strictness that had lent it so manly a beauty. Two furrows stood upon his brow between the eyes, which lay deep in bony sockets; yet this did not impair the gentleness in the gaze of those beautiful, large, dark eyes, which rested quietly and kindly, searchingly, upon Hans Castorp—upon him alone. His little sorrow of old, his protruding ears, could be discerned even beneath the head-covering, that curious head-covering which no one quite knew what to make of. Cousin Joachim was not in civilian dress; his sabre seemed to rest against his crossed thigh, he held his hands upon its hilt, and something like a pistol case could likewise be distinguished at his belt. Yet what he wore was not a proper military tunic either. Nothing gleaming or coloured was to be seen upon it; it had a close tunic collar and side pockets, and somewhere rather low down there was a cross. Joachim’s feet looked large and his legs very thin; they appeared to be tightly wrapped, in a sporting rather than a military fashion. And what of the head-covering? It looked as though Joachim had set a piece of field cookware, a cooking pot, upon his head and secured it beneath his chin with a storm strap. Yet, curiously enough, it became him in an antique, mercenary, warlike fashion.

Hans Castorp felt Ellen Brand’s breath upon his hands. Beside him he heard Kleefeld’s, coming rapidly. Nothing else was audible but the unceasing scraping of the finished record, still revolving beneath the needle, which no one stopped. He did not look around at any of his companions; he wished neither to see nor know anything of them. His head bent obliquely over his hands and upon his knees, he stared, leaning far forward through the red gloom, at the visitor in the chair. For an instant his stomach seemed about to turn over. His throat contracted, and four or five sobs shook him in an intimate convulsion. “Forgive me!” he whispered within himself; and then his eyes overflowed, so that he could see no more.

He heard whispering: “Speak to him!”—He heard Dr. Krokowski’s baritone voice pronounce his name solemnly and cheerfully and repeat the summons. Instead of obeying it, he drew his hands away from beneath Elly’s face and rose.

Again Dr. Krokowski called his name, this time in a tone of stern admonition. But in a few strides Hans Castorp had reached the steps by the entrance door and, with one curt movement of the hand, switched on the white light.

Brand had started violently in a profound shock. She twitched in Kleefeld’s arms. That chair was empty.

Hans Castorp walked up to Krokowski, who was standing and protesting, and halted close before him. He tried to speak, but no word came from his lips. With a brusquely demanding movement of the head, he held out his hand. Once he had received the key, he nodded menacingly several times into the doctor’s face, turned about, and left the room.

The Great Irritability

As the little years succeeded one another, something began to go about the Berghof, a spirit whose direct descent from the demon whose malignant name we have mentioned Hans Castorp suspected. With the irresponsible curiosity of a traveller in pursuit of cultivation, he had studied that demon and had indeed discovered within himself alarming capacities for taking an ample part in the monstrous service rendered to it by the contemporary world. By temperament he was little fitted to indulge the spirit that was now gaining ground, although it, exactly like the old one, had always been present in germ and had always shown itself here and there. Nevertheless, he observed with horror that he too, whenever he relaxed his self-command a little, succumbed in expression, speech, and bearing to an infection from which no one in the circle escaped.

What was the matter, then? What was in the air?—Contentiousness. Seething irritability. Nameless impatience. A general inclination toward venomous exchanges, outbursts of fury, even physical violence. Embittered quarrels, unbridled shouting back and forth, sprang up every day between individuals and entire groups; and the characteristic thing was that those not involved, instead of being repelled by the condition of the persons momentarily seized or attempting to intervene, took a sympathetic part in it and inwardly abandoned themselves to the frenzy as well. People turned pale and trembled. Eyes flashed provocatively, mouths contorted with passion. They envied those who were active at the moment their right, their occasion, to scream. A rending lust to do likewise tormented body and soul, and anyone who lacked the strength to flee into solitude was irretrievably drawn into the whirlpool. Idle conflicts and mutual accusations before the authorities—who strove to mediate, but were themselves alarmingly liable to lapse into roaring brutality—multiplied throughout the Berghof; and anyone who left it in a tolerably healthy state of mind could never know in what condition he would return. A member of the Good Russian table, a rather elegant provincial lady from Minsk, still young and only slightly ill—three months, no more, had been pronounced upon her—went down into the village one day to make purchases at the French blouse shop. There she quarrelled so violently with the saleswoman that she returned home in a state of extreme agitation, suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage, and was incurable from that day forth. Her husband, who was summoned, was informed that she must now remain up here for ever and ever.

That was one example of what was going about. Reluctantly, we shall cite others. This reader or that may remember the round-spectacled schoolboy, or former schoolboy, at Frau Salomon’s table, that meagre young man who had the habit of cutting up the food upon his plate into a fine hodgepodge and, propped upon his elbows, shovelling it into himself, while from time to time he pushed his napkin behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. Thus, still a schoolboy or former schoolboy, he had sat here all this time, shovelling and wiping his eyes, without giving occasion for more than a fleeting, grazing notice of his person. But now, one morning at first breakfast, quite unexpectedly and, so to speak, out of a clear sky, he suffered a seizure and fit of frenzy that attracted general attention and brought the entire dining-room to its feet. A commotion arose in the region where he sat; pale, he sat there screaming, and his screams were directed at the dwarf woman standing beside him. “You are lying!” he screamed in a breaking voice. “The tea is cold! Ice-cold, the tea you have brought me; I do not want it—taste it yourself before you lie, and see whether it is not lukewarm dishwater, altogether unfit for decent people to drink! How dare you bring me ice-cold tea; how can such a notion enter your head, how can you persuade yourself that you may set such lukewarm swill before me with even the slightest prospect of my drinking it?! I shall not drink it! I do not want it!” he shrieked, and began beating the table with both fists, so that all the crockery upon it rattled and danced. “I want hot tea! Boiling-hot tea is what I want; it is my right before God and man! I do not want it, I want it scalding hot, I want to die on the spot if I take so much as a single sip—Accursed cripple!!” he suddenly yelled, as though with one wrench he had cast off the final rein and burst ecstatically into the utmost freedom of frenzy. He raised his fists against Emerenzia as he did so and quite literally bared his foaming teeth at her. Then he went on drumming, stamping, and howling his “I will,” his “I will not”—while meanwhile matters in the dining-room took their usual course. A terrible and strained sympathy rested upon the raging schoolboy. Some had sprung to their feet and watched him with fists likewise clenched, teeth gritted, and eyes aflame. Others sat pale, their eyes lowered, and trembled. They were still doing so long after the schoolboy, sunk in exhaustion, was sitting before his replaced tea without drinking it.

What was this?

A man entered the Berghof community, a former merchant, thirty years old, long feverish, who for years had wandered from institution to institution. The man was an opponent of the Jews, an anti-Semite, on principle and as a sport, with gleeful fanaticism—the borrowed negation was the pride and substance of his life. He had been a merchant; he was one no longer; he was nothing in the world, but a Jew-hater he had remained. He was very seriously ill, coughed as though heavily burdened, and in between seemed to sneeze with his lung—high-pitched, brief, single, uncanny. Yet he was no Jew, and that was the positive thing about him. His name was Wiedemann, a Christian name, not an unclean one. He subscribed to a periodical called “The Aryan Beacon” and made speeches such as this:

“I arrive at Sanatorium X in A. Just as I am about to install myself in the reclining gallery—who is lying in the chair to my left? Herr Hirsch! Who is lying to my right? Herr Wolf! Naturally, I left at once,” and so forth.

“You can ill afford that!” Hans Castorp thought with aversion.

Wiedemann had a brief, lurking glance. It looked, in fact and without metaphor, as though a fluffy tassel hung close before his nose, at which he squinted maliciously and beyond which he saw nothing. The false idea that rode him had become an itching mistrust, a restless mania of persecution that drove him to drag forth and consign to disgrace any impurity that might be hiding or lurking in disguise near him. Wherever he went or stood, he taunted, suspected, and spat venom. In short, the business of pillorying all life that did not possess the privilege which was his only one filled his days.

Now the inward circumstances whose indications presently occupy us aggravated this man’s disorder extraordinarily; and since it was inevitable that here too he should encounter life burdened with the disadvantage from which he, Wiedemann, was free, those circumstances brought about a scene of wretchedness that Hans Castorp was obliged to witness and that must serve us as a further example of what we have to describe.

For there was another man—as far as he was concerned, there was nothing to unmask; the case was clear. This man’s name was Sonnenschein, and since one could not bear a dirtier name, Sonnenschein’s person from the first day onward constituted the fluffy tassel hanging before Wiedemann’s nose, at which he squinted briefly and maliciously and struck with his hand, almost less in order to drive it away than to set it swinging, so that it might irritate him all the more.

Sonnenschein, a merchant by origin, like the other man, was likewise quite seriously ill and morbidly sensitive. A friendly man, neither stupid nor by nature without humour, he in his turn soon came to hate Wiedemann for his taunts and his swats at the tuft, until the hatred itself became a torment; and one afternoon everyone came running into the hall because Wiedemann and Sonnenschein had fallen upon each other there in an extravagant and bestial fashion.

It was a spectacle full of horror and misery. They tussled like little boys, but with the desperation of grown men who have come to such a pass. They clawed at each other's faces, seized each other by nose and throat while striking out at one another, grappled, rolled upon the floor in dreadful and radical earnest, spat at each other, kicked, shoved, tugged, battered, and foamed. Office staff who came hurrying up had difficulty separating the two men, locked together with teeth and claws. Wiedemann, salivating and bleeding, his face stupefied with rage, exhibited the phenomenon of hair standing on end. Hans Castorp had never seen such a thing and had not believed that it actually occurred. Herr Wiedemann's hair stood rigidly and stiffly on end, and thus he rushed away, while Herr Sonnenschein, one eye vanished into a mass of blue and a bleeding gap in the wreath of curly black hair encircling his skull, was led into the office, where he sat down and wept bitterly into his hands.

So matters went with Wiedemann and Sonnenschein. All who witnessed it continued to tremble for hours. By comparison it is a positive relief, in contrast to such misery, to tell of a true affair of honour, which likewise belongs to this period and which, by reason of the ceremonial formality with which it was conducted, deserved its name, to be sure, to the point of absurdity. Hans Castorp did not witness its several phases, but informed himself of the intricate and dramatic course of events solely by means of documents, declarations, and minutes relating to the affair, copies of which were circulated within the Berghof and beyond it—not merely in the locality, the canton, and the country, but abroad and in America as well—and sent for study even to persons of whom it must have been obvious from the outset that they neither could nor wished to devote the slightest particle of interest to the matter.

It was a Polish affair, a turmoil of honour arising in the bosom of the Polish group that had lately assembled at the Berghof, an entire little colony occupying the Good Russian table—(Hans Castorp, to insert this information here, no longer sat there, but had in the course of time migrated first to Kleefeld's table, then to Salomon's, and finally to that of the Misses Levi). The company was so highly polished with elegance and chivalry that one could only raise one's brows and inwardly prepare for anything—a married couple, a young lady besides, who was on friendly terms with one of the gentlemen, and for the rest nothing but cavaliers. Their names were von Zutawski, Cieszynski, von Rosinski, Michael Lodygowski, Leo von Asarapetian, and various others. Now in the Berghof restaurant, over champagne, a certain Japoll had, in the presence of two other cavaliers, made unrepeatable remarks concerning Herr von Zutawski's wife, as well as the young lady named Kryloff who was close to Herr Lodygowski. From this arose the steps, acts, and formalities that formed the substance of the written documents distributed and dispatched. Hans Castorp read:

“Declaration, translated from the Polish original.—On 27 March 19.., Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski approached Herren Dr. Antoni Cieszynski and Stefan von Rosinski with the request that they proceed in his name to Herr Kasimir Japoll, in order to demand satisfaction from him by the means prescribed by the code of honour for ‘the grave insult and calumny which Herr Kasimir Japoll inflicted upon his wife and consort Jadwiga von Zutawska in conversation with Herren Janusz Teofil Lenart and Leo von Asarapetian.’

“When, some days ago, Herr von Zutawski indirectly learned of the above-mentioned conversation, which had taken place at the end of November, he immediately took steps to obtain complete certainty as to the facts and the nature of the insult committed. Yesterday, 27 March 19.., through the testimony of Herr Leo von Asarapetian, the direct witness of the conversation in which the insulting words and insinuations were uttered, the calumny and insult were established; Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski was thereby induced to address himself without delay to the undersigned, in order to confer upon them the mandate to initiate proceedings under the code of honour against Herr Kasimir Japoll.

“The undersigned make the following declaration:

‘1. On the basis of the minutes drawn up by one party on 9 April 19.. in Lemberg by Herren Zdzistaw Zygulski and Tadeusz Kadyj in the affair of Herr Ladislaw Goduleczny against Herr Kasimir Japoll, and further on the basis of the declaration of the court of honour dated 18 June 19.., likewise drawn up in Lemberg in the selfsame affair—which two documents, being in complete agreement, establish that Herr Kasimir Japoll “as a consequence of his repeated conduct, which is incompatible with the conception of honour, cannot be regarded as a gentleman”—

‘2. the undersigned draw the consequences arising from the foregoing in their fullest extent and establish the absolute impossibility that Herr Kasimir Japoll should still in any way be capable of giving satisfaction.

‘3. They consider it inadmissible on their own part to conduct an affair of honour against a man who stands outside the conception of honour, or to act as intermediaries in such an affair.’

“In view of this state of affairs, the undersigned draw Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski's attention to the futility of pursuing his rights against Herr Kasimir Japoll by proceedings under the code of honour, and advise him to take the path of criminal prosecution, in order to prevent further injuries from being committed by a person as incapable of rendering satisfaction as Herr Kasimir Japoll has shown himself to be.—(Dated and signed:) Dr. Antoni Cieszynski, Stefan von Rosinski.”

Hans Castorp further read:

“Minutes

“of the witnesses concerning the incident between Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski, Herr Michael Lodygowski,

“and Herren Kasimir Japoll and Janusz Teofil Lenart in the bar of the Kurhaus at D., on 2 April 19.. between 7½ and 7¾ p.m.

“Whereas Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski, on the basis of the declaration made by his representatives, Herren Dr. Antoni Cieszynski and Stefan Rosinski, in the matter of Herr Kasimir Japoll, had on 28 March 19.., after mature deliberation, arrived at the conviction that the recommended criminal prosecution of Herr Kasimir Japoll for ‘the grave insult and calumny’ against his consort Jadwiga could afford him no satisfaction, since:

1. there existed justified grounds for suspecting that Herr Kasimir Japoll would not appear before the court at the appointed time, and that his further prosecution, in view of his being an Austrian national, would be not merely rendered difficult but made positively impossible,

2. and since, furthermore, the judicial punishment of Herr Kasimir Japoll would be incapable of expiating the insult whereby Herr Kasimir Japoll sought calumniously to dishonour the name and house of Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski and his consort Jadwiga,

Herr Stanislaus von Zutawski, having indirectly learned that Herr Kasimir Japoll intended to leave this locality the following day, chose the shortest path and, in his conviction, the most thorough and most appropriate to the circumstances prevailing,

and on 2 April 19.., between 7½ and 7¾ p.m., in the presence of his consort Jadwiga and Herren Michael Lodygowski and Ignaz von Mellin, repeatedly slapped Herr Kasimir Japoll, who was seated over alcoholic beverages in the American Bar of the local Kurhaus in the company of Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart and two unknown girls.

“Immediately thereafter Herr Michael Lodygowski slapped Herr Kasimir Japoll, adding that this was for the grave insults inflicted upon Fräulein Krylow and himself.

“Directly afterwards Herr Michael Lodygowski slapped Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart for the unspeakable wrong inflicted upon Herr and Frau von Zutawski, whereupon,

“without losing a moment, Herr Stanislaus von Zutawski likewise repeatedly and several times slapped Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart for the calumnious defilement of his consort as well as of Fräulein Krylow.

“Herren Kasimir Japoll and Janusz Teofil Lenart remained entirely passive throughout the whole of this occurrence. (Dated and signed:) Michael Lodygowski, Ign. v. Mellin.”

The inner circumstances did not permit Hans Castorp to laugh at this rapid fire of official slaps, as he might otherwise have done. He trembled as he read of it, and the irreproachable code of conduct on the one side, the boyish and flabby dishonour of the other, as both sprang to the reader's eye from the documents, stirred him to his depths by their somewhat lifeless but impressive contrast. So it was with everyone. Far and wide, the Polish affair of honour was passionately studied and discussed through clenched teeth. A counter-pamphlet by Herr Kasimir Japoll had a somewhat sobering effect: it asserted that von Zutawski had known perfectly well that he, Japoll, had once been declared incapable of giving satisfaction in Lemberg by certain puffed-up milksops, and that all his immediate and un-delayed steps had been sheer monkey-business, since he had known from the outset that he would not be obliged to fight. Von Zutawski, moreover, had refrained from suing him, Japoll, for the sole and simple reason that, as everyone, including von Zutawski himself, knew perfectly well, his consort Jadwiga had furnished him with an entire collection of antlers, for which he, Japoll, could readily have supplied proof of truth; nor would Krylow's general conduct have gained her much honour in court. Besides, it was only his own, Japoll's, incapacity to give satisfaction that had been established, not that of his interlocutor Lenart as well, and von Zutawski had entrenched himself behind the former in order to run no risk. Of the part played by Herr Asarapetian in the whole affair he preferred not to speak. As for the scene in the Kurhaus bar, he, Japoll, though sharp-tongued and inclined to wit, was nevertheless an extremely frail man; von Zutawski, with his friends and the unusually robust Zutawska, had enjoyed physical superiority, especially since the two little ladies who had been in his, Japoll's, and Lenart's company were merry creatures, to be sure, but as easily frightened as hens; and therefore, in order to avert a savage brawl and public scandal, he had induced Lenart, who had wished to defend himself, to remain quiet and, in God's name, endure the gentlemen von Zutawski's and Lodygowski's fleeting social contacts, which had caused no pain and had been interpreted by those seated around them as friendly horseplay.

Thus Japoll, for whom naturally there was not much to be salvaged. His corrections could disturb only superficially the fine contrast between honour and misery that emerged from the opposing party's findings, especially as he did not command the reproductive facilities of the Zutawski party, but could manage to put into circulation only a few carbon copies of his rejoinder. Those minutes, on the other hand, as has been said, were received by everyone; even persons wholly unconnected with the matter received them. Naphta and Settembrini, for example, had likewise had copies sent to them—Hans Castorp saw the papers in their hands, and observed to his surprise that they too gazed down upon them with grimly intent and strangely enraptured expressions. He had expected from Herr Settembrini, at least, the cheerful mockery which he himself, owing to the prevailing inner circumstances, could not muster. But the circulating infection observed by Hans Castorp evidently exercised even over the clear mind of the Freemason a power that robbed him of laughter and made him seriously susceptible to the inflammatory excitements of the traffic in slaps; and besides, the man of life was darkened by the state of his health, which, slowly and amid mocking reversals for the better, was nevertheless deteriorating inexorably—a condition he cursed and of which he was savagely and self-contemptuously ashamed, but which by this time compelled him every few days to keep to his bed.

Naphta, his housemate and adversary, fared no better. In his organic interior too the disease advanced—the disease that had been the physical ground, or must one say pretext, for the so premature termination of his career in the Order; and the high and rarefied conditions under which they lived were unable to arrest its spread. He too was often bedridden; the cracked-plate rattle of his voice clattered more strongly when he spoke, and with heightened fever he spoke still more, more sharply and bitingly than before. Those spiritual resistances to illness and death whose defeat by the superior force of a base nature caused Herr Settembrini such pain must have been foreign to little Naphta; and thus his manner of receiving the deterioration of his bodily condition was not sorrow and grief, but a jeering cheerfulness and aggressiveness without equal, a craving for intellectual doubt, denial, and confusion that exasperated the other's melancholy to the utmost and daily sharpened their intellectual disputes. Hans Castorp, of course, could speak only of those at which he was present. But he was fairly certain that he missed none, that his own presence, the presence of the pedagogic object, was necessary to kindle significant colloquies. And though he did not spare Herr Settembrini the distress of finding Naphta's malicious sallies worth hearing, he was nevertheless obliged to admit that by now they exceeded every measure and, often enough, the bounds of intellectual sanity.

This sick man possessed neither the strength nor the good will to rise above illness, but saw the world in its image and under its sign. To the fury of Herr Settembrini, who would have liked nothing better than to send the listening pupil out of the room or stop his ears, he declared matter to be by far too base a material for the spirit ever to be realized in it. To strive for that was folly. What came of it? A grotesque! The actual outcome of the much-vaunted French Revolution was the capitalist bourgeois state—a fine present indeed! which people hoped to improve by making the horror universal. The world republic—that would be happiness, to be sure! Progress? Ah, it was the case of the famous invalid who continually changed his position in the hope of finding relief. The unavowed but secretly almost universal desire for war was one expression of this. The war would come, and that was a good thing, although it would bring forth something other than its promoters expected of it. Naphta despised the bourgeois state of security. He found occasion to express himself on the subject when, one autumn day as they were walking along the main road, rain began to fall and suddenly, as if at a word of command, everyone raised umbrellas over their heads. To him this was a symbol of the cowardice and vulgar softness that were the fruits of civilization. An incident and portent such as the sinking of the steamship “Titanic” had an atavistic, but genuinely refreshing effect. Afterwards, a great clamour for increased “safety of traffic.” Always the greatest indignation whenever “security” seemed threatened. It was pitiful, and in its humanitarian flabbiness made a very pretty rhyme with the wolfish crudity and baseness of the economic battlefield represented by the bourgeois state. War, war! He was in favour of it, and the general lust for it seemed to him comparatively honourable.

But whenever Herr Settembrini introduced the word “justice” into the conversation and recommended that lofty principle as a preventive against catastrophes in domestic and foreign affairs, it became apparent that Naphta, who only lately had found the spiritual too good for its earthly embodiment ever to succeed or even to be attempted, was bent on casting doubt upon and disparaging the spiritual itself. Justice! Was it an adorable concept? A divine one? A concept of the first rank? God and nature were unjust; they had favourites, practised election by grace, adorned one man with perilous distinction and prepared for another an easy, commonplace lot. And man endowed with will? For him justice was, on the one hand, a paralysing weakness, doubt itself—and on the other, a fanfare summoning him to deeds without scruple. Since man, therefore, in order to remain within the moral sphere, must constantly correct “justice” in the latter sense by “justice” in the former—what became of the unconditional and radical character of the concept? Besides, one was “just” to one standpoint _or_ to the other. The rest was liberalism, and nowadays it would not entice a dog from behind the stove. Justice was, of course, an empty verbal shell of bourgeois rhetoric; and in order to arrive at action, one must first of all know which justice was meant: that which sought to give each man his due, or that which sought to give everyone the same.

We have merely plucked at random from the boundless abundance one example of the manner in which he set about disturbing reason. But matters grew worse when he came to speak of science—in which he did not believe. He did not believe in it, he said, because man was entirely free to believe in it or not. It was a faith like any other, only worse and more foolish than any other; and the word “science” itself was the expression of the most stupid realism, which was not ashamed to accept or pass off as hard currency the more than questionable reflections of objects in the human intellect, and from them to construct the most spiritless and comfortless dogmatism ever imposed upon mankind. Was not, for instance, the concept of a sensory world existing in and of itself the most ridiculous of all self-contradictions? Yet modern natural science as dogma lived solely upon the metaphysical presupposition that the forms of cognition belonging to our organization—space, time, and causality, within which the phenomenal world enacted itself—were real conditions existing independently of our cognition. This monistic assertion was the most naked effrontery ever offered to the spirit. Space, time, and causality meant, in monistic terms, evolution—and there one had the central dogma of the freethinking-atheistic sham religion by which it was thought to invalidate the first book of Moses and oppose enlightening knowledge to a stupefying fable, as though Haeckel had been present at the creation of the earth. Empiricism! Was the cosmic ether, then, exact? The atom, that charming mathematical jest of the “smallest, indivisible particle”—was it proven? Surely the doctrine of the infinity of space and time rested upon experience? Indeed, provided one possessed a little logic, one would arrive at amusing experiences and conclusions with the dogma of the infinity and reality of space and time: namely, at the conclusion of nothingness. Namely, at the insight that realism was true nihilism. Why? For the simple reason that the relation of any finite magnitude whatsoever to infinity was zero. There was no magnitude in the infinite, and neither duration nor change in eternity. In infinite space, since every distance there was mathematically equal to zero, there could not even be two points side by side, much less bodies, and still less movement. He, Naphta, stated this in order to confront the impudence with which materialistic science passed off its astronomical nonsense, its windy chatter about the “universe,” as absolute knowledge. Pitiful humanity, which had allowed a boastful array of empty numbers to force it into a sense of its own nullity and deprive it of the pathos of its own importance! For things might still be tolerable so long as human reason and cognition confined themselves to the earthly and, within that sphere, treated their experiences with subject-objects as real. But once they reached beyond it into the eternal riddle by practising so-called cosmology and cosmogony, the jest was at an end and presumption attained the summit of its monstrosity. What blasphemous nonsense it was, fundamentally, to calculate the “distance” of some star from the earth in trillions of kilometres, or even in light-years, and imagine that by such numerical flimflam one afforded the human spirit insight into the essence of infinity and eternity—when infinity had absolutely and unconditionally nothing to do with magnitude, nor eternity with duration and distances in time, but, far from being concepts of natural science, signified rather the very abolition of what we called nature! Truly, the simplicity of a child who believed that the stars were holes in the firmament through which eternal brightness shone was many thousand times dearer to him than all the hollow, absurd, and presumptuous chatter perpetrated by monistic science concerning the “universe”!

Settembrini asked whether he himself entertained that belief concerning the stars. To which he replied that he reserved to himself all the humility and freedom of scepticism. Here once again one could see what he understood by “freedom,” and whither such a conception of it was capable of leading. And if only Herr Settembrini had not had reason to fear that Hans Castorp might find all this worth hearing!

Naphta’s malice lay in wait for opportunities to spy out the weaknesses of nature-subduing progress and to demonstrate human relapses into the irrational among its agents and pioneers. Aviators, airmen, he said, were for the most part distinctly unsavoury and suspicious individuals, and above all extremely superstitious. They took lucky pigs and a crow on board with them; they spat three times this way and that; they put on the gloves of fortunate pilots. How was such primitive unreason to be reconciled with the world-view underlying their profession?—The contradiction he exposed delighted him, gave him satisfaction; he dwelt upon it at length ... But we are reaching this way and that into the inexhaustible store for specimens of Naphta’s hostility, when there are only too concrete events to relate.

One afternoon in February the gentlemen joined together for an excursion to Monstein, a place an hour and a half by sleigh from the scene of their daily lives. They were Naphta and Settembrini, Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal. They travelled in two one-horse sleighs, Hans Castorp with the humanist, Naphta with Ferge and Wehsal, the latter sitting beside the driver; and at three o’clock, well wrapped up, they departed from the residence of the outsiders and, amid a jingling of bells that sounds so friendly through a snow-silent landscape, made their way along the right-hand slope, past Frauenkirch and Glaris, towards the south. A covering of cloud advanced swiftly from that quarter, so that before long only a pale-blue strip remained visible behind them above the Rhätikon chain. The frost was severe, the mountains misty. The road that bore them, a narrow, unguarded platform between rock wall and abyss, rose steeply into a wilderness of firs. They proceeded at walking pace. Tobogganers descending the road frequently came towards them and had to dismount when they met. Beyond bends in the road, strange bells sounded delicately in warning; sleighs harnessed with two horses in tandem passed them, and giving way demanded caution. Near their destination a beautiful view opened upon a rocky stretch of the Zügen road. They emerged from their rugs before the little inn at Monstein, which called itself the “Kurhaus,” and, leaving the sleighs behind, walked a few steps farther to look south-eastward towards the “Stulsergrat.” The giant wall, three thousand metres high, was veiled in mist. Only at one point did a heaven-high pinnacle project from the vapour, unearthly, remote as Valhalla, sacredly inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it greatly and called upon the others to do likewise. It was he who, with feelings of submission, pronounced the word “inaccessible,” thereby giving Herr Settembrini occasion to emphasize that the rock had, of course, very certainly been climbed. Indeed, such a thing scarcely existed any longer: inaccessibility, or any piece of nature upon which man had not already set his foot. A slight exaggeration and a piece of boasting, Naphta replied. And he named Mount Everest, which to that day had offered an icy rebuff to human impertinence and seemed intent upon maintaining that reserve for ever. The humanist was annoyed. The gentlemen returned to the “Kurhaus,” before which, beside their own sleighs, stood several others, unharnessed and belonging to strangers.

One could lodge here. Upstairs there were numbered hotel rooms. The dining-room was there as well, rustic and well heated. The excursionists ordered a light meal from the obliging landlady: coffee, honey, white bread, and pear bread, the speciality of the place. Red wine was sent out to the drivers. Swiss and Dutch visitors sat at other tables.

We should be tempted to say that, in one of our five friends, the warmth induced by the hot and highly commendable coffee gave rise to an elevated conversation. But that would be inaccurate, for this conversation was really a monologue by Naphta, who, after a few words contributed by the others, carried it on alone—a monologue conducted in a decidedly peculiar and socially offensive fashion, since the ex-Jesuit, in a tone of amiable instruction, addressed it exclusively to Hans Castorp, turning his back upon Herr Settembrini, who sat on his other side, and wholly ignoring the other two gentlemen as well.

It would have been difficult to give a name to the subject of his improvisation, which Hans Castorp followed with nods that were half and half assenting. It had, in fact, no single subject, but moved loosely through the realm of the spirit, touching here and there, and was chiefly designed to demonstrate, in a discouraging fashion, the ambiguity of the phenomena of spiritual life, the iridescent nature and polemical uselessness of the great concepts abstracted from them, and to make perceptible in what shimmering raiment the Absolute appears upon earth.

At most, one might have defined the theme of his discourse as the problem of freedom, which he treated in the spirit of confusion. Among other things he spoke of Romanticism and the fascinating double meaning of that European movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, before which the concepts of reaction and revolution came to nothing unless they were united in a higher synthesis. For it was, of course, supremely ridiculous to seek to associate the concept of the revolutionary exclusively with progress and the Enlightenment sweeping victoriously forward. European Romanticism had been above all a movement of freedom: anti-classicist, anti-academic, directed against old French taste, against the Old School of reason, whose defenders it had mocked as powdered, periwigged heads.

And Naphta turned to the Wars of Liberation, to Fichtean enthusiasms, to that intoxicated and song-filled national uprising against an intolerable tyranny—which, unfortunately, heh-heh, had embodied freedom, that is to say, the ideas of the Revolution. Most amusing: singing lustily, people had drawn back their arm to smash revolutionary tyranny in favour of the reactionary princes’ rod, and had done so in the name of freedom.

The youthful listener would there become aware of the distinction, or even the opposition, between external and internal freedom—and at the same time of the ticklish question which form of servitude was most, heh-heh, or least compatible with a nation’s honour.

Freedom was really perhaps even more a Romantic than an Enlightenment concept, for it shared with Romanticism the inextricable interweaving of humanity’s urges towards expansion and the passionately constricting emphasis upon the self. The individualistic impulse to freedom had given rise to the historical-Romantic cult of the national, which was warlike and which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although liberalism likewise taught individualism, only in a somewhat opposite fashion. Individualism was Romantic and medieval in its conviction of the infinite, the cosmic importance of the individual being, from which followed the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the geocentric doctrine, and astrology. On the other hand, individualism was a concern of liberalizing humanism, which tended towards anarchy and wished, in any event, to protect the dear individual from being sacrificed to the community. That was individualism: the one thing and then again the other, a word for many things.

But this much had to be conceded: that the pathos of freedom had produced the most brilliant enemies of freedom, the most ingenious champions of the past in its struggle against irreverently corrosive progress. And Naphta named Arndt, who had cursed industrialism and glorified the nobility; named Görres, who had written _Christian Mysticism_. And had mysticism, then, nothing to do with freedom? Had it not been anti-scholastic, anti-dogmatic, anti-priestly? One was admittedly compelled to see in the hierarchy a power of freedom, for it had raised a barrier against unlimited monarchy. But the mysticism of the waning Middle Ages had vindicated its libertarian nature as the forerunner of the Reformation—the Reformation, heh-heh, which was itself an inextricable tangle of freedom and medieval reaction ...

Luther's deed ... Why yes, it had the merit of demonstrating, with the coarsest vividness, the dubious nature of the deed itself, of deeds in general. Did Naphta's listener know what a deed was? A deed, for example, had been the assassination of Councillor of State Kotzebue by Sand, a member of the student fraternity. What, to speak in criminal terms, had “put the weapon into young Sand's hand”? Enthusiasm for freedom, of course. Yet on closer inspection it had not really been that, but rather moral fanaticism and hatred of frivolity alien to the national spirit. Kotzebue, to be sure, had in turn been in Russian service, and thus in the service of the Holy Alliance; and so Sand had, after all, probably fired for freedom—an assumption that nevertheless lapsed once more into improbability by virtue of the circumstance that Jesuits had numbered among his closest friends. In short, whatever a deed might be, it was in any event a poor means of making oneself clear, and contributed little to the settlement of intellectual problems.

“May I permit myself to inquire whether you intend soon to have done with your _equivocations_?”

It was Herr Settembrini who had asked, and sharply. He had been sitting there, drumming his fingers on the table and twisting his moustache. Now it was enough. His patience was at an end. He sat erect, more than erect: very pale, he had, so to speak, risen upon his toes while still seated, so that only his thighs continued to touch the seat of the chair, and thus, with flashing black eyes, he confronted the enemy, who had turned towards him with feigned astonishment.

“_How_ did you choose to express yourself?” was Naphta's counter-question ...

“I chose,” said the Italian, swallowing, “—I choose to express myself to the effect that I am resolved to prevent you from troubling an unprotected young man any longer with your ambiguities!”

“Sir, I call upon you to watch your words!”

“No such summons is required, sir. I am accustomed to watching my words, and my words do precise justice to the facts when I declare that your manner of intellectually confusing, seducing, and morally enervating a young man who is unsteady enough already is an _infamy_, and cannot be chastised too severely in words ...”

At the word “infamy,” Settembrini struck the table with the flat of his hand and, pushing back his chair, now rose altogether—the signal for all the others to do likewise. People at the other tables looked across and listened—at one table only, in fact, for the Swiss guests had already departed, and only the Dutchmen remained, attending with bewildered expressions to the altercation now breaking out.

Thus they all stood rigidly upright at our table: Hans Castorp and the two antagonists, and opposite them Ferge and Wehsal. All five were pale, their eyes dilated and their mouths twitching. Could not the three uninvolved parties have attempted to exert a soothing influence, to dissolve the tension with some jesting word, to turn everything towards a happy conclusion by some human appeal? They made no such attempt. The inward circumstances prevented them. They stood and trembled, and involuntarily their hands clenched into fists. Even A. K. Ferge, to whom, by his own avowal, all higher matters were utterly remote, and who had from the outset wholly renounced any effort to gauge the implications of the dispute—even he was convinced that the issue here was one of breaking or bending, and that, swept along oneself, there was nothing one could do but let matters take their course. The good-natured bush of his moustache travelled violently up and down.

It was silent, and so Naphta could be heard grinding his teeth. For Hans Castorp this was an experience similar to the one involving Wiedemann's bristling hair: he had thought it merely a figure of speech, something that did not occur in reality. But now Naphta was actually grinding his teeth in the silence, a frightfully unpleasant, wild, and adventurous sound, which nevertheless proved to be the sign of a certain terrible self-command; for he did not shout, but said softly, and only with a kind of panting half-laugh:

“Infamy? Chastised? Are the asses of virtue turning vicious? Have we brought the educational constabulary of civilization so far that it draws steel? That I call a success, for a beginning—one lightly achieved, as I add with contempt, since the mildest teasing has sufficed to send the watchful moral sense flying to arms! The rest will follow, sir. The ‘chastisement’ too, that as well. I hope your civil principles will not prevent you from knowing what you owe me; otherwise I should be compelled to put those principles to the test by means which—”

A sudden, steep movement from Herr Settembrini caused him to continue:

“Ah, I see that will not be necessary. I stand in your way, and you in mine—very well, we shall remove the settlement of this little difference to the proper place. For the moment, only this. Your sanctimonious anxiety for the scholastic conceptual state of the Jacobin Revolution regards my method of teaching young people to doubt, of overthrowing the categories and depriving ideas of their academic dignity of virtue, as an educational crime. That anxiety is only too well founded, for your humanism is finished, be assured of that—done for and dispatched. Already today it is nothing but a pigtail, a classicistic absurdity, an intellectual _ennui_ productive of spasms of yawning; and the new revolution, _our_ revolution, sir, is preparing to sweep it away. If, as educators, we sow doubt more deeply than your modeste enlightenment ever dreamed possible, we know very well what we are doing. Only from radical scepticism, from moral chaos, does the unconditional arise, the holy terror of which the age has need. This by way of my justification and your instruction. The rest is another matter. You will hear from me.”

“You shall find a hearing, sir!” Settembrini called after him as he left the table and hurried to the clothes-rack to take possession of his furs. Then the Freemason sank heavily back into his chair and pressed both hands to his heart.

“_Distruttore! Cane arrabbiato! Bisogna ammazzarlo!_” he brought forth in short breaths.

The others were still standing at the table. Ferge's moustache continued its upward and downward travels. Wehsal had set his lower jaw awry. Hans Castorp imitated his grandfather's manner of supporting his chin, for the back of his neck was trembling. They all reflected how little they had anticipated any such outcome when they set forth. All of them, Herr Settembrini not excepted, reflected at the same time what a piece of good fortune it was that they had come in two sleighs and not in one together. For the moment, this made the return journey easier. But what then?

“He has challenged you,” Hans Castorp said uneasily.

“Indeed,” Settembrini replied, casting an upward glance at the man standing beside him, only to turn away from him immediately afterwards and support his head in his hand.

“You accept?” Wehsal wanted to know ...

“You ask?” Settembrini replied, regarding him too for a moment ... “Gentlemen,” he continued, rising with perfect composure, “I regret the conclusion of our pleasure, but every man must reckon with such incidents in life. In theory I disapprove of the duel; my thought is governed by law. In practice, however, matters are different; and there are situations in which—antagonisms that—in short, I am at that gentleman's disposal. It is well that I fenced a little in my youth. A few hours' practice will restore suppleness to my wrist. Let us go! The details will have to be arranged. I presume that gentleman has already ordered his horses put to.”

During the homeward journey and afterwards, Hans Castorp had moments when the enormity of what lay before them made him dizzy, particularly when it emerged that Naphta would hear nothing of cut or thrust, but insisted upon a pistol duel—and that he did in fact possess the choice of weapons, since according to the code of honour he was the injured party. Moments came, we say, when the young man was able to free his mind to a certain degree from the general entanglement and befogging influence of the inward circumstances, and to remind himself that this was madness, and that it must be prevented.

“If there had been a real insult!” he cried in conversation with Settembrini, Ferge, and Wehsal, whom Naphta had already secured as his bearer of the challenge on the return journey, and who mediated between the parties. “An affront of a civil, social kind! If one man had dragged the other's honest name through the mire, if a woman were involved, some such tangible calamity of life in which no possibility of settlement can be seen! Very well, for such cases the duel exists as the final recourse; and when honour has then been satisfied and the affair has passed off without grave harm, and one hears that the antagonists parted reconciled, one may even find it a good institution, salutary and practicable in certain cases of entanglement. But what has he done? I do not mean to defend him; I ask only what he has done to insult you. He has overthrown the categories. He has, as he puts it, robbed concepts of their academic dignity. You felt insulted by that—with justice, let us suppose—”

“Suppose?” Herr Settembrini repeated, looking at him ...

“With justice, with justice! He insulted you by it. But he did not affront you! There is a difference, if you please! The matter concerns abstract things, intellectual things. One may insult with intellectual things, but one cannot affront with them. That is a maxim which every court of honour would accept, I can assure you before God. And therefore what you answered him about ‘infamy’ and ‘severe chastisement’ was no affront either, for that too was meant intellectually; it all remains within the intellectual sphere and has nothing whatever to do with the personal, where alone such a thing as an affront can exist. The intellectual can never be personal—that is the completion and elucidation of the maxim—and therefore—”

“You are mistaken, my friend,” Herr Settembrini replied with closed eyes. “You are mistaken, first, in assuming that intellectual matters cannot acquire a personal character. You should not think so,” he said, smiling in a peculiarly subtle and painful way. “But above all you err in your estimate of the intellectual as such, which you evidently consider too weak to engender conflicts and passions of the severity of those brought forth by real life, and which leave no recourse but an encounter at arms. _All’incontro!_ The abstract, the purified, the ideal is at the same time the absolute; it is therefore the truly severe, and it harbours far deeper and more radical possibilities of hatred, of unconditional and irreconcilable antagonism, than social life. Are you surprised that, even more directly and inexorably than social life, it leads to the situation of You or I, the truly radical situation, that of the duel, of physical combat? The duel, my friend, is not an ‘institution’ like any other. It is the final thing, the return to the primal state of nature, only slightly mitigated by a certain regulation of a chivalric kind, which is very superficial. The essence of the situation remains the absolutely primordial, physical combat; and it is incumbent upon every man, however far removed from the natural, to keep himself equal to that situation. He may fall into it any day. He who cannot stand up for the ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of it; and what matters is to remain a man amid all spiritualization.”

There Hans Castorp had received his correction. What was there to answer? He remained silent in troubled brooding. Herr Settembrini's words made a show of composure and logic, and yet they issued from him strangely and unnaturally. His thoughts were not his own thoughts—just as the idea of single combat had not occurred to him of itself, but had merely been taken over from the little terrorist Naphta; they were the expression of his captivity within the general inward circumstances, whose servant and instrument Herr Settembrini's beautiful intellect had become. What, was the intellectual, because it was severe, to lead inexorably to the animal, to settlement by physical combat? Hans Castorp rebelled against it, or at least attempted to do so—only to discover, to his horror, that he could not. The inward circumstances were strong within him too; neither was he the man to wrest himself free of them. Terrible and ultimate, a breath reached him from that region of memory where Wiedemann and Sonnenschein had rolled about in helplessly animal combat, and with horror he understood that at the end of all things only the physical remained, the nails, the teeth. Yes, yes, they would probably have to fight, for thus at least that mitigation of the primal state by chivalric regulation might be preserved ... Hans Castorp offered to serve as Herr Settembrini's second.

This was refused. No, it would not be suitable, it would not be fitting, he was told—first by Herr Settembrini with a smile that was subtle and painful, and then, after brief consideration, by Ferge and Wehsal as well, who likewise found, without offering any particular reason, that Hans Castorp could not take part in the encounter in that capacity. As a neutral observer, perhaps—for the presence of such a person was also among the prescribed chivalric mitigations of the animal—he might attend at the place of combat. Even Naphta, through the mouth of Wehsal, his representative in the affair of honour, made his views known in this sense, and Hans Castorp was content. Whether as witness or neutral observer, he would in any event have the opportunity to exert influence upon the determination of the conditions, which proved bitterly necessary.

For Naphta was quite beside himself in his proposals. He demanded a distance of five paces and three exchanges of shots, should that prove necessary. This madness he had conveyed by Wehsal on the very evening of the rupture; Wehsal had made himself entirely the mouthpiece and representative of his savage interests and, partly under instructions, partly no doubt according to his own taste, insisted upon such conditions with the utmost tenacity. Settembrini, naturally, found nothing objectionable in them, but Ferge, as second, and the impartial Hans Castorp were outraged, and the latter even became abusive toward the wretched Wehsal. Was he not ashamed, he asked, to rake up such atrocious unpleasantness when this was a purely abstract duel, founded upon no actual insult whatever! Pistols were drastic enough already, without these murderous particulars. That was the end of chivalry; why not shoot across a handkerchief at once! He, Wehsal, was not going to let anyone fire at him from such a distance, and so his bloodthirstiness came readily enough to his lips—and so forth. Wehsal shrugged his shoulders, wordlessly intimating that this was precisely the radical situation; and by doing so he disarmed, as it were, the opposing party, which was inclined to forget the fact. Nevertheless, in the course of the following day's negotiations they succeeded, above all, in reducing the three exchanges of shots to one, and then in settling the question of distance by providing that the combatants should face one another at fifteen paces and be entitled to advance five paces before firing. But even this was achieved only against an assurance that no attempts at reconciliation should be made. Besides, they had no pistols.

Herr Albin had some. Besides the small, gleaming revolver with which he liked to frighten the ladies, he possessed a matched pair of officers' pistols, bedded in the velvet of a common case, which came from Belgium: automatic Brownings with grips of brown wood, containing the magazines, bluish-steel firing mechanisms, and brightly turned barrels, upon whose muzzles the sights sat neat and fine. Hans Castorp had once seen them in the braggart's possession, and, against his own convictions, out of sheer enthrallment, offered to borrow them from him. This he did without making any factual secret of their purpose, though he shrouded it in a personal secret of honour and appealed, with ready success, to the braggart's sense of gentlemanly conduct. Herr Albin even instructed him in loading them and went outdoors with him to discharge blank trial shots from both weapons.

All this took time, and thus two days and three nights elapsed before the rendezvous. The meeting place was Hans Castorp's invention: he had proposed the picturesque spot, blue with blossom in summer, to which he had once withdrawn in sovereign seclusion. Here, on the third morning after the quarrel, as soon as there was sufficient light, the affair was to be settled. Only on the preceding evening, and fairly late at that, did it occur to Hans Castorp, who was greatly agitated, that it would be necessary to take a physician to the field of combat.

He immediately consulted Ferge on the point, which proved exceedingly difficult. Radamanth had indeed been a Corps student, but it was impossible to approach the head of the establishment for assistance in such an illegality, particularly as patients were involved. Indeed, there was scarcely any hope of finding a physician here who would be prepared to lend a hand at a pistol duel between two men gravely ill. As for Krokowski, it was not even certain whether that spiritual-minded person was at all proficient in the treatment of wounds.

Wehsal, who was called into consultation, reported that Naphta had already expressed himself on the matter: he wanted no physician. He was not going to that place to be salved and bandaged, but to fight, and in all seriousness. What came afterward was a matter of indifference to him and would take care of itself. This seemed a sombre declaration, which Hans Castorp nevertheless endeavoured to interpret as meaning that Naphta was tacitly of the opinion that no physician would be needed. Had not Settembrini likewise sent word through Ferge, who had been dispatched to him, that the question was to be dropped, as it did not concern him? It was not altogether unreasonable to hope that the adversaries might at bottom be united in the resolve to permit no bloodshed. They had slept twice since that exchange of words and would do so a third time. Sleep cools and clarifies; no particular state of mind can withstand the passage of the hours without alteration. Tomorrow morning, with the shooting-irons in their hands, neither of the disputants would any longer be the man he had been on the evening of the quarrel. At most they would act mechanically and under the compulsion of honour, not of their present free will, as at that time they would have acted from desire and conviction; and surely some means must be found of preventing such a denial of their present selves in favour of what they had once been!

Hans Castorp was not wrong in his reasoning—wrong only, unfortunately, in a manner of which he could not have dreamed. Indeed, he was entirely right so far as Herr Settembrini was concerned. But had he guessed in what sense Leo Naphta would have altered his intentions by the decisive moment, or would alter them in that very moment, not even the inner circumstances from which all this had arisen could have induced him to permit what lay ahead.

At seven o'clock the sun was still far from emerging behind its mountain, but dawn was struggling smokily into being when Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to make his way to the rendezvous. Servant-girls cleaning the hall looked up from their work at him in astonishment. He found the main gate no longer locked, however: Ferge and Wehsal, separately or together, had doubtless already passed through it, the one to fetch Settembrini, the other Naphta, and conduct them to the field of combat. He, Hans, went alone, since his capacity as impartial witness did not permit him to attach himself to either party.

He went mechanically and under the compulsion of honour, beneath the pressure of circumstances. That he should attend the encounter was a self-evident necessity. It was impossible to exclude himself and await the outcome in bed: firstly, because—but he did not pursue the firstly, adding at once, secondly, that matters could not in any case be left to themselves. Nothing terrible had happened yet, thank God, and nothing terrible need happen; indeed, it was unlikely. They had been obliged to rise by artificial light and must now meet outdoors without breakfast, in the bitter frost of early morning: so it had once been agreed. But then, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp's, presence, everything would undoubtedly turn somehow toward the good and cheerful—by means that could not be foreseen and that one would do better not to try to divine, since experience taught that even the most modest occurrence proceeded differently from the way one attempted to picture it in anticipation.

Nevertheless, it was the most unpleasant morning in his memory. Faint and haggard from want of sleep, Hans Castorp was inclined to a nervous chattering of the teeth and, at no great depth within his being, was already sorely tempted to mistrust his self-reassurances. These were such very peculiar times... The quarrel-ravaged lady from Minsk, the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish exchange of slaps passed savagely through his mind. He could not imagine that, before his eyes and while he was present, two men would fire upon each other and bloody one another. But when he reflected upon what had become fact before those same eyes of his in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, he mistrusted himself and his world and shivered in his fur jacket—while, for all that and amid it all, a sense of the extraordinary and pathetic nature of the situation, together with the strengthening elements of the morning air, uplifted and invigorated him.

Amid such mingled and shifting sensations and thoughts, he climbed in the half-light, which was slowly growing brighter, from the mouth of the bobsleigh run in “Dorf,” ascending the slope by the narrowest of paths; he reached the deeply snowbound forest, crossed the wooden bridges beneath which the run descended, and trudged onward among the trunks along a way that was more the product of footprints than of the shovel. Since he walked hastily, he very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, who held the pistol case beneath his cape with one hand. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and scarcely had he reached their side when he caught sight of Naphta and Wehsal as well, a little way ahead.

“A cold morning, eighteen degrees at least,” he said with good intentions, but was himself alarmed by the frivolity of his words and added: “Gentlemen, I am convinced...”

The others remained silent. Ferge's good-natured moustache moved up and down. After a while Settembrini stopped, took Hans Castorp's hand, laid his other hand upon it as well, and said:

“My friend, I shall not kill. I shall not do it. I shall expose myself to his bullet; that is all honour can require of me. But I shall not kill—rely upon that!”

He released him and walked on. Hans Castorp was deeply moved, but after a few steps he said:

“That is wonderfully noble of you, Herr Settembrini; only, on the other hand... If he, for his part...”

Herr Settembrini merely shook his head. And since Hans Castorp reflected that if one man did not fire, the other could not possibly bring himself to do so either, he found that everything was beginning auspiciously and that his assumptions were starting to be confirmed. His heart grew lighter.

They crossed the footbridge that spanned the ravine down which, in summer, the waterfall—now silenced in rigidity—plunged, contributing so greatly to the picturesque character of the place. Naphta and Wehsal were pacing up and down in the snow before the bench, cushioned with thick white pillows, upon which Hans Castorp had once, amid unusually vivid memories, been obliged to wait for his nosebleed to cease. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp examined himself to see whether he too felt any desire to do so; finding not the least inclination within himself, he concluded that in Naphta's case it must therefore be all the more a matter of affectation. With the pleasure he always felt here, he looked about him at the bold intimacy of his spot, which under these icy conditions was no less beautiful than in the season of its blue flowering. The trunk and branches of the fir that thrust obliquely into the scene were burdened with snow.

“Good morning!” he wished them in a cheerful voice, desiring at once to introduce into the gathering a natural tone that might help disperse evil—but met with no success, for no one answered him. The greetings exchanged consisted of silent bows, stiff to the point of invisibility. Nevertheless, he remained determined to employ without delay and to good purpose the momentum of his arrival, the hearty elevation of his breathing, the warmth communicated to him by his rapid walk through the winter morning, and began:

“Gentlemen, I am convinced...”

“You may expound your convictions on some other occasion,” Naphta cut him off coldly. “The weapons, if you please,” he added with the same arrogance. And Hans Castorp, struck across the mouth, was forced to watch as Ferge drew the fatal case from beneath his coat and as Wehsal, who had stepped up to him, received one of the pistols from his hand in order to pass it to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge. Then they had to make room; Ferge murmured a request to that effect and began pacing out and marking the distances: the outer limits by digging short lines into the snow with his heel, the inner barriers with two walking-sticks, his own and Settembrini's.

The good-natured sufferer—what was he doing? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged and took ample strides, so that the fifteen paces at least amounted to a respectable distance, though there were still those accursed barriers, which really were not far apart. Certainly, his intentions were honest. Yet all the same, under the compulsion of what befogment was he acting when he made arrangements of such monstrous import?

Naphta, who had thrown his fur coat into the snow so that the mink lining showed, stepped, pistol in hand, onto one of the outer heel-marks as soon as it had been drawn and while Ferge was still at work upon the remaining marks. When he had finished, Settembrini too took up his position, his damaged fur jacket hanging open. Hans Castorp tore himself free of his paralysis and hastily stepped forward once more.

“Gentlemen,” he said in distress, “no rashness! In spite of everything, it is my duty...”

“Be silent!” Naphta cried cuttingly. “I demand the signal.”

But no one gave a signal. That had not been properly arranged. Presumably someone was to call “Begin!”; but it had not been considered, and at all events had never been mentioned, that it would fall to the impartial witness to utter the dreadful command. Hans Castorp remained silent, and no one took his place.

“We begin!” Naphta declared. “Advance, sir, and fire!” he called across to his adversary, and himself began to move forward, the pistol held at arm's length and aimed at Settembrini at chest height—an incredible sight. Settembrini did likewise. At the third pace—the other had already reached the barrier without firing—he raised the pistol very high and pulled the trigger. The sharp report awakened manifold echoes. The mountains tossed resonance and reverberation from one to another, the valley rang with it, and Hans Castorp thought the people must come running.

“You fired into the air,” Naphta said with self-command, lowering his weapon.

Settembrini replied:

“I fire where I please.”

“You will fire again!”

“I have no intention of doing so. It is your turn.” Herr Settembrini, his head raised and his gaze directed toward heaven, had placed himself somewhat sideways to the other man, not presenting his full front, which was touching to behold. One could see clearly that he had heard one should not offer one's adversary a full broadside, and that he was acting upon this instruction.

“Coward!” Naphta screamed, by this cry of humanity conceding that it required greater courage to fire than to let oneself be fired upon; then he raised his pistol in a manner that had nothing more to do with combat and shot himself in the head.

Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered or reeled backward for several paces, flinging his legs forward while the mountains played catch with the sharp clamour of his deed, described with his whole body a violently wheeling turn to the right, and fell face downward into the snow.

For one moment they all stood rigid. Settembrini, after flinging his weapon far from him, was the first to reach him.

“_Infelice!_” he cried. “_Che cosa fai per l’amor di Dio!_”

Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the black-and-red hole beside the temple. They looked into a face best covered with the silk handkerchief whose corner hung from Naphta’s breast pocket.

The Thunderclap

Hans Castorp remained seven years among those up here—a number not round in the eyes of adherents of the decimal system, yet a good, manageable number in its way, a mythically picturesque body of time, one might say, more satisfying to the feelings than, for example, a dry half-dozen. He had sat at all seven tables in the dining-hall, at each for approximately a year. At last he sat at the Bad Russian Table, together with two Armenians, two Finns, a Bukharan, and a Kurd. He sat there with a little beard which he had meanwhile allowed to grow, a straw-blond tuft upon his chin of fairly indeterminate shape, which we are compelled to regard as evidence of a certain philosophical indifference toward his outward appearance. Indeed, we must go further and connect this idea of a personal inclination to neglect himself with a similar inclination on the part of the outer world in relation to him. The authorities had ceased devising diversions for him. Apart from the morning question whether he had slept “beautifully,” which was rhetorical in nature and put collectively, the Hofrat no longer addressed him particularly often, nor did Adriatica von Mylendonk—who bore a fully ripened sty at the time of which we speak—do so every few days. If we examine matters more closely, it happened seldom or never. They left him in peace—a little like a pupil who enjoys the peculiarly amusing privilege of no longer being questioned, of no longer needing to do anything, because his being held back is a settled matter and he is no longer taken into account—an orgiastic form of freedom, we add, asking ourselves whether freedom can ever be of any other form or kind than precisely this. In any event, here was someone upon whom the authorities need henceforth keep no solicitous eye, because it was certain that no wild and defiant resolutions would ripen any longer within his breast—a secure and final fixture who would long since no longer have known where else to go, who was no longer capable of grasping the thought of returning to the flatlands at all.... Was not a certain carelessness concerning his person expressed in the mere fact that he had been transferred to the Bad Russian Table? By which, incidentally, not the very slightest disparagement of the so-called Bad Russian Table is intended! There were no appreciable advantages or disadvantages among the seven tables. It was, boldly speaking, a democracy of tables of honour. The same overwhelmingly copious meals were served at this one as at all the others; Rhadamanthus himself would at times, in due rotation, fold his enormous hands before his plate there; and the nationalities who dined at it were honourable members of mankind, even if they understood no Latin and did not behave with exaggerated delicacy while eating.

Time, which is not of the nature of railway-station clocks, whose great hand drops forward by jerks, five minutes at a time, but rather of those very small watches whose hand’s movement remains altogether beneath perception, or of the grass which no eye sees growing although it grows secretly, a fact which one day can no longer be denied; time, a line composed entirely of extensionless points—whereupon the unhappily deceased Naphta would probably ask how a collection of extensionless things contrives to produce a line—time, then, had continued, in its creepingly imperceptible, secret, and yet industrious fashion, to bring forth changes. The boy Teddy, to give only one example, was one day—but of course not “one day,” rather from some wholly indeterminate day onward—no longer a boy. The ladies could no longer take him upon their laps when he occasionally got up, exchanged his pyjamas for his sporting-suit, and came downstairs. Imperceptibly the little leaf had turned: on such occasions he now took them upon his own lap, and that afforded both parties just as much pleasure, indeed rather more. He had become a youth—we will not say that he had blossomed, but at any rate he had shot up: Hans Castorp had not seen it happen, but he saw that it had. Time and growth, however, did not agree with young Teddy; he was not made for them. Temporal existence did not bless him—in his twenty-first year he died of the disease to which he had proved receptive, and his room was rummaged through. We relate this in a tranquil voice, since there was no great difference between his new condition and his former one.

But weightier deaths occurred, deaths in the flatlands which concerned our hero more closely, or at least would formerly have concerned him more closely. We are thinking of the recent demise of old Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and foster-father of faded memory. He had most scrupulously avoided unwholesome conditions of atmospheric pressure and had left it to Uncle James to make a fool of himself among them; but in the long run he had nevertheless been unable to escape apoplexy, and the news of his passing, telegraphically brief yet tenderly and considerately phrased—tender and considerate more out of regard for the departed than for the recipient of the message—had one day made its way up to Hans Castorp’s excellent reclining-chair; whereupon he bought black-bordered paper and wrote to his uncle-cousins that he, the double orphan, who must now regard himself as orphaned once again, indeed three times over, was all the more grieved because he was neither permitted nor allowed to interrupt his stay up here in order to accompany his great-uncle on his final journey.

To speak of grief would be to put too fair a complexion upon the matter, yet in those days Hans Castorp’s eyes did display an expression more meditative than usual. This death, whose emotional significance could never have been great and had been diminished almost to nothing by adventurous little years of estrangement, nevertheless amounted to the severing of yet another bond, yet another connection with the lower sphere, and gave final completeness to what Hans Castorp rightly called freedom. Indeed, in the late period of which we speak, all contact between him and the flatlands had been abolished without remainder. He wrote no letters there and received none. He no longer obtained Maria Mancini from below. Up here he had found a brand that suited him, to which he now remained as faithful as once he had been to that former friend: a product which would have helped even a polar explorer in the ice through the direst hardships, and with which in one’s possession one simply lay as though beside the sea and could hold out—a particularly well-tended sand-leaf cigar named “Rütlischwur,” somewhat stubbier than Maria, mouse-grey in colour, with a bluish band about its body, very compliant and mild in character, and yielding a snow-white, durable ash in which the veins of the wrapper remained standing; it consumed itself so evenly that it might have served the smoker in place of a running hourglass, and according to his needs it did so serve him, for he no longer carried his pocket-watch. It had stopped; one day it had fallen from his bedside table, and he had refrained from having it set once more upon its measuring circular course—for the same reasons that had long since caused him to renounce the possession of calendars, whether the kind from which one tore off a page each day or the kind that provided advance instruction concerning the incidence of days and festivals: for reasons of “freedom,” then, in honour of the walk on the beach, of the stationary Forever-and-Ever, of that hermetic enchantment to which the transported one had proved receptive and which had been the fundamental adventure of his soul, the adventure within which all the alchemical adventures of this simple substance had taken place.

Thus he lay, and thus once again, in high summer, the season of his arrival, for the seventh time—the fact was unknown to him—the year completed its circuit within itself.

Then there thundered—

But shame and awe restrain us from filling our narrative mouth with what then resounded and occurred. Let there be no boasting here, no hunter’s tall tales! We moderate our voice to the statement that the thunderclap of which we all know did indeed resound, that deafening detonation of a long-accumulated calamitous compound of stupor and irritability—a historical thunderclap, let it be said with subdued respect, which shook the foundations of the earth, but for us the thunderclap that bursts the Magic Mountain asunder and sets the Seven Sleeper down roughly before its gates. Bewildered, he sits in the grass and rubs his eyes, like a man who, despite many admonitions, has neglected to read the newspapers.

His Mediterranean friend and mentor had always sought to remedy this to some degree, making it his concern to instruct the problem child of his educational efforts, in broad outlines, concerning events down below; but he had found scant hearing from a pupil who did indeed allow the intellectual shadows of things, acting as his governors, to make him dream this and that, yet had paid no heed to the things themselves, and this from the prideful inclination to take the shadows for the things while seeing in the things themselves only shadows—for which one ought not to scold him too severely, since this relationship has not been clarified with ultimate validity.

It was no longer as it had once been, when Herr Settembrini, after establishing sudden clarity, had sat at the bedside of the horizontal Hans Castorp and sought to exert a corrective influence upon him in matters of death and life. Now, conversely, Hans Castorp sat with his hands between his knees beside the humanist’s bed in the little cabinet, or beside his daytime couch in the separate and intimate garret studio with the Carbonari chairs and the water-bottle; he kept him company and listened courteously to his expositions upon the state of the world, for Herr Lodovico was not often on his feet any longer. Naphta’s stark end, the terrorist deed of the sharply despairing disputant, had dealt his sensitive nature a heavy blow; he could not recover from it and had ever since suffered from great weakness and debility. His collaboration upon the “Sociological Pathology” had stalled; the lexicon of all works of belles-lettres that took human suffering as their subject made no further progress; that League waited in vain for the relevant volume of its encyclopaedia; Herr Settembrini was compelled to restrict his participation in the organisation of progress to the spoken word, and Hans Castorp’s friendly visits afforded him precisely an opportunity for this which, without them, he too would have had to forgo.

He spoke in a weak voice, but copiously, beautifully, and from the heart, about mankind’s self-perfection by social means. His discourse moved as though upon doves’ feet; but presently, when he spoke, for example, of the union of liberated peoples for the happiness of all, there entered into it—though he neither intended nor was himself aware of it—something like the rushing of eagles’ wings; and that was undoubtedly politics, the ancestral inheritance of his grandfather, which in him, Lodovico, had united with the father’s humanistic inheritance to form beautiful literature—just as humanity and politics were united in the lofty, toast-worthy idea of civilisation, that idea filled with the mildness of doves and the daring of eagles, which awaited its day, the morning of the peoples, when the principle of persistence would be struck upon its head and the holy alliance of bourgeois democracy set in motion.... In short, there were discordances here. Herr Settembrini was humanitarian, yet at the same time and by that very token, though only half avowedly, he was also bellicose. At the duel with the stark Naphta he had behaved like a human being; but on the grand scale, where humanity joined politics in enthusiasm to form the victorious and sovereign idea of civilisation, and where the citizen’s pike was consecrated at the altar of mankind, it became doubtful whether, where no personal issue was involved, he still intended to keep his hand from blood—indeed, internal circumstances caused the element of eagle-daring in Herr Settembrini’s beautiful convictions to prevail increasingly over that of dovelike mildness.

Not infrequently his relation to the great constellations of the world was divided, troubled by scruples, and embarrassed. Recently, two or perhaps one and a half little years ago, his country’s diplomatic cooperation with Austria in Albania had disturbed him in conversation: a cooperation which exalted him because it was directed against Latinless Half-Asia, against the knout and Schlüsselburg, and which tormented him precisely as a misalliance with the hereditary enemy, the principle of persistence and the enslavement of peoples. The previous autumn, France’s great loan to Russia for the purpose of building a railway network in Poland had awakened similarly conflicting feelings in him. For Herr Settembrini belonged to his country’s Francophile party, which cannot occasion surprise when one considers that his grandfather had equated the days of the July Revolution with those of the creation of the world; but the accord of the enlightened Republic with Byzantine Scythia caused him moral embarrassment—a constriction of his breast which nevertheless, at the thought of the strategic significance of that railway network, sought to reinterpret itself as quick-breathing hope and joy. Then came the assassination of the prince, which for everyone except German Seven Sleepers was a storm-signal, an intimation to those in the know, among whom we may properly reckon Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp saw him shudder as a private human being before such a deed of terror, yet also saw his breast rise at the thought that what had occurred was an act of the people and of liberation, directed against the fortress of his hatred, although on the other hand it had to be judged the fruit of Muscovite machinations, which caused him oppression but did not prevent him, three weeks later, from characterising the monarchy’s extreme demand upon Serbia as an insult to mankind and a ghastly crime, in view of its consequences, which he was initiated enough to foresee and which he greeted with rapid breath....

In short, Herr Settembrini’s feelings were multiply compounded, like the doom which he saw gathering with great speed and to which, in half-spoken words, he sought to open his pupil’s eyes, while a certain national courtesy and compassion nevertheless restrained him from giving himself full utterance upon the matter. In the days of the first mobilisations, of the first declaration of war, he had acquired the habit of extending both hands to his visitor and pressing Hans Castorp’s hands in his own, so that it went to the blockhead’s heart, though not properly to his head. “My friend!” said the Italian. “Gunpowder, the printing-press—undeniably, you invented them once! But if you believe that we shall march against the Revolution ... _Caro_ ...”

During those days of sultry expectation, when a veritable rack stretched the nerves of Europe taut, Hans Castorp did not see Herr Settembrini. The savage newspapers now rose directly from the depths to his balcony box, flashed through the house, filled the dining-room, and even the chambers of the gravely ill and the moribund, with their sulphurous, chest-oppressing reek. Those were the seconds in which the seven-sleeper in the grass, not knowing what was happening to him, slowly raised himself before sitting upright and rubbing his eyes ... But let us carry the image to its conclusion, in justice to his emotion. He drew his legs beneath him, stood up, looked about. He found himself disenchanted, redeemed, set free—not by his own strength, as he was forced shamefacedly to confess, but cast out into the open air by elemental powers from without, for whom his liberation was a quite incidental consequence. Yet though his little destiny vanished before the universal one, did there not nevertheless find expression in it something of personally intended, and therefore divine, goodness and justice? Was life taking back its sinful problem child once more—not cheaply, but only in this way, in this grave and stern fashion, in the form of a visitation which might perhaps mean not life but, in this particular case, three volleys of honour for him, the sinner—it could happen. And so he sank to his knees, face and hands uplifted to a heaven sulphurously dark, but no longer the roof of the grotto on the mountain of sin.

It was in this posture that Herr Settembrini found him—speaking, as will be understood, in strongly figurative terms; for in reality, as we know, our hero’s moral reserve precluded such theatricals. In reserved reality the mentor found him packing his trunk—for from the moment of his awakening Hans Castorp had found himself swept into the tumult and whirlpool of frantic departure which the shattering thunderclap had created in the valley. “Home” resembled an anthill in panic. Five thousand feet downward the little nation of those up here plunged headlong into the flatlands of visitation, crowding the footboards of the beleaguered little train, without luggage if need be, while trunks lay stacked in rows over the station platform—the swarming station, to whose heights a scorched sultriness seemed to rise from below—and Hans plunged with them. Amid the tumult Lodovico embraced him—literally, clasped him in his arms and kissed him like a southerner (or a Russian) upon both cheeks, which, for all the commotion, caused our wild traveller no little embarrassment. But he almost lost his composure when, at the final moment, Herr Settembrini addressed him by his Christian name, namely “Giovanni,” and with it cast aside the form of address customary in the civilised West and allowed the intimate thou to prevail!

“_E così in giù_,” he said—“_in giù finalmente! Addio, Giovanni mio!_ I had wished to see you depart otherwise, but so be it: the gods have ordained it thus and not otherwise. I had hoped to release you to your work; now you will fight in the midst of your own people. My God, it was appointed for you, and not for our lieutenant. How life plays with us ... Fight bravely, there where blood binds you! No one can do more now. And forgive me if I devote what remains of my strength to drawing my country too into the struggle, upon that side to which the spirit and sacred self-interest direct it. _Addio!_”

Hans Castorp squeezed his head between ten others that filled the frame of the little window. He waved above them. Herr Settembrini too waved with his right hand, while delicately touching the corner of one eye with the tip of his left ring finger.

* * * * *

Where are we? What is this? Whither has the dream swept us? Twilight, rain and mire; the fiery glow of the clouded sky, which roars without cease with heavy thunder filling the sodden air, rent by shrill singing, by furious, hell-hound howling that rushes onward and ends its course in splinters, spurtings, crashes and flames; by moans and screams, by a blare of brass that threatens to burst, and the beat of drums driving faster, ever faster ... There is a wood from which colourless swarms pour forth, running, falling and leaping. There a line of hills stretches before the distant conflagration, whose glow sometimes gathers into streaming flames. Around us lies rolling farmland, churned and sodden. A highway, muddy and strewn with broken branches, runs towards the wood; from it a rutted, bottomless field-track curves towards the hills; tree-stumps rise in the cold rain, naked and stripped of boughs ... Here is a signpost—it is useless to question it; the half-darkness would conceal its lettering even if the board had not been jaggedly torn apart by a direct hit. East or west? These are the flatlands; this is war. And we are timid shadows by the roadside, shamefaced in the security of shadows, by no means disposed to indulge in boasting and hunters’ yarns, but led hither by the spirit of narration so that, among the grey comrades running, falling, drummed forward as they swarm out of the wood, we may look once more into the simple face of one whom we know, the companion of so many little years, the good-natured sinner whose voice we have heard so often, before we lose sight of him.

They have been brought up, the comrades, to lend the final weight to the battle that has lasted all day and whose object is the recapture of that position among the hills and the burning villages beyond, lost to the enemy two days ago. It is a regiment of volunteers, young blood, students for the most part, not long in the field. They were roused in the night, travelled by train until morning and marched through the rain until afternoon over dreadful roads—over no roads at all, for the highways were blocked, and they had to go through fields and marshes, for seven hours, in coats soaked heavy, carrying assault kit; and it was no pleasure outing, for if a man did not wish to lose his boots, at almost every step he had to bend down, hook a finger into the loop and use it to pull his foot from the squelching ground. Thus they needed an hour to cross one small meadow. Now they are here; their young blood has accomplished everything, and their excited, already exhausted bodies, held taut by the deepest reserves of life, ask nothing of the sleep and nourishment withheld from them. Their wet faces, spattered with mud and framed by chinstraps beneath their displaced, grey-covered helmets, are glowing. They glow from exertion and from the sight of the losses suffered on their passage through the marshy wood. For the enemy, aware of their approach, has laid a barrage of shrapnel and heavy-calibre shells across their path, already striking in splinters among their groups within the wood and lashing the wide, ploughed fields with howling, spurting flame.

They must pass through it, the three thousand fevered boys; as reinforcements they must decide with their bayonets the assault upon the trenches before and behind the line of hills, upon the burning villages, and help carry it forward to a certain point designated in the order their leader bears in his pocket. They are three thousand so that two thousand of them may still remain when they reach the hills and villages; that is the meaning of their multitude. They are a body calculated, after heavy losses, still to act and conquer, still to greet victory with a thousand-voiced hurrah—regardless of those who have become individuals by falling out. Many a one has already become an individual, falling out during the forced march for which he proved too young and tender. He grew pale and staggered, grimly demanded manhood of himself, and yet at last dropped behind. For a while he dragged himself alongside the marching column, file after file overtook him, and he disappeared, remaining where it was not good to remain. And then the splintering wood had come. But those swarming from it are still many; three thousand can endure a bloodletting and remain even then a teeming host. Already they flood across our rain-lashed land, the highway, the field-track, the fields churned to mud; we watching shadows by the roadside stand in their very midst. At the forest’s edge bayonets are continually being fixed with drilled movements; the brass calls urgently, the drum beats and rolls within the deeper thunder, and onward they plunge as best they can, with harsh cries and feet heavy as nightmare, for the clods of the fields cling like lead to their clumsy boots.

They fling themselves down before the oncoming howl of projectiles, only to leap up and hurry onward again, shouting with the brittle courage of youth because they have not been hit. They are hit, they fall, their arms battling the air, shot through the forehead, the heart, the bowels. They lie with their faces in the mire and move no more. They lie with their backs raised by their packs, the backs of their heads driven into the ground, and claw the air with their hands. But the wood sends forth new ones, who throw themselves down and leap up and stumble onward, shouting or silent, between those who have fallen out.

The young blood with its packs and bayoneted rifles, its filthy coats and boots! In humanistically prettified fashion, one might dream quite other pictures while contemplating it. One might imagine it bathing and swimming horses in a cove of the sea, walking along the shore with the beloved, its lips at the soft bride’s ear, or happily and companionably teaching one another the art of archery. Instead it lies with its nose in the fiery filth. That it does so gladly, despite boundless terror and an inexpressible homesickness for its mother, is a sublime and shaming matter in itself, but ought to be no reason for placing it in such a position.

There is our acquaintance, there is Hans Castorp! We recognised him from afar by the little moustache he allowed to grow at the Bad Russian Table. He glows, drenched through, like all the others. He runs on feet heavy with field-clods, the bayoneted rifle in his dangling fist. Look, he treads upon the hand of a fallen comrade—treads that hand with his hobnailed boot deep into the muddy ground strewn with splintered branches. It is he nevertheless. Why, he is singing! As one sings to oneself in blank, mindless excitement, without knowing it, so he uses his broken breath to sing half aloud to himself:

“I carved into its bark So many a loving word—”

He falls. No, he has flung himself flat because a hell-hound comes howling, a great high-explosive shell, a loathsome sugarloaf from the abyss. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs spread, feet twisted, heels turned earthward. The product of a science run wild, charged with the very worst, drives like the devil himself deep into the ground thirty paces obliquely ahead of him, bursts down there with hideous, overwhelming force, and hurls into the air a fountain as high as a house, composed of earth, fire, iron, lead and dismembered humanity. For two had been lying there—they were friends and had lain down together in their extremity: now they are mingled and gone.

O shame of our shadowy security! Away! We shall not tell of this! Has our acquaintance been hit? For one moment he thought he had. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin; it hurts, no doubt, but is ridiculous. He gets to his feet and staggers onward, limping on earth-heavy feet, singing unconsciously:

“And i–its branches ru–ustled, As if they ca–alled to me—”

And thus, amid the tumult, the rain and the twilight, he passes from our sight.

Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s guileless problem child! Your story is over. We have told it to the end; it was neither entertaining nor tedious—it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But in the end it was your story; since it happened to you, there must surely have been something behind your ears after all, and we do not deny the pedagogic fondness we conceived for you in the course of it, which might move us delicately to touch the corner of one eye with a fingertip at the thought that in future we shall neither see nor hear you again.

Fare well—whether now you live or are left behind! Your prospects are poor; the wicked dancing revel into which you have been swept will last many another sinful little year, and we should not care to wager much that you will escape it. To speak honestly, we leave the question open with tolerable unconcern. Adventures of the flesh and spirit, which exalted your simplicity, allowed you in spirit to survive what in the flesh you are scarcely likely to survive. There came moments when, out of death and carnal licence, a dream of love arose within you, full of foreknowledge and wise governance. Will love one day arise even from this worldwide festival of death, even from the malignant fever-fire that sets the rainy evening sky ablaze all around?

_FINIS OPERIS_

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