The Magic Mountain Part 2

"Grandpa," little Hans Castorp might say, standing on tiptoes to reach the old man's ear, "please show me the christening basin."

And the grandfather, who had already pulled back the skirts of his long cashmere frock-coat and taken the bunch of keys from his trouser pocket, forthwith opened the door of the gla.s.s case, whence floated odours odd and pleasant to the boy's sense. Inside were all manner of disused and fascinating objects: a pair of silver-branched candlesticks, a broken barometer in a wooden case with allegorical carving, an alb.u.m of daguerreotypes, a cedar-wood case for liqueurs, a funny little Turk in flowing silk robes, under which was a hard body with a mechanism inside. Once, when you wound him up, he had been able to leap about all over the table, but he was long since out of repair. Then there was a quaint old model of a s.h.i.+p; and right at the bottom a rat-trap. But from one of the middle shelves Grandfather took a much-tarnished, round silver dish, with a tray likewise of silver, and showed them both to the boy, lifting them separately and turning them about in his hands as he told the story he had so often told before.

Plate and basin, one could see, and as the little one heard once again, had not originally belonged together; but, Grandfather said, they had been in use together for a round hundred years, or since the time when the basin was made. The latter was very beautiful, of simple and elegant form, in the severe taste of the early nineteenth century. It rested, plain and solid, on a round base, and had once been gilt within, but the gilding had faded with time to a yellow s.h.i.+mmer. Its single decoration was a chaste garland of roses and serrated leaves about the brim. As for the plate, its far greater antiquity could be read on the inside: the date 1650 was engraved there in ornamental figures, framed in curly engraved lines executed in the "modern manner" of the period, florid and capricious devices and arabesques that were something between star and flower. On the back, engraved in a variety of scripts, were the names of its successive owners, seven in number, each with the date when it had pa.s.sed into his hands. The old man named each one to his grandson, pointing with beringed index finger. There was Hans Castorp's father's name, there was Grandfather's own, there was Great-grandfather's; then the "great" came doubled, tripled, quadrupled, from the old man's mouth, whilst the little lad listened, his head on one side, the eyes full of thought, yet fixed and dreamy too, the childish lips parted, half with awe, half sleepily. That great-great-great-great-what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past! All that, as his face showed, made a profound impression. As he listened to the great-great-great, he seemed to smell the cool, earthy air of the vault of St. Michael's or Saint Katherine's; the breath of regions where one went hat in hand, the head reverently bowed, walking weavingly on the tips of one's toes; seemed, too, to hear the remote and set-apart hush of those echoing places. Religious feeling mingled in his mind with thoughts of death and a sense of history, as he listened to the sombre syllable; he received therefrom an ineffable gratification-indeed, it may have been for the sake of hearing the sound that he so often begged to see the christening basin.

Grandfather set the vessel back on the tray, and let the boy look into the smooth, faintly golden inside, which caught the light from the window in the ceiling. "Yes," he said, "it will soon be eight years since we held you over it, and the water flowed into it from your baptism. La.s.sen, the s.e.xton of St. Jacob's, poured it into our good Pastor Bugenhagen's hand, and it ran out over your little topknot and into the basin. We had warmed it, so it should not frighten you and make you cry, and you did not; you cried beforehand, though, so loud that Bugenhagen could hardly get on with the service, but you stopped when you felt the water-and that, let us hope, was out of respect for the Holy Sacrament. A few days from now it will be forty-four years since your blessed father was a baby at the baptismal font, and it was over his head the water flowed into the basin. That was here in this house, where he was born, in front of the middle dining-room window, and old Pastor Hezekiel was still alive. He was the man the French nearly shot when he was young, because he preached against their burning and looting. He has been with G.o.d these many years. Then, five-and-seventy years ago, I was the youngster whose head they held over this selfsame basin; that was in the dining-room too, and the minister spoke the very words that were spoken when you and your father were baptized, and the clear, warm water flowed over my head precisely the same way-there wasn't much more hair than there is now-and fell into this golden bowl just as it did over yours."

The little one looked up at Grandfather's narrow grey head, bending over the basin

as it had in the time he described. A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity-these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom was displayed.

As a young man he was aware that the image of his grandfather was more deeply and clearly imprinted on his mind, with greater significance, than those of his own parents. The fact might rest upon sympathy and physical likeness, for the grandson resembled the grandfather, in so far, that is, as a rosy youth with the down on his chin might resemble a bleached, rheumatic septuagenarian, Yet it probably spoke even more for that which was indeed the truth, that the grandfather had been the real personality, the picturesque figure of the family.

Long before Hans Lorenz Castorp's pa.s.sing, his person and the things for which he stood had ceased to be representative of his age. He had been a typical Christian gentleman, of the Reformed faith, of a strongly conservative cast of mind, as obstinately convinced of the right of the aristocracy to govern as if he had been born in the fourteenth century, when the labouring cla.s.ses had begun to make head against the stout resistance of the free patriciate and wrest from it a place and voice in the councils of the ancient city. He had little use for the new. His active years had fallen in a decade of rapid growth and repeated upheavals, a decade of progress by forced marches, which had made continual demands on the public capacity for enterprise and self-sacrifice. Certainly he had no part or lot, old Castorp, in the brilliant triumph of the modern spirit that followed hard upon. It was not his fault; he had held far more with ancestral ways and old inst.i.tutions than with ruinous schemes for widening the harbour, or G.o.dless and rubbis.h.i.+ng plans for a great metropolis. He had put on the brakes; he had whittled things down wherever he could; and if matters had gone to his liking, the administration would have continued to wear the same old-fas.h.i.+oned, idyllic guise as, in his time, his own office did.

Such, in his lifetime and afterwards, was the figure the old man presented to the eye of his fellow burghers; and such, in essentials, was he also to the childish gaze of little Hans Castorp, who knew naught of affairs of state, and whose formless, uncritical judgments were rather the fruit of mere lively perceptions. Yet they persisted into later life, as the elements of a perfectly conscious memory-picture, which defied expression or a.n.a.lysis, but was none the less positive for all that. We repeat that natural sympathy was in play here too, the close family tie and essential intimacy which not infrequently leaps over an intervening generation.

Senator Castorp was tall and lean. The years had bent his back and neck, but he tried to counteract the curvature by pressure in another direction; drawing down his mouth with sedulous dignity, though the lips were shrunken against the bare gums, for he had lost all his teeth, and put in the false ones only to eat. It was this posture also which helped to steady an incipient shaking of the head, gave him his look of being sternly reined up, and caused him to support his chin on his neckcloth in the manner so congenial to little Hans Castorp's taste.

He loved his snuff-box-it was a longish, gold-inlaid tortoise-sh.e.l.l one-and on account of his snuff-taking, used a red pocket-handkerchief, the corner of which always hung out of the back pocket of his coat. If this foible added a quaint touch to his appearance, yet the effect was only of a slight negligence or licence due to age, which length of days either consciously and cheerfully permits itself, or else brings in its train without the victim's being aware. If weakness it were, it was the only one the sharp eye of the child ever noted in his grandfather's exterior. But the old man's everyday appearance was not his real and authentic one, either to the seven-year-old child, or to the memory of the grown man in after years. That was different, far finer and truer; it was Grandfather as he appeared in a life-size portrait which had once hung in the house of Hans Castorp's own parents, had moved over with him to the Esplanade on their death, and now hung above the great red satin sofa in the reception-room.

The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Councillor: the sober, even G.o.dly, civilian habit of a bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-a.s.sertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to the perpetual continuity of things, and the perfect soundness of its business signature. Senator Castorp stood at full length on a red-tiled floor, in a perspective of column and pointed arch. His chin was dropped, his mouth drawn down, his blue, musing eyes, with the tear ducts plain beneath them, directed toward the distant view. He wore the black coat, cut full like a robe, more than knee-length, with a wide tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of fur all round the edge; the upper sleeves were wide and puffed and furtrimmed too, while from beneath them came the narrow under-sleeves of plain cloth, then lace cuffs, which covered the hands to the knuckles. The slender, elderly legs were cased in black silk stockings; the shoes had silver buckles. But about his neck was the broad, starched ruff, pressed down in front and swelling out on the sides, beneath which, for good measure, a fluted jabot came out over the waistcoat. Under his arm he held the old-fas.h.i.+oned, broad-brimmed hat that tapered to a point at the top.

It was a capital painting, by an artist of some note, in an old-masterish style that suited the subject and was reminiscent of much Spanish, Dutch, late Middle Ages work. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it; not, of course, with any knowledge of art, but with a larger, even a fervid comprehension. Only once-and then only for a moment-had he ever seen Grandfather as he was here represented, on the occasion of a procession to the Rathaus Rathaus. But he could not help feeling that this presentment was the genuine, the authentic grandfather, and the everyday one merely subsidiary, not entirely conformable-a sort of interim grandfather, as it were. For it was clear that the deviations and idiosyncrasies presented by his everyday appearance were due to incomplete, perhaps even unsuccessful adaptation; they were the not quite eradicable vestiges of Grandfather's pure and genuine form. The choker collar and band, for instance, were old-fas.h.i.+oned; an adjective it would have been impossible to apply to that admirable article of apparel whose interim representative they were: namely, the ruff. The same was true of the outlandish top-hat Grandfather wore, with the bellshaped crown, to which the broad-brimmed felt in the painting corresponded, only with a higher degree of actuality; and of the voluminous frock-coat, whose archetype and original was for little Hans Castorp the lace- and fur-trimmed ceremonial garment.

Thus he was glad from his heart that it should be the authentic, the perfect grandfather who lay there resplendent on that day when he came to take last leave of him. It was in the room where so often they had sat facing each other at table; and now, in the centre, Hans Lorenz Castorp was lying in a silver-mounted coffin, upon a begarlanded bier. He had fought out the attack on his lungs, fought long and stoutly, despite his air of being at home in the life of the day only by dint of his powers of adaptability. One hardly knew whether he had won or lost in the struggle; but in any case there he lay, with a stern yet satisfied expression, on his bed of state. He had altered with the illness, his nose looked sharp and thin; the lower half of his body was hidden by a coverlet on which lay a palm branch; the head was lifted high by the silken pillow, so that his chin rested beautifully in the front swell of the ruff. Between the hands, half-shrouded in their lace cuffs, their visibly cold, dead fingers artfully arranged to simulate life, was stuck an ivory cross. He seemed to gaze, beneath drooping lids, steadfastly down upon it.

Hans Castorp had probably seen his grandfather several times at the beginning of this last illness, but not toward the end. They had spared him the sight of the struggle, the more easily that it had been mostly at night; he had only felt it through the surcharged atmosphere of the house, old Fiete's red eyes, the coming and going of the doctors. What he gathered as he stood now by the bier in the dining-room, was that Grandfather had finally and formally surmounted his interim aspect and a.s.sumed for all time his true and adequate shape. And that was a gratifying result, even though old Fiete continually wept and shook his head, even though Hans Castorp himself wept, as he had at sight of the mother he had abruptly been bereft of, and the father who, so little time after her, lay in his turn still and strange before the little boy's eyes. Thus for the third time in so short a s.p.a.ce and in such young years did death play upon the spirit and senses-but chiefly on the senses-of the lad. The sight was no longer strange, it was already right familiar; and as on those earlier occasions, only in still greater degree, he bore himself in the presence of death with a responsible air, quite self-controlled, showing no nervous weakness, if some natural dejection. He was unaware of the practical result the loss would mean to his own life, or else with childlike indifference was instinctively confident that he would be taken care of somehow; thus, at the bier, he displayed both an uncomprehending coolness and a detached alertness of observation, to which were added, on this third occasion, a feeling and expression of connoisseurs.h.i.+p. And something more, a peculiar, precocious variation: he seemed no longer to think of tears-either the frequent outburst of grief or the contagion from the grief of others-as a natural reaction. In three or four months after his father's pa.s.sing he had forgotten about death; but now he remembered, and all the impressions of that time recurred, precise, immediate, and piercing in their transcendent strangeness.

Reduced to order and put into words, they would have been something like the following. In one aspect death was a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournful beauty. In another it was quite different. It was precisely the opposite, it was very physical, it was material, it could not possibly be called either holy, or pensive, or beautiful-not even mournful. The solemn, spiritual side expressed itself in the ceremonial lying-in state of the corpse, in the fan-leaved palm and the wealth of flowers, all which symbolized the peace of G.o.d and the heavenly kingdom, as did even more explicitly the ivory cross stuck between the dead fingers of what was once Grandfather, and the bust of Christ by Thorwaldsen at the head of the bier, with towering candelabra on either side. It was these last that gave a churchly air to the scene. All such arrangements had their more precise justification in the fact that Grandfather was now clothed forever in his true and proper guise. But over and above that raison d'etre raison d'etre they had another, of a more profane kind, of which little Hans Castorp was distinctly aware, though without admitting it in so many words. One and all of them, but expressly the flowers, and of these more expressly the hosts of tuberoses, were there to palliate the other aspect of death, the side which was neither beautiful nor exactly sad, but somehow almost improper-its lowly, physical side-to slur it over and prevent one from being conscious of it. they had another, of a more profane kind, of which little Hans Castorp was distinctly aware, though without admitting it in so many words. One and all of them, but expressly the flowers, and of these more expressly the hosts of tuberoses, were there to palliate the other aspect of death, the side which was neither beautiful nor exactly sad, but somehow almost improper-its lowly, physical side-to slur it over and prevent one from being conscious of it.

It was this other aspect of death that made Grandfather himself look so strange; not like Grandfather at all, more like a life-size wax doll, which death had put in his place to be the centre of all this pious and reverent spectacle. He who lay there-or, more correctly, that which lay there-was not Grandfather himself, but a sh.e.l.l, made, as Hans Castorp was aware, not of wax, but of its own substance, and only of that. Therein, precisely, was the impropriety. It was scarcely sad at all-as things are not which have to do with the body and only with it. Little Hans Castorp regarded that substance, waxy yellow, and fine-grained like cheese, of which the life-size figure was made, the face and hands of what had been Grandfather. A fly had settled on the quiet brow, and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete shooed it cautiously away, taking care not to touch the forehead of the dead, putting on a seemly air of absent-mindedness-of obscurantism, as it were-as though he neither might nor would take notice of what he was doing. This correctness of demeanour obviously had to do with the fact that Grandfather was now no longer anything but body. But the fly, after a circling flight, came to rest on Grandfather's fingers, close to the ivory cross. And Hans Castorp, watching, thought he detected, more plainly than ever before, a familiar, strange exhalation, faint, yet oddly clinging-he blushed to find that it made him think of a former schoolfellow, who was avoided by his cla.s.smates because he suffered from a certain unpleasant affection-for the drowning out of which the tuberoses were there, and which, with all their lovely luxuriance and the strong-ness of their scent, they yet failed to overpower.

He stood three times by his Grandfather's bier. Once alone with old Fiete; once with Great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and his two uncles, James and Peter; the third and last time when a group of harbour hands in their Sunday clothes came to take leave of the head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral. The room was full of people, and Pastor Bugenhagen of St. Michael's, the same who had baptized little Hans, preached the sermon in a ruff. He was most friendly with the boy as they drove out together to the cemetery, in the first carriage behind the hea.r.s.e. Thus did another epoch in the life of Hans Castorp come to an end, and again he moved to a new home and new surroundings, for the second time in his young life.

At Tienappels', and of Young Hans's MoralState THE CHANGE was no loss to him; for he entered the home of his appointed guardian, Consul Tienappel, where he wanted for nothing. Certainly this was true so far as his bodily needs were concerned, and not less in the sense of safe-guarding his interests-about which he was still too young to know anything at all. For Consul Tienappel, an uncle of Hans's deceased mother, was administrator of the Castorp estate; he put up the property for sale, took in hand the business of liquidating the firm of Castorp and Son, Importers and Exporters, and realized from the whole nearly four hundred thousand marks, the inheritance of young Hans. This sum Consul Tienappel invested in trust funds, and took unto himself two per cent of the interest every quarter, without impairment of his kinsmanly feeling.

The Tienappel house lay at the foot of a garden in Harvestehuderstra.s.se; the windows looked out on a plot of lawn in which not the tiniest weed was suffered to flourish, then upon public rose-borders, and then upon the river. The Consul went on foot every morning to his business in the Old Town-although he possessed more than one fine equipage-in order to get a little exercise, for he sometimes suffered from cerebral congestion. He returned in the same way at five in the afternoon, at which time the Tienappels dined, with due and fitting ceremony. He was a weighty man, whose suits were always of the best English cloths; his eyes were watery blue and prominent behind his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, his nose was ruddy, and his square cut beard was grey; he wore a flas.h.i.+ng brilliant on the stubby little finger of his left hand. His wife was long since dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, of whom one was in the navy and seldom at home, the other occupied in the paternal wine trade, and destined heir to the business. The housekeeping, for many years, had been the care of an Altona goldsmith's daughter, named Schalleen, who wore starched white ruffles at her plump, round wrists. Hers it was to see to it that the table, morning and evening, was richly laden with cold meats, with crabs and salmon, eel and smoked breast of goose, with tomato ketchup for the roast beef. She kept a watchful eye on the hired waiters when Consul Tienappel gave a gentlemen's dinner; and she it was who, so far as in her lay, took the place of a mother to little Hans Castorp.

So he grew up; in wretched weather, in the teeth of wind and mist, grew up, so to say, in a yellow mackintosh, and, generally speaking, he throve. A little anaemic he had always been, so Dr. Heidekind said, and had him take a good gla.s.s of porter after third breakfast every day, when he came home from school. This, as everyone knows, is a hearty drink-Dr. Heidekind considered it a blood-maker-and certainly Hans Castorp found it most soothing to his spirits and encouraging to a propensity of his, which his Uncle Tienappel called "dozing": namely, sitting staring into s.p.a.ce, with his jaw dropped and his thoughts fixed on just nothing at all. But on the whole he was sound and fit, an adequate tennis player and rower; though actually handling the oars was less to his taste than sitting of a summer evening on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst ferry-house, with a good drink before him and the sound of music in his ears, while he watched the lighted boats, and the swans mirrored in the bright water. Hear him talk, sedate and sensible, in a rather low, monotonous voice, just tinged with dialect; observe him in his blond correctness, with his well-shaped head, which had about it some stamp of the cla.s.sic, and his self-possessed, indolent bearing, the fruit of innate, inherited, perfectly unconscious self-esteem-you would swear that this young Castorp was a legitimate and genuine product of the soil in which he flourished, and strikingly at home in his environment. Nor would he, had he ever put such a question to himself, have been for a single second doubtful of the answer.

Yes, he was thoroughly in his element in the atmosphere of this great seaboard city: this reeking air, compact of good living and a retail trade that embraced the four corners of the earth. It had been the breath of his father's nostrils, and the son drew it in with profound acquiescence and a sense of well-being. The exhalations from water, coals, and tar, the sharp tang in the nostrils from heaped-up stacks of colonial produce; the huge steam-cranes at the dock-side, imitating the quiet, the intelligence, and the giant strength of elephants at work, as they hoisted tons of sacks, bales, chests, vats, and carboys out of the bowels of seagoing s.h.i.+ps and conveyed them into waiting trains and scales; the business men, in yellow rubber coats like his own, streaming to the Bourse at midday, where, as he knew, there was oftentimes pretty sharp work, and a man might have to strengthen his credit at short notice by giving out invitations to a big dinner-all this he felt, saw, heard, knew. Besides it all, there was the field in which later was to lie his own particular interest: the confusion of the yards, the mammoth bodies of great s.h.i.+ps, Asiatic and African liners, lying in dry-dock, keel and propeller bare, supported by props as thick as tree-trunks, lying there in monstrous helplessness, swarmed over by troops of men like dwarfs, scouring, whitewas.h.i.+ng, hammering; there were the roofed-over ways, wrapped in wreaths of smoke-like mist, holding the towering frames of rising s.h.i.+ps, among which moved the engineers, blueprint and loading scale in hand, directing the work-people. All these were familiar sights to Hans Castorp from his youth upwards, awaking in him only the agreeable, homely sensations of "belonging," which were the prerogative of his years. Such sensations would reach their height when he sat of a Sunday forenoon with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemssen-Joachim Ziemssen-in the pavilion at Alster, breakfasting on hot cuts and smoked meat, with a gla.s.s of old port; or when, having eaten, he would lean back in his chair and give himself up to his cigar. For therein especially was he true to type, that he liked good living, and notwithstanding his thinbloodedness and look of over-refinement clung to the grosser pleasures of life as a greedy suckling to its mother's breast.

Comfortably, not without dignity, he carried the weight of culture with which the governing upper cla.s.s of the commercial city endowed its children. He was as clean as a well-cared-for baby, and dressed by the tailor in whom the young men of his social sphere felt most confidence. Schalleen took beautiful care of his small stock of carefully marked linen, which was bestowed in a dressing-chest on the English plan. When he studied away from home, he regularly sent back his laundry to be washed and mended, for it was a saying of his that outside Hamburg n.o.body in the kingdom knew how to iron. A rough spot on the cuff of his dainty coloured s.h.i.+rts filled him with acute discomfort. His hands, though not particularly aristocratic in shape, were well tended and fresh-skinned, and he wore a platinum chain ring as well as the seal ring inherited from Grandfather. His teeth were rather soft and defective and he had a number of gold fillings.

Standing and walking, he rather stuck out his abdomen, which hardly made an athletic impression; but his bearing at table was beyond cavil. Sitting very erect, he would turn the whole upper part of his body to speak to his neighbour (with selfpossession, of course, and a little platt platt) and he kept his elbows well in as he dismembered his piece of fowl, or deftly, with the appointed tool, drew the rosy flesh from a lobster's sh.e.l.l. His first requirement after a meal was the finger-bowl of perfumed water, his second the Russian cigarette-which paid no duty, as he had a convenient way of getting them smuggled in. After the cigarette the cigar; he favoured a Bremen brand called Maria Mancini, of which we shall hear more hereafter; the fragrant narcotic blended so soothingly with the coffee. Hans Castorp protected his supply of tobacco from the injurious effects of steam-heating by keeping it in the cellar, whither he would betake himself every morning to load his case with his stock for the day. It went against his grain to eat b.u.t.ter served in the piece instead of in little fluted b.a.l.l.s.

It will be seen that we mean to say everything that may be said in Hans Castorp's favour, yet without fulsomeness, not making him out as better, or worse, than he was. He was neither genius nor dunderhead; and if, in our description of him, we have avoided the use of the word mediocre, it has been for reasons quite unconnected with his intelligence, hardly even with any bearing upon his whole simple personality, but rather out of regard for his lot in life, to which we incline to ascribe a certain importance above and beyond personal considerations. His head-piece sustained without undue strain the demands made upon it by the course at the Realgymnasium-strain, indeed, was something to which he was quite definitely disinclined, whatever the circ.u.mstances or the object of his effort; less out of fear of hurting himself than because he positively saw no reason, or, more precisely, saw no positive reason, for exertion. This then, perhaps, is why we may not call him mediocre: that, somehow or other, he was aware of the lack of such a reason. A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from a.s.suming a critical att.i.tude toward them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, ends, hopes, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seem, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognize it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow, puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may even extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of "Why?" "To what end?" a man who is capable of achievement over and above the average and expected modic.u.m must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither the one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.

All this that we have said has reference to the inward state of the young man not only during his school years, but also in those that followed, after he had made choice of his civil profession. On his way through his forms at school, he had now and again to take one for the second time. But in the main his origin, his good breeding, and also a pretty if unimpa.s.sioned gift for mathematics got him forward; and when he received his one-year service certificate, he made up his mind to continue at school, princ.i.p.ally, it must be said, because he thus prolonged a situation he was used to, in which no definite decisions had to be taken, and in which he had further time to think matters over and decide what he really wanted to do, which he was far from knowing after he had arrived at the top form. Even when it was finally decided-to say when Hans Castorp finally decided it would be saying too much-he had the feeling that it might quite as well have been decided some other way.

So much, however, was true, that he had always liked s.h.i.+ps. As a small boy he had filled the pages of his note-books with drawings of fis.h.i.+ng-barks, five-masters and vegetable-barges. When he was fifteen, he had had a front seat at the christening ceremony of the new double-screw steamer Hansa Hansa. He had watched her leave the ways at Blohm and Voss's, and afterwards made quite a happy water-colour of the graceful s.h.i.+p, done with a good deal of attention to detail, and a loving and not unskillful treatment of the gla.s.sy green, rolling waves. Consul Tienappel hung it in his private office, and somebody told him that it showed talent, that the artist might develop into a good marine painter-a remark which the Consul could safely repeat to his ward, for Hans Castorp only laughed good-humouredly, and not for a moment considered letting himself in for a career of being eccentric and not getting enough to eat.

"You haven't so much, you know," his Uncle Tienappel would say to him. "James and Peter will get most of what I have; that is to say, it stops in the business, and Peter will draw his interest. What belongs to you is well invested, and brings you in something safe. But it's no joke living on your interest to-day, unless one has at least five times what you have; and if you want to be somebody here in this town and live as you have been brought up to, you'll have to earn a good bit more to put with it, you mark my words, my son."

Hans Castorp marked them. He looked about for a profession suitable in his own

eyes and those of his fellow citizens. And when he had once chosen-it came about at the instance of old Wilms, of the firm of Tunder and Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel at the Sat.u.r.day whist-table that young Castorp ought to study s.h.i.+p-building; it would be a good idea, he could come into his office and he would keep an eye on him-when he had once chosen, he thought very highly of his calling. It was, to be sure, confoundedly complicated and fatiguing, but all the same it was very first-rate, very solid, very important. And certainly, being peaceful in his tastes, he preferred it to that of his cousin Ziemssen, the son of his mother's half-sister, who was bent on being an officer. But Joachim Ziemssen was rather weak in the chest, and for that reason a calling which would keep him in the open, and in which there was no mental strain or fatigue to speak of, might be quite the right thing for him, Hans Castorp thought with easy condescension. He had the greatest respect for work-though personally he found that he tired easily.

And here we revert to our suggestion of a few pages back: the idea that an unfavourable influence exerted upon a man's personal life by the times in which he lives may even extend to his physical organism. Hans Castorp respected work-as how should he not have? It would have been unnatural. Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else that was estimable. It was the principle by which one stood or fell, the Absolute of the time; it was, so to speak, its own justification. His regard for it was thus religious in its character, and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter, whether he loved it; and that he could not do, however great his regard, the simple reason being that it did not agree with him. Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighted with the leaden load of effort; lying s.p.a.cious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one's teeth and conquer, one after the other. These conflicting sentiments on the subject of work had, strictly speaking, to be reconciled. Is it, perhaps, possible, if he had been able to believe in work as a positive value, a self-justifying principle, believe in it in the very depth of his soul, even without being himself conscious of doing so, that his body as well as his spirit-first the spirit and through it the body as well-would have been able to devote itself to his task with more of joy and constancy, would have been able to find peace therein? Here again is posed the question of Hans Castorp's mediocrity or more than mediocrity, to which we would give no hard and fast answer. For we do not set up as the young man's encomiast, and prefer to leave room for the other view: namely, that his work stood somewhat in the way of his unclouded enjoyment of his Maria Mancini.

To military service he was not inclined. His being revolted against it, and found ways of making difficulties. It may be, too, that Staff Medical Officer Dr. Eberding, who visited at Harvestehuderstra.s.se, heard from Consul Tienappel, in the course of conversation, that young Castorp was leaving home to begin his technical studies, and would find a call to the colours a very sensible interruption to his labours.

Working slowly and deliberately-he kept up his soothing habit of porter breakfasts while he was away-he filled his brain with a.n.a.lytic and descriptive geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, projection, hydrostatic; reckoned full and empty displacement, stability, trim moment, and metacentre; and sometimes he got very sick of it. His technical drawings, the draughts and designs of frames, waterlines and longitudinal projections, were not quite so good as the picturesque representation of the Hansa Hansa on the high seas; but wherever it was in place to call in the sense perceptions to help out the intellectual, wherever he could wash in the shadows and lay on the cross-sections in the conventional colours, there Hans Castorp showed more dexterity than most. on the high seas; but wherever it was in place to call in the sense perceptions to help out the intellectual, wherever he could wash in the shadows and lay on the cross-sections in the conventional colours, there Hans Castorp showed more dexterity than most.

When he came home for the holidays, very clean, very well dressed, with a little red-blond moustache that became his sleepy, young patrician face, obviously en route en route to a considerable position in life, people looked at him, the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community and made it their business to know all about family and social relations-and that, in a self-governing city-state, meant most of the population-they looked him well over, his fellow citizens, and asked themselves what public role young Castorp was destined to fill. He had traditions, his name was old and good, they would certainly have to reckon with him one day, as a political factor. Some day he would sit in the a.s.sembly, or on the Board of Directors, he would help make the laws, he would occupy some honourable office and share the burdens of sovereignty. He would belong to the executive branch, perhaps, or the Finance or Building Commission. His voice would be listened to, his vote would count. It would be interesting to see what party he would choose. Appearances were deceiving, but he did not look as a man does whom the democrats can count on; and his likeness to his grandfather was unmistakable. Would he take after him, and be a drag, a conservative element? It was quite possible-but so was the opposite. He was an engineer, studying s.h.i.+p-building; on the technical side, in touch with world commerce. He might turn out to be a radical, a reckless spender, a profane destroyer of old buildings and landscape beauties. He might be as unfettered as a Jew, as irreverent as an American; he might prefer a ruthless break with tradition to a considered development of natural resources; he might incline to plunge the state into foolhardy experimentation. All that was conceivable. Was it in his blood to feel that their Wors.h.i.+ps in the Senate, before whom the double sentry at the to a considerable position in life, people looked at him, the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community and made it their business to know all about family and social relations-and that, in a self-governing city-state, meant most of the population-they looked him well over, his fellow citizens, and asked themselves what public role young Castorp was destined to fill. He had traditions, his name was old and good, they would certainly have to reckon with him one day, as a political factor. Some day he would sit in the a.s.sembly, or on the Board of Directors, he would help make the laws, he would occupy some honourable office and share the burdens of sovereignty. He would belong to the executive branch, perhaps, or the Finance or Building Commission. His voice would be listened to, his vote would count. It would be interesting to see what party he would choose. Appearances were deceiving, but he did not look as a man does whom the democrats can count on; and his likeness to his grandfather was unmistakable. Would he take after him, and be a drag, a conservative element? It was quite possible-but so was the opposite. He was an engineer, studying s.h.i.+p-building; on the technical side, in touch with world commerce. He might turn out to be a radical, a reckless spender, a profane destroyer of old buildings and landscape beauties. He might be as unfettered as a Jew, as irreverent as an American; he might prefer a ruthless break with tradition to a considered development of natural resources; he might incline to plunge the state into foolhardy experimentation. All that was conceivable. Was it in his blood to feel that their Wors.h.i.+ps in the Senate, before whom the double sentry at the Rathaus Rathaus presented arms, were likely to know best in all contingencies; or would he side with the opposition in the a.s.sembly? In his blue eyes, under their reddish-brown brows, his fellow citizens read no answer to their curious questioning. And he probably knew none himself, Hans Castorp, this still unwritten page. presented arms, were likely to know best in all contingencies; or would he side with the opposition in the a.s.sembly? In his blue eyes, under their reddish-brown brows, his fellow citizens read no answer to their curious questioning. And he probably knew none himself, Hans Castorp, this still unwritten page.

When he took the journey upon which we have encountered him, he was in his twenty-third year. He had spent four semesters at the Dantzig Polytechnic, four more at the technical schools of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, and had just previously pa.s.sed his first final, quite respectably, if without any fanfare of trumpets. And now he was preparing to enter the firm of Tunder and Wilms, as volunteer apprentice, in order to get his practical training in the s.h.i.+p-yards.

But at this point his life took the following turn. He had had to work hard and steadily for his examination, and came home looking rather paler than a man of his blond, rosy type should do. Dr. Heidekind scolded, and insisted on a change of air; a complete change, not a stay at Norderney or Wyk on Fohr-that would not mend matters this time, he said; if they wanted his advice, it was that Hans Castorp should go for a few weeks to the high mountains before he took up his work in the yards. Consul Tienappel told his nephew and foster-son he approved of the plan, only that in that case they would part company for the summer, for wild horses couldn't drag him into the high mountains. They were not for him; he required a reasonable atmospheric pressure, else he might get an attack. Hans Castorp would be good enough to go by himself-let him pay his cousin Ziemssen a visit.

It was an obvious suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill-not ill like Hans Castorp, but in all seriousness, critically. There had been a great scare, in fact. He had always been subject to feverish catarrh, and one day he actually spat blood; whereupon he had been rushed off to Davos, heels over head, to his great distress and affliction, for he had just then arrived within sight of the goal of all his hopes. Some semesters long, he had complied with the wish of his family and studied law; then, yielding to irresistible inward urging, he had changed over, presented himself as ensign and been accepted. And now, for the past five months, he had been stuck in the International Sanatorium Berghof (directing physician Hofrat Behrens) and was bored half sick, as he wrote home on postcards. If Hans Castorp wanted to do himself a good turn before he entered his post at Tunder and Wilms's, what more natural than that he should go up to Davos and keep his poor cousin company for a while-it would be agreeable on both sides.

It was midsummer before he made up his mind to go. Already the last week in July. He left for a stay of three weeks.

CHAPTER III.

Drawing the Veil HE had been so utterly weary, he had feared to oversleep; but he was on his legs rather earlier than usual, and had a superfluity of leisure in which to perform the accustomed ritual of his morning toilet, in which a rubber tub, a wooden bowl of green lavender soap, and the accompanying little brush played the princ.i.p.al parts. He had even time to do some unpacking and moving in. As he covered his cheeks with scented lather and drew over them the blade of his silver-plated "safety," he recalled his confused dreams and shook his head indulgently over so much nonsense, with the superior feeling a man has when shaving himself in the clear light of reason. He did not feel precisely rested, yet had a sense of morning freshness.

With powdered cheeks, in his Scotch-thread drawers and red morocco slippers, he walked out on the balcony, drying his hands. The balcony ran across the house and was divided into small separate compartments by opaque gla.s.s part.i.tions, which did not quite reach to the bal.u.s.trade. The morning was cool and cloudy. Trails of mist lay motionless in front of the heights on one side and the other, while great cloud-ma.s.ses, grey and white, hung down over the distant peaks. Patches and bands of blue showed here and there; now and then a gleam of suns.h.i.+ne lighted up the village down in the valley, till it glistened whitely against the dark fir-covered slopes. Somewhere there was music, very likely in the same hotel where there had been a concert the evening before. The subdued chords of a hymn floated up; after a pause came a march. Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him in much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze. He listened well pleased, his head on one side, his eyes a little bloodshot.

He could see below him the winding road up to the sanatorium, by which he had come the night before. Among the dewy gra.s.s of the sloping terrace short-stemmed, star-shaped gentians stood out. Part of the level ground had been enclosed for a garden, with flower-beds, gravel paths, and an artificial grotto under a stately silver fir. A hall, with reclining-chairs and a galvanized roof, opened towards the south; near it stood a flag-pole, painted reddish-brown, on which the flag fluttered open now and then on its cord. It was a fancy flag, green and white, with the caduceus, the emblem of healing, in the centre.

A woman was walking in the garden, an elderly lady, of melancholy, even tragic aspect. Dressed all in black, a black veil wound about her dishevelled grey-black hair, with wrinkled brow and coal-black eyes that had hanging pouches of skin beneath them, she moved with rapid, restless step along the garden paths, staring straight before her, her knees a little bent, her arms hanging stiffly down. The ageing face in its southern pallor, with the large, wried mouth drawn down on one side, reminded Hans Castorp of a portrait he had once seen of a famous tragic actress. And strange it was to see how the pale, black-clad woman unconsciously matched her long, woeful pace to the music of the march.

He looked down upon her with pensive sympathy; it seemed to him the sad apparition darkened the morning suns.h.i.+ne. But in the same instant he became aware of something else, something audible: certain noises penetrating to his hearing from the room on the left of his own, which was occupied, Joachim had said, by a Russian couple. Again he felt a discrepancy; these sounds no more suited the blithe freshness of the morning than had the sad sight in the garden below-rather they seemed to befoul the air, make it thick, sticky. Hans Castorp recalled having heard similar sounds the evening before, though his weariness had prevented him from heeding them: a struggling, a panting and giggling, the offensive nature of which could not long remain hidden to the young man, try as he good-naturedly did to put a harmless construction on them. Perhaps something more or other than good nature was in play, something to which we give a variety of names, calling it now purity of soul, which sounds insipid; again by that grave, beautiful name of chast.i.ty; and yet again disparaging it as hypocrisy, as "hating to look facts in the face"; even ascribing it to an obscure sense of awe and piety-and, in truth, something of all these was in Hans Castorp's face and bearing as he listened. He seemed to be practising a seemly obscurantism; to be mentally drawing the veil over these sounds that he heard; to be telling himself that honour forbade his taking any cognizance of them, or even hearing them at all-it gave him an air of propriety which was not quite native, though he knew how to a.s.sume it on occasion.

With this mien, then, he drew back from the balcony into his room, in order not to listen further to proceedings which, for all the giggling that went with them, were plainly in dead earnest, even alarming. But from indoors the noise could be heard even more plainly. He seemed to hear a chase about the room; a chair fell over; someone was caught and seized; loud kissing ensued-and the music below had changed to a waltz, a popular air whose hackneyed, melodious phrases accompanied the invisible scene. Hans Castorp stood towel in hand and listened, against his better judgment. And he began to blush through the powder; for what he had all along seen coming was come, and the game had pa.s.sed quite frankly over into the b.e.s.t.i.a.l. "Good Lord!" he thought. He turned away and made as much noise as possible while he concluded his toilet. "Well, at least they are married, as far as that goes," he said to himself. "But in broad daylight-it's a bit thick! And last night too, I'm sure. But of course they are ill, or at least one of them, or they wouldn't be here-that may be some excuse. The scandalous part of it is, the walls are so thin one can't help hearing everything. Simply intolerable. The place is shamefully jerry-built, of course. What if I should see them, or even be introduced? I simply couldn't endure it!" Here Hans Castorp remarked with surprise that the flush which had mounted in his freshly shaven cheek did not subside, nor its accompanying warmth: his face glowed with the same dry heat as on the evening before. He had got free of it in sleep, but the blush had made it set in again. He did not feel the friendlier for this discovery towards the wretched pair next door; in fact he stuck out his lips and muttered a derogatory word in their direction, as he tried to cool his hot face by bathing it in cold water-and only made it glow the more. He felt put out; his voice vibrated with ill humour as he answered to his cousin's knock on the wall; and he appeared to Joachim on his entrance like anything but a man refreshed and invigorated by a good night's sleep.

Breakfast "MORNING," Joachim said. "Well, that was your first night up here. How did youfind it?"He was dressed for out-of-doors, in sports clothes and stout boots, and carried his ulster over his arm. The outline of the flat bottle could be seen on the side pocket. As yesterday, he wore no hat."Thanks," responded Hans Castorp, "it was well enough, I won't try to judge yet. I've had all sorts of mixed-up dreams, and this building seems to possess the disadvantage of being porous-the sound goes straight through it. It's annoying.- Who is that dark woman down in the garden?" Joachim knew at once whom he meant. "Oh," he said, "that's Tous-les-deux. We all call her that up here, because it's the only thing she says. Mexican, you know; doesn't know a word of German and hardly any French, just a few sc.r.a.ps. She has been here for five weeks with her eldest son, a hopeless case, without much longer to go. He has it all over, tubercular through and through, you might say. Behrens says it is much like typhus, at the end-horrible for all concerned. Well, two weeks ago the second son came up, to see his brother before the end-handsome as a picture; both of them were that, with eyes like live coals- they fluttered the dovecots, I can tell you. He had been coughing a bit down below, but otherwise quite lively. Well, he no sooner gets up here than he begins to run a temperature, high fever, you know, 103.1. They put him to bed-and if he gets up again, Behrens says, it will be more good luck than good management. But it was high time he came, in any case, Behrens says.-Well, and since then the mother goes about-whenever she is not sitting with them-and if you speak to her, she just says: 'Tous les deux!' 'Tous les deux!' She can't say any more, and for the moment there is no one up here who understands Spanish." She can't say any more, and for the moment there is no one up here who understands Spanish."

"So that's it," Hans Castorp said. "Will she say it to me, when I get to know her, do you think? That will be queer-funny and weird at the same time, I mean." His eyes looked as they had yesterday, they felt hot and heavy, as if tired with weeping, and yet brilliant too, with the gleam that had been kindled in them yesterday at the sound of that strange, new cough on the part of the gentleman rider. He had the feeling that he had been out of touch with yesterday since waking, and had only now picked up the threads again where he laid them down. He told his cousin he was ready, sprinkling a few drops of lavender-water on his handkerchief as he spoke and dabbing his face with it, on the brow and under the eyes. "If you like, we can go to breakfast, tous les tous les deux deux," he recklessly joked. Joachim looked with mildness at him, then smiled his enigmatic smile of mingled melancholy and mockery-or so it seemed, for he did not express himself otherwise.

After looking to his supply of cigars Hans Castorp took coat and stick, also, rather defiantly, his hat-he was far too sure of himself and his station in life to alter his ways and acquire new ones for a mere three weeks' visit-and they went out and down the steps. In the corridor Joachim pointed to this and that door and gave the names of the occupants-there were German names, but also all sorts of foreign ones-with brief comments on them and the seriousness of their cases.

They met people already coming back from breakfast, and when Joachim said good-morning, Hans Castorp courteously lifted his hat. He was tense and nervous, as a young man is when about to present himself before strangers-when, that is, he is conscious that his eyes are heavy and his face red. The last, however, was only true in part, for he was rather pale than otherwise.