The Magic Mountain (105 page)

Pieter Peeperkorn often lay sick in bed—that he did so on the day after that first evening of cards and champagne should come as no surprise. Almost all the guests at that extended and intense party were in a sorry state, not excluding Hans Castorp, who had a bad headache, but did not let that affliction prevent him from paying a sick call on his host of the previous evening; when he ran into the Malayan on the second floor, he asked him to pass on the request and was told he would be welcome.

Entering through a parlor that separated Frau Chauchat’s room from the Dutchman’s. bedroom, which contained two beds, he discovered the latter was conspicuously more spacious and more elegantly furnished than the average Berghof room. There were silk-upholstered easy chairs and tables with legs that had soft, curving lines; a white carpet covered the floor, and the beds were not the customary hygienic deathbeds, but quite splendid affairs: of polished cherry, with brass hardware and a little canopy—without curtains—that joined the two beds as a kind of small, protective baldachin.

Peeperkorn was lying in one of the beds, with books, letters, and newspapers strewn across a red silk quilt, and was reading the
Telegraaf
with the help of his high-bridged, horn-rimmed pince-nez. Next to him on a chair was a tray with coffee things and on his nightstand, amid glasses of medicine, was a half-empty bottle of wine—the simple, sparkling Swiss red of the night before. To Hans Castorp’s quiet amazement, the Dutchman was not wearing a white shin, but a woolen affair with long sleeves that buttoned at the wrists and an open, collarless neck, the smooth fabric clinging to the old man’s broad shoulders and massive chest. This outfit set the human grandeur of that head in strong relief against the pillow, in part lending it a less bourgeois, more working-class look, in part suggesting a sculptured, immortalized bust.

“By all means, young man,” he said, grabbing his pince-nez by its high bridge and removing it. “I beg you, please—not at all. On the contrary.” And Hans Castorp sat down beside him, hiding his sympathetic surprise—if indeed genuine admiration was not the emotion his sense of justice demanded of him—behind amiable, bright chatter, which Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent scraps of conversation and very compelling gestures. He did not look good—looked worse for wear in fact, yellow, downright sick. Toward morning he had had an attack of fever, which always left him exhausted and was accompanied now by the unpleasant consequences of drink.

“We overdid it last night,” he said. “No, permit me to say—overdid it badly. You are still—fine, and so it makes no real—but at my age and in my compromised—my child,” he said, turning with mild, yet resolute sternness to Frau Chauchat, who had just entered from the parlor, “—fine, fine, but I repeat, better attention should have been paid, I should have been prevented from—” Something like gathering royal wrath came to his face and voice as he spoke these words. But one needed only to imagine what sort of a storm would have erupted had anyone seriously attempted to disturb him in his drinking, to realize just how unfair and unreasonable such an objection was. It was probably just a part of grandeur. His traveling companion ignored it, too, and greeted Hans Castorp, who had risen from his chair—though she did not extend him her hand, but simply smiled and gestured for him “oh, but please” to resume his seat and “oh, but please” not to let her interrupt his tête-à-tête with Mynheer Peeperkorn. She busied herself with this and that in the room, instructed the valet to remove the coffee things, disappeared for a while, then returned again on cat’s feet, but did not sit down, just stood there and joined briefly in their conversation, or—to record Hans Castorp’s general impression—monitored it a bit. But of course! It had been no problem for her to return to the Berghof in the company of a personality of grand stature; but when the man who had waited for her here so long now displayed the reverence due such a personality, from man to man, she revealed her own uneasiness in pointed phrases like “oh, but please.” Hans Castorp could only smile at it—but he bent down over his knees to hide his smile and experienced the inner glow of joy.

Peeperkorn offered him a glass of wine from the bottle on the nightstand. Under such circumstances, the Dutchman remarked, the best thing was to pick up where one had left off the night before, and this sparkling wine had the same good effect as soda water. He touched glasses with Hans Castorp, who as he sipped watched the freckled, lance-nailed captain’s hand, the woolen shin buttoned just above its wrist, lift the glass to the broad, ragged lips that now formed around the rim and toss the wine down the bouncing workingman’s, or sculptured bust’s, gullet. They then spoke about the medicine on the nightstand, a brown liquid, from which Peeperkorn took the spoonful Frau Chauchat urged upon him. It was an antipyretic, mainly quinine. The Dutchman gave his guest a little sample, just so he could experience its rich, bitter, spicy taste; and he went on to praise quinine at some length, because its beneficial effects were not limited simply to destroying germs and regulating body temperature, but it also deserved to be celebrated as a tonic that retarded the metabolism of protein and enhanced one’s appetite. In short, it was a true regaling cordial, a splendid drink that invigorated, stimulated, and quickened the system—an intoxicating drug, as well, by the way; one could very easily get a little tipsy and mellow from it, he said, gesturing with both fingers and head as he had the night before in the grand jocular fashion that made him resemble a dancing heathen priest.

Yes, a splendid substance, this china-bark! European pharmacology had known of it, by the way, for less than three hundred years, and chemistry had discovered quinine less than a hundred years before—that is, the alkaloid that was the basis of its virtue—discovered and to some extent analyzed it, though thus far the chemists could not claim to understand its composition well enough to produce it artificially. In general, our pharmacologists would do well not to be too overweening about their knowledge, for they had the same problem with a great many things: they knew this and that about the dynamics and effects of a substance, but any question as to precise causes all too frequently proved an embarrassment. The young man needed only to look at toxicology. No one would be able to give him any information about the elementary properties that produced the effects of so-called poisons. Snake venoms, for instance, why, no more was known about them than that, as animal products, they were included among the complex proteins, were made up of simpler proteins that in certain—but as yet quite uncertain—combinations packed a wallop. Introduced into the bloodstream, they brought forth results we considered quite astounding, simply because we were not used to equating protein and poison. But the world of substances, Peeperkorn said—holding the ring of perfection and the three finger lances up next to his head, which he had now lifted from the pillow to gaze out with pale eyes from under the arabesques of his brow—the world of substances was such that they all concealed both life and death simultaneously, all were both therapeutic and poisonous. Pharmacology and toxicology were one and the same thing—we were healed by poisons, and a substance considered an agent of life could, under certain circumstances, in a single convulsion kill within seconds.

He spoke very forcefully and with unusual coherence about medicines and poisons, and Hans Castorp tilted his head and nodded as he listened, less concerned with the contents of what was said, which seemed very important to the Dutchman, than with quietly exploring the effects of the man’s personality, which ultimately was as inexplicable as the effects of snake venoms. Dynamics, that was everything in the world of substances, Peeperkorn said, all else was relative. Quinine was a therapeutic poison, too, of first-class potency. Four grams of it caused dizziness, deafness, shortness of breath, produced blurred vision like atropine, intoxicated like alcohol; and the workers in quinine factories had bloodshot eyes and swollen lips, suffered from skin rashes. And he began to talk about the cinchona, the china-bark tree, about the primeval forests of the Cordillera, where it grew at altitudes above ten thousand feet, which was why the bark, known as “Jesuits’ powder,” had been so late in coming to Spain—though the natives of South America had long known its powers. He described the Dutch government’s massive cinchona plantations on Java, from which each year many millions of pounds of the bark were exported in the form of reddish, cinnamon-like quills to Amsterdam and London. There was something about bark as such, the tissue between the epidermis and the cambium of ligneous plants, Peeperkorn said—it almost always possessed extraordinary dynamic virtues, both for good and evil. Primitive peoples’ understanding of such drugs far exceeded our own. On some islands east of New Guinea young people prepared a love potion from the bark of a particular tree, presumably a poisonous species like the
Antiaris toxicaria
of Java, which like the manzanilla tree exhaled toxic vapors that could fatally stupefy man and beast. They took the bark of this tree, then ground it into a powder, mixed the powder with rasped coconut, rolled the mixture in a leaf, and roasted it. They then sprinkled the tea from this mixture into the face of the desired reluctant lover while she slept, causing her to burn with love for whoever sprinkled it. Sometimes it was the bark of roots that had such qualities, like those of a vine on the Malay peninsula called
Strychnos tieuté
, with which the natives mixed snake venom to make upas-rajah, a drug that when introduced into the bloodstream, with a dart or arrow for instance, led to almost instant death, although there was no one who could have told young Hans Castorp how it actually did so. This much was clear, however: upas stood in close dynamic relationship to strychnine. Peeperkorn was sitting up in bed now and with a lightly trembling captain’s hand he would occasionally set the wineglass to his ragged lips and take great, thirsty gulps. He went on to speak about the “crow’s-eye tree” of the Coromandel coast, from whose orange-yellow berries, the “crow’s eyes,” was extracted the most dynamic alkaloid of all, called strychnine. Keeping his voice at a low whisper, while lines creased his raised brow, he described the ash-gray branches, the garishly shiny leaves, and the yellow-green blossoms of this tree, so that as young Hans Castorp pictured it in his mind’s eye, the image was both dismal and hysterically garish, leaving him with a rather eerie feeling.

Frau Chauchat broke in now, saying that this was not good for Peeperkorn, that the conversation was fatiguing him, might cause another fever attack, and as much as she disliked interrupting their visit, she really did have to ask Hans Castorp to let that be all for now. Which he did, of course; but over the next few months, he would often sit at the regal man’s bedside after one of these quartan attacks—while Frau Chauchat came and went, casually monitoring the conversation or participating with a few words of her own. And even on days when Peeperkorn was free of fever, Hans Castorp would spend several hours with him and his pearl-necklaced traveling companion. For when the Dutchman was not confined to bed, he seldom failed to gather about him a small, constantly changing assortment of Berghof guests for after-dinner games with wine and other regalements, either in the social rooms as on that first occasion, or in the restaurant; and Hans Castorp would take his customary seat between the great man and the careless woman. They kept company even outdoors, took walks together, and were joined at times by Herr Ferge and Herr Wehsal, and soon by Settembrini and Naphta as well, for they could not have failed to run into those intellectual adversaries; Hans Castorp thought himself very lucky to be able to introduce them to Peeperkorn, and, at last, to Clavdia Chauchat as well—and was totally unconcerned whether the disputants welcomed these new acquaintances and connections. He was quietly confident that they required a pedagogic object and would rather put up with unwelcome society than entirely forfeit the chance to thrash out their differences before him.

And he was not mistaken in assuming that the members of his motley circle of friends would at least get used to not getting used to one another. To be sure, there was quite sufficient tension, strain, and even silent hostility among them; and we ourselves are amazed that our inconsequential hero managed to keep the group together. Our only explanation is that there was something shrewdly life-affirming in our hero’s nature, which allowed him to find everything “worth listening to” and which one might also call obligingness, in the sense that it not only bound him to very different kinds of people and personalities, but also to some extent linked them to one another.

What a strange interweaving of relationships it was! We are intrigued by the idea of making that tangle of threads visible to all for just a moment, much as Hans Castorp himself was able to observe it with a shrewd and life-affirming eye on their walks together. There was miserable Wehsal, whose desire for Frau Chauchat continued to smolder and who humbly revered Peeperkorn and Hans Castorp, the former for his command of the present, the latter for events in the past. There was Clavdia Chauchat herself, that charming, softly treading patient and traveler, who was Peeperkorn’s vassal, by choice and conviction, to be sure—yet the sight of a cavalier from a long-ago Mardi Gras night on such good terms with her lord and master always made her somewhat uneasy, honing her emotions to a point. But was not the annoyance she felt in this regard somehow reminiscent of her relationship to Settembrini, young Hans Castorp’s pedagogic friend? To that eloquent orator and humanist, whom she could not stand and called arrogant and inhumane? How she would have loved to have confronted him and demanded to know what those words (spoken in his Mediterranean tongue, of which she understood not a syllable more than he of hers, though with none of his supercilious contempt)—what those words had been that he had called after the agreeable young German, just as the lad was about to approach her that night, this pretty little bourgeois lad who came from a good family and had a moist spot? Hans Castorp—“head over heels in love,” as people say, and yet not in the happy sense of the idiom, but as one loves when it is forbidden and unreasonable, when there are no calm little songs from the flatlands to be sung, terribly in love, dependent, subjugated, suffering and serving—was nevertheless a man who remained shrewd enough amid his slavery to know exactly what his devotion was worth, and would continue to be worth, to the slinking patient with the enchanting “Tartar slits”; and she could be constantly reminded of its worth, or so he told himself despite his suffering subjugation, by the behavior of Herr Settembrini, who only too openly confirmed her own suspicions by attitudes as dismissive toward her as humanistic courtesy allowed. The worst pan—or, in Hans Castorp’s eyes, the best—was that she did not find any real compensation, either, in her relationship to Leo Naphta, in whom she had set some hope. Granted, she did not have to deal here with Herr Lodovico’s fundamental repudiation of her character, and the essentials for conversation were somewhat more favorable, so that the two of them, Clavdia and the caustic little man, would sometimes move away from the others to talk: about books, about questions of political philosophy, where they found agreement in radical answers; and Hans Castorp sometimes ingenuously joined in as well. Yet she could not help noticing that the parvenu, being a cautious man like all parvenus, showed a certain aristocratic restraint toward her; his Spanish terrorism ultimately had little in common with her own door-slamming, vagabonding “
hu
maneness.” And last and subtlest of all, there was a gentle malice that was hard to define, but which she, with a woman’s heightened awareness, surely had to feel drifting toward her from
both
adversaries, Settembrini and Naphta (and indeed her Mardi Gras cavalier felt it as well), and which had its origin in their relationship to Hans Castorp: the pedagogue’s inherent ill will toward women as a disruptive and distracting element, a silent and primal hostility that united the two men by abrogating their intense pedagogic rivalry.