The Magic Mountain (115 page)
Indeed, Hans Castorp’s good nature destined him to be the confidant of more than one fellow resident obsessed with some idea and yet sadly unable to find a hearing among the easygoing majority. An erstwhile sculptor from the Austrian provinces, a handsome older gentleman with a white moustache, aquiline nose, and blue eyes, had come up with a project for raising public revenues, which he had written out in a fine hand, underlining the important points in sepia watercolor. The plan was that every newspaper subscriber would have to save his daily paper, weighing 1.4 ounces, which would then be collected on the first of each month, yielding approximately thirty pounds of used paper a year, no less than six hundred pounds in twenty years—at ten pfennigs a pound, that would come to sixty German marks. Five million subscribers, the memorandum continued, would therefore in the course of twenty years recycle newspaper worth the immense sum of three hundred million marks, two-thirds of which would be applied to renewing subscriptions, making them much cheaper, and one-third, around one hundred million marks, made available for humanitarian purposes—to finance tuberculosis sanatoriums for the general public, to subsidize struggling artists, and so forth. The plan was worked out in detail, down to a punch-holed form to be used as the receipt for reimbursements and a sketch of a sliding scale from which the department in charge of collection could figure the value of the quantity turned in each month. From any point of view, it was a solidly based, well-justified plan. Imprudent waste and destruction of newsprint, unwittingly flushed down the drain or sent up the chimney, was high treason, a crime against our forests and the nation’s economy. Saving paper, conserving’ paper, meant saving and conserving cellulose, the forests themselves, and the human labor needed to produce cellulose and paper—both labor and capital. And since old newspaper would also be recycled as valuable packing paper and cardboard, which would then provide an important economic base for national and local taxation, the plan would also reduce the tax burden on newspaper subscribers. In short, it was a good plan, indeed incontrovertible; and if there seemed to be something uncanny and frivolous, sinister and mad about it, that was due simply to the skewed fanaticism with which the erstwhile artist pursued and advocated his one and only economic plan—which he evidently did not take seriously enough to make even the least attempt to put into action. Hans Castorp would tilt his head and nod as he listened to the man propagate his earth-saving ideas in flights of fevered eloquence, and all the while he would explore the nature of his own contempt and disdain that prevented him from joining the inventor in his battle against a thoughtless world.
Several Berghof residents studied Esperanto and had learned enough to converse in the artificial lingo at meals. Hans Castorp cast them dark glances, and kept to himself the fact that he did not think them the worst of the lot. A group of English guests had recently introduced a parlor game that consisted of nothing more than the first person’s turning to his neighbor in a circle and asking, “Did you ever see the Devil with a nightcap on?” to which that person replied, “No, I never saw the Devil with a nightcap on,” and then passed the question along—and on it went, round and round. It was dreadful. But poor Hans Castorp grew even gloomier watching the solitaire players, who could be seen at work everywhere in the Berghof at all hours. For the passion for this pastime had so taken hold of late that the whole place was a den of iniquity; and Hans Castorp had all the more reason to feel gripped by horror, because he fell victim to the plague himself for a while—was indeed perhaps one of the most serious cases. He was afflicted by a game known as “elevens,” in which a bridge deck is arranged in three rows of three cards each, and any two cards that add up to eleven, plus any of the three face cards when they turn up, are then covered anew, until, if fortune smiles, the game is won. One would not think it possible that such a simple game could be the source of such exquisite joy, to the point of sheer bewitchment. And yet Hans Castorp, like so many others, explored that possibility—explored it with a scowl, for debauchery is never cheerful. He was the plaything of the imp of the cards, a captive of the capricious whims of its favor, which would sometimes start things out on an easy wave of luck—all jacks, queens, kings, and sums of eleven—so that the game was over before the third time through (a fleeting triumph, which only pricked your nerves to try again); at other times the imp waited until the ninth and final card to deny any chance of its ever being covered or at the very last moment it abruptly blocked everything and cast an almost certain victory to the winds. Hans Castorp played solitaire everywhere, at any time of day—at night under the stars, in the morning in his pajamas, at meals, even in his dreams. He shuddered, but he played. Which was how Herr Settembrini found him one day when he stopped to visit, to “bother” him—as had been his mission from the very first.
“
Accidente!
” he said. “You’re playing solitaire, my good engineer?”
“That’s not quite it,” Hans Castorp replied. “I’m just laying the cards out, wrestling with abstract chance. I’m intrigued by its fickle tricks, the way it can toady up to you and then turn incredibly obstinate. This morning I got out of bed and easily won three games, one after the other, once only twice through—a record for me. And would you believe that I’ve laid them out thirty-two times in a row now, without being able to get halfway through even once?”
Herr Settembrini gazed at him with sad black eyes, as so often in the course of these many little years. “At any rate, I find you preoccupied,” he said. “It doesn’t look as if this is where I shall find solace for my woes, balm for the inner conflict that torments me.”
“Inner conflict?” Hans Castorp repeated, and laid out his cards.
“The world situation baffles me,” the Freemason said. “The Balkan League will be formed, my good engineer, all my sources tell me so. Russia is working feverishly for it, and the arrow of the coalition is pointed at the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, without whose breakup Russia cannot accomplish a single one of its goals. Do you understand my scruples? I hate Vienna with all that is in me, as you know. But should I grant the support of my soul to Sarmatian despotism, when it is about to put the torch to our most noble continent? On the other hand, I would feel personally disgraced by diplomatic cooperation, even on a one-time ad hoc basis, between my own country and Austria. Those are questions of conscience that—”
“Seven and four,” Hans Castorp said. “Eight and three. Jack, queen, king. It’s going to work. You bring me luck, Herr Settembrini.”
The Italian said nothing. Hans Castorp could feel those black eyes, that gaze of reason and morality, resting in deep mourning upon him, but went right on laying out his cards for a while, before he finally laid his cheek in one hand and stared up with a naughty child’s sullen look of false innocence.
“Your eyes,” his mentor said, “try in vain to conceal that you know how things stand with you.”
“
Placet experiri
,” Hans Castorp had the impudence to reply, and Herr Settembrini departed—and then, to be sure, once left to his own devices, the young man did not lay out his cards again, but sat for a long time at the table in his white room, his head propped in his hand, brooding, gripped by the horror of the eerie and skewed state in which he saw the world entrapped, by the fear of the grinning demon and monkey-god in whose crazed and unrestrained power he now found himself—and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”
A fearful, apocalyptic name, very much calculated to instill secret terrors. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and the area around his heart with the palms of his hands. He was afraid. It was as if “all this” could come to no good end, as if the end was surely a catastrophe, a rebellion of patient nature, a thunderstorm and a great cleansing wind that would break the spell cast over the world, wrench life from its “dead standstill,” and overturn the “doldrums” in a terrible Last Judgment. He longed to flee, as noted—it was just lucky that medical authority had, as mentioned before, kept an “unblinking eye” on him, that it had known how to read the expression on his face and was intent on diverting him with new, fertile hypotheses.
In its fraternity jargon and cadence, medical authority had announced the true cause for the waywardness of Hans Castorp’s body temperature and offered its scientific opinion that the cause would not be difficult to overcome and that a cure and authorized release back to the flatlands suddenly loomed ahead in the near future. Assailed by manifold sensations, the young man’s heart pounded hard as he held out his arm to give blood, and he turned slightly pale as he admired the splendid ruby red of the sap of life rising to fill glass tubes. Assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, the director himself performed this little operation with its far-reaching consequences. Then came a series of days that for Hans Castorp were dominated by one question: once outside his body, would what he had given pass the test under the eye of science?
Nothing had been able to grow as yet, of course, the director said at first. Unfortunately, nothing showed signs of wanting to grow, he said later. But then came a morning when he walked up to Hans Castorp during breakfast—seated nowadays at the upper end of the Good Russian table, where once had sat the great man with whom he had shared the bond of brotherhood—and, amid idiomatic congratulations, revealed to him that streptococci had been identified beyond a doubt in one of the prepared cultures. It was now a matter of probabilities: should the symptoms of toxicity be traced to the small tubercle bacillus, which was also present, or to strep, whose presence was quite modest? He, Behrens, would have to inspect the matter at length and more closely—the culture was not yet ripe. He showed it to Hans Castorp in the lab: a blood-red jelly with little gray dots here and there. Those were the cocci. (Every ass could have cocci, however, as well as tubercles; and if there had been no symptoms, these findings would have been of no further significance.)
Outside his body, under the eye of science, Hans Castorp’s congealed blood continued to pass the test. There came a morning when the director in his spirited idiomatic phrases reported: Cocci had grown not just in one culture, but in all the rest now as well, and in great quantity. It was uncertain if they were all strep; it was more than likely, however, that the symptoms of toxicity came from them—though one could not be certain, of course, how many of those symptoms might be credited to unvanquished remnants of tuberculosis definitely present as well. And the conclusion to be drawn? Strepto-vaccine therapy! The prognosis? Extraordinarily good—particularly since the therapy carried no risk, and so could not hurt in any case. For the serum would be made from Hans Castorp’s own blood, so that the injections could introduce no contagious matter into his body that was not already there. At worst, it would be useless, have no effect—but, then, could one call that a worst case, since the patient would be staying on at any rate.
Well, Hans Castorp was not willing to go quite that far. But he submitted to the therapy, though he found it ridiculous and disgraceful. These vaccinations of himself with himself could be no more than a disgustingly joyless diversion, a self-to-self incestuous abomination, an infertile, hopeless enterprise inside his own body. That was the voice of ignorant hypochondria, which proved correct only as to infertility—though, to be sure, completely correct in that one point. The diversion lasted several weeks. At times it seemed to make him ill—though, of course, he had to be in error about that—at times it seemed to help; but that turned out to be an error as well. The result was zero, though that was never expressly announced. The enterprise fizzled out, and Hans Castorp went on playing solitaire—eye to eye with the demon whose unrestrained power he could not help feeling was sure to come to some horrible end.
What new acquisition of the Berghof was it, then, that rescued our friend of many years from his mania for solitaire and led him into the arms of another, nobler, if ultimately no less strange passion? We are about to introduce it, since we ourselves are much taken by that mysterious object’s secret charms and are honestly eager to share them.
In its never-resting concern for its guests, a thoughtful management had decided to add another amusing gadget to the collection in the main social room—purchased at a price we do not care to estimate, but that must have been considerable, a handsome disbursement on the part of the administration of this highly recommended institution. An ingenious toy, then, on the line of the stereoscopic viewer, the tubelike kaleidoscope, and the cinematographic drum? Yes indeed—and then again, not at all like them. First, it was not an optical contrivance that the guests found one evening in the music room—some of them greeting it by clasping their hands over their heads, others by folding them reverently with heads bowed—it was an acoustic instrument; and second, there was no comparison to those little mechanisms in value, status, and rank. This was no childish, monotonous peep show, of which they were all tired and with which no one bothered after his first three weeks here. It was an overflowing cornucopia of artistic pleasure, of delights for the soul from merry to somber. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.
We are seriously concerned that the term may be misunderstood, be associated with undignified and outdated notions, with an obsolete model that in no way does justice to the reality we envision here, the product of untiring advances in musical technology, developed to elegant perfection. My dear friends, this was no wretched crank-box, the old-fashioned sort with a turntable and stylus on top, plus a misshapen, trumpetlike brass appendage, the sort of thing you might have found at one time set up on a tavern counter to fill unsophisticated ears with nasal braying. This small cabinet, a little deeper than it was wide, was stained a dull black, had a silky cord that led to an electrical wall outlet, and stood on its special table in simple dignity—and bore no resemblance whatever to such crude, antediluvian machines. When you lifted the gracefully beveled lid, a well-secured brass rod raised automatically to hold it in place at a protective angle, and inside you saw, set slightly lower, the turntable with its green cloth cover and nickel rim, plus the nickel spindle that fitted into the hole of the ebonite disks. At the front on the right was a device like the dial on a clock for regulating the turntable’s tempo, to its left, the lever that started and stopped it; at the rear on the left, however, was the sinuous, club-shaped nickel tube that had pliant, movable joints and ended in a flat, round sound-box equipped with a screw into which the needle was inserted. When you opened the double doors at the front, you saw a diagonal pattern of wooden louvers stained black—nothing more.