The Magic Mountain (119 page)
Those, then, were Hans Castorp’s favorite recordings.
Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had taken an unexpected turn after all these little years. His researches, dedicated to psychic dissection and the dream life of his patients, had always had a subterranean character, the whiff of the catacomb. Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall—the sanatorium’s main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.
We say this, because we consider it our duty to shame irresponsible sorts who asserted that Dr. Krokowski had turned to arcane subjects in the hope of rescuing his lectures from what he feared was unmitigated monotony. His purposes, then, were purely emotional—or so said slanderous tongues, of which there is never a lack. It is true that during those Monday sessions, the gentlemen flicked their ears more vigorously to hear better and that Fräulein Levi looked even more than ever like a mechanically driven wax figure, if that was possible. But such effects were as legitimate as the changes that came with the evolution of the learned doctor’s thought—an evolution he saw as not only consistent, but also inevitable. His field of study had always been concerned with those dark, vast regions of the human soul that are called the subconscious, although one would perhaps do better to speak of the superconscious, since there are occasions when the knowledge that rises up from those regions far exceeds an individual’s conscious knowledge, suggesting that there may be connections and associations between the bottommost unlighted tracts of the individual soul and an omniscient universal soul. The realm of the subconscious, the “occult” realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply that same makeshift term. That is not all. Any man who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of forbidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world—a power he is then forced to declare to be the second source of magical phenomena. As an idealist of the pathological, if not to say a pathological idealist, such a man will see himself at the starting point of a sequence of thought that very quickly flows into the problem of being-in-general—that is to say, into the problem of the relationship between mind and matter. The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly opposite terms. All in all, this is nothing less than the old argument over which came first, the chicken or the egg, an argument that is so extraordinarily perplexing because of two facts: first, we cannot imagine an egg that has not been laid by a hen; and second, no hen exists that has not crept out of a postulated egg.
These were the issues, then, that Dr. Krokowski had been discussing in his recent lectures. He had come to them by organic, legitimate, logical means—we cannot emphasize that enough; and to go one step farther, we shall add that he had begun to discuss them long before Ellen Brand appeared on the scene and brought these matters to the stage of empirical experiment.
Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our audience does not know her, whereas the name is quite familiar to us. Who was she? Almost nobody at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen—everyone called her Elly—with flax-blond hair, a Danish girl, not even from Copenhagen, but from Odense on the island of Fyn, where her father owned a butter factory. She knew something about real life, had in fact spent a couple of years as a clerk in a provincial branch office of a national bank, sitting on a swivel stool, a sleeve-protector on her right arm, and staring at massive tomes—and had ended up with a fever. Her case was negligible, really more suspicion than fact, even though Elly was delicate, and obviously anemic, too—but definitely a likable girl, the sort you would have loved to pat on her flax-blond head, as the director did regularly whenever he spoke to her in the dining hall. There was an aura of Nordic coolness about her, a glasslike chasteness, a virginal, childish quality that was quite attractive, as were both the full, pure look in her blue, childlike eyes and her pointed, refined way of speaking, in a slightly broken German with the typical mispronunciations of Danes—like “fleck” for “flesh.” There was nothing remarkable about her facial features. The chin was too small. She sat at the same table as Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered her.
This, then, was Fräulein Brand, Elly, the friendly little Danish girl, who rode a bike and used to sit on an office swivel stool—and there were things about her that no one would have even dreamed possible on first or second glance at that shining face, but that began to emerge within only a few weeks after her arrival up here and that Dr. Krokowski saw as his task to uncover in all their strangeness.
Some parlor games during an evening social were what first pulled the learned doctor up short. There had been all sorts of guessing games; then came the search for hidden objects, done with piano accompaniment, which would be played louder if the searcher got closer to the hiding-place, and softer if he or she wandered off track. This was followed by a game in which someone was sent out of the room, and when he came back had to guess the complicated task the others had decided he was to perform—exchanging the rings worn by two people, for example; or bowing three times in order to ask someone to dance; or fetching a particular book from the library and giving it to some particular person; and so on. It should be noted that games of this sort had not normally been played in Berghof society. Who had been the actual instigator could not be determined afterward. It had definitely not been Elly. But it was in her presence that they first took a fancy to such amusements.
The participants—almost all of them old acquaintances of ours, including Hans Castorp—showed some skill, to a greater or lesser degree, although a few of them were totally inept. Elly Brand’s abilities turned out to be quite extraordinary, sensational, unseemly. Her resourcefulness in searching out hidden objects was greeted with much applause and admiring laughter, and that might have been the end of it; but when she began guessing her complicated task, people slowly fell silent. She accomplished everything they had secretly assigned her to do, carried it out the moment she entered the room, with a gentle smile, without hesitation, and without musical accompaniment, either. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining hall and sprinkled it on Prosecutor Paravant’s head, then took him by the hand, led him to the piano, and held his forefinger to plunk out the beginning of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Then she brought him back to his seat, curtsied, pulled over a footstool, and sat down at his feet—exactly as they had racked their brains to devise.
She had been listening!
She blushed; and much relieved at seeing her embarrassment, they began to scold her in unison—until she assured them that no, no, no, they shouldn’t think such a thing of her. She had not been listening, not outside, not at the door, truly she hadn’t.
Not outside, not at the door?
“Oh, no.” But she did apologize all the same—she had been listening here in the room, after she came in. She couldn’t help that.
Could not help it? In the room?
It came in whispers. It was whispered to her what she had to do, very softly, but quite clearly and distinctly.
It was a confession, apparently. Elly felt guilty somehow, felt she had cheated. She should have told them she was not suited for such games, because everything was whispered to her. There is no earthly point in a contest where one of the competitors possesses supernatural powers. To use a term from sports, Ellen was suddenly disqualified, but in a way that made chills run up your spine when she confessed. Several voices immediately cried out for Dr. Krokowski. Someone ran to get him, and he came: he broke into a rugged, pithy smile once he had the picture, his very presence demanding their cheerful trust. They breathlessly reported this case of crass abnormality: an omniscient girl had appeared on the scene, a maiden who heard voices. —My, my, and what else? They should just calm down now. We would see. This was his native soil—marshy, soggy, unsteady footing for all, though he trod it with more steady assurance. He asked questions, heard them out. My, my, well, what had they here? “So that’s how things are with you, my child, is it?” And he laid a hand on the young girl’s head, the way everyone liked to do. Certainly something worthy of attention, but nothing to be frightened by in the least. He let his hand drift down from her head in a gentle stroke along her shoulder, to her arm, and fastening his exotic brown eyes on her bright blue ones, he submerged his gaze in hers. She returned it meekly, then more meekly still, that is, lowered her eyes more and more, as her head slipped slowly toward her chest and shoulder. When her eyes began to roll back, the physician passed his hand in a casual upward sweep in front of her face, declared everything perfectly in order, and sent the entire excited party off to evening rest cure—except for Elly Brand, with whom he said he wanted to “chat” a little.
Chat! They should have known. And yet no one felt all that easy about the word, even if it was a standard word for their cheerful comrade, Dr. Krokowski. Everyone felt the touch of an icy finger deep inside, even Hans Castorp, who was late in finding his way to his splendid lounge chair that evening; he stretched out and recalled how, as he watched Elly’s unseemly achievements and listened to her embarrassed explanation, the ground had shifted under his feet, making him feel a little queasy and anxious all over, like a slight touch of seasickness. He had never been in an earthquake, but he told himself that it most probably evoked similar sensations of unmistakable terror—quite apart from the curiosity that Ellen Brand’s disagreeable talents also awakened in him. It was a curiosity that bore within it a sense of its own ultimate hopelessness, that is, an awareness that there were regions to which his mind was forbidden the access it groped to find—giving rise to doubts whether it was simply idle, or perhaps sinful curiosity, which did not, however, prevent it from being what it was: curiosity. Like everyone else, over the course of his life Hans Castorp had heard one thing or another about arcane. natural, or supernatural, phenomena—there has already been mention made of his clairvoyant great-aunt, whose melancholy story had been passed down to him. But never had that world, to which he would not have denied theoretical and unbiased recognition, pressed in hard upon him; he had no practical experience of it, and the aversion he felt to such experiences (an aversion based on good taste, an aesthetic aversion, an aversion that came with his pride as a human being—if we can apply such pretentious terms to our thoroughly unpretentious hero) was almost equal to the curiosity they aroused in him. He could sense in advance, quite clearly, quite definitely, that however such experiences might develop, they would never seem anything but preposterous, incomprehensible, and lacking in human value. And yet he burned to taste them. He understood that “idle or sinful”—which was bad enough as an alternative—was no alternative at all, that the two coincided, and that to say something was spiritually and intellectually “hopeless” was merely the amoral way of saying it was “forbidden.” And yet the old
placet experiri
, planted in him by someone who would have most stoutly disapproved of any experiments of
this
sort, had taken firm root in Hans Castorp’s mind. By now, his morality coincided with his curiosity, probably always had. It was the unconditional curiosity of the tourist thirsty for knowledge; a curiosity that, in having tasted the mystery of personality, had perhaps not been all that far from the realms emerging here; a curiosity that displayed something of a military character by not trying to evade something forbidden if it might offer itself. And so Hans Castorp decided to be on the alert and not to step aside if Ellen Brand should have further adventures.
Dr. Krokowski issued a strict prohibition against any more lay experiments with Fräulein Brand’s hidden talents. He placed a scientific embargo on the child, held sessions with her in his analytical dungeon, and hypnotized her, so it was said, in an attempt to develop and train the possibilities slumbering inside her and to probe her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, as a motherly friend and benefactor, did the same, and learned a few things under the seal of secrecy, which under the same seal she then spread throughout the house, not excluding the concierge desk. She learned, for example, that the person or thing that had whispered things to the girl during the game was named Holger—it was a boy named Holger, a spirit, whom little Ellen knew quite well, a deceased, ethereal creature, something like her guardian angel. —And so he had blabbed the part about the pinch of salt and Paravant’s forefinger? —Yes, his phantom lips caressing her ear, so close they tickled a little and made her smile, had whispered it all to her. —That must have been nice back in school to have had Holger whisper the answers when she hadn’t done her homework. —Ellen had made no response. But later, she said that Holger probably was not allowed to do that. He was forbidden to get mixed up in serious matters, and besides, he probably had not known many answers to school questions.