The Magic Mountain (78 page)

Then came the eve of departure, when Joachim did everything for the last time—each meal, each rest cure, each promenade—and took his leave of the doctors and the head nurse. And then came the day itself. Joachim arrived at breakfast with glowing eyes and cold hands, since he had not slept at all, and hardly ate a bite. When the dwarf reported that his baggage was strapped to the carriage, he hastily jumped to his feet to bid farewell to his tablemates. As she said her good-byes, Frau Stöhr wept great tears, the unsalty, free-flowing tears of the uncultured; and in the next moment, behind Joachim’s back, she turned to the teacher, shook her head, and wagged one hand, its fingers splayed—her sour expression reflecting a vulgar skepticism about Joachim’s permission to depart and how he would manage now. Hans Castorp watched her as he stood there drinking the rest of his tea, ready to follow his cousin out. There was still some tipping to do, and then came the official farewell in the lobby, extended by a representative of the management. As always, patients had gathered to watch the departure: Frau Iltis of the “stirletto,” Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion, drastic Herr Popóv and his wife. They waved their handkerchiefs as the carriage, rear brake set, skidded down the driveway. Joachim had been given roses. He was wearing a hat. Hans Castorp was not.

It was a splendid morning, the first sunny day after a long gloomy period. Outlined against the blue were the unchanged hallmarks of Schiahorn, Green Towers, and Dorfberg—Joachim’s eyes rested on them. What a shame he had to depart in such beautiful weather, Hans Castorp remarked; there was something almost spiteful about it, because a last inhospitable impression always made parting easier. To which Joachim replied that things didn’t have to be made easier for him, that this was excellent drill weather, which he would certainly ‘be able to use down below. Otherwise they said little. As things stood for each of them and between them, there was in fact little to say. Besides, the limping concierge was right in front of them, up on the box next to the driver.

Sitting up straight, thrown back against the cabriolet’s hard cushions, they crossed the brook and then the narrow tracks, following the street running alongside them and faced by an irregular pattern of buildings, and halted now on the gravel apron in front of the Dorf railroad station, which was not much more than a shed. Hans Castorp was startled to recognize it all again; he had not seen the station since his arrival at dusk thirteen months before. “This is where I arrived,” he said superfluously. And Joachim simply replied, “Yes, so you did,” and paid the driver.

The bustling, limping concierge took care of everything—the ticket, the baggage. They stood side by side on the platform, next to the miniature train, right in front of the little gray-upholstered compartment where

Joachim had claimed a seat with his coat, plaid blanket, and roses. “Well, make sure you swear that oath fervently,” Hans Castorp said; and Joachim responded, “I intend to.” And what else? They exchanged final regards to be paid both to people down below and up here. Then Hans Castorp stood there drawing figures on the asphalt with his cane. At the “all aboard” call, he looked up in surprise; he stared at Joachim. Joachim stared at him. They shook hands. Hans Castorp managed a vague smile; his cousin’s eyes were serious, sad, urgent. “Hans!” he said—good God! Had the world ever known a more embarrassing moment? He had called Hans Castorp by his first name. Their whole lives long they had used informal pronouns and phrases like “my man,” and now, in defiance of all cool, reserved custom, in a moment of the most embarrassing exuberance—a first name. “Hans,” he said, and in desperate anguish he squeezed his cousin’s hand, and the latter noticed Joachim’s head trembling from lack of sleep and the excitement of the trip, just as his own did when he “played king.” “Hans,” he said imploringly, “come soon!” And then he swung himself up on the footboard. The door closed, there was a whistle, the cars banged against each other, the little locomotive pulled, the train glided away. The traveler waved from the window with his hat; the man left behind waved with his hand. He stood there a long time, alone, his heart in turmoil. Then he slowly walked back up the road that Joachim had led him along little more than a year before.

The wheel turned. The clock hand jerked. Orchis and columbine had ceased blooming, as had the wild pink. The deep blue stars of gentian and the pale, poisonous blossoms of meadow crocus appeared again in the wet grasses, and there was a reddish cast to the woodlands. The autumn equinox had passed, All Souls’ was coming into view—and for expert consumers of time, that meant so were the first Sunday in Advent, the shortest day of the year, and Christmas. But for now, there was a succession of beautiful October days—days like the one on which the cousins had viewed the director’s oil paintings.

Since Joachim’s departure, Hans Castorp no longer sat at Frau Stöhr’s table—the same table that had been abandoned by the late Dr. Blumenkohl and where Marusya had sat, stifling her unfounded mirth in her orange-scented handkerchief. New guests, total strangers, were sitting there now. Two and a half months into our friend’s second year, management had assigned him a different seat, at a neighboring table set crosswise to his old one, between it and the Good Russian table and farther toward the veranda door on the left—in short, Settembrini’s table. Yes, Hans Castorp was now sitting in the same spot the humanist had deserted; like his old place, it was at one end of the table, opposite the “doctor’s chair,” which was reserved at each of the seven tables for the director and his aide-de-camp.

At the far end on his left, the hunchbacked amateur photographer from Mexico sat perched on several pillows, wearing the facial expression of a deaf man, the result of linguistic isolation; on his right was seated the old maid from Transylvania, a lady who, as Herr Settembrini had complained, demanded that everyone take an interest in her brother-in-law, although no one knew the man, nor wished to know him. At certain times of the day, she could be seen at the railing of her balcony doing hygienic deep-breathing exercises—her chest, flat as a platter, rising and falling and her cane with a niello-silver handle, which she also used on her constitutionals, held straight across the back of her neck. A Czech gentleman sat across from her; people called him Herr Wenzel, since no one could pronounce his real last name. In his day, Herr Settembrini had tried to utter its intricate succession of consonants—not, however, as an honest attempt at its wild jungle of sound, but as an amusing challenge for his own hopelessly elegant Latinity. Although this Bohemian was as stocky as a badger and displayed an appetite quite amazing even for people up here, he had been asserting for four years now that he would soon die. At their evening socials, he would occasionally plunk out the songs of his homeland on a ribboned mandolin or talk about his sugar-beet plantation, where only pretty maids worked. Closer to Hans Castorp, then, one on each side of the table, came Herr and Frau Magnus—the beer-brewer from Halle and his wife. Melancholy hung like a cloud over them, because both were steadily losing vital products of metabolism—Herr Magnus, sugar; Frau Magnus, protein. The mood of pallid Frau Magnus in particular seemed without a glimmer of hope; she exuded bleakness of spirit the way a cellar exudes damp. And perhaps even more explicitly than ignorant Frau Stöhr, she represented the union of sickness and stupidity that Hans Castorp had declared intellectually offensive—for which Settembrini had rebuked him. Herr Magnus was more talkative and lively by nature, although in ways that had once aroused Settembrini’s literary impatience. He was also inclined to temper tantrums and had frequently clashed with Herr Wenzel about politics or other matters, for he was incensed by the nationalist aspirations of the Bohemian, who likewise declared himself an advocate of temperance and would sometimes cast moral aspersions on the brewer’s profession, whereupon the latter would turn red-faced and defend the incontestable benefits to health found in the beverage with which his interests were so intimately entwined. On such occasions, Herr Settembrini’s humor had at one time helped to smooth matters over; but although he sat in the same chair now, Hans Castorp was less adept at this and unable to lay claim to the necessary authority.

With only two of his tablemates was he acquainted more personally. The first, his neighbor on the left, was A. K. Ferge, the good-natured martyr from Saint Petersburg, from under whose bushy reddish-brown moustache came anecdotes about the manufacture of galoshes and tales of distant regions, the Arctic Circle, and the perpetual winter at North Cape. Hans Castorp even took his constitutionals with him now and then. The other person, however, who would join up with them whenever he met them along the way and who sat at the far end of the table across from the hunchbacked Mexican, was the man from Mannheim with the thinning hair and bad teeth—his name was Wehsal, Ferdinand Wehsal, a merchant by trade, the same man whose eyes had constantly clung with such gloomy hunger to the charming Frau Chauchat and who, ever since Mardi Gras, had sought out Hans Castorp’s friendship.

He did so with dogged humility, gazing up out of devoted eyes, a look that Hans Castorp found disgusting and horrible, for he understood its complex meaning, but that he nevertheless struggled to return in a humane, calm fashion. Knowing that the slightest frown was sufficient to terrify and cow the pitiful, sensitive fellow, he tolerated Wehsal’s servile habit of seizing every opportunity to bow and scrape, sometimes allowed him to carry his overcoat on their promenades—and Wehsal would bear it over one arm with a kind of reverence—and even put up with the Mannheimer’s conversation, and very gloomy conversation it was. Wehsal loved to pose questions such as whether there was any point in declaring one’s love to someone who did not even know one was alive—a hopeless declaration of love, what did the gentlemen think of that? For his part, he thought very highly of it, was of the opinion that it brought infinite happiness. Such an act of confession might arouse disgust and entailed much self-abasement; all the same, it established, if only for a moment, intimate contact with the desired object, dragging her into one’s confidence, into the element of one’s passion, and although it meant that everything was over, such eternal loss was not too much to pay for desperate bliss—for confession was a form of violence, all the more enjoyable for the disgust it encountered. At this, Hans Castorp’s face darkened and Wehsal shrank back, but more in response to the presence of good-natured Herr Ferge—who had often emphasized that all higher, more complicated things were utterly foreign to him—than to any judgmental moral rectitude in our hero’s expression. Since our intent all along has been to make him no better or worse than he was, it should also be noted that when poor Wehsal approached him privately one evening and begged with ashen words for God’s sake to please tell him in strict confidence about his experiences that night of the Mardi Gras party, Hans Castorp had complied with calm charity, although, as the reader can well imagine, he did not permit anything the least bit base or frivolous to sully that hushed scene. All the same, we have our reasons for excluding him and ourselves from it, and will merely add that afterward Wehsal bore his friend’s overcoat with twice the reverence.

But enough of Hans’s new tablemates. The seat on his right was occupied, though only temporarily, for just a few days, by a visitor, just as he himself had once been, by a guest, a relative from the flatlands, an envoy from those regions, one might say—in a word, by Hans’s uncle James Tienappel.

It was strange suddenly to have sitting beside him a representative and ambassador from home, the scent of an old, vanished, earlier life, of an “upper world” that lay so far below, still clinging fresh to the weave of the man’s English suit. But it had been inevitable. Hans Castorp had been quietly expecting such a raid from the flatlands for a long time now, had even correctly guessed the person who would actually be entrusted with the task of reconnaissance—but that had not been hard to do. Seafaring Peter was more or less out of the question, and as for Great-uncle Tienappel, it was understood that wild horses could not drag him to regions whose barometric pressures he had every reason to fear. No, it would have to be James who was commissioned to check up on the missing family member. Hans Castorp had expected him before this. But once Joachim had returned home alone and spread the news among their relatives of how things stood up here, an attack was due, indeed overdue; and so Hans Castorp had not been the least bit surprised when, barely two weeks after Joachim’s departure, the concierge handed him a telegram, whose content he surmised even as he opened it: an announcement of the imminent arrival of James Tienappel. He had business in Switzerland and had decided to use the occasion to visit Hans on his mountaintop. He would be there the day after next.

“Fine,” Hans Castorp thought. “Lovely,” he thought. And even silently added something like, “Just as he pleases.” And addressing the approaching visitor, he thought, “If you only knew!” In short, he received the news with great calm, passed word along to both Director Behrens and management, had them ready a room—Joachim’s old one was still available. Two days later, at around eight in the evening, the same time of day that he himself had arrived—although it was dark now—he hired the same hard-riding vehicle in which he had seen Joachim off, to take him to the station in Dorf and fetch the envoy from the flatlands who had come to check up on him.

Crimson-faced and wearing neither hat nor overcoat, he stood at the edge of the platform as the little train rolled in, stood under the window of his relative’s compartment, and directed him to get off now—he was here. Consul Tienappel—he was a vice-consul, having generously relieved the old man of his honorary duties as well—emerged from his compartment half-frozen and wrapped in his winter coat (because there really was a biting chill to the October evening, its air very close to what one would call clear and frosty, indeed it was sure to freeze by morning), stepped forward expressing his amused surprise in the somewhat spare, but very civilized phrases of a northwestern German gentleman, greeted his nephew, or quasi cousin, emphasizing his satisfaction at how splendid he looked, discovered that the limping attendant had taken care of all his baggage problems, and climbed up with Hans Castorp onto the high, hard seats of the carriage. They drove off under a starry sky; leaning his head back and pointing a forefinger into the air, Hans Castorp elucidated the fields of heaven for his uncle, or quasi cousin, tracing with words and gestures one twinkling constellation here, another there, and calling planets by name; his relative, meanwhile, paid more attention to his companion than to the cosmos, remarking to himself that, although it was certainly possible and hardly crazy to speak here and now about the stars, there were surely several other more obvious topics. Since when was he so well informed about what was up there, he asked Hans Castorp; to which the latter replied that it was knowledge acquired from his rest cure, from lying on his balcony every evening—spring, summer, fall, and winter. What? He spent his nights lying on a balcony? Oh, yes. And the consul would be doing the same—he would not have much choice in the matter.