The Magic Mountain (42 page)

“You don’t say, Herr Settembrini! Allow me to offer you my heartiest congratulations! That is a magnificent commission, just in your line, I should think. No wonder the League thought of you! And what joy you must feel to aid in the elimination of human suffering!”

“It is a work very broad in its scope,” Herr Settembrini said thoughtfully, “and will require much consideration and wide reading. Especially,” he added, and his gaze seemed to lose itself in the immensity of his task, “since literature has regularly chosen to depict suffering, and even second- and third-rate masterpieces treat of it in one form or another. But what of that? So much the better! However comprehensive the work may be, it is at least of a nature that will permit me to carry it on, if needs must, even in this accursed place—though I hope I need not be here long enough to bring it to a conclusion. That is something,” he said, moving closer to Hans Castorp, and subduing his voice nearly to a whisper, “that is something which can hardly be said of the duties nature lays upon you, Engineer! This is what I wanted to bring out, this is the word of warning I have been trying to utter. You know what admiration I feel for your profession. But as it is a practical, not an intellectual calling, you are differently situated from myself, in that you can only pursue it down in the world— only there can you be a true European, only there can you actively fight suffering, improve the time, further progress, with your own weapons and in your own way. If I have told you of the task that has fallen to my lot, it was only to remind you, only to recall you to yourself, only to clarify certain conceptions of yours which the atmospheric conditions up here were obviously beginning to becloud. I would urge it upon you: hold yourself upright, preserve your self-respect, do not give ground to the unknown. Flee from this sink of iniquity, this island of Circe, whereon you are not Odysseus enough to dwell in safety. You will be going on all fours—already you are inclining toward your forward extremities, and presently you will begin to grunt— have a care!”

The humanist had uttered these admonitions in the same low voice, shaking his head impressively. He finished with drawn brows and eyes directed toward the ground. To answer him slightly or jestingly, as Hans Castorp would once have done, was out of the question. The young man weighed that possibility for a second, standing with lowered lids. Then he lifted his shoulders and spoke, no louder than Herr Settembrini: “What shall I do?” “What I told you.” “You mean—go away?”

“Yes—and then I was free to do so, though it seemed to me silly to throw up the sponge just because the air up here put me about a bit. But now it is a rather different state of affairs: I have been examined, and Hofrat Behrens told me in so many words that it would be no good my going home, I should only have to come back again; and that if I stopped down there, the whole lobe would be at the devil before you could say Jack Robinson.” “I know; and now you have the evidence in your pocket.”

“You say that so ironically—with the right kind of irony, of course, that cannot for a moment be misunderstood, the direct and classic device of oratory—you see, I remember the things you say. But do you mean that after you have seen this photograph, after the x-ray and Behrens’s diagnosis, you take it upon yourself to advise me to go home?”

Settembrini hesitated for a second. Then he drew himself up, and directed the gaze of his black eyes full upon Hans Castorp’s face. He answered, with an emphasis not quite without theatrical effect: “Yes, Engineer, I take it upon myself.”

But Hans Castorp’s bearing too had stiffened. He stood with his heels together, and looked straight at Herr Settembrini in his turn. This time it was a duel. Hans Castorp stood his ground. Influences from not far off gave him strength. Here was a schoolmaster—but yonder was a woman with narrow eyes. He made no apologies for his words, he did not beg Herr Settembrini not to take offence; he answered: “Then you are more prudent for yourself than for others. You did not go to Barcelona in the face of the doctor’s orders. You were afraid of death, and you stopped up here.”

To a certain point Herr Settembrini’s pose was undeniably shaken; his smile, as he answered, was slightly forced.

“I know how to value a ready answer—even though your logic smacks of sophistry. It would disgust me to enter the lists in the sort of rivalry that is too current up here; otherwise I might reply that my case is far more serious than yours—so much more, in fact, that it is only by artificial means, almost by deliberate self-deception, that I can keep alive the hope of leaving this place and having sight of the world below before I die. In the moment when that hope can no longer be decently sustained, in that moment I shall turn my back on this establishment, and take private lodgings somewhere in the valley. That will be sad; but as the sphere of my labours is the freest, the least material in the world, the change cannot prevent me from resisting the forces of disease and serving the cause of humanity, up to my latest breath. The difference between us, in this respect, I have already pointed out to you. Engineer, you are not the man to assert your better self in these surroundings. I saw it at our first meeting. You reproach me with not having gone to Barcelona. I submitted to the prohibition, not to destroy myself untimely. But I did so with the most stringent reservations; my spirit protested in pride and anguish against the dictates of my wretched body. Whether that protest survives in you, as you comply with the behests of our powers that be—whether it is not rather the body, the body and its evil propensities, to which you lend a ready ear—”

“What have you against the body?” interrupted Hans Castorp suddenly, and looked at him with wide blue eyes, the whites of which were veined with blood. He was giddy with his own temerity and showed as much.—Whatever am I saying? he thought. I’m getting out of my depth. But
I
won’t give way; now I have begun, I won’t give him the last word if I can help it. Of course he will have it anyhow, but never mind, I will make the most of it while I can.—He enlarged upon his objection: “But you are a humanist, are you not? What can you have to say against the body?” Settembrini’s smile this time was unforced and confident. ” ‘What have you against analysis?’ ” he quoted, with his head on one side. ” ‘Are you down on analysis?’ You will always find me ready to answer you, Engineer,” he said, with a bow and a sweeping downward motion of the hand, “particularly when your opposition is spirited; and you parry not without elegance. Humanist—yes, certainly, I am a humanist. You could never convict me of ascetic inclinations. I affirm, honour, and love the body, as I protest I affirm, honour, and love form, beauty, freedom, gaiety, the enjoyment of life. I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism. I think my position is unequivocal. But there is one power, one principle, which commands my deepest assent, my highest and fullest allegiance and love; and this power, this principle, is the intellect. However much I dislike hearing that conception of moonshine and cobwebs people call ‘the soul’ played off against the body, yet, within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature, and nature—within the sphere, I repeat, of her antagonism to the mind, and to reason—is evil, mystical and evil. ‘You are a humanist?’ By all means I am a humanist, because I am a friend of mankind, like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human nobility. That nobility is comprehended in the mind, in the reason, and therefore you will level against me in vain the reproach of Christian obscurantism—” Hans Castorp demurred.

“You will,” Herr Settembrini persisted, “level this reproach in vain, if humanistic pride one day learns to feel as a debasement and disgrace the fact that the intellect is bound up with the body and with nature. Did you know that the great Plotinus is said to have made the remark that he was ashamed to have a body?” asked Settembrini. He seemed eager for a reply, and Hans Castorp was constrained to confess that this was the first he had heard of it.

“We have it from Porphyrius. An absurd remark, if you like. But the absurd is the intellectually honourable; and nothing can be more pitiable than the reproach of absurdity, levelled against the mind as it asserts its dignity against nature, and refuses to abdicate before her.—Have you heard of the Lisbon earthquake, Engineer?” “An earthquake? No—I see no newspapers up here—”

“You misunderstand me.
En passant
, let me say it is a pity, and very indicative of the spirit of this place, that you neglect to read the papers. But you misunderstand me, the convulsion of nature to which I refer is not modern. It took place some hundred and fifty years ago.”

“I see. Oh, wait—I have it. I have read that Goethe said to his servant, that night in his bedchamber—”

“He rebelled. Yes. He declined to accept that brutal
fatum et factum
. His spirit refused to abdicate before it. He protested in the name of reason and the intellect against that scandalous dereliction of nature, to which were sacrificed thousands of human lives, and three-quarters of a flourishing city. You are astonished? You smile? You may well be astonished; but as for smiling, give me leave to tell you it is out of place. Voltaire’s attitude was that of a worthy descendant of those old Gauls that shot their arrows against the heavens. There, Engineer, you have the hostility the intellect feels against nature, its proud mistrust, its high-hearted insistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, reason-denying power. Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it—to abdicate, that is, inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of involving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hypocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible
haut goût
of the grave. And thus too with the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs the movement toward light; we must despise it in so far as it represents the principle of disease and death, in so far as its specific essence is the essence of perversity, of decay, sensuality, and shame.” These last words Settembrini had uttered standing close to Hans Castorp, very rapidly and tonelessly, as though to make an end of the subject. Succour was nigh for the youth: Joachim entered the reading-room, with two postcards in his hand. The Italian broke off; and the dexterity with which he altered his tone for one in a lighter and fitting social key was not lost upon his pupil—if so Hans Castorp may be called. “There you are, Lieutenant! Have you been looking for your cousin? I must apologize; we had fallen into conversation—if I am not mistaken, we have even had a slight disagreement. He is not a bad reasoner, your cousin, a by no means contemptible antagonist in an argument—when he takes the notion.”

HANS CASTORP and Joachim Ziemssen, arrayed in white trousers and blue blazers, were sitting in the garden after dinner. It was another of those much-lauded October days: bright without being heavy, hot and yet with a tang in the air. The sky above the valley was a deep southern blue and the pastures beneath, with the cattle tracks running across and across them, still a lively green. From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peaceful, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights.

The cousins were sitting on a bench at the end of the garden, in front of a semicircle of young firs. The small open space lay at the north-west of the hedged-in platform, which rose some fifty yards above the valley, and formed the foundations of the Berghof building. They were silent. Hans Castorp was smoking. He was also wrangling inwardly with Joachim, who had not wanted to join the society on the verandah after luncheon, and had drawn his cousin against his will into the stillness and seclusion of the garden, until such time as they should go up to their balconies. That was behaving like a tyrant—when it came to that, they were not Siamese twins, it was possible for them to separate, if their inclinations took them in opposite directions. Hans Castorp was not up here to be company for Joachim, he was a patient himself. Thus he grumbled on, and could endure to grumble, for had he not Maria? He sat, his hands in his blazer pockets, his feet in brown shoes stretched out before him, and held the long, greyish cigar between his lips, precisely in the centre of his mouth, and drooping a little. It was in the first stages of consumption, he had not yet knocked off the ash from its blunt tip; its aroma was peculiarly grateful after the heavy meal just enjoyed. It might be true that in other respects getting used to life up here had mainly consisted in getting used to not getting used to it. But for the chemistry of his digestion, the nerves of his mucous membrane, which had been parched and tender, inclined to bleeding, it seemed that the process of adjustment had completed itself. For imperceptibly, in the course of these nine or ten weeks, his organic satisfaction in that excellent brand of vegetable stimulant or narcotic had been entirely restored. He rejoiced in a faculty regained, his mental satisfaction heightened the physical. During his time in bed he had saved on the supply of two hundred cigars which he had brought with him, and some of these were still left; but at the same time with his winter clothing from below, there had arrived another five hundred of the Bremen make, which he had ordered through Schalleen to make quite sure of not running out. They came in beautiful little varnished boxes, ornamented in gilt with a globe, several medals, and an exhibition building with a flag floating above it.