The Magic Mountain (83 page)

Such a result was as far as possible from Frau Ziemssen’s intention. It was really more for decorum’s sake that she had tried to introduce a little sobriety into the mood of her son, not realizing that precisely the middle course, the golden mean, was impossible up here, and only a choice of extremes offered. When she saw him break down, she seemed not far from tears herself, and most grateful to her nephew for his gallant efforts to redress the balance of the situation. Yes, he said, Joachim would find there had been changes in the population of the Berghof, there were new people, but on the other hand, some that had gone away were come back again. For instance, the great-aunt and her charges sat once more at Frau Stöhr’s table, and Marusja laughed as much as ever.

Joachim said nothing. But Frau Ziemssen was thereby reminded that they had chanced to meet someone who sent greetings, which she must deliver while she thought of it. It was in a restaurant in Munich, where they had spent a day between two night journeys. A lady—a not unsympathetic person, though unaccompanied, and with rather too level brows—had come up to their table to greet Joachim. She had been a patient up here, Joachim would know—

“Frau Chauchat,” Joachim said, in a low voice. She was spending some time in a cure in the Allgäu, and intended to go to Spain in the winter. She sent greetings. Hans Castorp was no raw youth, he had control over the nerves that might have made the blood rush to or leave his face. He said: “Oh, so she has emerged from behind the Caucasus again, has she? And she is going to Spain?”

The lady had mentioned a place in the Pyrenees. A pretty, or at least a charming woman. Pleasant voice, pretty gestures. But free manners, slack, Frau Ziemssen thought. “She spoke to us as though we were old friends, told about herself, asked questions, though it seems Joachim had never actually known her. I thought it rather odd.”

“That is the East—and the illness,” replied Hans Castorp. “One mustn’t try to measure her by humanistic standards.” He thought he remembered that she had intended to make a journey into Spain. H’m, Spain. That country too lay remote from the humanistic mean, though on the side of austerity rather than of softness. There it was not lack but excess of form that obtained; death itself was in the guise of form, not dissolution—black, refined, sanguinary, Inquisition, stiff ruff, Loyola, the Escurial,
et cetera—
h’m, yes, it was interesting; he wondered what Frau Chauchat would say to Spain. She’d probably get over banging doors—and perhaps a combination of the two extremes would bring her closer to the humane mean. Yet something pretty awful, terroristic, might come to pass if the East went to Spain… No, he neither paled nor flushed; but the impression the news had made upon him betrayed itself none the less; on such talk as this nothing but perplexed silence could supervene. Joachim, of course, was less taken aback than his mother, being acquainted from aforetime with his cousin’s mental volatility up here. But a great perturbation showed in Frau Ziemssen’s eyes, as though her nephew had uttered some gross impropriety; and after a painful pause she broke up the gathering by rising from table, with a phrase or so intended to gloze over the situation. Before they separated, Hans Castorp told them that Behrens’s order was for Joachim to remain in bed at least on the morrow, or until he had come to examine him. The rest would be decided later. Soon the three relatives lay each in his room, with the door open to the freshness of the summer night in this altitude, and each with his thoughts: Hans Castorp’s were chiefly concerned with Frau Chauchat’s return, to be expected within six months’ time.

So this was young Joachim’s home-coming—for a little after-cure. That way of putting it had obviously been the one given out down below, and it passed current here too, even Hofrat Behrens taking it up, though the first thing he did was to sentence Joachim to four weeks in the “caboose” by way of repairing the most obvious damage, acclimatizing him anew, and putting his house in order as far as temperature was concerned. He was careful to avoid setting any limit for the “aftercure.” Frau Ziemssen, sensible, discerning, never very sanguine save at Joachim’s bedside, mentioned the autumn, perhaps October, as the terminus, and Behrens acquiesced, at least to the extent of saying that anyhow they would be further on then than they were now. Frau Ziemssen liked him immensely. His bearing toward her was courtly; he called her “my dearest lady,” looking deferentially down upon her with his bloodshot eyes; and he talked such extravagant corps-student jargon that despite her depression she always had to laugh. “I know he is in the best of hands,” she said; and after a week’s stay went back to Hamburg, as Joachim had no need of care, and his cousin was always with him.

“Set your heart at rest,” Hans Castorp said to Joachim, sitting by his bed in number twenty-eight. “You’ll get off by the autumn, the old ‘un has more or less committed himself to that. You can look forward to it as a terminus—October. In that month some people go to Spain, and you can go back to your
bandera
, to distinguish yourself
ex supererogatione
…”

It became his daily task to console his cousin for the disappointment of missing the manœuvres, which were beginning in these August days. Joachim could think of nothing else, and expressed the greatest self-contempt at this cursed slackness that had come over him in the last minute.

“
Rebellio carnis
,” Hans Castorp said. “What can you do about it? The bravest officer can do nothing—even St. Anthony had his little experiences. Good Lord, don’t the manœuvres come every year—and surely you know how time flies up here. You haven’t been gone long enough not to get back into step quite easily, and before you can turn round your little after-cure will be over.”

But the refreshment of his sense of time, caused by Joachim’s stay in the valley, had been so considerable that he could not help looking forward with dread to the next four weeks. Everybody, it is true, did his best to make time light for him; the sympathy felt on all hands for the clean personality of the young officer expressed itself in many visits. Settembrini came, was very affectionate and charming, and called Joachim
Capitana
, instead of Lieutenant as before. Naphta too visited him, and all the old acquaintances in the house availed themselves of a free quarter-hour to sit by his bed, repeat the phrase about the little after-cure, and hear his news. The ladies were Stöhr, Levi, Iltis and Kleefeld, the gentlemen Ferge, Wehsal, and others. They even brought him flowers. When the four weeks were up he left his bed, the fever being so far brought under control that it would not harm him to move about. He began taking his meals in the dining-room, at his cousin’s table, sitting between him and the brewer’s wife, Frau Magnus, opposite Herr Magnus, the place that had once been Uncle James’s, and for a few days Frau Ziemssen’s as well.

Thus the young people began to live once more side by side. Yes, to make it all even more as it had been, Mrs. Macdonald breathed her last, with the picture of her little son in her hand, and her room, next his cousin’s, reverted to Joachim, after it had been thoroughly freed of bacteria by means of H2CO. More exact, indeed, it was to say that Joachim now lived next door to Hans Castorp, instead of the reverse: the latter was now the old inhabitant, and his cousin shared his existence only provisionally and temporarily. Joachim stuck stiffly by the October terminus—though his nervous system refused to some extent to lend itself to the humanistic norm, and prevented a compensatory radiation of heat.

The cousins resumed their visits to Settembrini and Naphta and their walks with those two devoted opponents. When they were joined by A. K. Ferge and Wehsal, which often happened, they formed a group of six, and before this considerable audience the two opposed spirits carried on an endless duel, which we could not reproduce in any fullness without losing ourselves, as it did daily, in an infinitude of despair. Hans Castorp chose to regard his own poor soul as the object of their dialectic rivalry. He had learned from Naphta that Settembrini was a Freemason, which fact impressed him as much as Settembrini’s earlier statement that Naphta was a Jesuit. He was quite absurdly surprised to hear that there still existed such things as Freemasons; and diligently plied the terrorist with questions about the origin and significance of this curious body, which in a few years would celebrate its two-hundredth birthday. When Settembrini spoke behind his back of Naphta and his intellectual tendencies, it was always on an appealing note of warning, with a hint that the subject had more than a little of the diabolic about it. But when Naphta did the same, he made unaffectedly merry over the sphere which the other represented, and gave Hans Castorp to understand that the things for which Settembrini fought were all of them dead issues; free-thought and bourgeois enlightenment were the pathetic delusions of yesterday, though prone to the self-deception which made them a laughing-stock: namely, that they were still full of revolutionary life. Said Naphta: “Dear me, his grandfather was a
carbonaro—
in other words a charcoal-burner. From him he gets the charcoal-burner’s faith in reason, freedom, human progress, the whole box of tricks belonging to the classicistic-humanistic virtue-ideology. You see, what perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, permanence of matter. We must admit that this disparity would be enough to excuse the spirit’s lack of interest in reality, for the rule is that it has sickened long before of the ferments that bring revolution in their train. In very truth, dead spirit is more repulsive to the living than dead matter, than granite for example, which makes no claim to be alive. Such granite, the relic of an ancient reality left so far behind by the spirit that it refuses any longer to associate with it the conception of reality, continues a sluggish existence, and by its bald and dull continuance prevents futility from becoming aware that it is futile. I am speaking in general terms, but you will know how to apply my words to that humanistic freethought which imagines itself to be still in a heroic attitude of resistance to authority and domination. Ah, and the catastrophes, by virtue of which it thinks to manifest its vitality, the ever-delayed spectacular triumphs at which it is preparing to assist, and thinks one day to celebrate! The living spirit would die of ennui at the bare thought of these, were it not aware that from such catastrophes it alone can emerge as the victor, welding as it does the elements of the old and the new to create the true revolution.— How is your cousin to-day, Hans Castorp? You know what profound sympathy I feel for him.”

“Thanks, Herr Naphta. Everyone seems to feel the same, such a good lad as he is. Even Herr Settembrini admits him very much into his good graces, despite his dislike of a sort of terrorism there is in Joachim’s profession. And now I hear Herr Settembrini is a Mason! Imagine! I must say that gives me to think. It sets his personality in a new light, and clarifies certain things for me. Does he go about putting his foot at the right angle and shaking hands with a particular grip? I have never seen anything—”

“Our worthy third-degree friend has probably got beyond such childishness,” Naphta thought. “I imagine the lodges have curtailed their rites a good deal, in response to the lamentable arid Philistinism of our time. They would probably blush for the ceremonial of former periods as an extravagant mummery, and not without reason, for it would be absurd to present their atheistic republicanism in the guise of a mystery. I don’t know with what species of horrors they may have tested Herr Settembrini’s constancy; they may have led him blindfold through dark passages, and made him wait in gloomy vaults before the hall of the conclave, full of mirrored lights, burst upon his eyes. They may have solemnly catechized him, menaced his bare breast with swords to the accompaniment of a death’s-head and three tapers. You must ask himself; but I fear you will get small satisfaction, for even if the procedure was much tamer than this, in any case he will have been sworn to silence.” “Sworn? To silence? They do that too, then?” “Certainly. Silence and obedience.”

“Obedience too. But listen, Professor, it seems to me then, he has no occasion to stick at the terrorism in my cousin’s profession. Silence, and obedience! I could never have believed a free-thinker like Herr Settembrini would submit to such out-and-out Spanish conditions and vows. I perceive that Freemasonry has something quite military and Jesuitical about it.”

“And your perceptions are perfectly correct,” Naphta responded. “Your diviningrod twitches, and knocks. The idea of the society is rooted in and inseparably bound up with the absolute. By consequence, it is terroristic; that is to say, anti-liberal. It lifts the burden from the individual conscience, and consecrates in the name of the Absolute every means even to bloodshed, even to crime. There is some support for the view that the vows of the brotherhood were once symbolically sealed in blood. A brotherhood can never be purely contemplative. By its very nature it must be executive, must organize. You probably do not know that the founder of the Illuminati, a society which for a long time was nearly identified with Freemasonry, was a former member of the Society of Jesus?” “No, that is certainly news to me.”

“Adam Weishaupt formed his secret benevolent order entirely upon the model of the Society of Jesus. He himself was a Mason, and the most reputable lodge members of the time were Illuminati. I am speaking of the second half of the eighteenth century, which Settembrini would not hesitate to characterize as the period of the degeneration of his fraternity. Actually it was the period of its highest flower, as of all secret societies in general, a time when Masonry attained to a higher life, of which it was later ‘purged’ by men of the stamp of our friend of humanity here. In that time he would certainly have belonged to those who reproached it with Jesuitry and obscurantism.” “Were there grounds for the reproach?”

“Yes—if you choose to call it that. The shallow free-thinking of the day was of that opinion. It was the period when the Fathers of our faith sought to animate the society by breathing into it Catholic-hierarchical ideas—at that time there was actually a Jesuit lodge of Freemasonry at Clermont, in France. And it was the time when Rosicrucianism made its entrance into the lodges, that remarkable brotherhood, which, you will note, was a peculiar union of purely rational ideas of political and social improvement and a millennial programme, with elements distinctly oriental, Indian and Arabic philosophy and magical nature-lore. The reform and revision of the lodges which then took place was in the direction of strict observance in a definitely irrational and mystical, magical-alchemical sense, to which the Scottish Rite owes its existence. These are degrees of knighthood which were added to the old military ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master; upper ranks which issued in the hieratical, and were full of Rosicrucian mysticism. There ensued a sort of castingback to certain spiritual and knightly orders which existed in the Middle Ages, for instance the Templars, you know, who took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Even to-day there is an upper degree in Freemasonry which bears the title ‘Grand Duke of Jerusalem.’ “