The Magic Mountain (100 page)

It was the blissful month of May, oft celebrated in the pleasant little ditties of the flat-land. Up here the air was fresh, the temperature scarcely ingratiating; but at least the snow was gone. It might, indeed, snow again; during the last few days there had been flurries of gigantic flakes, but it did not lie, it only made wet. The winter drifts had wasted away, they were gone, save for vestiges here and there; and the green slopes, the open paths, tempted the spirit to rove.

The group had been less socially occupied of late weeks owing to the illness of its ruling spirit, the prepotent Pieter Peeperkorn. His fever refused to yield to the beneficent working of the climate or the skilled ministrations of so excellent a doctor as Hofrat Behrens. He was obliged to spend much time in bed, not only on the days when the quartan fever held sway, but on others too. There was trouble with his liver and spleen, Behrens told those who tended him; the digestion was not what it should be—in short, the Hofrat did not neglect to point out that the condition seemed to indicate a danger of chronic debility, not to be ignored.

Mynheer Peeperkorn had presided at only one evening festivity in all these weeks; and the group had taken but one short walk. Hans Castorp was rather relieved than otherwise at this state of affairs; for the pledge he had drunk with Clavdia Chauchat’s protector made him difficulties, in general conversation, of the same kind he had to deal with in the case of Frau Chauchat herself, namely the avoidance of the formal mode of address—as though, as Peeperkorn said, they had eaten a philippina together. He was fertile in expedients to get round it or simply leave it out; nevertheless, the favour accorded him by Peeperkorn had doubled his present dilemma.

But now the excursion to the waterfall was the order of the day; Peeperkorn himself had arranged it, and felt equal to the effort. It was the third day after the usual attack, and he announced that he wished to take advantage of it. He did not, indeed, appear at the early meals of the day, but took them, in company with Madame Chauchat, in their salon, as they often did of late. But Hans Castorp received word, through the lame concierge, to be ready for a drive an hour after the midday meal, and further, to communicate with Ferge and Wehsal, Settembrini and Naphta, and to engage two landaus for three o’clock.

Accordingly, at this hour they assembled before the portal of the Berghof—Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal. and awaited the pair from the
appartements de luxe;
whiling the time by holding out lumps of sugar on the palms of their hands, for the horses to nip them up with thick, moist black lips. Their companions appeared with no great delay on the threshold; Peeperkorn’s kingly head seemed narrower; he lifted his hat as he stood in a long, rather shabby ulster, by Madame Chauchat’s side, and his lips shaped a vague form of greeting to the company in general. Then he descended and shook hands with the three gentlemen, who met him at the foot of the steps. He laid his left hand on Hans Castorp’s shoulder, saying: “Well, young man, and how goes it, my son?” “Topping, thanks, I hope it’s mutual,” responded the young man.

The sun shone, the day was beautiful and bright. But they had done well to don overcoats, driving would be cool. Madame Chauchat too wore a warm belted mantle of some woolly stuff with a pattern of large checks, and a small fur about her shoulders. The rim of her felt hat was turned down at one side by the olive-green veil she wore bound under her chin; an effect so charming that it was actual pain to most of the beholders—Ferge being the only man there not in love with her. To his disinterested state was probably due the temporary advantage he presently enjoyed, of being selected to sit opposite Mynheer and Madame in the first landau, while Hans Castorp mounted with Wehsal into the second, catching as he did so a mocking smile that for a moment visited Frau Chauchat’s face. The others would be called for at their lodgings. The Malayan servant joined the party with a capacious basket, from the top of which protruded the necks of two winebottles. He bestowed it under the back seat of the first landau, took his place by the coachman on the box and folded his arms; the horses started up, and the carriages, with the brakes against their wheels, drove down the drive.

Wehsal had seen Frau Chauchat’s smile, and expressed himself on the subject to his companion, showing his bad teeth as he talked.

“Did you see,” he asked, “how she was laughing at you for having to drive alone with me? Yes, yes, a man like me is always fair game. Do you find it so disgusting to have to sit next to me?”

“Pull yourself together, Wehsal, and stop talking in that poor-spirited way,” Hans Castorp admonished him. “Women are for ever smiling, at anything, just for the sake of smiling; there is no sense in attending to it. Why do you always cry yourself down? You have your advantages and your disadvantages, like the rest of us. For instance, you can play out of the
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and it’s not everybody who can. Will you play for us again soon’ “

“Yes, you think you can talk to me condescendingly, like that,” retorted the wretched soul, “and you don’t know what cheek there is in your consolation and how it just lowers me the more. You have the right to, though. You are laughing out of the wrong corner of your mouth now; but once you were in the seventh heaven, and felt her arms about your neck—oh, God, it burns me in the pit of my stomach when I think of it—and you are conscious of all you have had, when you look down on me and my torments and think what a beggarly wretch I am.”

“You haven’t a pretty way of expressing yourself, Wehsal. I don’t need to conceal my opinion of it, since you reproach me with being cheeky: it is really very repulsive and probably intentional on your part; you lay yourself out to be disgusting and humiliate yourself, the whole time. Are you really so desperately in love with her?” “Fearfully,” answered Wehsal, with a head-shake. “Words cannot express what I have had to endure from my craving for her. I wish I could say it will be the death of me—but the trouble is, one can neither die nor live. It was a bit better while she was away, I was gradually beginning to forget her. But since she came back, and I have her daily before my eyes, I get attacks—I bite my hand and strike about me, and am beside myself. Such things ought not to be; yet one cannot wish not to have them. Whoever is in that state cannot wish not to be, it would be like wishing not to live, because it has bound itself up with life. What good would it do to die? Afterwards— afterwards, yes, gladly. In her arms it would be bliss. But before—no; it would be preposterous, because life is longing, and longing is life—it cannot go against itself, that is the cursed catch in the game. Even when I say cursed, it is only a way of talking, as though I were somebody else, for in myself I cannot feel it so. There are many kinds of torture, Castorp, and whichever one you are under, your one desire and longing is to be free of it. But the torture of fleshly lust is the only one you can never wish to be free of, except through satisfaction. Never, never in any other way, never at any price. So it is; the man who is not suffering from it doesn’t dwell on it; but the man who is learns to know our Lord Jesus Christ, and his tears run down. Good Lord in heaven, what a thing it is, that the flesh can crave the flesh like that, simply because it is not its own flesh, but belongs to another soul—how strange, and yet, when you come to look at it, how unassuming, how friendly, how almost apologetic! One might say, almost, if that is all he wants, in God’s name let him have it! What is it I want, Castorp? Do I want to kill her? Do I want to shed her blood? I only want to fondle her. Dear, good Castorp, don’t despise me for whining like this—but after all, couldn’t she let me have my way? There would be something higher about it, Castorp; I am not a beast of the field, in my way I am a man too. Pure fleshly desire casts about, here, there, and everywhere; it is not bound, not fixed, and so we call it animal. But when it is fixed upon a human being, with a human face, then we begin talking about love. It is not that I just crave her carnal part, to enjoy as if she were a fleshand-blood doll; if there were one least little thing different about her face, it might be that I should not crave her at all—which shows that I love her soul, and love her with my soul. For love of the face is love of the soul—”

“Why, Wehsal, what’s the matter with you? You are off your head, you don’t know how you are going on—”

“But that is just it,” pursued the unhappy wretch, “that she has a soul, that she is a creature made up of soul and body. And her soul will have absolutely nothing to do with mine, nor her body either, and thence come, oh, God, the torments I suffer, and therefore is my desire condemned to shame, and my body must mortify itself for ever. Why will she know nothing of me, Castorp, either body or soul, and why is my desire a horror to her? Am I not a man? Even if I am repulsive? I swear to you that I am, that I would give her more than all the others who have lain there, once she opened to me the bliss of her embrace, of her arms, which are beautiful because her soul is so. There is not a glory of the flesh I would not offer her, Castorp, if it were only a matter of the body, not of the countenance, if it were not her accursed soul that will have none of me, without which I should have no longing for her body—that is the devil’s treadmill in which I eternally go round and round.”

“Hush, Wehsal, hush, the coachman can understand you. He does not turn his head, on purpose, but I can see by the expression of his back that he is listening.”

“Yes, you’re right, he is listening, and he understands. There you have again the thing I am talking about, and can see what it is like. If I were speaking of—of palingenesis, or hydrostatics, he would not understand, and would not listen, he would not have the faintest idea about it, nor care to have. There is no popular understanding for those things. But this business of body and soul, the last and highest and most ghastly private matter in the world, is also the most universal—everybody can understand it and laugh at anyone suffering from it, whose days are a torture of desire and his nights a torment of hell. Castorp, dear Castorp, let me make my little moan to you—you don’t know the sort of nights I have. Every night I dream of her, ah, what do I not dream of her, it makes me burn inside even to think of it! And all the dreams end the same way: she gives me a box on the ear, slaps me in the face, sometimes spits at me, with her face all distorted with disgust, and then I awake, covered with sweat and drowned in shame and desire—”

“That will do, Wehsal. We will sit quiet now, and make up our minds to hold our tongues until we reach the grocer’s and someone gets in with us. That is my wish. I don’t want to wound you, and I admit that your mental state is a quite choice and par ticular mess. But you know the story about the maiden who by way of being punished for something had snakes and toads hop out of her mouth, a snake or a toad for every word she spoke. The book does not say what she did about it, but I should think she finally had to keep her mouth shut.”

“But every human being needs to express what he feels,” said Wehsal complainingly, “to relieve himself, my dear Castorp, when he is in the state I am in!” “And every human being has the right to do it, too, if you like. But my dear Wehsal, it seems to me there are certain rights a man simply does not assert.”

After which, according to Hans Castorp’s desire, they were silent. Moreover, they were now arrived at the grocer’s vine-clad cottage, where they needed not to linger at all, for Naphta and Settembrini stood waiting in the street; the one in his shabby fur, the other in a yellowish-white spring overcoat, copiously stitched, and looking almost foppish. They all bowed and exchanged greetings, and Naphta took his place beside Ferge in the first landau, which now contained four persons, while Herr Settembrini added himself to the other two in the second carriage. Wehsal gave up his place on the back seat, and the Italian lolled there elegantly, as though on his native Corso; in his very best mood, and bubbling over with
esprit.

He talked about the pleasure of driving, the charm of sitting still and being moved along at the same time amid a changing scene; showed a fatherly interest in Hans Castorp, even patted the forlorn Wehsal’s cheek and bade him forget his own unsympathetic ego in admiration of the blithe exterior world, to which the Italian pointed with a spacious gesture of his hand in its worn leather glove.

It was a delightful drive. The horses, all four of them sturdy, glossy, well-fed beasts, with a blaze on each forehead, covered the excellent road at a steady pace. There was no dust. The route was bordered here and there by crumbling rock tufted with grass and flowers. Telegraph-poles flew past. Their way wound along the mountain forests in pleasant curves that invited the interest and led it on; in the sunny distance glimmered mountain heights still partly covered with snow. They left behind their own accustomed valley, and the change of scene refreshed their spirits. At the edge of the forest they drew up, having decided to cover on foot the remainder of the distance to the goal they had in mind—a goal of which they had been for some time aware, by reason of the sound that came to their ears, at first scarcely perceptible, but steadily increasing in volume. They all heard, directly they dismounted, that far-away, sibilant, vibrating roar, that distant murmuring of water, as yet so faint that they would suddenly lose the sound and pause to listen again.