The Magic Mountain (102 page)

Madame Chauchat and the Malay were there alone. And this time Clavdia lifted her face toward the young man as he neared the bed.

“You had a right to be called,” she said.

“Right, then, of course, as I always am,” Behrens answered himself. “Well, I can’t have you spreading the toxin of your disaffection all over my community, you disgruntled citizen, you. I must convince you that you are not forgotten of God and man, that the powers above have an eye, an unchanging eye upon you, and ceaselessly ponder your welfare. Old Behrens hasn’t forsaken you yet, my lad. Well, joking aside, I’ve been thinking about your case, and in the watches of the night something has come to me. I might almost speak of a revelation—in short, I promise great things from my new idea, nothing more nor less than your complete cure and triumphal progress down to the flat-land, before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Yes,” he went on, after a pause for effect, “you may well open your eyes”—Hans Castorp had done nothing of the sort, merely blinked at him rather sleepy and distraught—”of course you haven’t an idea how old Behrens can say such a thing. Well, it’s like this: it cannot have escaped your acute apperceptions that there is something about your case that doesn’t hold water. The symptoms of infection have not for a long time corresponded to the local condition, which is undoubtedly very much improved. It’s not only since yesterday that I’ve been thinking about it. Here is your latest photo, take it and hold it up to the light. See there! The sheerest pessimist and cavillar—as the Kaiser says—could not see very much in it to find fault with. Some of the foci are absorbed, the area is smaller and more clearly defined, which you are experienced enough to know is a sign of healing. Nothing here to explain the unreliability of your domestic heater, my man. The doctor finds himself under the necessity of casting about for another cause.” Hans Castorp’s bow conveyes at most a civil interest.

“You would think old Behrens must admit to having made a mistake in the treatment? Well, if you did, you’ve come a cropper again; sized the thing up wrong, and old Behrens too. The treatment was not wrong, but it was just possibly one-sided. The possibility has occurred to me that your symptoms were not necessarily to be referred to tuberculosis alone—because it is out of the question to refer them to it any longer. There must be some other source of trouble. In my view, you’ve got cocci.” “Yes,” he repeated with increase of emphasis, and in acknowledgment of the bow with which Hans Castorp accepted his statement, “it is my profound conviction that you have streps—which, of course, is not necessarily alarming.”

Of alarm there could be no talk: Hans Castorp’s face expressed at most a sort of ironic recognition, either of his companion’s acuteness, or of the new dignity with which the Hofrat had hypothetically invested him.

“No call for panic,” he varied his theme. “Everybody has cocci. Any ass can have streps. You needn’t be puffed up. It is not very long since we have known that one can have streptococci in the blood without showing any symptoms of infection. And many of my colleagues are as yet unacquainted with the situation which confronts us, namely, that a man can even have tubercular bacilli in his blood without being any the worse for it. We aren’t more than three steps from the conception that tuberculosis is a disease of the blood.” Hans Castorp politely found that truly remarkable.

“When I say streps,” Behrens began again, “you must not picture a well-known or severe type of illness. If this little one has really settled down and made itself at home in you, the bacteriological blood-test will show it. But whether it is really the cause of the fever—supposing it is present—that we can only tell from the effect of the streptovaccine treatment. This, my dear friend, is the technique, and I promise myself unheard-of results. Tuberculosis is the most long-winded thing in the world; but affections of this sort can be cured very quickly to-day; if you react to the inoculations, you will be as sound as a bell inside six weeks. Well, what do you say to that? That little ole Behrens has his head on his shoulders, what?”

“It is only a hypothesis for the moment, isn’t it?” Hans Castorp said languidly.

“But a demonstrable hypothesis! A highly fruitful hypothesis!” the Hofrat responded. “You’ll see how fruitful it is, when the cocci begin to grow in our culture. To-morrow afternoon we’ll rap you; we’ll let your blood according to the sacred rites of the village barber. It’s diverting in itself, and may have miraculous results.” Hans Castorp declared himself ready for the diversion, and thanked the Hofrat in due form for his efforts in his behalf. He put his head on one side and watched Behrens paddle off. It was true: the intervention had come at the critical moment, Rhadamanthus had not been far out in the description he gave of Hans Castorp’s face and air. The new undertaking was put forth—quite explicitly, there had been no attempt to wrap it up—in order to tide him over the crisis he was in, which betrayed itself by a bearing very like the departed Joachim’s, when he was mentally working himself up to a certain desperate resolve.

And further. It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he himself had arrived at this point, but that all the world, “the whole show,” as he said, had arrived there with him; he found it hard to differentiate his particular case from the general. He had experienced the extravagant ending of his connexion with a certain personality. A commotion had ensued in the house. There had been a farewell between Clavdia Chauchat and himself, the surviving member of a severed brotherhood; a farewell, uttered in the shadow of a tragic renunciation, and followed by her second departure from the Berghof. Now all these events had put the young man in a frame of mind to find life itself not precisely canny. Everything appeared to have gone permanently and increasingly awry, as though a demonic power—which had indeed for a long time given hints of its malign influence—had suddenly taken control, in a way to induce secret consternation and almost thoughts of flight. The name of the demon was Dumps.

The reader will accuse the writer of laying it on pretty thick when he associates two such ideas as these, and ascribes to mere staleness a mystical and supernatural character. But we are not indulging in flights of fancy. We are adhering strictly to the personal experience of our simple-minded hero, which in some way defying exact definition it has been given us to know, and which indicates that when all the uses of this world unitedly become flat, stale, and unprofitable, they are actually possessed by a demonic quality capable of giving rise to the feelings we have described. Hans Castorp looked about him. He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation; life as dead.

Yet it was occupied too, it had activities of various kinds, pursued simultaneously; now and again one of these would assume the proportions of a craze, and subordinate everything to itself. Old residents experienced the periodic revival of more than one of these fads. So for instance amateur photography, always playing an important rôle at the Berghof, had twice become a perfect mania, lasting weeks and months on end. Everywhere one saw people absorbedly bent over cameras supported in the pit or their stomachs, focusing and snapping the shutter; and floods of snapshots were handed round at table. It became a point of honour to do the developing oneself. The supply of dark-rooms in the establishment was not sufficient, the bedroom windows and doors were draped with black cloth, and people busied themselves by dim red lights over chemical baths, until something caught fire, the Bulgarian student at the “good” Russian table was nearly reduced to ashes, and a prohibitory decree went forth from the management. Next they tired of ordinary photography, the fashion veered to flashlights and colour photography after Lumière. They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diapositive, showing him with a copper-coloured visage, a brassy buttercup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poisonously green meadow, with Frau Stöhr on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fräulein Levi on the other in a blood-red sweater.

Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Everybody pasted, haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carried on correspondence with special vendors, foreign and domestic, with societies and private owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specimens, even by people whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof.

Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody’s mouth was stained brown, and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to
Milka-nut
,
Chocolat à la crême d’amandes
,
Marquis-napolitains
, and gold-besprinkled cats’ tongues.

Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and even the last thoughts and energies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn free-hand without lifting the pen—or, as a further refinement, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.

We know on the authority of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics; we know too the disciplinary grounds of his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more generally applied themselves to the same study, the necessity for certain recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these dealt with the passage across the balconies, at the end of the white glass partitions that did not quite reach to the balustrade. These were now extended by means of little doors, which the bathing-master had it in charge to lock every night—and did so, to a general accompaniment of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the verandah roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been introduced on Lawyer Paravant’s account. He had long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to challenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his brains, all the sporting pertinacity which once—before the beginning of this prolonged and enforced holiday, that even threatened at times to end in total quiescence—had gone to the convicting of criminals. It was—the squaring of the circle.

In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself that the arguments on which science based the impossibility of the proposition were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living, and brought him here, having selected him to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental into the realms of the earthly and exact. By day and night he measured and calculated; covered enormous quantities of paper with figures, letters, computations, algebraic symbols; his face, which was the face of an apparently sound and vigorous man, wore the morose and visionary stare of a monomaniac; while his conversation, with consistent and fearful monotony, dealt with the proportional number pi, that abandoned fraction which the debased genius of a mathematician named Zachariah Dase one day figured out to the two-hundredth decimal place—purely for the joy of it and as a work of supererogation, for if he had figured it out to the two-thousandth, the result, as compared with unattainable mathematical exactitude, would have been practically unchanged. Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant like the plague; for whomever he succeeded in buttonholing, that unhappy wretch had to listen to a torrent of red-hot oratory, as the lawyer strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in the defilement of the mind of man by the hopeless irrationality of this mystic relation. The fruitlessness of for ever multiplying the diameter of the circle by pi to find its circumference, of multiplying the square of the radius by pi to find its area, caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated, since Archimedes’ day; whether the solution were not, in actual fact, a child’s affair for simpleness. Why could not one rectify the circumference, why could one not also convert every straight line into a circle? Lawyer Paravant felt himself, at times, near a revelation. He was often seen, late in the evening, sitting at his table in the forsaken and dimly lighted dining-room, with a piece of string laid out before him, which he carefully arranged in circulai shape, and then suddenly, with an abrupt gesture, stretched out straight; only to fall thereafter, leaning on his elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat sometimes lent him a helping hand at the sorry sport, and generally encouraged him in his freak. And the sufferer turned to Hans Castorp too, again and yet again, with his cherished grievance, finding in the young man much friendly understanding and a sympathetic interest in the mystery of the circle. He illustrated his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact drawing, executed with vast pains, showing a circle between two polygons, one inscribed, the other circumscribed, each polygon being of an infinite number of tiny sides, up to the last human possibility of approximation to the circle. The remainder, the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bounding lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp, for all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi than his interlocutor. He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant not to overheat himself with his cat’s-cradle; spoke of the series of dimensionless points of which the circle consisted, from its beginning—which did not exist—to its end— which did not exist either; and of the overpowering melancholy that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence of direction at any given moment—spoke with such tranquil resignation as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect.