The Magic Mountain (103 page)

It was a consequence of our good Hans Castorp’s nature that more than one of his fellow-patients made a confidant of him; several of them possessing some
idée fixe
or other and suffering because they could get no hearing from the callous majority. There was an elderly man from somewhere in the back blocks of Austria, a one-time sculptor, with white moustaches, a hooked nose and blue eyes; who had conceived a project, financial and political in its scope, and drawn it up most meticulously in a calligraphic hand, colouring the important points in sepia. The main feature of the scheme was that every newspaper subscriber should bind himself to contribute a daily quantum of forty grammes of old newspaper, collected on the first of every month; which in one year would amount to a lump quantity of 1400 grammes, and in twenty years to not less than 288 kilogrammes. Reckoning at twenty pfennig the kilo, this would come to fifty-seven marks and sixty pfennig. Five million subscribers, it was calculated, would in the course of twenty years deliver a quantity of old newspaper valued at the enormous sum of 288 million marks; of which two-thirds might be reckoned off to the new subscriptions, which would thus pay for themselves, the other third, amounting to about a million marks, remaining to be devoted to humanitarian projects, such as financing free establishments for tuberculous patients, encouraging struggling talent, and so on. The plan was elaborated even to the design for a centimetre price-column, from which the organization for collecting the old paper could read off each month the value of the paper collected, and the stamped form to be used as a receipt in exchange for payment. It was an excellent plan from every point of view. The wanton waste and destruction of news-print, thrown away or burnt up by the unenlightened, was a betrayal of our forests and of our political economy. To save and conserve paper meant to save cellulose, meant the conservation of our forests, the protection of human material that was used up in the manufacture of cellulose and paper—human material and capital. Furthermore, since newspaper might easily come to have four times the value of wrapping-paper and pasteboard, it would become an economic factor of considerable importance, and the basis of fruitful governmental and communal assessments, and thus lighten for newspaper readers the burden of taxation. In short, the plan was good, it was every way incontrovertible. The uncanny air of futility, or even a sort of sinister crackbrainedness, which hung about it was due to the addled fanaticism with which the former artist pursued and supported an economic idea, about which he was obviously so little serious that he made not the smallest effort to put it into execution. Hans Castorp, nodding, with his head on one side, listened to the man, as with fevered eloquence he made propaganda for his idea; observing at the same time in himself the contempt and repulsion which diminished his partisanship for the inventor against the indifference of the thoughtless world.

Some of the patients studied Esperanto, and knew enough to converse a little in that artificial jargon at their meals. Hans Castorp listened gloomily, but admitted to himself that there were other things even worse. A group of English who had been here for a short time, introduced a parlour game which consisted in the question, asked by the first player of his neighbour: “Have you ever seen the Devil with a nightcap on?” To which the person asked must reply: “No, I’ve never seen the Devil with a nightcap on,” and then repeat the question in his turn, and so on. It was insufferable. Yet Hans Castorp found the patience-players even worse. They were to be seen all over the house, at every hour of the day, laying out their cards; a passion for that diversion having assumed such proportions at the Berghof as to turn the place into a den of vice. Hans Castorp had the more ground for horror, in that he himself fell a temporary victim to the plague—was, indeed, one of the severest cases. It was the patience called “elevens” that proved his undoing, the game in which the cards are laid out in three rows of three deep, and any two cards that together make eleven covered anew as they come uppermost, as well as the three face-cards, until by good luck the pack is dealt out. It seems inconceivable that such a simple procedure could prove fascinating to the point of bewitchment—yet so it was. Hans Castorp, like so many others, experienced it—always with drawn and frowning brows, for this particular form of debauch is never a merry one. He was given over to the whims of the card-goblins, ensnared by the fitful and fickle favour of fortune, which sometimes let the face-cards and elevens pile up so that the game was over before the third tier was laid, when the fleeting triumph would stimulate the nerves to new efforts. But next time perhaps, the ninth and last card would fall without any possibility of covering anything, or else the game, having aroused flattering hopes, would obstinately stick at the last moment. Everywhere, at all hours of the day, he played patience—and at night under the stars, and in the morning in his pyjamas; played at table, played almost in his sleep. He shuddered, but he played. Thus one day Herr Settembrini found him—and disturbed him, as even from the beginning it had been his mission to do. “
Accidente!”
said he. “What, Engineer, you are playing cards?”

“Not precisely playing cards,” Hans Castorp told him. “I am just laying them out, to have a tussle with abstract chance. The tricks it plays intrigue me, it is as inconsistent as the wind. It fawns on you, and then suddenly puts up its back and won’t budge. This morning, directly I got up, it came three times running, once in two rows, which is a record. But will you believe it, this is the thirty-third time I have played it without once going even halfway through?”

Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often he had looked in the course of the years, with melancholy black eyes.

“At all events, you are preoccupied,” he said. “It does not look as though I could find here the consolation I seek, nor balsam for my inward wound.” “Wound?” echoed Hans Castorp, laying afresh.

“The world situation puzzles me,” the Freemason sighed. “The Balkan Federation will go through, Engineer, all the information I receive points that way. Russia is working feverishly for it. And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which must fall before any of the Russian programme can be realized. You understand my scruples. Austria, as of course you are aware, I hate with all my strength. But shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent? Yet on the other hand, diplomatic collaboration, to however small an extent, between my own country and Austria, I should regard as dishonourable. These are conscientious scruples which—”

“Seven and four,” said Hans Castorp. “Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out. You have brought me luck, Herr Settembrini.”

The Italian was silent. Hans Castorp felt the black eyes, the eyes of reason and morality, bent in sorrow upon him. He played on for a while; then, resting his cheek in his hand, looked up at his mentor with the innocent, impenitent air of a naughty child. “Your eyes,” the master said, “vainly seek to hide the fact that you are conscious of your state.”

“
Placet experiri
,” Hans Castorp was so pert as to reply to him. Herr Settembrini left; and the abandoned one sat long, at his table in the middle of his white room, his chin supported on his hand, and brooded; shuddering in the very core of him at the cross-purposes everything in the world had got into, at the grinning and grimacing of the demons and ape-headed gods into whose hands it had fallen, at their unbridled domination, the name of which was “The Great God Dumps.” An apocalyptic, evil name, calculated to give rise to mysterious fears. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and his heart with the flat of his hand. He was frightened. It seemed to him “all this” could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall; snatch life beyond the “dead point” and put an end to the “small potatoes” in one terrible Last Day. He longed to flee—as we have seen already. It was fortunate, then, that the heads had their unchanging eyes upon him, that they knew how to read his face, and were ready to tide him over the hard place with new and fruitful diversions.

They had declared, the heads, in the accents of a corps-student, that they were on track of the actual causes of the instability of Hans Castorp’s heating economy. And those causes, according to their scientific pronouncement, were so easy to come at that a veritable cure and legitimate dismissal to the flat-land had leaped into the foreground. The young man’s heart throbbed stormily with manifold emotions, when he stretched out his arm for the blood-letting. Going slightly pale, and blinking, he expressed his admiration for the splendid ruby colour of his life-blood, as it mounted in the glass container. The Hofrat himself, assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, performed the slight but portentous operation. Then passed several days, occupied in Hans Castorp’s mind with the question how this blood of his, this part of himself, would behave out of his control and under the eye of science.

At first, the Hofrat said one could not expect it to grow straight off. Later, he said it was unfortunate nothing had grown, as yet. But there came a day when he approached Hans Castorp at breakfast, where he sat at the upper end of the “good” Russian table, in the place once occupied by his great brother-in-blood, and whimsically congratulated him on the fact that the coccus was definitely established in one of the cultures they had prepared. It was now a question of probabilities: whether the symptoms of infection were to be referred to the insignificant amount of tubercle bacillus, or to the streptococci, which, also, were only present in small quantity. He, Behrens, must think it over. They were not finished with the cultures yet. He showed them to Hans Castorp in the “lab”: a red, coagulate blood, in which tiny grey points were discernible. Those were the cocci. But any ass might have cocci, and tubercular bacilli too. If not for the symptoms of infection, they were not worth noticing. Outside his body, under the eyes of science, Hans Castorp’s blood went on bearing witness. The morning came when the Hofrat in his sprightly phraseology announced that not only on the first culture, but on all the others as well, cocci had subsequently grown, in large quantities. It was not yet certain that they were all streptococci, but it was more than probable that they were the cause of the existing infection—or such part of it as had not been due to the previously existing and perhaps not quite conquered tubercular infection. And the conclusion the Hofrat drew was—a streptovaccine! The prognosis was extraordinarily favourable, there was not the slightest risk about the procedure, so in any case it could do no harm to try it. As the serum was prepared from Hans Castorp’s own blood, the inoculation with it could introduce into his system no deterrent not already present there. At worst, the experiment would have a negative result—which could hardly be called unfavourable, since even without it the patient must stop on in any case!

Hans Castorp could not go quite that far. He submitted to the treatment, though he found it absurd, contemptible. This inoculation of himself with part of himself seemed a singularly cheerless procedure, an incestuous abomination, a self-to-self which could have nothing but a fruitless, hopeless result. Such was his ignorant and hypochondriac judgment, right only as to the unfruitfulness of the result, but there wholly. The diversion lasted for weeks. Sometimes it seemed to do harm—which was of course not the case—sometimes good, which, it followed, must equally not be the case. The result was negative—without being explicitly so called and announced. The whole undertaking died a natural death, and Hans Castorp went on playing patience— and gazing into the eye of the demon, whose unbridled sway he foresaw would come to an end of horror.

WHAT new acquisition of House Berghof was it which at length released our longstanding friend from his patience-playing mania, and flung him into the arms of another passion, nobler, though at bottom no less strange? We are about to relate, being ourselves much taken by the mysterious object, and eager to communicate our enthusiasm.

The excellent management, in its sleepless concern for the happiness of its guests, had considered matters, there in the bowels of the earth, had resolved, and acted. It acquired, at a cost which we need not go into, but which must surely have been considerable, a new device for the entertainment of the patients, and added it to those already installed in the largest of the reception-rooms of House Berghof. Was it some clever artifice, of the same nature as the stereopticon, the kaleidoscope, or the cinematographic cylinder? Yes—and yet, again, no, far from it. It was not an optical toy which the guests discovered one evening in the salon, and greeted with applause, some of them flinging their hands above their heads, others stooping over and clapping in their laps. It was an acoustical instrument. Moreover, the simple devices above-mentioned were not to be compared with it—they were outclassed, outvalued, outshone. This was no childish peep-show, like those of which all the guests were sick and tired, at which no one ever looked after the first few weeks. It was an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment, ranging from grave to gay. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.

We are seriously concerned lest the term be understood in an unworthy, outworn sense, and ideas attach to it which are applicable only to the primitive form of the instrument we have in mind, never to the elegant product evolved by a tireless application of technical means to the Muses’ own ends. My dear friends, we implore you to realize that the instrument we describe was not that paltry box with a handle to it, a disk and shaft atop and a shapeless brass funnel attached, which used to be set up on the table outside country inns, to gratify the ears of the rude with its nasal braying. This was a case finished in dull ebony, a little deeper than broad, attached by a cord to an electric switch in the wall, and standing chastely on its special table. With the antediluvian mechanism described above, it had nothing in common. You lifted the prettily bevelled lid, which was automatically supported by a brass rod attached on the inside, and there above a slightly depressed surface was the disk, covered with green cloth, with a nickelled rim, and nickelled peg upon which one fitted the hole in the centre of the hard-rubber record. At the right, in front, was a time-regulating device, with a dial and figures like a watch; at the left, the lever, which set the mechanism going or stopped it; and behind, also on the left, the hollow, curving, club-shaped, nickel-plated arm, with its flexible joints, carrying the flat round sound-box at the end, with a fitment into which the needle was screwed. If you opened the double doors at the front of the box, you saw a set of slanting shelves, rather like a blind, stained black like the case—and that was all.