The Magic Mountain (115 page)

The offer was refused. No, it was not fitting, it would not do, he was told: first by Herr Settembrini himself, with that fine, rueful smile; then, after brief consideration, by Ferge and Wehsal, who also, without specified reason, found it would not do for Hans Castorp to assist at the encounter in this capacity. As a neutral party, perhaps— the presence of such an one was a part of the prescribed chivalrous mitigations—he might be present. Even Naphta, through his second, let it be known that this was his view, and Hans Castorp was satisfied. As witness, or as neutral party, in either case he was able to exert his influence upon the details of the procedure now to be discussed and settled—an influence which proved necessary indeed.

For Naphta’s proposals went beyond all bounds. He demanded a distance of five paces, and, if necessary, three exchanges of fire. These insane conditions he sent by Wehsal the very evening of the quarrel; Wehsal had succeeded in fully identifying himself with Naphta’s mad ideas, and partly as representative, but certainly also in accordance with his personal taste, obstinately insisted upon them. Settembrini, of course, found nothing in them to object to. But Ferge, as second, and the neutral Hans Castorp, were beside themselves, and the latter fell heavily upon the wretched Wehsal. Was he not ashamed to bring forward such frantic and inhuman ideas to meet a case where the injury was purely abstract, not sensible at all? As though pistols were not bad enough, that they must add these murderous conditions! Where did the chivalrous mitigation come in? He might as well suggest firing across a handkerchief! He, Wehsal, was not going to be fired at five paces off—it was easy for him to be blood-thirsty! And so forth. Wehsal shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that precisely that extreme case was a contingency; thus reducing to silence Hans Castorp, who was inclined to forget the fact. But he succeeded, during the negotiations of the following day, in fixing the number of shots at one instead of three, and in dealing with the question of distance so as to arrange that the combatants should be placed fifteen paces apart, and have the right to advance five paces before firing. But in exchange for these concessions, he had to promise that no attempt should be made at reconciling the parties.—It was discovered that none of them had any pistols. Herr Albin had. Besides the shiny little revolver with which he loved to frighten the ladies, he had a pair of officer’s pistols from Belgium in a velvet case: Browning automatics, with brown wooden butts holding the magazine, blued steel mechanism and shining barrels, with crisp little sights atop. Hans Castorp had seen them in Herr Albin’s room, and against his own convictions, out of sheer compulsion from the prevailing temper, offered to borrow them. He made no concealment of the purpose they were to serve, but appealing to the young swaggerer’s honour, readily swore him to secrecy. Herr Albin instructed him how to load the pistols, and they tested both weapons with blank shots in the open.

All this took time: two days and three nights intervened between the quarrel and the meeting. The place was of Hans Castorp’s choosing: that picturesque blue-blossoming scene of his retreat and stock-taking activities. On this spot the affair should take place, on the third morning, as soon as there should be light enough to see. The evening before, rather late, it occurred to Hans Castorp, by this time thoroughly wrought up, that there ought to be a physician present.

He immediately advised with Ferge, who foresaw great difficulty. Rhadamanthus himself was an old corps-student; but it would be impossible to ask the head of the establishment to act in an illegal affair, and between patients to boot. It was scarcely likely a doctor could be found who would be willing to lend a hand in a pistol duel between two severe cases. As for Krokowski, for all his brain, it was a question whether the technique of wound treatment would be his strong point.

Wehsal, who was present, announced that Naphta had already expressed himself to the effect that he wanted no doctor. He was not going to the meeting-place to be salved and bandaged, but to lay about him, and that in grim earnest. It sounded a sinister declaration enough; but Hans Castorp tried to interpret it as meaning that Naphta felt there would be no need of a physician. Ferge too bore back a message from Herr Settembrini, that they might dispose of the question, it did not interest him. It was thus not unreasonable to hope that both antagonists had resolved not to let it come to the shedding of blood. Two nights had passed since the quarrel, and there would be yet a third. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

Hans Castorp’s reflections proved in the event not far from justified; but justified in a manner unlike anything he could have dreamed. So far as Herr Settembrini was concerned, he was entirely right. But had he suspected in what direction Leo Naphta would have altered his intentions beforehand, or at the decisive moment, not even the prevailing temper, of which all this was the outcome, could have driven him to let the affair go on.

At seven o’clock next morning, the sun showed no sign of making an appearance above the mountain; yet day was dawning, difficultly, in a reek of mist, as Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to go to the rendezvous. The maidservants cleaning the hall looked after him in wonder. The house door, however, was unbolted; Ferge and Wehsal, alone or in company, had undoubtedly passed that threshold, the one to accompany Settembrini, the other Naphta, to the field of battle. He, Hans, went alone, his capacity of neutral not permitting him to attach himself to either party.

He moved mechanically, under the compulsion of honour, under pressure from the prevailing temper. It was necessary for him to be present at the encounter—that went without saying. Impossible to stop away and await the event in bed, in the first place because—but he did not finish his firstly, but hastened on to secondly, which was that one could not leave the thing to itself. Thus far, thank Heaven, nothing dreadful had happened; and nothing dreadful need happen, it was really highly improbable that anything would. They had had to get up and dress by artificial light. and breakfastless, in the bitter frost, betake themselves to the appointed spot. But once there, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp’s presence, the whole thing would surely be turned aside, work out for good—in some manner not yet foreseen, and best left unguessed at, since experience showed that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.

All which notwithstanding, this was the unpleasantest morning within his memory. He felt stale and seedy, his teeth tended to chatter; in the depth of his being he was prone to mistrust his own powers of self-control. These were such singular times. The lady from Minsk, who shattered her health on the point of a quarrel with her
corsetière
, the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish earboxes—drearily he thought of them. Simply he could not picture two people, before his eyes, in his presence, standing up to shoot at each other, spill each other’s blood. But when he remembered what it had come to, what he had actually seen, in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, then he misdoubted himself, misdoubted all the world, and shivered in his fur jacket; though at the same time a feeling of the extraordinariness, the abnormality of all this, heightened by the quality of the early morning air, began now surprisingly to elevate and stimulate him.

In the dusk of that slow-brightening dawn, moved by such mingled and fluctuating hopes and feelings, he mounted the narrow path along the slope, from the village end of the bob-run; arrived at the deeply drifted woods, crossed the little wooden bridge over the course, and followed a way among the tree-trunks trodden by feet in the snow rather than cleared by any shovel. He walked fast, and very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter holding the case of pistols with one hand under his cloak. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and, coming abreast, was aware of Naphta and Wehsal, only a few paces in advance.

“Cold morning; at least eighteen degrees of frost,” said he, in the purity of his intentions, but started at the frivolity of his own remark, and added: “Gentlemen, I am convinced—”

The others were silent. Ferge’s good-natured moustache wagged up and down. After a while Settembrini came to a pause, took Hans Castorp’s hand, laid his own other one upon it, and spoke.

“My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I will offer myself to his bullet, that is all that honour can demand. But I will not kill, you may trust me.”

He released the young man and walked on. Hans Castorp was deeply moved. After a few steps he said: “That is splendid of you, Herr Settembrini. Now—on the other side—if he, for his part— “

But Herr Settembrini shook his head. Hans Castorp reflected that if one party did not fire, the other would surely not be able to bring himself to do it either; and his heart perceptibly lightened. Everything was going well, his predictions seemed about to be verified.

They crossed the foot-bridge over the gorge, where the waterfall hung stiff and silent. Naphta and Wehsal were walking up and down before the bench now upholstered with thick white cushions of snow: the bench on which Hans Castorp, lying to await the end of his nose-bleeding, had experienced such lively memories out of the distant past. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp questioned himself if he should do the same, but found he had no faintest desire. It seemed to him an affectation in the other. With the pleasure he always felt in these surroundings, he looked about at them in their icy state and found them not less beautiful than in the season of their blue blossom-time. The fir that jutted so boldly into the picture had its trunk and branches laden with snow.

“Good-morning,” he said cheerily, with the idea of lending the scene a note of the natural, which should help to dissipate its evil bearing—but was out of luck, for nobody answered. The greetings consisted in silent bows, so stiff as to be almost imperceptible. However, he was resolved to convert the energy from his walk, the splendid warmth engendered by brisk motion in the cold air, at once and without delay to good purpose; and so began: “Gentlemen, I am convinced—”

“You will develop your convictions another time,” Naphta cut him off icily. “The weapons, if you please,” he added, in the same arrogant tone. Hans Castorp, thus slapped on the mouth, had to look on while Ferge brought out the fatal
étui
from beneath his cloak, and handed one pistol to Wehsal to pass on to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge’s hand. The latter in a murmur asked them to make a space, and began measuring off the ground. He marked off the outer limits by lines dug with his heel in the snow, the inner by means of two canes, his own and Settembrini’s. Our good-natured sufferer, what sort of work was this for him? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged, he took proper strides, the fifteen paces, at least, were a goodly distance—but the cursed canes, alas, were not far apart at all. Certainly, he was acting in all honour; but what a grip the prevailing temper had upon him, to enforce him to a procedure so monstrous in its significance!

Naphta had flung his fur cloak on the ground, so that its mink lining showed. Pistol in hand, he moved to one of the outer barriers directly it was established, and while Ferge was still marking off the other. When that was fixed, Settembrini took up his position, his shabby fur coat open in front. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of a stealing paralysis, and flung himself once more into the breach.

“Gentlemen,” he said, choking, “don’t be hasty. It is my duty, after all—” “Silence!” cried out Naphta sharply. “Give the signal.”

But no one gave the signal. It had not been arranged for. Somebody, of course, ought to say: “Fire!” but it had not been realized that it was the office of the neutral party to give the dread sign—at least, it had not been mentioned. Hans Castorp remained silent, and nobody spoke in his place.

“We will begin,” Naphta declared. “Come forward, sir, and fire,” he called across to his antagonist, and began himself to advance, holding the pistol at arm’s length, directed at Settembrini—an unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At the third step the other, without firing, was already at the barrier—the Italian raised the pistol very high, and fired. The shot awaked repeated echoes, the mountains flung back the sound and the rebound, the valley reverberated with the shock, until it seemed to Hans Castorp people must come running.

“I have no such intention. It is your turn.” Herr Settembrini, lifting his face toward the sky, had turned himself somewhat side-wise to his opponent. It was touching to realize that he had heard one should not offer one’s breast full face to an opponent’s fire; and that he was acting according to the regulations.

“Coward!” Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with duelling, and shot himself in the head.

Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered, or tottered, while the mountains played ball with the sound of his shot, a few steps backward, flinging out his legs jerkily; executed a right turn with his whole body, and fell with his face in the snow. They all stood a moment rigid. Settembrini, hurling his weapon from him, was first at Naphta’s side.
“Infelice!”
he cried.
“Che cosa fai, per l’amor di Dio?”