The Magic Mountain (88 page)

From now on, Joachim took up the horizontal. Hans Castorp sitting in his excellent chair wrote to Louisa Ziemssen. To his earlier reports he added that Joachim had now taken to his bed; that he had said nothing, but the wish to have his mother by him could be read in his eyes, and Hofrat Behrens agreed that it would be well. He put it all with great delicacy. And Louisa Ziemssen, as was not surprising, took the earliest possible train and came to her son. Three days after the humanely worded letter went off she arrived, and Hans Castorp engaged a sleigh and fetched her from the station in a snow-storm. As the train drew in, he took care to compose his features, that the mother might not receive a shock, nor on the other hand be lulled by false hopes. How often had such meetings taken place on this platform, how often this arrival in haste, this anguished searching of features as the traveller descended from the train! Frau Ziemssen gave the impression that she had run all the way from Hamburg on foot. Flushed of face, she drew Hans Castorp’s hand between hers to her breast, and looking at him as though she feared to hear, put her hurried, almost shamefaced queries. He parried them by thanking her for having come so quickly, saying it was splendid to have her, and how delighted Joachim would be. Yes, he was in bed now; it was too bad, but had to be, on account of the liquid diet, which must naturally weaken him to some extent. If necessary, of course, there were other expedients—for instance, artificial nourishment. But she would see for herself.

She saw; and beside her, Hans Castorp saw too. Up to that moment he had not been fully aware of the changes the last weeks had made in Joachim—the young have not much eye for such things. But now he looked with the eyes of the newly arrived mother, as though he had not seen Joachim for weeks; and realized clearly and distinctly, as doubtless she did too, and beyond a doubt Joachim himself clearest of all, that he was a
moribundus
. He took Frau Ziemssen’s hand and held it—his own was as yellow and wasted as his face. And his ears, because of the emaciation, stood out almost disfiguringly. Yet despite this blemish, the one affliction of his young days, and despite the austere expression illness set upon his features, their manly beauty seemed intensified—the lips, perhaps, beneath the small black moustache, looked a shade too full by contrast with the hollow cheek. Two lengthwise folds had graven themselves in the yellow surface of his brow; his eyes, deep in their bony sockets, were larger and more beautiful than ever, Hans Castorp never tired of looking at them. For all the distressed and wavering look was gone, now Joachim lay in bed; there was only that earlier light in their dark, quiet depths—yes, there was the “ominous” look as well. He did not smile, he took his mother’s hand and whispered her a welcome. He had not even smiled on her entrance; and this immobility of his mien said all.

Louisa Ziemssen was a brave soul. She did not dissolve in grief at sight of her dear son. The almost invisible net that confined and kept in order her hair was symbolic of her composed and self-controlled bearing. Phlegmatic, energetic, as they all were on her native heath, she took in hand the care of Joachim, spurred on by his appearance to engage all her maternal powers in the struggle, and persuaded that if anything could save him, it must be her watchful and devoted care. Not to spare herself, but only from a sense of style, did she consent to call in a nurse. It was Sister Berta, Alfreda Schildknecht, who came with her little black bag. Frau Ziemssen’s zeal left her little to do, by day or night, and she had plenty of time to stand in the corridor, with her eye-glass ribbon behind her ear, and keep an eye to all that went on. She was a prosaic soul, this Protestant sister. Once, when she was alone in the room with Hans Castorp and the patient, who was not asleep but lay on his back with open eyes, she actually made the remark: “Who would have dreamed I should ever come to tend the last illness of either of you?”

Hans Castorp, horrified, shook his fist at her, but she scarcely grasped his meaning; she was far from any thought of sparing Joachim’s feelings, and too matter-of-fact to dream that anyone, least of all the next of kin, could be in any doubt as to the character and issue of this illness. “There,” she said, and held a handkerchief wet with cologne to Joachim’s nose, “take a little comfort, Herr Leutnant, do!” And after all, she was right: there could be little sense, at this hour, in keeping up the pretence. It was more for the sake of the tonic effect that Frau Ziemssen still spoke to her son, in a brisk, encouraging voice, of his recovery. For two things were unmistakable: first, that Joachim was approaching death in full consciousness, and second, that he consented to his state, and was in harmony with himself. Only in the last week—the end of November—did cardiac weakness show itself. There were hours when he grew confused, no longer realized his condition, and spoke of an early return to the colours, spoke even of the autumn manœuvres, which he imagined were still going on. Then it was Hofrat Behrens ceased to hold out any hope, and told the relatives the end was a matter of hours. The condition is as regular as it is pathetic, this forgetful, credulous self-deception, that attacks even masculine spirits at the hour when the lethal process nears its culmination. As impersonal, as true to type, as independent of the individual consciousness as the temptation to slumber that overpowers the man benumbed by cold, or the walking in circles of one who has lost his way. Hans Castorp’s grief and concern did not prevent him from objective observation of these phenonema, nor from making shrewd if baldly expressed remarks upon them in conversation with Naphta and Settembrini, when he reported to them on his cousin’s condition. He even drew upon himself a rebuke from Settembrini, for saying he thought the current conception in error which would have it that a philosophical credulity and belief that all is for the best is the mark of a sound nature, as pessimism and cynicism are of morbidity. For if this were true, it would not be precisely the hopeless final stage that displayed an optimism so abnormally rosy as to make the preceding depression seem by comparison a crassly healthy manifestation of life. He was glad at the same time to be able to tell his friends that though Rhadamanthus gave them no hope, yet the hopelessness was not of the most painful character, for he prophesied a gentle, painless end, despite Joachim’s blooming youth.

“Idyllic—affair of the heart, my dear lady,” Behrens said, and held Louisa Ziemssen’s hand in his own two, the size of shovels, looking down at her with his goggling, watery, blood-shot eyes. “I’m tremendously glad it is taking such a gratifying course, and he doesn’t need to go through with œdema of the glottis or any indignity of that sort, he will be spared a lot of messing about. The heart is giving out rapidly, lucky for him and for us; we can do our duty with camphor injections and the like, without much chance of drawing things out. He will sleep a good deal at the end, and his dreams will be pleasant, I think I can promise you that; even if he shouldn’t go off in his sleep, still it will be a short crossing, he’ll scarcely notice, you may rely upon it. It’s so in the majority of cases, at bottom—I know what death is, I am an old retainer of his; and believe me, he’s overrated. Almost nothing to him. Of course, all kinds of beastliness can happen beforehand—but it isn’t fair to count those in, they are as living as life itself, and can just as well lead up to a cure. But about death—no one who came back from it could tell you anything, because we don’t realize it. We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and the end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that’s that.”

Which was the Hofrat’s way of administering consolation. We may hope that the reasonable Frau Ziemssen drew comfort therefrom; his assurances, at least, were in a very large degree justified by the event. Joachim, in these days, slept many hours, out of weakness, and probably dreamed of the flat-land and the service and whatever else was pleasant to him to dream. When he roused, and they asked how he felt, he would answer a little incoherently, yet always that he felt well and happy. This though he had scarcely any pulse, and at the end could no longer feel the hypodermic needle. His body was insensitive, you might have burned or pinched the flesh, he was past feeling. Great physical changes had taken place since the mother’s coming. Shaving had grown burdensome to him, for some eight or ten days it had not been done, and he had now a strong growth of beard, setting off with a black frame his waxen face and gentle eyes. It was the warrior’s beard, the beard of the soldier in the field; they all found it manly and becoming. But because of this beard Joachim had suddenly grown from a stripling to a ripe man—though perhaps not because of it alone. He was living fast, his life whirred away like the mechanism of a watch; he passed at a gallop through stages not granted him in time to reach; and in the last four-and-twenty hours became a grey old man. The cardiac weakness caused a facial swelling that gave the effect of strain, and made upon Hans Castorp the impression that dying must at the very least be a great effort, though of course Joachim, thanks to various sensory adjustments and a merciful narcosis of the system, was not aware of it. The puffing of the features was mostly about the lips; the inside of the mouth also seemed dry or semi-paralysed, making Joachim mumble like an old man—which annoyed him excessively. If he could only, he said thickly, get rid of it he would be quite all right, but it was a cursed nuisance.

In what sense he meant the “quite all right” was not clear—in fact, he showed the typical tendency to ambiguousness, made more than one remark of doubtful or double sense, seemed to know and yet not to; once, when it was very evident that a wave of the oncoming dissolution broke over him, he shook his head and said self-pityingly that he felt very bad, he had never felt so bad before.

After that he became austere, forbidding, even gruff; would not listen to any soothing fictions or pretence, but stared before him and made no reply. Louisa Ziemssen had sent for a young clergyman, who, to Hans Castorp’s regret, did not appear in a starched ruff, but wore bands instead. After he had prayed with Joachim, the patient assumed an official tone and air, and uttered his wishes in the form of short commands.

At six o’clock in the afternoon he began making a strange continuous movement with his right hand, with the chain bangle on the wrist: passing it across the bed-cover, at about the hips, lifting it as he drew it back and toward him, with a raking motion, as though he were gathering something in.

At seven o’clock he died; Alfreda Schildknecht was in the corridor, the mother and cousin were alone with him. He had sunk down in the bed, and curtly ordered them to prop him up. While Frau Ziemssen, with her arm about his shoulders, tried to do so, he said hurriedly that he must write out an application for an extension of his leave and hand it in at once; and even while he said this, the “short crossing” came to pass, as Hans Castorp, reverently watching in the light of the red-shaded table-lamp, quickly perceived. His gaze grew dim, the unconscious tension of the features relaxed, the strained and swollen look about the lips notably diminished; the beauty of early manhood visited once more our Joachim’s quiet brow, and all was over.

Louisa Ziemssen turned sobbing away; it was Hans Castorp who bent over the moveless, breathless form, closed the eyes with the tip of his ring-finger, and laid the hands together on the coverlet. Then he too stood and wept, tears ran down his cheeks, like those that had smarted the skin of the English officer of marines: those clear drops flowing in such bitter abundance every hour of our day all over our world, till in sheer poetic justice we have named the earth we live in after them; that alkaline, salty gland-secretion, which is pressed from our system by the nervous stress of acute pain, whether physical or mental. It contained, as Hans Castorp knew, a certain amount of mucin and albumen as well.

The Hofrat came, summoned by Sister Berta. He had been there a half-hour earlier, and given a camphor injection; had scarcely been absent for more than the moment of the “short crossing.” “Ay,” said he simply, “he has it behind him now,” and lifted the stethoscope from Joachim’s breast. And he pressed both their hands, nodding his head; standing with them awhile by the bed, and looking into Joachim’s moveless visage, with the warrior beard. “Crazy young one,” he said: jerking his head towards the recumbent form. “Crazy chap. Would force it, you know—of course, that’s the way of the service down there, all force, all compulsion—he joined the service while he was febrile, he took a life-and-death chance. Field of honour, you know—slipped away from us, and now he’s dead on the field. Honour was the death of him, and death—well, you might put it the other way round too. At any rate, he’s gone—’had the honour to take his leave.’ A madman, a crazy chap.” And he left, tall and stooped, his neck-bone very prominent.

It had been decided to take Joachim home; and House Berghof assumed the arrangements, doing all that was necessary or that could add to the dignity or stateliness of the occasion. Mother and cousin needed not to lift a finger. By next day Joachim lay in his silk dress-shirt, with flowers about him on the coverlet, looking, in the midst of all this white, more beautiful than immediately after death. Every trace of strain was gone from the features, they had composed themselves, growing cold, into a silent purity of form. Curling dark locks fell upon the yellowish brow, that seemed to be of some fine brittle stuff between wax and marble; through the crisp hair of the beard, the lips showed full and curling. An antique helmet would have become this head—as many of the guests remarked, who came to take last leave of Joachim. Frau Stöhr, as she looked, wept with abandon. “A hero, he was a hero,” cried she, and demanded that the E
rotica
be played at his grave.

“Be quiet,” hissed Settembrini, at her side. He and Naphta were with her in the room. Greatly moved, with both hands he waved the onlookers toward the bed and summoned them to mourn with him. “
Un giovanotto tanto simpatico
,
tanto
stimabile,”
said he repeatedly.