The Magic Mountain (71 page)

“War,” Settembrini exclaimed, “even war, my dear sir, has on occasion been forced to serve progress—as you yourself must grant me, if you will recall certain events from your own favorite epoch, by which I mean the Crusades. Those wars on behalf of civilization served mightily to enhance economic and commercial relations between peoples and united Western man under the banner of a single idea.”

“You are suddenly very tolerant of that idea. And so, might I courteously remind you that, although the Crusades did stimulate international commerce, they did anything but bring about international reconciliation. On the contrary, they taught peoples to differentiate themselves one from the other and fostered the growth of the concept of the nation-state.”

“Quite true, at least in regard to a given people’s relation to their clergy. Yes, it was during that period when a sense of national honor began to solidify against hierarchical pretension.”

“And yet, what you call hierarchical pretension is actually nothing less than the idea of unifying mankind under the banner of the Spirit.”

“We know that spirit—thanks, but no thanks.”

“It is clear that your nationalist mania loathes the world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church. If only I knew how you reconcile that with your loathing of war. Your repristination of antiquity’s cult of the state surely makes you a champion of a positive interpretation of law, and as such—”

“Have we moved on to law? The idea, my dear sir, of both natural law and universal reason is alive in international law and—”

“Pooh, your international law is once again merely a Rousseauian bastardization of the
ius divinum
, which has nothing to do with either nature or reason, but is based upon revelation.”

“Let us not quarrel over terms, professor. What I honor as natural and international law, you may go right ahead and call
ius divinum
. The main thing is that above the positive law of nation-states there arises a universal law with a higher jurisdiction, which allows disputed questions between parties to be settled by courts of arbitration.”

“Courts of arbitration—the very idea! A bourgeois court of arbitration that decides questions of life and death, ascertains God’s will, and ordains the course of history. Fine, that takes care of the dove’s feet. But what about the pinions of eagles?”

“Bourgeois civilization—”

“Nonsense, the bourgeoisie doesn’t know what it wants. They scream about doing something to halt the decline in the birthrate, demand that the costs of raising and educating children be reduced—and all the while we’re suffocating in the throngs, and every profession is so overcrowded that the brawl over a few scraps of bread will soon eclipse all previous wars. Open spaces and green cities! Toughen the nation’s youth! But why toughen them if civilization and progress demand there be no more war? War would take care of all those problems, and provide the solutions. Toughen our youth and at the same time combat the decline in the birthrate.”

“You’re joking—not even trying to be serious. Our conversation is at an end, and just in time. We’re home,” Settembrini said and for the cousins’ sake pointed with his cane to a little house before whose gate they had now halted. It was a modest structure just this side of Davos-Dorf, separated from the road only by a small yard. Rising from bared roots, wild grape twined around the front door and, clinging to the wall, stretched an arched arm toward the ground-floor window on the right, the display window of a small grocery. The ground floor belonged to the grocer, Settembrini explained. Naphta’s lodgings and the tailor’s shop were the next floor up, his own residence was in the attic—a quiet studio.

In a surprising burst of cordiality, Naphta expressed the hope that further meetings would come from this first one. “Do come visit us,” he said. “I would say, ‘Come visit me,’ if Dr. Settembrini here did not have prior claims on your friendship. Come by anytime you like, whenever you feel the need for a little colloquy. I enjoy exchanging views with young people, am perhaps not totally lacking in my own pedagogic tradition. Our Master of the Lodge”—he pointed at Settembrini—“may wish to claim that all pedagogic proclivities, even the very calling itself, belong to bourgeois humanism—but one must take issue with him there. We shall see you soon again, I’m sure.”

Settembrini demurred. There were problems, he said—the lieutenant’s days up here were numbered and the engineer would now be doubling his efforts at rest cure in order to follow his cousin back down to the plains soon.

The young people agreed with them both, first the one and then the other. They accepted Naphta’s invitation with bows, and in the next moment they were nodding and shrugging to indicate that Settembrini’s objections were justified. And so the matter was left open.

“What did he call him?” Joachim asked as they climbed the looping road to the Berghof.

“I understood him to say ‘Master of the Lodge,’ ” Hans Castorp said, “and have been wondering about it myself. It’s probably a joke of some kind—they both have such odd names for each other. Settembrini called Naphta ‘
Princeps Scholasticorum
’—which isn’t bad. The scholastics were sort of the scribes of the Middle Ages, the dogmatic philosophers, if you like—hmm. The Middle Ages came up several times—and it reminded me how that very first day Settembrini said there was a medieval ring about a lot of things up here. The topic came up because of Adriatica von Mylendonk, because of her name. So how did you like
him
?”

“The little fellow? Not very well. I liked some things he said. Courts of arbitration are goody-goody nonsense, of course. But I didn’t think that much of him. A fellow can say all sorts of fine things—but what good is that, if he’s a dubious character? And there is something dubious about him, you can’t deny it. His story about the ‘place of cohabitation’ was definitely suspect. And that nose is Jewish, too—take a good look at him. And only Semites are such puny physical specimens. Do you seriously intend to visit the man?”

“But of course we’ll visit him,” Hans Castorp declared. “And as for being puny—that’s just the soldier talking. The Chaldeans had noses like that, too, and they were damn sharp people, and not just when it came to occult sciences. There is something of the occult about Naphta, too—I find him more than a little intriguing. I can’t say I’ve got him figured out after only today, but if we get together with him often enough, maybe we’ll both be able to. And I don’t think it’s out of the question that we’ll learn a thing or two out of this.”

“Oh, you and your learning! You’re always learning up here—about biology and botany and slippery turning points. And you started in on ‘time’ your first day here. When what we’re here to do is to get healthier, not more clever—healthier, until we’re truly healthy, so they can finally let us go free and send us back to the flatlands cured.”

“ ‘Freedom dwells within the mountains!’ ” Hans Castorp intoned giddily. “First tell me what freedom is,” he went on in normal tones. “Naphta and Settembrini were arguing about just that and couldn’t agree. ‘Freedom is the law of brotherly love,’ Settembrini says, and that sounds like it comes from his ancestor, the Carbonaro. But however brave that Carbonaro was, and our Settembrini himself may be—”

“Right—he got uneasy when the conversation turned to personal courage.”

“I do believe he’s afraid of some things Naphta is
not
afraid of, you see, and that his freedom and courage are somewhat namby-pamby concepts. Do you think he has enough courage ‘
to lose himself or to let himself be ruined
’?”

“What are you speaking French for?”

“Oh, just because. The atmosphere is so international. I don’t know who ought to like that more—Settembrini with his bourgeois world republic, or Naphta with his hierarchical cosmopolitanism. I was paying attention, you see, but none of it was clear. Instead, the more they talked the more confused I got.”

“That’s how it always is. When people talk and spout opinions, the result is always confusion. I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter what sort of opinions a man has, but whether he’s a decent fellow. The best thing is to have no opinions at all and just do your duty.”

“Yes, you can say that—as a mercenary, someone whose life is pure form. It’s different for me. I’m a civilian, more or less responsible for myself. But it upsets me to see such confusion—what with the one preaching about an international world republic and loathing war on principle, but at the same time so patriotic that the Brenner Pass is the only possible border and he’s willing to fight a civilizing war over it; and the other claiming the nation-state is the Devil’s own work and gushing about the unification of all mankind, only to turn around and defend the law of natural instincts and make fun of peace conferences. We definitely have to go find out what we can learn from all this. You say our job is to get healthier, not more clever. But the two must be compatible, damn it. And if you don’t believe that, then you’re dividing the world in two—which is always a great mistake, let me tell you.”

Reclining on his balcony, Hans Castorp identified a plant that .had started to flourish in a great many places now that the astronomical summer had begun and the days were growing shorter again: columbine, or aquilegia, from the family Ranunculaceae, a long-stemmed herbaceous perennial, with blue and violet, sometimes almost reddish-brown flowers and flat, spreading, weedlike foliage. The plant could be found most everywhere, but it grew in particular abundance on the remote meadow where he had first noticed it almost a year before—the same secluded woodland valley with footbridge and bench where his premature, freewheeling walk had come to such a disconcerting end. He had been revisiting the spot now and then of late.

It was not all that far, really, when you went about it a little less impetuously than he had done that day. If you started at the bobsled finish line in Dorf and worked your way up the slope along a forest path with several wooden bridges that crossed the run as it descended from Schatzalp, you could—omitting detours, arias, and exhausted pauses—be there in twenty minutes. And if the weather was good and Joachim was tied up at the Berghof by a checkup, X-ray, blood sample, injection, or weigh-in, Hans Castorp might hike up there after second breakfast, occasionally after first; sometimes he even used the hour between tea and supper for a visit to his favorite spot; and then he would sit down on the same bench where he had had that nasty nosebleed, tilt his head to catch the sound of the rushing brook, and enjoy the closed landscape with its banks of blue columbine blossoming once again in the meadow.

Had he come only for that? No, he sat there so that he could be alone to remember, to think back over the past months with all their many and varied impressions and adventures, which were not easy to sort out, because they often seemed interlaced, blending into one another until palpable reality was often no longer distinguishable from what had merely been thought, dreamed, or imagined. But adventures they had been—so much so that whenever he recalled them, his heart, skittish since his very first day up here, would stop still and then begin to pound. Or was his skittish heart startled simply by the intellectual realization that the blue columbine—here in the same spot where Pribislav Hippe had appeared to him as he lay in a state of reduced vitality—was not still blooming, but blooming once again, that “three weeks” would soon be one whole adventurous year come full circle?

He no longer got nosebleeds, however, when he sat down on the bench beside the torrent—that was a thing of the past. The process of acclimatization, which from the very start Joachim had described as difficult and which had indeed proved to be so, had advanced to a point where, after eleven months, it had to be regarded as complete—further progress in that area was hardly noticeable now. His digestive chemistry had stabilized and adjusted. His Maria Mancinis tasted good again; the nerves of his dry mucous membranes had long since become receptive to the delicate aroma of the brand (a bargain at the price), so that for sentimental reasons he continued to order them from Bremen whenever his supply ran low, although the shop windows of an international resort displayed very inviting wares. Did not Maria act as a kind of connection between him, a man withdrawn from the world, and his former home in the flatlands? Did it not maintain and preserve those connections more effectively than, for instance, the postcards he now and then sent to his uncles, particularly since the intervals between them had been growing steadily longer the more he appropriated local conceptions of how to handle time on a grand scale? As a favor to the recipients, he usually sent picture postcards, with pretty views of the valley in either its snow-covered or summery state and just enough space for him to inform his kinsmen about the doctor’s latest statement after a monthly checkup or complete physical—for instance, that from what the doctor could both hear and see, some improvement was undeniable, but that he was not yet detoxified and that his chronically slightly raised temperature came from the continued presence of some small areas, which, if he were only patient, would definitely vanish completely so that he would never have to return here again. He could be certain that any literary efforts beyond these were not demanded or expected of him. The world he was addressing was not one with a tradition of humanistic rhetoric; the answers he received were no more effusive than his postcards and usually accompanied the monies needed for his maintenance here—interest on his paternal inheritance, the conversion of which into Swiss currency worked so much to his advantage that he never used up one installment before the next arrived from home. The letters consisted of a few typewritten lines signed by James Tienappel, with greetings and best wishes for recovery from his great-uncle and sometimes from seafaring Peter as well.

The director, Hans Castorp reported home, had recently discontinued his series of injections. For such a young patient, he was not reacting well; they had resulted in headaches, fatigue, loss of appetite and weight, had at first raised his “fever” slightly, but then had not got rid of it. It continued to glow as a dry, subjective flush in his pink face, a reminder that for this child of the lowlands with their intoxicatingly damp meteorology, acclimatization consisted primarily of getting used to not getting used to things—which, by the way, Rhadamanthus himself, with his purple cheeks, had never done. “Some people never get used to it,” Joachim had responded right off, and this did appear to be the case with Hans Castorp. Even the tremor of his head, which had begun to bother him soon after his arrival up here, gave every indication of not wanting to clear up, but would invariably start again when he was walking or talking, or even sitting there in the blue-blossoming meadow, thinking back over the complexity of his adventures; in fact, Hans Lorenz Castorp’s dignified chin-propping method had almost become a habit for his grandson as well—and he never used it without being reminded of the old man’s stiff collar, that interim form of his ceremonial ruff, of the soft golden hollow of the baptismal bowl, the religious sound of “great-great-great,” and similar secret, private associations, all leading to yet another round of reflection on the complexity of his life.