The Magic Mountain (105 page)

Evening, after the social quarter-hour, when the guests were gone, was his best time. He remained in the salon, or returned stealthily thither, and played until deep in the night. He found there was less danger than he had feared of disturbing the nightly rest of the house; for the carrying power of this ghostly music proved relatively small. The vibrations, so surprisingly powerful in the near neighbourhood of the box, soon exhausted themselves, grew weak and eerie with distance, like all magic. Hans Castorp was alone among four walls with his wonder-box; with the florid performance of this truncated little coffin of violin-wood, this small dull-black temple, before the open double doors of which he sat with his hands folded in his lap, his head on one side, his mouth open, and let the harmonies flow over him.

These singers male and female whom he heard, he could not see; their corporeal part abode in America, in Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg. But let them dwell where they might, he had their better part, their voices, and might rejoice in the refining and abstracting process which did away with the disadvantages of closer personal contact, yet left them enough appeal to the sense, to permit of some command over their individualities, especially in the case of German artists. He could distinguish the dialect, the pronunciation, the local origin of these; the character of the voice betrayed something of the soul-stature of individuals, and the level of their intelligence could be guessed by the extent to which they had neglected or taken advantage of their opportunities. Hans Castorp writhed when they failed. He bit his lips in chagrin when the reproduction was technically faulty; he was on pins and needles when the first note of an often-used record gave a shrill or scratching sound—which happened more particularly with the difficult female voice. Still, when these things happened, he bore with them, for love makes us forbearing. Sometimes he bent over the whirring, pulsating mechanism as over a spray of lilac, rapt in a cloud of sweet sound; or stood before the open case, tasting the triumphant joy of the conductor who with raised hand brings the trumpets into place precisely at the right moment. And he had favourites in his treasure-house, certain vocal and instrumental numbers which he never tired of hearing.

One group of records contained the closing scenes of a certain brilliant opera, overflowing with melodic genius, by a great countryman of Herr Settembrini, the doyen of dramatic music in the south, who had written it to the order of an oriental prince, in the second half of the last century, to celebrate the completion of a great technical achievement which should bind the peoples of the earth together. Hans Castorp had learned something of the plot, knew the main lines of the tragic fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida; and when he heard it from his casket could understand well enough what they said. The incomparable tenor, the royal alto with the wonderful sob in her register, and the silver soprano he understood perhaps not every word they said, but enough, with his knowledge of the situation, and his sympathy in general for such situations, to feel a familiar fellow-feeling that increased every time he listened to this set of records, until it amounted to infatuation.

First came the scene of the explanation between Radames and Amneris: the king’s daughter has the captive brought before her, whom she loves, whom she would gladly save for her own, but that he has just thrown all away for the sake of a barbarian slave—fatherland and honour and all. Though he insists that in the depth of his soul honour remains untarnished. But this inner unimpairment avails him little, under the weight of all that indisputable guilt and crime, for he has become forfeit to the spiritual arm, which is inexorable toward human weakness, and will certainly make short work of him if he does not, at the last moment, abjure the slave, and throw himself into the royal arms of the alto with the sob in her register—who, so far as her voice went, richly deserved him. Amneris wrestles fervidly with the mellifluous but tragically blind and infatuated tenor, who sings nothing at all but “In vain” and “I cannot,” when she addresses him with despairing pleas to renounce the slave, for that his own life is in the balance. “I cannot”… “Once more, renounce her”… “In vain thou pleadest”—and deathly obstinacy and anguished love blend together in a duet of extraordinary power and beauty, but absolutely no hope whatever. Then comes the terrifying repetition of the priestly formulas of condemnation, to the accompaniment of Amneris’s despair; they sound hollowly from below, and them the unhappy Radames does not reply to at all.

The high-priest calls attention to his silence, and they all hollowly declare him guilty.

“Radames, Radames,” sings the high-priest again. “The camp thou hast left before the battle.”

And again: “Justify thyself.” “Lo, he is silent,” the highly prejudiced presiding officer announces once more; and all the priests acain unanimously declare him guilty.

“Radames, Radames,” for the third time comes the inexorable voice. “To Fatherland, to honour and thy King, thy oath thou hast broken”—”Justify thyself,” resounded again. And finally, for the third time, “
Fellonia
,” the priestly chorus proclaims, after noting that Radames has again remained absolutely silent. So then there is nothing for it: the chorus announces the evil-doer for judgment, proclaims that his doom is sealed, that he must die the death of a deserter and be buried alive beneath the temple of the offended deity.

The outraged feelings of Amneris at this priestly severity had to be imagined, for here the record broke off. Hans Castorp changed the plate, with as few movements as possible, his eyes cast down. When he seated himself again, it was to listen to the last scene of the melodrama, the closing duet of Radames and Aida, sung in the underground vaults, while above their heads in the temple the cruel and bigoted priests perform the service of their cult, spreading forth their arms, giving out a dull, murmurous sound. “
Tu—in qitesta tomba?”
comes the inexpressibly moving, sweet and at the same time heroic voice of Radames, in mingled horror and rapture. Yes, she has found her way to him, the beloved one for whose sake he has forfeited life and honour, she has awaited him here, to die with him; and the exchange of song between the two, broken at times by the muffled sound of the ceremonies above them, or blending and harmonizing with it, pierced the soul of our solitary night-watcher to its very depth, as much by reason of the circumstances as by the melodic expression of them. They sang of heaven, these two; but truly the songs were heavenly themselves, and heavenly sweet the singing of them. That melodic line resistlessly travelled by the voices, solo and
unisono
, of Radames and Aida; that simple, rapturous ascent, playing from tonic to dominant, as it mounts from the fundamental to the sustained note a half-tone before the octave, then turning back again to the fifth—it seemed to the listener the most rarefied, the most ecstatic he had ever heard. But he would have been less ravished by the sounds, had not the situation which gave them birth prepared his spirit to yield to the sweetness of the music. It was
so
beautiful, that Aida should have found her way to the condemned Radames, to share his fate for ever! The condemned one protested, quite properly, against the sacrifice of the precious life; but in his tender, despairing “
No
,
no
,
troppo sei bella
” was the intoxication of final union with her whom he had thought never to see again. It needed no effort of imagination to enable Hans Castorp to feel with Radames all this intoxication, all this gratitude. And what, finally, he felt, understood, and enjoyed, sitting there with folded hands, looking into the black slats of the jalousies whence it all issued, was the triumphant idealism of the music, of art, of the human spirit; the high and irrefragable power they had of shrouding with a veil of beauty the vulgar horror of actual fact. What was it, considered with the eye of reason, that was happening here? Two human beings, buried alive, their lungs full of pit gas, would here together—or, more horrible still, one after the other—succumb to the pangs of hunger, and thereafter the process of putrefaction would do its unspeakable work, until two skeletons remained, each totally indifferent and insensible to the other’s presence or absence. This was the real, objective fact—but a side, and a state of affairs quite distinct, of which idealism and emotion would have none, which was triumphantly put in the shade by the music and the beauty of the theme. The situation as it stood did not exist for either operatic Radames or operatic Aida. Their voices rose
unisono
to the blissful sustained note leading into the octave, as they assured each other that now heaven was opening, and the light of its eternity streaming forth before their yearning eyes. The consoling power of this aesthetic palliation did the listener good, and went far to account for the special love he bore this number of his programme.

He was wont to rest from these terrors and ecstasies in another number, brief, yet with a concentrated power of enchantment; peaceful, compared with the other, an idyll, yet
raffiné
, shaped and turned with all the subtlety and economy of the most modern art. It was an orchestral piece, of French origin, purely instrumental, a symphonic prelude, achieved with an instrumentation relatively small for our time, yet with all the apparatus of modern technique and shrewdly calculated to set the spirit adreaming.

Here is the dream Hans Castorp dreamed: he lay on his back in a sunny, flowerstarred meadow, with his head on a little knoll, one leg drawn up, the other flung over—and those were goat’s legs crossed there before him. His fingers touched the stops of a little wooden pipe, which he played for the pure joy of it, his solitude on the meadow being complete. He held it to his lips, a reed pipe or little clarinet, and coaxed from it soothing head-tones, one after the other, just as they came, and yet in a pleasing sequence. The care-free piping rose toward the deep-blue sky, and beneath the sky stretched the branching, wind-tossed boughs of single ash-trees and birches whose leaves twinkled in the sun. But his feckless, day-dreaming, half-melodious pipe was far from being the only voice in the solitude. The hum of insects in the sunwarmed air above the long grass, the sunshine itself, the soft wind, the swaying treetops, the twinkling leaves—all these gentle vibrations of the midsummery peace set themselves to his simple piping, to give it a changeful, ever surprisingly choice harmonic meaning. Sometimes the symphonic accompaniment would fade far off and be forgot. Then goat-legged Hans would blow stoutly away, and by the naïve monotony of his piping lure back Nature’s subtly colourful, harmonious enchantment; until at length, after repeated intermission, she sweetly acceded. More and higher instruments came in rapidly, one after another, until all the previously lacking richness and volume were reached and sustained in a single fugitive moment that yet held all eternity in its consummate bliss. The young faun was joyous on his summer meadow. No “Justify thyself,” was here; no challenge, no priestly court-martial upon one who strayed away and was forgotten of honour. Forgetfulness held sway, a blessed hush, the innocence of those places where time is not; “slackness” with the best conscience in the world, the very apotheosis of rebuff to the Western world and that world’s insensate ardour for the “deed.” The soothing effect of all which upon our nightwalking music-maker gave this record a special value in his eyes.

There was a third. Or rather there were many, a consecutive group of three or four, a single tenor
aria
taking up almost half the space of a whole black rubber plate. Again it was French music—an opera Hans Castorp knew well, having seen and heard it repeatedly. Once, at a certain critical juncture now far in the past, he had made its action serve him for an allegory. The record took up the play at the second act, in the Spanish tavern, in crude Moorish architecture, a shawl-draped, roomy cellar like the floor of a barn. One heard Carmen’s voice, a little brusque, yet warm, and very infectious in its folk-quality, saying she would dance before the sergeant; one heard the rattle of castanets. But in the same moment, from a distance, the blare of trumpets swelled out, bugles giving a military signal, at which sound the little sergeant starts up. “One moment, stop!” he cries, and pricks up his ears like a horse. Why? What was it then, Carmen asked; and he: “Dost thou not hear?” astonished that the signal did not enter into her soul as into his. “Carmen, ‘tis the retreat!” It is the trumpets from the garrison, giving the summons. “The hour draws nigh for our return,” says he, in operatic language. But the gipsy girl cannot understand, nor does she wish to. So much the better, she says, half stupidly, half pertly; she needs no castanets, for here is music dropped from the sky. Music to dance by, tra-la, tra-la! He is beside himself. His own disappointment retreats before his need to make clear to her how matters stand, and how no love-affair in the world can prevent obedience to this summons. How is it she cannot understand anything so fixed, so fundamental? “I must away, the signal summons me, to quarters!” he cries, in despair over a lack of understanding that doubly burdens his heavy heart. And now, hear Carmen! She is furious. Outraged to the depths of her soul, her voice is sheer betrayed and injured love—or she makes it sound so. “To quarters? The signal?” And her heart? Her faithful, loving heart, just then, in its weakness, yes, she admitted, in its weakness, about to while away an hour with him in dance and song? “Tan-ta-ra!” And in a fury of scorn she sets her curled hand to her lips and imitates the horns: “Taran-tara!” And that was enough to make the fool leap up, on fire to be off! Good, then, let him be off, away with him! Here are helmet, sabre, and hanger—away, away, away with him, let him be off, let him be off, off to the barracks! He pleads for mercy. But she goes on, scorching him with her scorn, mocking him, taking his place and showing in pantomime how at the sound of the horn he lost what little sense he had. Tan-tara! The signal! O heaven! he will come too late! Let him go, let him be off, for the summons sounds, and he, like a fool, makes to go, at the very moment when she would dance for him. From this time, so she will account his love!