The Magic Mountain (44 page)

All this was fuel to Hans Castorp’s fire. His brow was flushed, his eyes fairly sparkled, he had so much to say he knew not where to begin. In the first place, he had it in mind to remove the picture of Frau Chauchat from the window wall, where it hung somewhat in shadow, and place it to better advantage; next, he was eager to take up the Hofrat’s remarks about the constitution of the skin, which had keenly interested him; and finally, he wanted to make some remarks of his own, of a general and philosophical nature, which interested him no less mightily.

Laying his hands upon the painting to unhook it, he eagerly began: “Yes, yes indeed, that is all very important. What I’d like to say is—I mean, you said, Herr Hofrat, if I understood rightly, you said: ‘In another relation.’ You said it was good when there was some other relation besides the lyric—I think that was the word you used—the artistic, that is; in short, when one looked at the thing from another point of view—the medical, for example. That’s all so enormously to the point, you know—I do beg your pardon, Herr Hofrat, but what I mean is that it is so exactly and precisely right, because after all it is not a question of any fundamentally different relations or points of view, but at bottom just variations of one and the same, just shadings of it, so to speak, I mean: variations of one and the same universal interest, the artistic impulse itself being a part and a manifestation of it too, if I may say so. Yes, if you will pardon me, I will take down this picture, there’s positively no light here where it hangs, permit me to carry it over to the sofa, we shall see if it won’t look entirely— what I meant to say was: what is the main concern of the study of medicine? I know nothing about it, of course—but after all isn’t its main concern with human beings? And jurisprudence—making laws, pronouncing judgment—its main concern is with human beings too. And philology, which is nearly always bound up with the profession of pedagogy? And theology, with the care of souls, the office of spiritual shepherd? All of them have to do with human beings, all of them are degrees of one and the same important, the same fundamental interest, the interest in humanity. In other words, they are the humanistic callings, and if you go in for them you have to study the ancient languages by way of foundation, for the sake of formal training, as they say. Perhaps you are surprised at my talking about them like that, being only a practical man and on the technical side. But I have been thinking about these questions lately, in the rest-cure; and I find it wonderful, I find it a simply priceless arrangement of things, that the formal, the idea of form, of beautiful form, lies at the bottom of every sort of humanistic calling. It gives it such nobility, I think, such a sort of disinterestedness, and feeling, too, and—and—courtliness—it makes a kind of chivalrous adventure out of it. That is to say—I suppose I am expressing myself very ridiculously, but—you can see how the things of the mind and the love of beauty come together, and that they always really have been one and the same—in other words, science and art; and that the calling of being an artist surely belongs with the others, as a sort of fifth faculty, because it too is a humanistic calling, a variety of humanistic interest, in so far as its most important theme or concern is with man—you will agree with me on that point. When I experimented in that line in my youth, I never painted anything but ships and water, of course. But notwithstanding, in my eyes the most interesting branch of painting is and remains portraiture, because it has man for its immediate object—that was why I asked at once if you had done anything in that field.—Wouldn’t this be a far more favourable place for it to hang?”

Both of them, Behrens no less than Joachim, looked at him amazed—was he not ashamed of this confused, impromptu harangue? But no, Hans Castorp was far too preoccupied to feel self-conscious. He held the painting against the sofa wall, and demanded to know if it did not get a much better light. Just then the servant brought a tray, with hot water, a spirit-lamp, and coffee-cups.

Behrens motioned them into the cabinet, saying: “Then you must have been more interested in sculpture, originally, than in painting, I should think. Yes, of course, it gets more light there; if you think it can stand it. I should suppose so, because sculpture concerns itself more purely and exclusively with the human form. But we mustn’t let the water boil away.”

“Quite right, sculpture,” Hans Castorp said, as they went. He forgot either to hang up or put down the picture he had been holding, but tugged it with him into the neighbouring room. “Certainly a Greek Venus or athlete is more humanistic, it is probably at bottom the most humanistic of all the arts, when one comes to think about it!”

“Well, as far as little Chauchat goes, she is a better subject for painting than sculpture. Phidias, or that other chap with the Mosaic ending to his name, would have stuck up their noses at her style of physiognomy.—Hullo, where are you going with the ham?”

“Pardon me, I’ll just lean it here against the leg of my chair, that will do very well for the moment. The Greek sculptors did not trouble themselves about the head and face, their interest was more with the body, I suppose that was their humanism.—And the plasticity of the female form—so that is fat, is it?”

“That is fat,” the Hofrat said concisely. He had opened a hanging cabinet, and taken thence the requisites for his coffee-making: a cylindrical Turkish mill, a long-handled pot, a double receptacle for sugar and ground coffee, all in brass. “Palmitin, stearin, olein,” he went on, shaking the coffee berries from a tin box into the mill, which he began to turn. “You see I make it all myself, it tastes twice as good.—Did you think it was ambrosia?”

“No, of course I knew. Only it sounds strange to hear it like that,” Hans Castorp said.

They were seated in the corner between door and window, at a bamboo tabouret which held an oriental brass tray, upon which Behrens had set the coffee-machine, among the smoking utensils. Joachim was next Behrens on the Ottoman, overflowing with cushions; Hans Castorp sat in a leather arm-chair on castors, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat’s picture. A gaily-coloured carpet was beneath their feet. The Hofrat ladled coffee and sugar into the long-handled pot, added water, and let the brew boil up over the flame of the lamp. It foamed brownly in the little onion-pattern cups, and proved on tasting both strong and sweet.

“Your own as well,” Behrens said. “Your ‘plasticity’—so far as you have any—is fat too, though of course not to the same extent as with a woman. With us fat is only about five per cent of the body weight, in females it is one sixteenth of the whole. Without that subcutaneous cell structure of ours, we should all be nothing but fungoid growths. It disappears, with time, and then come the unæsthetic wrinkles in the drapery. The layer is thickest on the female breast and belly, on the front of the thighs, everywhere, in short, where there is a little something for heart and hand to take hold of. The soles of the feet are fat and ticklish.”

Hans Castorp turned the cylindrical coffee-mill about in his hands. It was, like the rest of the set, Indian or Persian rather than Turkish; the style of the engraving showed that, with the bright surface of the pattern standing out against the purposely dulled background. He looked at the design, without immediately seeing what it was. When he did, he blushed unawares.

“Yes, that is a set for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “I keep it locked up, you see, my kitchen queen might hurt her eyes looking at it. It won’t do you gentlemen any harm, I take it. It was given to me by a patient, an Egyptian princess who once honoured us with a year or so of her presence. You see, the pattern repeats itself on the whole set. Pretty roguish, what?”

“Yes, it is quite unusual,” Hans Castorp answered. “Ha ha! No, it doesn’t trouble me. But one can take it perfectly seriously; solemnly, in fact—only then it is rather out of place on a coffee-machine. The ancients are said to have used such motifs on their sarcophagi. The sacred and the obscene were more or less the same thing to them.”

“I should say the princess was more for the second,” Behrens said. “Anyhow she still sends me the most wonderful cigarettes, superfinissimos, you know, only sported on “first-class occasions.” He fetched the garish-coloured box from the cupboard and offered them. Joachim drew his heels together as he received his cigarette. Hans Castorp helped himself to his; it was unusually large and thick, and had a gilt sphinx on it. He began to smoke—it was wonderful, as Behrens had said.

“Tell us some more about the skin,” he begged the Hofrat; “that is, if you will be so kind.” He had taken Frau Chauchat’s portrait on his knee, and was gazing at it, leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips. “Not about the fat-layer, we know about that now. About the human skin in general, that you know so well how to paint.” “About the skin. You are interested in physiology?”

“Very much. Yes, I’ve always felt a good deal of interest in it. The human body— yes, I’ve always had an uncommon turn for it. I’ve sometimes asked myself whether I ought not to have been a physician—it wouldn’t have been a bad idea, in a way. Because if you are interested in the body, you must be interested in disease—specially interested, isn’t that so? But it doesn’t signify, I might have been such a lot of things—for example, a clergyman.” “Indeed?”

“I just happened to—it was more or less outward circumstances that decided the matter.”

“Well, about the skin. What do you want to hear about your sensory sheath? You know, don’t you, that it is your outside brain—ontogenetically the same as that apparatus of the so-called higher centres up there in your cranium? The central nervous system is nothing but a modification of the outer skin-layer; among the lower animals the distinction between central and peripheral doesn’t exist, they smell and taste with their skin, it is the only sensory organ they have. Must be rather nice—if you can put yourself in their place. On the other hand, in such highly differentiated forms of life as you and I are, the skin has fallen from its high estate; it has to confine itself to feeling ticklish; that is to say, to being simply a protective and registering apparatus—but devilishly on the qui vive for anything that tries to come too close about the body. It even puts out feelers—the body hairs, which are nothing but hardened skin cells—and they get wind of the approach of whatever it is, before the skin itself is touched. Just between ourselves, it is quite possible that this protecting and defending function of the skin extends beyond the physical. Do you know what makes you go red and pale?” “Not very precisely.”

“Well, neither do we, ‘very precisely,’ to be frank—at least, as far as blushing is concerned. The situation is not quite clear; for the dilatory muscles which are presumably set in action by the vasomotor nerves haven’t yet been demonstrated in relation to the blood-vessels. How the cock really swells his comb, or any of the other well-known instances come about, is still a mystery, particularly where it is a question of emotional influences in play. We assume that a connexion subsists between the outer rind of the cerebrum and the vascular centre in the medulla. Certain stimuli—for instance, let us say, like your being powerfully embarrassed, set up the connexion, and the nerves that control the blood-vessels function toward the face, and they expand and fill, and you get a face like a turkey-cock, all swelled up with blood so you can’t see out of your eyes. On the other hand, suppose you are in suspense, something is going to happen—it may be something tremendously beautiful, for aught I care—the blood-vessels that-feed the skin contract, it gets pale and cold and sunken, you look like a dead man, with big, lead-coloured eye-sockets and a peaked nose. But the
Sympathicus m
akes your heart thump away like a good fellow.” “So that is how it happens,” Hans Castorp said. ‘

“Something like that. Those are reactions, you know. But it is the nature of reactions and reflexes to have a reason for happening; we are beginning to suspect, we physiologists, that the phenomena accompanying emotion are really defence mechanisms, protective reflexes of the system. Goose-flesh, now. Do you know how you come to have goose-flesh?” “Not very clearly either, I’m afraid.”

“That is a little contrivance of the sebaceous glands, which secrete the fatty, albuminous substance that oils your skin and keeps it supple, and pleasant to feel of. Not very appetizing, maybe, but without it the skin would be all withered and cracked. Without the cholesterin, it is hard to imagine touching the human skin at all. These sebaceous glands have little erector-muscles that act upon them, and when they do so, then you are like the lad when the princess poured the pail of minnows over him. Your skin gets like a file, and if the stimulus is very powerful, the hair ducts are erected too, the hair on your head bristles up and the little hairs on your body, like quills upon the fretful porcupine—and you can say, like the youth in the story, that now you know how to shiver and shake.”

“Oh,” said Hans Castorp, “I know how already. I shiver rather easily, on all sorts of provocation. Only what surprises me is that the glands are erected for such different reasons. It gives one goose-flesh to hear a slate-pencil run across a pane of glass; but when you hear particularly beautiful music you suddenly find you have it too, and when I was confirmed and took my first communion, I had one shiver after another, it seemed as though the prickling and stickling would never leave off. Imagine those little muscles acting for such different reasons!”

“Herr Hofrat,” he said, “I wanted to come back to something you said a moment ago, about internal processes, lymphatic action, and that sort of thing. Tell us about it—particularly about the lymphatic system, it interests me tremendously.”