The Magic Mountain (92 page)

He did not finish. Before him stood Peeperkorn. He had searched for his travellingcompanion, entered through the portières and stood in front of Hans Castorp’s chair, behind which he saw her talking; stood like a tower, so close to Hans Castorp as to rouse the latter from his trance, and make him realize that it was in place to get up and be mannerly. But they were so close he had to slide sidewise from his seat, and then the three stood in a triangle, the centre of which was the chair.

Frau Chauchat complied with the requirements of the civilized West, by presenting the gentlemen to each other, Hans Castorp to Peeperkorn as “an acquaintance of a former stay.” Superfluous to account for Herr Peeperkorn. She gave his name, and the Dutchman bent a look upon the young man, out of his colourless eyes, beneath the astonishing arabesque of wrinkles that made his face so like an old idol’s; gave him a look, and put out his hand, which was freckled on the back, and would have looked like a sea-captain’s, Hans Castorp thought, but for the lanceolate finger-nails. For the first time, he stood under the immediate influence of Peeperkorn’s impressive personality (personality was the word that always occurred to one in reference to this man, one knew straightway that this was a personality; and the more one saw of him the more one was convinced that a personality must look not otherwise than as he did) and his unstable youth felt the weight of this broad-shouldered, red-faced man in the sixties, with his aureole of white hair, his cracked lips and the chin-whisker that strayed long and scanty over the clerical waistcoat. Peeperkorn’s manner was courtesy itself.

“My dear sir,” he said, “with the greatest of pleasure. Don’t mention it. I am entirely your man. In making your acquaintance, I distinctly feel—as a young man, you inspire me with confidence. I like you. I—don’t mention it. Settled, sir, settled. You suit me.”

What could Hans Castorp do? Peeperkorn’s gestures were conclusive, peremptory. He liked Hans Castorp. It was “settled.” And his satisfaction gave Peeperkorn an idea, which he indicated by means of speaking gesture. His fair companion, coming to the rescue, elaborated and made it vocal.

“My child,” he said. “Very well. Very well indeed. Very. But how would it be—? Pray understand me. Our life here is but brief. Our power to do it justice is but— These are facts, my child. Laws. In—ex—orable. In short, my child, in short and in brief—” He paused, in an impressive attitude, which suggested that he would defer to another’s judgment but disclaim responsibility if, despite his warning, an error were committed.

Frau Chauchat was obviously skilled in interpreting his half-uttered wishes. She said: “Why not? We might remain down a little longer, make a party, perhaps, and drink a bottle of wine together.” She turned to Hans Castorp. “Make haste! Why are you waiting? We must have company, we three are not enough. Who is still in the salon? Ask anyone who is there, fetch some of your friends down from their balconies. We will ask Dr. Ting-fu from our table.” Peeperkorn rubbed his hands.

“Very good,” he said. “Absolutely. Capital. Do as you are bid, young man, make haste! Let us make a little company, play, and eat and drink. Let us feel that—settled, young man. Absolutely.”

Hans Castorp took the lift to the second storey. He knocked at Ferge’s door, who in his turn fetched Wehsal and Herr Albin from their chairs in the main rest-hall below. Lawyer Paravant and the Magnus couple were still in the hall, Frau Stöhr and the Kleefeld in the salon. A large table was set up under the centre chandelier, chairs and serving-tables put about. Mynheer courteously greeted each guest as he appeared, with a glance of the pallid eyes and a lifting of the masklike brows. They sat down, twelve together, Hans Castorp between his kingly host and Clavdia Chauchat. Cards and counters were produced, they decided on some rounds of
vingt et un
. Peeperkorn summoned the dwarf and in his most impressive manner ordered wine—white Chablis of ‘06, three bottles for a start—and dessert, whatever
pâtisseries
and dried fruits were to be had. He rubbed his hands in high glee as the good things came in, and communicated his sentiments in broken phrases which were none the less entirely successful, at least in the direction of establishing his “personality.” He laid both hands on his neighbour’s arm, then raised his long forefinger with the pointed nail, and claimed and received the admiration of the table for the splendid golden colour of the wine in the rummers, for the sugar that sweated from the Malaga grapes, for a certain sort of little salt and poppy-seed pretzel. These, he declared, were divine, and with an imperious gesture nipped in the bud any possible protest against the strength of his adjective. He had taken charge of the bank at first, but soon turned it over to Herr Albin and was understood to say that the charge of it hindered his unfettered enjoyment.

The gambling was to him quite evidently a minor consideration. The stakes were very low, a mere trifle in his view, though the bidding, at his suggestion, began at fifty
rappen
, a considerable sum to most of those present. Lawyer Paravant and Frau Stöhr went white and red by turns; the latter suffered pangs of indecision when called on to decide whether it was too high for her to buy at eighteen. She squealed aloud when Herr Albin with chill routine dealt her a card so high as to confound her hopes over and over. Peeperkorn laughed heartily.

“Squeal away, madame, squeal away,” said he. “It sounds shrill and full of life, it wells up from depths—drink, madame, drink and refresh yourself for new efforts.” He filled her glass, also his neighbour’s and his own, ordered three more bottles, and clicked glasses with Wehsal and Frau Magnus the inly wasted one; they two seeming to stand in most need of enlivenment. Faces flushed more and more, from the effects of the truly marvellous wine—only Dr. Ting-fu’s remained unchangingly yellow, with jet-black slits of eyes. He staked very high, with his little suppressed giggle, and was shamelessly lucky. Lawyer Paravant, his gaze a-swim, challenged fate by putting ten francs on an only moderately hopeful opening card, bought until he was pale in the face, and then won twice his money back; for Herr Albin had rashly doubled on the strength of an ace he received. Not only the persons involved felt the shock of these events; the whole circle shared the shattering effect. Even Herr Albin, whose sangfroid outdid the croupiers of Monte Carlo, where, according to him, he was an old habitué, now scarcely mastered his excitement. Hans Castorp played high, so did Frau Stöhr and the Kleefeld, Frau Chauchat as well. They went the rounds: played
Chemin
de fer
,
“
My aunt, your aunt,” and the perilous
Différence
. There were outbursts of jubilation and despair, explosions of rage, attacks of hysterical laughter—all due to the reaction of this unlawful pleasure upon their nerves; and all perfectly serious and genuine. The chances and changes of life itself would have called up in them no other reaction.

But it was not solely—or even chiefly—the play and the wine that made the little circle so tense, that flushed their cheeks and opened their eyes so wide, or evoked such breathless excitement, such almost painful concentration on the moment’s business. It was rather the effect of a commanding nature in their midst, a “personality”; it was Mynheer Peeperkorn who held the gathering in the hollow of his mobile gesturing hand, and enforced it, by the spectacle of his countenance, by his pallid gaze beneath the monumental creases of his brow, by his words, and his compelling pantomime, to take the mood of the hour. No matter what he said; it was highly incomprehensible, and the more so the more wine he drank. Yet they hung on his lips, they could not take their eyes from the little round made by his finger and thumb, with the pointed nails stiffly erect beside it; or from the majestic, speaking face; they utterly succumbed to feelings which for self-forgetfulness and intensity far exceeded the accustomed gamut of these people. The tribute they paid was too much for some of them—Frau Magnus, at least, felt very poorly; threatened to faint, but stoutly refused to retire, and contented herself with the chaise-longue, where she lay awhile with a wet-napkin over her forehead, and then rejoined the group at the table. Peeperkorn put down her plight to lack of nourishment. He expressed himself in this sense, with impressive disjointedness, forefinger aloft. People must nourish themselves properly, he gave them to understand, in order to do justice to life’s manifold claims. And he ordered sustenance for the company: platters of cold meat, joint and roast; tongue, goose, ham, sausage, whole dishes of délectables, all garnished with little radishes, butter-balls, and parsley, gay as flower-beds. They found a welcome, despite the lately consumed supper, which, it were superfluous to tell the reader, had lacked nothing in heartiness. But Mynheer Peeperkorn, after a few bites, dismissed the whole as “kickshaws”—dismissed them with a scorn which gave dismaying evidence of the uncertain temper of this lordly man. Yes, he waxed choleric, turned upon one of the company who tried to defend the collation. He swelled with rage, struck the table with his fist, and cursed the food for garbage, fit for the dust-bin. This reduced the offender to silence, for certainly Peeperkorn, as host and dispenser of the good cheer, might find fault with its quality if he chose.

But his rage, however disproportionate, became him magnificently, Hans Castorp saw that. It did not misrepresent or render him petty: it wrought his incoherence, which no one in the group could have had the heart to connect with the mixture of wine he had drunk, to so royal a pitch that they all with one accord agreed, and took not another bite of the offending viands. Frau Chauchat set to work to mollify her companion’s mood. She stroked his great sea-captain’s hand, as it rested on the cloth after the blow he had struck, and said cajolingly that they might order something else, a hot dish, perhaps, if the
chef
could be won over. “Very good, my child,” Peeperkorn said, assuaged. And passed, without abating his dignity, from a full torrent of wrath to a state of appeasement, as he took Clavdia’s hand and kissed it. He ordered omelets for himself and the company, for each person a fine large om
elette aux fines herbes
, to help them do justice to the demands life made on them. And accompanied the order with a hundred-franc note as a sweetener for the staff.

His placidity was fully restored by the appearance of the steaming dishes, with their burden of canary-yellow besprent with green, which dispersed a mild warm fragrance of eggs and butter upon the air. They fell to with Peeperkorn, who ate and presided over the enjoyment, with broken words and compelling gesture enjoining upon everybody a perfervid appreciation of these gifts of God. He ordered a Hollands all round to go with the omelets; the transparent liquor gave out a healthy grain odour, mingled with just the faintest whiff of juniper—and Peeperkorn laid upon them all to drink it reverently.

Hans Castorp smoked, Frau Chauchat as well; the latter Russian cigarettes with a mouthpiece, from a lacquered box with a
troika
going full speed on the lid, which lay to hand on the table before her. Peeperkorn made no objection to his neighbours’ enjoyment, but did not smoke himself—he never had done so. If they understood him aright, he considered the use of tobacco one of those over-refined enjoyments the cultivation of which robbed of their majesty the simpler pleasures of life—those gifts and claims to which our power of feeling was even at best scarcely equal. “Young man,” said he to Hans Castorp, holding him by the power of his pale eye and his developed gesture: “Young man—the simple—the holy. Good—you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirit—let us absorb such things as these, exhaust them, satisfy their claims, before we—Positively, sir. Not a word. I have known men and women, cocaine eaters, hashish smokers, morphine takers—My dear friend, very good. Very good indeed. Very. Let them. We cannot judge, or condemn. But the simple, the great, the primeval gifts of God—to them they were unequal in the first place. Settled, my friend. Condemned, rejected. They could not respond.—Your name, young man? Good. I knew it, but I had forgotten. Not in cocaine, not in opium, not in vice as such does the viciousness lie. The unpardonable—the—unpardonable—sin—”

He paused. Tall and broad, he bent toward his neighbour; paused and maintained a marvellously expressive silence. His forefinger was raised, his mouth a broken line beneath the bare, red upper lip, which was somewhat raw from the razor, the horizontal folds of his bald forehead rose to meet the white aureole of his hair; the small pale eyes stared wide, and Hans Castorp seemed to read in them some flicker of horror at the crime, the great transgression, the unforgivable sin, which seeking to expound he stood there now, charming the silence with all the force of a commanding though incoherent personality. Hans Castorp thought it a disinterested horror, yet with something too of a personal kind, something that touched the kingly creature near: fear, perhaps, but not of any mean or narrow sort; that was very like panic flickering up momentarily in the eyes. Hans Castorp—despite the grounds he had for hostile misinterpretation of Frau Chauchat’s majestic friend—was by nature too respectful not to feel shocked at the revelation.

He cast down his eyes, and nodded, to give his neighbour the satisfaction of being understood.

“You are quite right,” he said. “It may easily be a sin—and a sign of impotence—to indulge in the refinements of life, at the same time being inadequate to its great, simple, sacred gifts. If I understood you aright, Herr Peeperkorn, that was your meaning. And though I hadn’t thought of it in that light, I may say that I agree with you, now that you mention it. It probably happens seldom enough that these sound and simple gifts of life have real justice done them. The majority of human beings are too heedless, too flabby, too corrupt, too worn out inwardly to give them their due, I feel sure of that.”

The mighty one was immensely pleased. “Young man,” he said, “positively. Will you permit me—not a word. I beg you to drink with me—no heel-taps—arm-in-arm. I do not, at this moment, propose to you the brotherly thou; I was about to do so, but it would no doubt be precipitate. Somewhat. In the near future, however. Depend upon it. Or, if you insist upon the present—” Hans Castorp demurred.