The Magic Mountain (97 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Dutchman said, and lifted his sea-captain’s hand, with its nails like lance-heads, in entreaty and monition. “Ladies and gentlemen. Very good. Very. Asceticism. Indulgences. Lust of the flesh. By all means. Most important. Most debatable. But may I—I should like to—I fear we may commit a serious error. Are we not irresponsibly neglecting—one of our highest—” He drew in a deep breath. “Ladies and gentlemen. This air—this characteristic thawing air, with its somewhat enervating breath, full of memories and promises of spring—we should not breathe it in to breathe it out in—Really.—I must implore you. We must not. It is an insult. We should give it out only in the form of praise—of complete and utter—enough, ladies and gentlemen. I interrupt myself—in honour of—” He did, indeed, stand still, bent backward, shading his brows with his hat. They followed his gaze. “May I,” said he, “may I draw your attention upwards—high in the sky, to that black, circling point against the blue, intensely blue, shading into black—that is a bird of prey. It is, if I am not mistaken—look, ladies and gentlemen, look, my child. It is an eagle. Most emphatically I call your attention—look, it is no buzzard, no vulture, it is an eagle. If you were as far-sighted as my advancing age—yes, my child, advancing—my hair is white. You would see, as plainly as I do, the blunt pinions—it is a golden eagle. He circles directly overhead, he hovers, not a single beat of his wing—at a tremendous height in the blue, and with his keen, far-sighted eyes under the prominent bony structure of his brows he is peering earthwards. The eagle, ladies and gentlemen, the bird of Jove, king of his kind, the lion of the upper air. He has feathered gaiters, and a beak of iron, with a sudden hook at the end; claws of enormous strength, their talons curving inwards, the front ones overlapped by the long hinder one in an iron clutch. Look!” And he tried to put his long fingers in the posture of an eagle’s claw. “Gaffer, why are you circling and spying up there?” He turned his head upwards again. “Strike! Strike downward, with your iron beak into head and eyes, tear out the belly of the creature God gives you—splendid! Splendid! Absolutely! Bury your talons in its entrails, make your beak drip with its blood—”

He had wrought himself to a pitch. All interest in Settembrini’s and Naphta’s antinomies was fled away. But the vision of the eagle remained—even though they ceased talking about it, and devoted themselves to the programme they were carrying out under Mynheer’s lead. They stopped at an inn to eat and drink—quite out of hours, but with an appetite whetted by silent memories of the eagle. There was a feasting and a tippling, such as always went on where Mynheer was, in Dorf or Platz, or the inns at Claris and Klosters, whither they had gone in the little train. Under his tutelage, they tasted the “classic” gifts of life: coffee and cream with fresh bread, moist cheese and fragrant Alpine butter, heavenly-tasting with hot roasted chestnuts. They drank red Veltliner, to their hearts’ content. Peeperkorn accompanied the impromptu meal with a fire of ejaculations; or incited Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to talk, that good-natured sufferer, who abhorred all high thoughts, but could hold forth so acceptably on the subject of the manufacture of rubber shoes in Russia. He described how the rubber mass was treated with sulphur and other substances, and the finished, glossy product subjected to a heat of over two hundred degrees to “vulcanize” it. He talked about the polar circle, for his business trips had more than once taken him thither; about the midnight sun, and eternal winter at the North Cape—all this out of his scraggy throat, from beneath his bushy moustaches. Up there, he said, the steamers looked tiny, next the gigantic cliffs, on the steel-grey surface of the sea. And a yellow radiation was diffused over great tracts of the heavens—the northern lights. The whole thing had seemed spooky to him, Anton Karlowitsch: the scene and himself to boot.

Thus Herr Ferge, the complete outsider, the only member of the group who stood detached from its complicated relationships. But now that we speak of these, it will be well to relate two conversations, two priceless conversations
à deux
, which our unheroic hero had, the first with Clavdia Chauchat, the second with the present companion of her travels; one in the hall, on an evening when the disturbing element lay above with a fever; the other on an afternoon by Mynheer’s bedside.

It was half dark in the hall. The social activities had been brief and languid, the guests withdrew early to the evening cure or else took their wilful way into town, to dance and game. A single light burned in the hall ceiling—and in the adjoining salons dimness reigned. But Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had taken dinner without her protector, was not gone upstairs after it, but still lingered in the writingroom, so he did the same. He sat by the tiled hearth, in the back part of the hall, which was raised by one step from the rest, and separated by arches supported on two columns; in a rocking-chair such as that one Marusja had leaned back in, on the evening Joachim had spoken with her for the first and last time. He was, permissibly at this hour, smoking a cigarette.

She came, he heard her approaching step and the sound of her frock; fanning the air with a letter she held by one corner, and saying, in her Pribislav voice: “The porter has gone. Do give me a
timbre poste
.”

She was wearing a thin dark silk this evening, cut round in the neck, with filmy sleeves finished by a buttoned cuff at the wrists. It was the cut he loved. She wore the pearls, they gleamed palely in the half light. He looked up into her Khirgiz face. “
Timbre?”
he repeated, “I have none.”

“No?
Tant pis pour vous
. Not prepared to do a lady a favour?” She pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “I am disappointed. You ought to be more precise and dependable. I imagined you having a compartment in your pocket-book, nice neat little sheets of all denominations.”

“Why should I? I never write a letter. To whom should I write? I seldom do, even a card, and that is already stamped. I have no one to write to. I have no contact with the flat-land, it has fallen away. We have a folk-song that says: ‘I am lost to the world’— so it is with me.”

“Well, then, lost soul, at least give me a
papiros
,” said she, and sat down opposite him on a bench with a linen cushion, one leg over the other. She stretched out her hand. “With those, at least, you are provided.” She took a cigarette, negligently, from the silver case he held out to her, and availed herself of his little pocket-device, the flame of which lighted up her face. The indolent “Give me a cigarette,” the taking it without thanks, bespoke the spoiled, luxurious female; yet even more it betokened a human companionship and mutual “belonging,” an unspoken give and take which came both thrilling and tender to his love-lorn sense.

He said: “Yes, I always have them. I am always provided, one must be. How should I get on without them? I have, as they say, a passion for them. To tell the truth, however, I am hardly a very passionate man, though I have my passions, phlegmatic ones.”

“I am extraordinarily relieved,” she said, breathing out, as she spoke, the smoke she had inhaled, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. But how should you be? You would have degenerated. Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
C’est ça.
You don’t realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you an enemy of the human race?” “Well, well, well! Enemy of the human race! How can you make such a general statement, Clavdia? Have you something definite and personal in your mind, when you say we don’t live for the sake of life, but for the sake of enriching ourselves? Women don’t usually moralize like that, so abstractly. Oh, morality, and that! A subject for Naphta and Settembrini to quarrel over. It belongs to the realm of the Great Confusion. Whether one lives for oneself, or for the sake of life—one doesn’t know oneself, no one can know that precisely and certainly. I mean, the limits are fluid. There is egoistic devotion, and there is devoted egoism. I think, on the whole, that it is as it is in love. Of course, it is probably immoral of me that I cannot very well attend to what you say to me about morality for being so happy that we are sitting here as we once did, and then never again, even since you came back. And that I may tell you there was never anything so lovely as the way those cuffs suit your hand, and the soft flowing silk your arm—your arm, that I know so well—” “I am going.”

“Yes, you see—you mock at me when I—and then, when I—you say you will leave me—”

“Pray speak a little more connectedly, if you expect me to understand you.”

“So I am not to have any benefit from all your practice in guessing the meaning of disconnected sentences? Is that fair, I ask—or I would if I did not know that it is not a matter of justice at all—”

“No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy—when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous.”

“
Voyons
,
mon ami
. I say no more about the form of address you persist in, in your folly. You will tire of it—and then, I am not prudish, not an outraged middle-class housewife—”

“No, for you are ill. Your illness gives you freedom. It makes you—wait, I must hunt for the word—it makes you—
spirituelle!”

“We shall speak of that another time. It was something else I meant. Something I demand to hear. You shall not pretend I had anything to do with your waiting—if you did wait—that I encouraged you to it, or even permitted it. You must admit explicitly that the opposite was the case—”

“Certainly, Clavdia, with pleasure. You never asked me to wait, I did it on my own. I can quite understand your laying stress on the point—”

“Even when you make admissions, there is always some impertinence about them. You are impertinent by nature—not only with me, but in general—God knows why. Your admiration, your very humility, is an impertinence. Don’t think I can’t see it. I ought not to speak with you at all, and certainly not when you dare to talk about waiting for me. It is inexcusable that you are still here. You should have been long ago at your work,
sur le chantier
, or wherever it was.”

“Now that, Clavdia, is not
spirituel—
it even sounds conventional. You are just talking. You can’t mean it in Settembrini’s sense—and however else, then? I cannot take it seriously. I will not go off without permission, like my poor cousin, who, as you said he would, died because he tried to do service down below, and who knew himself, I suppose, that he would die, but preferred death to doing service up here any longer. Well, it was for that he was a soldier. But I am not. I am a civilian, for me it would be deserting the colours to do what he did, and go and serve the cause of progress down in the flat-land, despite what Behrens says. It would be the greatest disloyalty and ingratitude, to the illness, and its
spirituel
quality, and to my love for you, of which I bear scars both old and new—and to your arms I know so well, even admitting that it was in a dream, a highly
spirituel
dream, that I learned to know them, and that you had no responsibility for my dream, and were not bound by it, nor your freedom infringed on—”

She laughed, cigarette in mouth, so that the Tartar eyes became narrow slits; leaning back against the wainscoting, her hands resting on the bench on either side of her, one leg crossed over the other, and swinging,her foot in its patent-leather shoe. “
Quelle générosité! Pauvre petit! Oh la la
,
vraiment—
Precisely thus I have always imagined
un homme de génie!”

“Don’t, Clavdia. I am no
homme de génie—
as little as I am a personality. Lord, no. But chance—call it chance—brought me up here to these heights of the spirit—you, of course, do not know that there is such a thing as alchemistic-hermetic pedagogy, transubstantiation, from lower to higher, ascending degrees, if you understand what I mean. But of course matter that is capable of taking those ascending stages by dint of outward pressure must have a little something in itself to start with. And what I had in me, as I quite clearly know, was that from long ago, even as a lad, I was familiar with illness and death, and had in the face of all common sense borrowed a lead pencil from you, as I did again on carnival night. But unreasoning love is
spirituel;
for death is the
spirituel
principle, the
res bina
, the
lapis philosophorum
, and the pedagogic principle too, for love of it leads to love of life and love of humanity. Thus, as I have lain in my loge, it has been revealed to me, and I am enchanted to be able to tell you all about it. There are two paths to life: one is the regular one, direct, honest. The other is bad, it leads through death—that is the
spirituel
way.”

“You are a quaint philosopher,” she said. “I will not assert that I have understood all your involved German ideas; but it sounds human and good, and you are good, a good young man. You have truly behaved
en philosophe
, one must say that for you— ” “Too much
en philosophe
for your taste, eh, Clavdia?”

“No more impertinences. They become tiresome. That you waited for me was silly—uncalled for. But you are not angry, because you waited in vain?”

“It was hard, Clavdia, even for a man phlegmatic in his passions. Hard for me and hard of you to come back with him like that—for of course you knew through Behrens that I was here and waiting for you. But I have told you I regard it as a dream, what we had together, and I admit that you are free. And I waited after all not quite in vain, for here you are, we sit together as once we did, I can hear the piercing sweetness of your voice, known to my ear from so long ago; and beneath this flowing silk are your arms, your arms that I know—even though upstairs there lies your protector, in a fever, the mighty Peeperkorn, whose pearls you wear—”