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Chapter Two

Of the Baptismal Basin and of the Grandfather in Twofold Form

Hans Castorp preserved only pale memories of his actual parental home; he had scarcely really known his father and mother. They died away within the short span between his fifth and seventh years, the mother first, quite unexpectedly and in expectation of her confinement, of a vascular obstruction resulting from neuritis, an embolism, as Dr. Heidekind called it, which caused instantaneous paralysis of the heart - she had just been laughing, sitting up in bed; it looked as if she had fallen over with laughter, and yet she had done so only because she was dead. That was not easy for Hans Hermann Castorp, the father, to understand, and since he had been very deeply attached to his wife and was not the strongest man himself, he did not know how to get over it. His mind was disordered and diminished from then on; in his dazed condition he made business mistakes, so that the firm of Castorp & Son suffered painful losses. The spring after next, during an inspection of warehouses at the windy harbor, he caught pneumonia, and since his shaken heart could not withstand the high fever, he died within five days despite all the care Dr. Heidekind devoted to him, and followed his wife, with considerable participation from the citizenry, into the Castorp family tomb, which lay very beautifully in St. Catherine's churchyard, with a view of the Botanical Garden.

His father, the senator, survived him, though only by a little, and the short span of time until he too died - likewise of pneumonia, incidentally, and amid great struggles and torments, for unlike his son Hans Lorenz Castorp was a nature difficult to fell, tenaciously rooted in life - this span of time, then, only a year and a half, the orphaned Hans Castorp spent in his grandfather's house, a house on the Esplanade built at the beginning of the past century on a narrow plot in the taste of northern classicism, painted in a gloomy weather color, with half-columns on either side of the entrance door in the middle of the ground floor, reached by five steps, and with two upper stories besides the bel etage, where the windows were drawn down to the floors and furnished with cast-iron grilles.

Here lay exclusively reception rooms, including the bright dining room decorated with stucco, whose three windows hung with wine-red curtains looked out on the little garden behind, and where, during those eighteen months, grandfather and grandson took their midday meal alone together every day at four o'clock, served by old Fiete with the earrings and the silver buttons on his tailcoat, who with this tailcoat wore just such a batiste neckcloth as the master of the house himself, and tucked his shaved chin into it in quite similar fashion. The grandfather used the familiar form with him and spoke Low German to him, not by way of joking - he had no humorous trait - but in all objectivity, and because that was simply how he dealt with people from the common folk, warehouse workers, postmen, coachmen, and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and very much liked to hear how Fiete answered, also in Low German, bending around behind his master from the left as he served in order to speak into his right ear, on which the senator heard considerably better than on the left. The old man understood and nodded and went on eating, very upright between the high mahogany back of the chair and the table, scarcely bent over his plate, while the grandson opposite him silently observed, with deep and unconscious attention, the spare, cultivated movements with which the grandfather's beautiful, white, lean old hands, with their arched, tapering nails and the green signet ring on the right forefinger, arranged a mouthful of meat, vegetable, and potato on the point of the fork and brought it to the mouth with a slight inclination of the head toward it. Hans Castorp looked at his own still awkward hands and felt in them the possibility, already prefigured, of one day holding and moving knife and fork just as his grandfather did.

Another question was whether he would ever arrive at tucking his chin into such a neckcloth as filled the spacious opening of the grandfather's oddly shaped collar, whose sharp points brushed his cheeks. For one had to be as old as he was for that, and already today, besides him and his old Fiete, no one far and wide wore such neckcloths and collars any longer. That was a pity, for little Hans Castorp particularly liked the way the grandfather leaned his chin into the high, snow-white cloth; even in memory, when he was grown, it pleased him exceedingly: there was something in it that he approved from the ground of his being.

When they had finished eating and had folded their napkins together, rolled them, and put them into the silver rings, a task with which Hans Castorp at that time did not easily come to terms, since the napkins were as large as small tablecloths, the senator rose before the chair, which Fiete drew away behind him, and went with shuffling steps into the "cabinet" to fetch his cigar; and at times the grandson followed him there.

This "cabinet" had come into being because the dining room had been made three-windowed and carried across the whole breadth of the house, so that, unlike the usual arrangement for this type of house, there had remained room not for three salons but only for two; one of them, however, lying perpendicular to the dining room and with only one window onto the street, would have turned out disproportionately deep. Therefore about a quarter of its length had been separated from it: precisely the "cabinet," a narrow room with a skylight, dusky and furnished with only a few objects: an etagere on which stood the senator's cigar cabinet, a card table whose drawer contained attractive things - whist cards, counters, little scoring boards with folding teeth, a slate with slate pencils, paper cigar tips, and more besides - and finally a rococo glass cabinet of rosewood in the corner, behind whose panes yellow silk curtains were stretched.

"Grandpapa," little Hans Castorp might well say in the cabinet, rising on tiptoe and striving upward toward the old man's ear, "please show me the baptismal basin!"

And the grandfather, who had already gathered back the skirts of his long, soft frock coat from his trousers and drawn his bunch of keys from his pocket, opened the glass cabinet with it, from whose interior there came toward the boy a peculiarly pleasant and curious scent. All sorts of objects no longer in use and for that very reason fascinating were kept there: a pair of curved silver candelabra, a broken barometer with figural wood carving, an album of daguerreotypes, a liqueur case of cedarwood, a little Turk, hard to the touch beneath his bright silk costume, with clockwork in his body that had once enabled him to walk across the table but had long since refused service, an old-fashioned ship model, and quite at the bottom even a rat trap. But the old man took from a middle shelf a heavily tarnished round silver bowl, which stood on a likewise silver plate, and showed both pieces to the boy, separating them and turning each one this way and that with explanations already given many times.

Basin and plate had not originally belonged together, as one could well see and as the little boy allowed himself to be instructed anew; yet, the grandfather said, they had been united in use for about a hundred years, namely since the basin had been acquired. The bowl was beautiful, of simple, noble form, shaped by the severe taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and solid, it rested on a round foot and was gilded inside; yet time had already faded the gold to a yellowish shimmer. As its only ornament, a raised wreath of roses and jagged leaves ran around its upper rim. As for the plate, its far greater age could be read on the inner side. "Sixteen hundred and fifty" stood there in flourished numerals, and all sorts of curly engravings framed the number, executed in the "modern manner" of those days, florid and arbitrary, coats of arms and arabesques that were half star and half flower. On the reverse, however, in changing styles of script, were dotted in the names of the heads who over time had possessed the piece. There were already seven of them, furnished with the year of inheritance, and the old man in the neckcloth pointed each one out to his grandson with his ringed forefinger. The father's name was there, the grandfather's own and the great-grandfather's; and then the prefix "great" doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in the explainer's mouth, and the boy listened, his head inclined sideways, his eyes fixed thoughtfully or even thoughtlessly and dreamily, his mouth devout and sleepy, to the great-great-great-great - that dark sound of the tomb and of time's burial, which nevertheless at the same time expressed a piously preserved connection between the present, his own life, and the deeply sunken past, and worked on him in quite a peculiar way: namely in the way expressed on his face. He fancied he was breathing musty-cool air, the air of St. Catherine's church or of St. Michael's crypt, at this sound; fancied he felt the breath of places where, hat in hand, one falls into a certain reverently forward-swaying gait without using the heels of one's boots. He thought he heard, too, the secluded, pacified stillness of such echoing places; religious sensations mingled with those of death and history at the sound of that dull syllable, and all this affected the boy somehow beneficially; indeed it may well be that for the sake of the sound, in order to hear it and repeat it, he had asked to be allowed to look at the baptismal basin once again.

Then the grandfather set the vessel back on the plate and let the little boy look into the smooth, faintly golden hollow, which gleamed up from the falling skylight.

"Now it will soon be eight years," he said, "since we held you over it and the water with which you were baptized flowed into it... Lassen, the sexton of St. James's, poured it into the hollow of our good Pastor Bugenhagen's hand, and from there it ran over your little head here into the basin. But we had warmed it so that you should not be startled and should not cry, and you did not; on the contrary, you had been screaming beforehand, so that Bugenhagen had not had an easy time with his address, but when the water came you grew still, and that was respect for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in the next few days it will be forty-four years since your blessed father was the child to be baptized, and the water flowed from his head into this. That was here in the house, his parental house, over there in the hall, before the middle window, and it was still old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the same man the French nearly shot as a young man because he had preached against their robberies and extortions - he too has long, long been with God. But seventy-five years ago it was I myself whom they baptized, also there in the hall, and they held my head over the basin here as it stands on the plate, and the clergyman spoke the same words as over you and your father, and likewise the warm, clear water flowed from my hair - there was not much more of it then than I have on my head now - down into the golden basin."

The little boy looked up at his grandfather's narrow old head, which was again bent over the basin as at that long-vanished hour of which he told, and an already tested feeling came over him, the strange, half-dreaming, half-frightening sensation of something at once drawing on and standing still, of a changing permanence that was recurrence and dizzying sameness - a sensation known to him from earlier occasions, and by which he had expected and wished to be touched again. It was partly for its sake that the showing of the standing and wandering heirloom had mattered to him.

If the young man examined himself later, he found that the image of his forefather had impressed itself on him much more deeply, clearly, and significantly than that of his parents; this may possibly have rested on sympathy and a special physical kinship, for the grandson resembled the grandfather, so far as a rosy beardless youth can resemble a bleached and rigid man of seventy. Mainly, however, it was probably characteristic of the old man himself, who without question had been the true character figure, the picturesque personality in the family.

Publicly speaking, time had passed over Hans Lorenz Castorp's nature and opinions long before his departure. He had been a highly Christian gentleman of the Reformed congregation, strictly traditional in sentiment, so stubbornly intent on an aristocratic narrowing of the social circle in which one was fit to govern, as though he lived in the fourteenth century, when the artisan class had begun, against the tenacious resistance of the old free patriciate, to win seat and voice in the municipal council, and he was hard to win for anything new. His activity had fallen in decades of vehement upswing and manifold upheavals, decades of progress in forced marches, which constantly made such high demands on public courage for sacrifice and risk. But by old Castorp, God knew, it had not been brought about that the spirit of the new age had celebrated its widely known, brilliant victories. He had held far more to the customs of the fathers and old institutions than to daredevil harbor extensions and godless metropolitan tomfoolery; he had braked and played down wherever he could, and if matters had gone according to him, the administration would still today look as idyllically old-fashioned as it had once looked in his own countinghouse.

Thus the old man presented himself, during his lifetime and afterward, to the bourgeois eye; and even if little Hans Castorp understood nothing of affairs of state, his silently observing child's eye nevertheless made, in essence, quite the same observations - wordless and therefore uncritical, rather merely living observations, which, incidentally, later too, as a conscious memory-image, entirely preserved their word- and analysis-hostile, simply affirmative stamp. As we said, sympathy was at play, that closest connection and kinship of nature which skips a generation and is nothing rare. Children and grandchildren look on in order to admire, and they admire in order to learn and develop what lies prefigured in them by inheritance.

Senator Castorp was gaunt and tall. The years had bent his back and neck, but he sought to compensate for the bend by counterpressure, whereby his mouth, whose lips were no longer held by teeth but rested directly on the empty gums - for he put in his dentures only to eat - drew itself downward in a dignified and effortful way; and precisely through this, as also perhaps as a means against an incipient unsteadiness of the head, there came about the honorably severe, braced-up posture and chin support that so pleased little Hans Castorp.

He loved the snuffbox - it was an oblong tortoiseshell box inlaid with gold that he handled - and for this reason used red handkerchiefs, whose corner was accustomed to hang from the back pocket of his frock coat. If this was a cheerful weakness in his appearance, it nevertheless had altogether the effect of a license of age, a negligence such as great age either consciously and jovially permits itself or brings with it in venerable unconsciousness; and in any case it remained the only one that Hans Castorp's childish sharp eye ever perceived in his grandfather's exterior. But for the seven-year-old, as later in the memory of the grown youth, the old man's everyday appearance was not his actual and real one. In actual reality he looked different, far more beautiful and correct than usual - namely as he appeared in a painting, a life-size portrait that had earlier hung in the parental living room and then, together with little Hans Castorp, had moved to the Esplanade, where it had received its place above the large red-silk sofa in the reception room.

It showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official dress as councilman of the city - that serious, indeed pious civic costume of a vanished century, which a commonwealth at once grave and audacious had carried with it through the ages and preserved in pompous use, in order ceremonially to make the past present and the present past, and to attest the steady coherence of things, the venerable assurance of their signed deed. Senator Castorp stood there in full figure, on a reddish-tiled floor, in a perspective of pillars and pointed arches. He stood with chin lowered, mouth drawn downward, the blue, thoughtfully gazing eyes with the bags beneath them directed into the distance, in the black, more than knee-length, gown-like overcoat, which, open in front, showed a broad fur trimming at border and hem. From wide, highly puffed and bordered upper sleeves emerged narrower under-sleeves of plain cloth, and lace cuffs covered the hands down to the knuckles. The slender old man's legs were in black silk stockings, the feet in shoes with silver buckles. Around his neck, however, lay the broad, starched, many-folded ruff, pressed down in front and swept upward at the sides, from beneath which, to excess, a folded batiste jabot still hung over the waistcoat. Under his arm he carried the old-fashioned hat with broad brim, whose crown tapered upward.

It was an excellent picture, created by a notable artist's hand, kept with good taste in the old-masterly style suggested by the subject, and awakening in the beholder all sorts of Spanish-Netherlandish-late-medieval notions. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it, not with an understanding of art, of course, but nevertheless with a certain more general and even penetrating understanding; and although he had seen the grandfather in person as the canvas represented him only once, at a ceremonial procession by the town hall, and even then only fleetingly, he could not help, as we said, feeling this pictorial appearance of his to be his actual and real one, and seeing in the everyday grandfather, so to speak, an interim grandfather, one provisionally and only imperfectly adapted. For the divergent and curious quality in this everyday appearance evidently rested on such imperfect, perhaps somewhat awkward adaptation; there were remnants and indications of his pure and true form not wholly to be effaced. Thus the old-fashioned high white collar could be called "father-killers"; but it was impossible to apply this designation to the admirable article of clothing of which those were only the interim indication, namely the Spanish ruff. And the same was true of the unusually curved top hat the grandfather wore in the street, to which in higher reality the broad-brimmed felt hat of the painting corresponded; and of the long and wrinkled frock coat, whose original image and true essence appeared to little Hans Castorp as the bordered, fur-trimmed gown.

Thus he was inwardly in agreement that the grandfather was resplendent in his correctness and perfection when one day it was time to take leave of him. This was in the hall, the same hall where they had so often sat opposite one another at the dining table; in its middle Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay on the bier, surrounded and heaped about with wreaths, in the silver-mounted coffin. He had fought through the pneumonia, had fought tenaciously and long, although it seemed that in the present life he had been at home only by way of adaptation, and now lay, one did not quite know whether victorious or overcome, in any case with a sternly pacified expression, much altered and sharp-nosed from the struggle, on his parade bed, the lower body covered by a blanket on which a palm branch lay, his head propped high on the silk pillow so that the chin rested most beautifully in the front hollow of the honorary ruff; and between the hands half covered by the lace cuffs, whose fingers in an artificially natural arrangement did not conceal coldness and lifelessness, an ivory cross had been placed, at which with lowered lids he seemed to gaze unwaveringly.

Hans Castorp had seen the grandfather several times at the beginning of his last illness, but toward the end no longer. He had been entirely spared the sight of the struggle, which for the most part had also taken place at night; only indirectly, through the anxious atmosphere of the house, old Fiete's red eyes, the coming and going of doctors, had he been touched by it. But the result before which he found himself placed in the hall could be summarized by saying that the grandfather had now been ceremonially released from interim adaptation and had definitively entered into his actual and appropriate form - an approvable result, even if old Fiete wept and shook his head without ceasing, and even if Hans Castorp himself wept, as he had wept at the sight of his suddenly dead mother and of his father soon afterward likewise lying still and strange.

For it was now already the third time within so short a span and at such young years that death had worked upon the mind and senses - especially also upon the senses - of little Hans Castorp; the sight and impression were no longer new to him, but already quite familiar, and as the first two times he had behaved toward them with perfect composure and reliability, by no means nervously, though with natural sorrow, so too now, and to an even higher degree. Ignorant of the practical significance of events for his life, or childishly indifferent to it, trusting that the world would somehow or other take care of him, he had displayed at the coffins a certain likewise childish coolness and objective attention, which on the third occasion received an additional, precocious shading through the feeling and expression of experienced connoisseurship - to say nothing further of frequent tears of emotion and of contagion by others as a self-evident reaction. In the three or four months since his father had died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions of that time restored themselves precisely, simultaneously, and interpenetratingly in their incomparable peculiarity.

Dissolved and put into words, they would have looked approximately as follows. Death had about it a pious, meaningful, and sadly beautiful, that is to say spiritual, aspect, and at the same time a wholly different, positively opposite, very physical, very material one, which could not really be called beautiful, or meaningful, or pious, or even sad. The solemn-spiritual aspect expressed itself in the pompous laying-out of the corpse, the splendor of flowers and palm fronds, which, as is known, signified heavenly peace; further and still more clearly in the cross between the dead fingers of the former grandfather, the blessing Christ by Thorwaldsen standing at the head of the coffin, and the candelabra rising on either side, which on this occasion had likewise assumed an ecclesiastical character. All these arrangements apparently had their more precise and good meaning in the thought that the grandfather had now entered forever into his actual and true form. Besides this, however, as little Hans Castorp well noticed, though without admitting it to himself in words, they all, and in particular the quantity of flowers, and among these again especially the numerous tuberoses, had another meaning and sober purpose as well: namely that of beautifying, making forgotten, or preventing from coming to consciousness the other, neither beautiful nor really sad but rather almost indecent, low bodily aspect that death had about it.

With this aspect it was connected that the dead grandfather appeared so strange, indeed not really as the grandfather, but as a life-size waxen doll which death had substituted for his person, and with which all this pious and honorable display was now being made. The one lying there, or more correctly: what was lying there, was therefore not the grandfather himself but a husk - which, as Hans Castorp knew, did not consist of wax but of its own substance; only of substance: that was precisely the indecent and scarcely even sad thing - sad as little as things are sad that have to do with the body and only with it. Little Hans Castorp looked at the wax-yellow, smooth, cheesy-firm substance of which the life-size death figure consisted, the face and hands of the former grandfather. Just then a fly settled on the motionless forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete chased it away carefully, taking care not to touch the forehead as he did so, and with an honorable darkening of his expression, as though he neither might nor wished to know anything about what he was doing - an expression of modesty that evidently referred to the fact that the grandfather was only body now and nothing more. But after a circling flight the fly briefly settled again on the grandfather's fingers, near the ivory cross. While this was happening, however, Hans Castorp believed he perceived more distinctly than before that faint yet quite peculiarly tenacious exhalation familiar from earlier times, which shamefully reminded him of a schoolmate afflicted with an unpleasant ailment and therefore avoided by everyone, and which the scent of the tuberoses was secretly intended to drown, though for all its beautiful luxuriance and severity it was unable to do so.

He stood repeatedly by the corpse: once alone with old Fiete, the second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and the two uncles James and Peter, and then a third time when a group of harbor workers in Sunday clothes stood for a few moments at the open coffin to take leave of the former head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral, at which the hall was full of people and Pastor Bugenhagen of St. Michael's, the same man who had baptized Hans Castorp, wearing the Spanish ruff, delivered the memorial address and afterward, in the cab, the first directly behind the hearse, which was followed by a long, long row, conversed very kindly with little Hans Castorp - and then this period of life too was over, and Hans Castorp immediately afterward changed house and surroundings, for the second time already in his young life.

At the Tienappels'. And of Hans Castorp's Moral Condition

It was not to his disadvantage, for he came into the house of Consul Tienappel, his appointed guardian, and there had nothing to miss: certainly not with respect to his person, and just as little with respect to the care of his further interests, of which he as yet knew nothing. For Consul Tienappel, an uncle of Hans's late mother, administered the Castorp estate; he brought the real estate to sale, also took the liquidation of the firm Castorp and Son, import and export, in hand, and what he got out of it was still about four hundred thousand marks, Hans Castorp's inheritance, which Consul Tienappel invested in trustee-safe securities, deducting for himself, regardless of his feelings as a relative, two percent commission from the interest due at the beginning of each quarter.

The Tienappel house lay at the back of a garden on Harvestehuder Way and looked out on a lawn in which not the smallest weed was tolerated, on public rose beds, and then on the river. Every morning the consul, although he possessed handsome vehicles, went on foot to his business in the old city in order to have at least a little exercise, for at times he suffered from congestions of blood in the head, and at five o'clock in the evening he returned the same way, whereupon at the Tienappels' the midday meal was eaten with every cultivation. He was a weighty man, dressed in the best English fabrics, with watery-blue protruding eyes behind gold spectacles, a florid nose, a gray sailor's beard, and a fiery diamond on the squat little finger of his left hand. His wife had long been dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, of whom one was in the navy and little at home, while the other worked in his father's wine trade and was the designated heir of the firm. For many years the household had been managed by Schalleen, a goldsmith's daughter from Altona with white starched ruffles around her cylindrical wrists. She saw to it that breakfast and supper tables were richly supplied with cold fare, with shrimp and salmon, eel, goose breast, and tomato catsup with the roast beef; she kept a watchful eye on the hired waiters when there was a gentlemen's dinner at Consul Tienappel's, and she it was who, as best she could, took a mother's place with little Hans Castorp.

Hans Castorp grew up in miserable weather, in wind and watery vapor, grew up in a yellow rubber coat, if one may put it so, and on the whole felt quite lively in it. A little anemic he had probably been from the beginning, Dr. Heidekind said so too, and had him given every day for his third breakfast, after school, a good glass of porter - a substantial drink, as is known, to which Dr. Heidekind attributed blood-forming effects, and which in any case soothed Hans Castorp's vital spirits in a way he found estimable, pleasantly encouraging his inclination to "doze," as his uncle Tienappel put it, that is, to dream into emptiness with slack mouth and without a firm thought. Otherwise, however, he was healthy and proper, a useful tennis player and rower, even if, instead of handling the oars himself, he preferred to sit on summer evenings with music and a good drink on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst ferry-house and watch the lit boats, between which swans moved along over the colorfully reflecting water; and if one heard him speak - calm, sensible, a little hollow and monotonous, with a touch of Low German - indeed, if one merely looked at him in his blond correctness, with his well-cut, somehow old-fashioned head, in which inherited and unconscious arrogance expressed itself in the form of a certain dry sleepiness, no one could doubt that this Hans Castorp was an unadulterated and honorable product of the local soil and splendidly in his place; he himself, had he only tested himself on the matter, would not have doubted it for a moment.

The atmosphere of the great maritime city, this damp atmosphere of world trade and good living, which had been the life-air of his fathers, he breathed with deep agreement, with self-evidence and good comfort. With the exhalations of water, coal, and tar, the sharp smells of accumulated colonial wares in his nose, he saw on the harbor quays enormous steam slewing cranes imitate the calm, intelligence, and gigantic strength of serving elephants, as they unloaded ton weights of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and demijohns from the bellies of resting seagoing ships into railway cars and sheds. He saw the merchant class in yellow rubber coats, as he himself wore one, stream toward the Exchange at noon, where, to his knowledge, things went sharply, and someone could quite easily have occasion to send out invitations to a large dinner in all haste in order to keep up his credit. He saw - and here later lay his particular field of interest - the bustle of the shipyards, saw the mammoth bodies of docked Asia and Africa steamers, tower-high, keel and propeller exposed, supported by tree-thick struts, in their monstrous helplessness on dry land, covered with dwarf armies of scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing workers; saw on the covered slipways, wreathed in smoky fog, the rib skeletons of ships in the making rise up, and engineers, construction drawings and bilge tables in hand, give their directions to the builders - familiar sights, all this, for Hans Castorp from youth on, and awakening in him nothing but feelings of cozy, native belonging, feelings that reached their high point perhaps in that situation in life when, on Sunday mornings with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemßen - Joachim Ziemßen - he breakfasted in the Alster Pavilion on warm rolls with smoked meat and a glass of old port, and afterward, drawing devotedly on his cigar, leaned back in his chair. For in this especially he was genuine: that he liked to live well, indeed, despite his thin-blooded, refined exterior, clung inwardly and firmly, like a voluptuous infant at the mother's breast, to life's coarse pleasures.

Comfortably and not without dignity he bore on his shoulders the high civilization which the ruling upper stratum of the trading city democracy bequeathed to its children. He was bathed as well as a baby and allowed himself to be dressed by that tailor who possessed the confidence of the young men of his sphere. The small, carefully marked linen treasure that the English drawers of his wardrobe contained was tended by Schalleen in the best manner; even when Hans Castorp studied away from home, he sent it home regularly for cleaning and mending - for his maxim was that outside Hamburg no one in the Reich understood ironing - and a roughened place on the cuff of one of his pretty colored shirts would have filled him with violent discomfort. His hands, although not especially aristocratic in form, were groomed and fresh of skin, adorned with a platinum chain ring and the grandfather's inherited signet ring, and his teeth, which were somewhat soft and had suffered damage more than once, were supplemented with gold.

When standing and walking he pushed his abdomen somewhat forward, which did not make an especially taut impression; but his posture at table was excellent. He turned his upright upper body politely toward the neighbor with whom he was chatting - sensibly and somewhat flatly - and his elbows lay lightly in, while he carved his piece of poultry or skillfully extracted the rosy flesh from a lobster claw with the table implement intended for that purpose. His first need after the meal was the finger bowl with perfumed water, the second the Russian cigarette, untaxed, which he obtained under the counter by way of comfortable smuggling. It preceded the cigar, a very tasty Bremen brand named Maria Mancini, of which there will be more to say, and whose spicy poisons united so satisfyingly with those of the coffee. Hans Castorp withdrew his tobacco supplies from the harmful influences of steam heat by keeping them in the cellar, down to which he descended every morning in order to incorporate the day's requirement into his case. Only reluctantly would he have eaten butter that had been set before him in one piece rather than in the form of fluted little balls.

One sees that we are intent on saying everything that can win favor for him, but we judge him without excess and make him neither better nor worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor a fool, and if we avoid the word "mediocre" to characterize him, this is for reasons that have nothing to do with his intelligence and scarcely anything to do with his simple person in general, namely out of respect for his fate, to which we are inclined to ascribe a certain supra-personal significance. His head sufficed for the demands of the Realgymnasium without having to overexert itself - but to do that he would most certainly not have been inclined under any circumstances or for the sake of any subject: less from fear of hurting himself than because he saw absolutely no reason for it, or, more correctly: no absolute reason; and perhaps precisely for that reason we may not wish to call him mediocre, because he somehow felt the absence of such reasons.

A human being lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, that of his epoch and contemporaneity; and even if he regards the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as absolutely given and self-evident, and is as far removed from the notion of exercising criticism upon them as good Hans Castorp truly was, it is nevertheless quite possible that he may feel his moral well-being vaguely impaired by their deficiencies. The individual may have all sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects before his eyes, from which he draws the impulse to high effort and activity; but if the impersonal around him, time itself, fundamentally lacks hopes and prospects despite all outward bustle, if it secretly reveals itself to him as hopeless, prospectless, and perplexed, and offers a hollow silence in response to the consciously or unconsciously posed, yet somehow posed, question of an ultimate, more than personal, absolute meaning for all effort and activity, then precisely in cases of more honest humanity a certain paralyzing effect of such a state of affairs will be almost unavoidable, and may extend by way of the psychic-moral even to the physical and organic part of the individual. To be disposed toward significant achievement, exceeding the measure of what is simply required, without time knowing any satisfying answer to the question "What for?" requires either a moral solitude and immediacy that rarely occurs and is heroic in nature, or a very robust vitality. Neither the one nor the other was Hans Castorp's case, and so he was probably mediocre after all, though in a quite honorable sense.

We have spoken here not only of the young man's inner behavior during his school years, but also of the following years, when he had already chosen his bourgeois profession. As for his progress through the classes, he even had to repeat one or another of them. On the whole, however, his origin, the urbanity of his manners, and finally also a pretty, though passionless, talent for mathematics helped him forward; and when he had his one-year certificate, he resolved to go through with school - chiefly, to tell the truth, because this prolonged an accustomed, provisional, and undecided condition and gained time for considering what Hans Castorp would most like to become, for that he did not know properly for a long time, did not know even in the highest class, and when it was then decided - to say that he had decided would almost be saying too much - he probably felt that it could just as well have been decided otherwise.

But this much was true, that he had always taken great pleasure in ships. As a little boy he had filled the pages of his notebooks with pencil drawings of fishing cutters, vegetable ewers, and five-masters, and when at fifteen he had been allowed to watch from a favored place as the new twin-screw mail steamer "Hansa" slid down the ways at Blohm & Voß, he had made in watercolors a well-caught and, far into the details, accurate portrait of the slender ship, which Consul Tienappel hung in his private office, and in which especially the transparent glass-green of the rolling sea was treated so lovingly and skillfully that someone had said to Consul Tienappel that this was talent and that a good marine painter might come of it - a remark the consul could calmly repeat to his foster son, for Hans Castorp merely laughed good-naturedly at it and did not for a moment enter into high-strung notions and starvation ideas.

"You haven't much," his uncle Tienappel sometimes said to him. "My money will essentially go to James and Peter one day, that is, it stays in the business, and Peter draws his annuity. What belongs to you is invested quite well and brings you something secure. But living on interest is no joke nowadays unless one has at least five times as much as you do, and if you want to amount to something here in the city and live as you are used to living, then you must earn a proper additional income, you'd better mark that, min Söhn."

Hans Castorp marked it and looked about for a profession with which he could stand before himself and other people. And once he had chosen - it happened at the suggestion of old Wilms, of the firm Tunder & Wilms, who at the Saturday whist table at Consul Tienappel's said that Hans Castorp ought to study shipbuilding, that was an idea, and enter his firm, and then he would keep an eye on the boy - he thought very highly of his profession and found that, although it was a damned complicated and strenuous one, it was also an excellent, important, and grand profession, and in any case far preferable for his peaceful person to that of his cousin Ziemßen, the stepsister's son of his blessed mother, who absolutely wanted to become an officer. Joachim Ziemßen was not even quite sound in the chest, but for that very reason an open-air profession, in which there could scarcely be serious talk of mental work and strain, might well be the right thing for him, as Hans Castorp judged with slight disdain. For he had the very greatest respect for work, although work personally tired him easily.

Here we return to our earlier hints, which aimed at the supposition that impairments of personal life by time might be capable of influencing the human physical organism directly. How could Hans Castorp not have respected work? It would have been unnatural. As matters stood, it had to count for him as the thing most absolutely worthy of respect; there was fundamentally nothing respectable besides it; it was the principle before which one stood or did not stand, the absolute of the time, it answered, so to speak, for itself. His respect for it was therefore religious and, so far as he knew, unquestionable in nature. But another question was whether he loved it; for that he could not do, however much he respected it, and for the simple reason that it did not agree with him. Strenuous work tugged at his nerves, soon exhausted him, and he openly admitted that he really loved much more the free time, the unburdened time to which the lead weights of toil were not attached, time that would have lain open before one, not divided by obstacles to be overcome with gritted teeth. Strictly speaking, this conflict in his relation to work would require resolution. Was it possibly the case that his body as well as his mind - first the mind, and through it the body too - would have been more joyfully and lastingly willing to work if, in the ground of his soul, where he himself had no information, he had been able to believe in work as an absolute value and a self-answering principle, and to rest content with that? This raises again the question of his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, which we do not intend to answer conclusively. For we do not consider ourselves Hans Castorp's eulogists and leave room for the supposition that work in his life simply stood somewhat in the way of the unclouded enjoyment of Maria Mancini.

He for his part was not drawn into military service. His inner nature resisted it and knew how to prevent it. It may also have been that Staff Surgeon Dr. Eberding, who visited at Harvestehuder Way, had heard conversationally from Consul Tienappel that young Castorp would regard the compulsion to arm himself as a sensitive disturbance of the studies he had just begun away from home.

His head, which worked slowly and calmly, especially since Hans Castorp maintained the soothing habit of the porter breakfast even away from home, filled itself with analytic geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, descriptive geometry, and graphic statics; he calculated loaded and unloaded displacement, stability, trim displacement, and metacenter, though at times it came hard to him. His technical drawings, those frame, waterline, and longitudinal plans, were not quite as good as his painterly representation of the "Hansa" on the high sea; but where it was a matter of supporting intellectual clarity by sensory clarity, of washing in shadows and laying out cross sections in cheerful material colors, Hans Castorp surpassed most in skill.

When he came home during vacations, very clean, very well dressed, with a small reddish-blond mustache in his sleepy young patrician face and evidently on the way to respectable stations in life, people who concerned themselves with municipal matters and were also well informed about family and personal relations - and most people are in a self-governing city-state - looked at him appraisingly, asking themselves into what public role young Castorp might one day grow. He had traditions, his name was old and good, and one day, this could almost not fail, one would have to reckon with his person as with a political factor. He would then sit in the citizenry or the citizens' committee and make laws, would take part in the cares of sovereignty in an honorary office, belong to an administrative department, perhaps the finance deputation or the one for building matters, and his voice would be heard and counted. One could be curious about how he would one day declare his party, young Castorp. Externals might deceive, but actually he looked very much the way one did not look if the democrats could count on one, and the resemblance to the grandfather was unmistakable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a brake, a conservative element? That was possible - and equally possible the opposite. For after all he was an engineer, a budding shipbuilder, a man of world traffic and technology. It could be that Hans Castorp would go among the radicals, become a daredevil, a profane destroyer of old buildings and scenic beauties, unbound like a Jew and lacking reverence like an American, inclined to prefer ruthless rupture with venerable tradition to a deliberate development of natural living conditions and to plunge the state into hazardous experiments - that too was conceivable. Would he have it in his blood that Their Sagacities, before whom the double sentry at the town hall presented arms, knew everything best, or would he be inclined to support the opposition in the citizenry? In his blue eyes beneath the reddish-blond brows no answer to such questions of civic curiosity could be read, and he probably did not yet know one himself, Hans Castorp, this blank page.

When he set out on the journey on which we encountered him, he was in his twenty-third year. At that time he had behind him four semesters of study at the Danzig Polytechnic and four more, which he had spent at the technical universities of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe; he had recently emerged from the first main examination without brilliance or orchestral flourish, but with good propriety, and was preparing to enter Tunder & Wilms as an engineer-volunteer in order to receive his practical training at the shipyard. At this point his path now took the following turn for the time being.

For the main examination he had had to work sharply and persistently, and when he came home he looked, after all, still more worn than suited his type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him and demanded a change of air, that is: a thorough one. Norderney or Wyk on Föhr would not do this time, he said, and if one asked him, then before going to the shipyard Hans Castorp belonged for a few weeks in the high mountains.

That was all very well, Consul Tienappel said to his nephew and foster son, but then their ways would part that summer, for four horses could not drag him, Consul Tienappel, into the high mountains. That was nothing for him; he needed sensible air pressure, otherwise he would have attacks. Into the high mountains Hans Castorp should very kindly travel alone. He ought to visit Joachim Ziemßen.

That was a natural suggestion. Joachim Ziemßen, namely, was ill - not ill as Hans Castorp was, but ill in a truly awkward way; it had even been a great fright. He had always been inclined to catarrh and fever, and one day there had actually been red sputum too, and head over heels Joachim had had to go to Davos, to his greatest sorrow and distress, for he stood precisely at the goal of his wishes. For a couple of semesters, according to the will of his family, he had studied jurisprudence, but from an irresistible impulse he had changed mounts and reported as an officer cadet, and had already been accepted. And now for more than five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium "Berghof" (medical director: Hofrat Dr. Behrens) and boring himself half to death, as he wrote on postcards. If, then, Hans Castorp was going to do some little thing for himself before taking up his post at Tunder & Wilms, nothing lay nearer than that he too should go up there to keep his poor cousin company - for both parties it was the most pleasant arrangement.

High summer had come when he resolved on the journey. The last days of July were already there.

He went for three weeks.