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Hippe

So the Sunday stood out. Its afternoon was marked besides by carriage drives undertaken by various groups of guests: after tea several two-horse carriages dragged themselves up the looping drive and stopped before the main portal to take up those who had ordered them, Russians chiefly, and Russian ladies at that.

"Russians always go for drives," Joachim said to Hans Castorp - they were standing together before the portal, watching the departures for their amusement. "Now they are driving to Clavadell, or to the lake, or into the Flüela valley, or to Klosters; those are the usual destinations. We can drive sometime during your stay too, if you feel like it. But I think for the moment you have enough to do getting settled in and do not need excursions."

Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his trouser pockets. Thus he watched as the small, lively old Russian lady took her seat in one carriage with her thin grandniece and two other ladies; they were Marusja and Madame Chauchat. The latter had put on a light dust-coat, belted at the back, but was without a hat. She sat beside the old lady in the back of the carriage, while the young girls took the rear-facing seats. All four were merry and kept their mouths in constant motion in their soft, as it were boneless language. They spoke and laughed about the carriage rug, which they divided among themselves with difficulty, about the Russian sweets that the great-aunt carried as provisions in a little wooden box padded with wadding and paper lace and was already offering around… Hans Castorp distinguished with interest Frau Chauchat's veiled voice. As always when the careless woman came before his eyes, that likeness he had searched for a while and that had dawned upon him in a dream was confirmed anew… Marusja's laughter, however, the sight of her round brown eyes looking childishly over the little cloth with which she covered her mouth, and of her high breast, which was supposed to be inwardly by no means a little diseased, reminded him of something else, something disturbing, that he had seen recently, and so he looked cautiously to the side at Joachim without moving his head. No, thank God, Joachim's face did not look as blotched as it had then, nor were his lips now so pitifully distorted. But he was looking at Marusja - and in a posture, with an expression of the eyes, that could by no means be called military, but rather appeared so cloudy and self-forgetful that one had to describe it as decidedly civilian. Then, to be sure, he pulled himself together and looked quickly at Hans Castorp, so that the latter had just time to take his eyes away from him and send them somewhere into the air. He felt his heart beating as he did so - unmotivated and on its own account, as it simply did here.

The rest of Sunday offered nothing extraordinary, apart perhaps from the meals, which, since they could hardly be made more abundant than usual, at least showed an increased delicacy in the dishes. (At dinner there was a chaud-froid of chicken, garnished with crayfish and halved cherries; with the ice, pastries in little baskets woven of spun sugar, and then also fresh pineapple.) In the evening, after he had drunk his beer, Hans Castorp felt still more exhausted, chilly, and heavy in his limbs than on the days before, said good night to his cousin as early as nine o'clock, hurriedly drew the featherbed up to his chin, and fell asleep as if struck down.

The very next day, however, the first Monday the visitor spent up here, brought another regularly recurring variation of the daily course: namely one of those lectures that Dr. Krokowski gave every fortnight in the dining hall before the entire adult, German-speaking, and non-moribund public of the "Berghof." It was, as Hans Castorp heard from his cousin, a series of connected lectures, a popular-scientific course under the general title Love as a Disease-Forming Power. The instructive entertainment took place after second breakfast, and it was, as Joachim again said, not permissible, or at least viewed with extreme displeasure, for anyone to absent himself from it - which was why it counted as astonishing insolence that Settembrini, although more master of German than anyone, not only never attended the lectures but also expressed himself about them in the most disparaging terms. As for Hans Castorp, he was immediately resolved to appear, chiefly out of politeness, but also from unconcealed curiosity. Beforehand, however, he did something entirely wrong and faulty: it occurred to him to take a long walk on his own, which agreed with him beyond all expectation badly.

"Now listen!" were his first words when Joachim entered his room in the morning. "I can see that things cannot go on this way with me. I have had enough of the horizontal way of life - one's blood falls asleep with it. With you it is of course something else; you are a patient, and I have no wish whatever to lead you astray. But now, right after breakfast, I want to take a proper walk, if you do not mind, a couple of hours more or less at random out into the world. I shall put a bite of breakfast in my pocket; then I am independent. We shall see whether I am not a different fellow when I come home."

"Very well!" said Joachim, seeing that the other was serious in his desire and intention. "But do not overdo it, I advise you. Things are different here than at home. And then be back punctually for the lecture!"

In reality there were other reasons besides the physical one that had suggested his plan to young Hans Castorp. It seemed to him that his hot head, the bad taste he generally had in his mouth, and the arbitrary beating of his heart were due far less to the difficulties of acclimatization than to such things as the doings of the Russian couple next door, the talk of the sick and stupid Frau Stöhr at table, the horseman's soft cough, which he heard daily in the corridors, Herr Albin's utterances, the impressions he had received of the social customs of the suffering youth, the expression on Joachim's face when he looked at Marusja, and similar perceptions. He thought it must be good to escape the spellbound circle of the "Berghof" for once, to breathe deeply in the open air and bestir himself properly, so that if one was tired in the evening, one would at least know why. And so, in an enterprising mood, he parted from Joachim when the latter, after breakfast, set out on his officially measured pleasure walk to the bench by the watercourse, and swung his stick as he marched down the carriage road on his own ways.

It was a cool, overcast morning - about half past eight. As he had intended, Hans Castorp breathed the pure morning air deeply, this fresh and light atmosphere that entered effortlessly and was without scent of moisture, without substance, without memories… He crossed the watercourse and the narrow-gauge track, reached the irregularly built-up road, left it at once, and took a meadow path that ran on level ground for only a short stretch and then led obliquely and rather steeply up the right-hand slope. The climbing pleased Hans Castorp, his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back from his forehead with the crook of his stick, and when, looking back from some height, he caught sight in the distance of the mirror of the lake he had passed on the journey here, he began to sing.

He sang the pieces he happened to have at his disposal, all sorts of popularly sentimental songs such as stand in students' and gymnastic-club songbooks, among them one in which the lines occurred:

"The bards should praise both love and wine,
But virtue rather oftener" -

sang them at first softly and humming, then loudly and with all his might. His baritone was brittle, but today he found it beautiful, and the singing inspired him more and more. If he had begun too high, he took refuge in piping head tones, and these too appeared beautiful to him. When his memory failed him, he helped himself by fitting any senseless syllables and words to the melody, sending them into the air with a shaping mouth and a splendid palate-r in the manner of art singers, and finally proceeded, as far as both text and notes were concerned, to fantasize entirely and even accompany his production with operatic arm movements. Since it is very strenuous to climb and sing at the same time, his breath soon grew short and failed him more and more. But out of idealism, for the sake of the beauty of the song, he mastered his distress and gave up his last strength amid frequent sighs, until at last, in extreme shortness of breath, blind, with only a colored shimmer before his eyes and flying pulses, he sank down under a thick pine - after such great elevation suddenly the prey of thoroughgoing dejection, of a morning-after misery bordering on despair.

When, with nerves tolerably restored, he set out to continue his walk, the back of his neck was trembling very actively, so that at such a young age he nodded his head in exactly the same way old Hans Lorenz Castorp had once done. He himself found that the phenomenon heartily reminded him of his dead grandfather, and without feeling it repulsive, he amused himself by imitating the dignified chin support with which the old man had tried to govern the trembling of his head and which had once so pleased the boy.

He climbed still higher, in switchbacks. The ringing of cowbells attracted him, and he found the herd too; it was grazing near a blockhouse whose roof was weighted with stones. Two bearded men came toward him with axes on their shoulders and separated when they had come near. "Well then, farewell and have my thanks!" one said to the other in a deep, palatal voice, laid his axe on his other shoulder, and began without a path, with crackling steps, to stride downhill among the spruces. It had sounded so strange in the solitude, this "Farewell and have my thanks," and had touched, dreamily, Hans Castorp's senses, benumbed by climbing and singing. He repeated it softly, trying to imitate the guttural and solemnly awkward dialect of the mountaineer, and climbed a little way beyond the alp hut, for he was concerned to reach the tree line; but after a glance at his watch he gave up this undertaking.

He followed to the left, in the direction of the town, a path that ran level and then led downward. Tall-stemmed coniferous forest received him, and as he wandered through it he even began to sing a little again, though cautiously and although his knees trembled still more strangely on the descent than before. But stepping out of the wood, he stood surprised before a magnificent scene that opened before him, an intimately enclosed landscape of peaceful and grand pictorial beauty.

In a shallow, stony bed a mountain stream came down from the right-hand height, poured foaming over blocks layered like terraces, and then flowed on more quietly toward the valley, picturesquely crossed by a footbridge with a plainly carpentered railing. The ground was blue with the bell-shaped blossoms of a shrub-like plant that grew rankly everywhere. Grave spruces, gigantic and regular in growth, stood singly and in groups on the floor of the ravine as well as up the heights, and one of them, rooted slantwise in the slope beside the wild brook, projected crookedly and bizarrely into the picture. Rustling seclusion ruled over the beautiful, lonely place. Beyond the brook Hans Castorp noticed a bench.

He crossed the footbridge and sat down, to let himself be entertained by the sight of the waterfall and the driving foam, to listen to the idyllic, talkative, uniform and yet inwardly varied sound; for Hans Castorp loved rushing water as much as music, indeed perhaps still more. But scarcely had he made himself comfortable when a nosebleed attacked him so suddenly that he could not entirely protect his suit from soiling. The bleeding was violent, stubborn, and troubled him for perhaps half an hour, forcing him constantly to run back and forth between brook and bench, rinse his handkerchief, sniff up water, and stretch himself out flat again on the wooden seat with the wet cloth on his nose. Thus he remained lying when at last the blood stopped - lay still, his hands clasped behind his head, his knees drawn up, his eyes closed, his ears filled with the rushing, not unwell, rather soothed by the abundant bloodletting and in a state of strangely reduced vital activity; for when he had breathed out, he felt for a long time no need to draw in new air, but with his body stilled calmly let his heart perform a series of beats until late and sluggishly he took another shallow breath.

Then all at once he found himself transported into that early situation of life which had been the archetype of a dream modeled on the latest impressions, a dream he had dreamed a few nights before… But he was carried away into the There and Then so strongly, so completely, so nearly to the abolition of space and time, that one might have said a lifeless body lay up here by the torrent on the bench, while the real Hans Castorp stood far away in an earlier time and setting, and indeed in a situation which, for all its simplicity, was daring and heart-intoxicating.

He was thirteen years old, in the lower third form, a boy in short trousers, and stood in the schoolyard in conversation with another boy, of about the same age, from another class - a conversation that Hans Castorp had begun quite arbitrarily and that, although because of its practical and narrowly circumscribed object it could only be quite brief, nevertheless delighted him to the highest degree. It was the break between the next-to-last and last lessons, a history lesson and a drawing lesson for Hans Castorp's class. In the yard, which was paved with red clinker bricks and separated from the street by a wall covered with shingles and provided with two entrance gates, the pupils walked up and down in rows, stood in groups, leaned half sitting against the glazed projections of the building walls. There was a confusion of voices. A teacher in a slouch hat supervised the bustle while biting into a ham roll.

The boy with whom Hans Castorp was speaking was named Hippe, Pribislav by first name. As a curiosity it was added that the r in this first name was to be pronounced like sh: it was "Pshibislav"; and this peculiar first name did not go badly with his appearance, which was not quite average and decidedly somewhat foreign. Hippe, son of a historian and Gymnasium professor, consequently a notorious model pupil and already a class ahead of Hans Castorp although scarcely older than he, came from Mecklenburg and in his own person was plainly the product of an old racial mixture, an infusion of Germanic blood with Wendish-Slavic - or the reverse. To be sure, he was blond; his hair was clipped very short over his round skull. But his eyes, blue-gray or gray-blue in color - it was a somewhat uncertain and ambiguous color, perhaps the color of a distant mountain range - showed a peculiar, narrow, and, strictly speaking, even somewhat slanting cut, and directly beneath them sat the cheekbones, protruding and strongly marked - a facial formation that in his case was by no means disfiguring but even had a quite appealing effect, yet that had been enough to earn him among his schoolmates the nickname "the Kirghiz." Incidentally, Hippe already wore long trousers, and with them a high-buttoned blue jacket drawn in at the back, on the collar of which a few flakes from his scalp usually lay.

Now the matter was that Hans Castorp had long since directed his attention toward this Pribislav - had chosen him out of the whole swarm of the schoolyard, known and unknown to him, interested himself in him, followed him with his eyes, shall one say admired him? in any case regarded him with exceptional interest and already on the way to school looked forward to observing him in intercourse with his classmates, to seeing him speak and laugh and distinguishing from afar his voice, which was pleasantly covered, veiled, a little hoarse. Granted that there was no quite sufficient reason for this interest, unless one wished to take the pagan first name, the model-pupil status (which, however, could not possibly weigh in the matter), or finally the Kirghiz eyes for such a reason - eyes that sometimes, with a certain side-glance that did not serve for seeing, could darken in a melting way into something veiled and nocturnal - yet Hans Castorp troubled himself little about the intellectual justification of his feelings or even about how they might have had to be named in case of need. For friendship could hardly be spoken of, since he did not "know" Hippe at all. But first, there was not the slightest compulsion to give a name, since there was no thought of the object ever being brought up in speech - it was not suited for that and did not ask for it either. And second, a name means, if not criticism, then at least determination, that is, lodging within the known and familiar, while Hans Castorp was permeated by the unconscious conviction that an inward good such as this should once and for all be protected from such determination and lodging.

But well or badly founded, in any case these feelings, so remote from name and communication, were of such vital force that Hans Castorp had been carrying them within himself almost for a year already - approximately for a year, for their beginnings could not be exactly found - which at least spoke for the fidelity and constancy of his character, if one considers what an enormous mass of time a year means at that age. Unfortunately, moral judgment regularly inhabits the designations of character traits, whether in a praising or blaming sense, although they all have their two sides. Hans Castorp's "fidelity," for which, incidentally, he gave himself no special credit, consisted, speaking without valuation, in a certain heaviness, slowness, and persistence of his temperament, a preserving basic mood that made states and conditions of life appear to him the more worthy of attachment and continuance the longer they had existed. He was also inclined to believe in the infinite duration of the state, the condition, in which he happened to find himself, valued it for precisely that reason, and was not eager for change. Thus he had become accustomed in his heart to his silent and distant relation to Pribislav Hippe and at bottom regarded it as a permanent institution of his life. He loved the emotions it brought with it, the tension whether that boy would meet him today, pass close by him, perhaps look at him, the soundless, delicate fulfillments with which his secret presented him, and even the disappointments that belonged to the matter, the greatest of which was when Pribislav was "absent": then the schoolyard was desolate, the day devoid of all savor, but the lingering hope remained.

That lasted a year until it reached that adventurous high point, then it lasted another year, thanks to Hans Castorp's preserving fidelity, and then it ceased - and indeed without his noticing any more of the loosening and dissolution of the bonds that tied him to Pribislav Hippe than he had noticed of their formation. Pribislav also left the school and the city as a result of his father's transfer; but Hans Castorp scarcely paid attention to that any longer; he had forgotten him already before. One may say that the figure of the "Kirghiz" had imperceptibly entered his life out of mists, had slowly gained more and more distinctness and tangibility up to that moment of greatest nearness and corporeality in the yard, had stood for a while so in the foreground, and then gradually stepped back again and vanished into the mists without the pain of farewell.

That moment, however, the daring and adventurous situation into which Hans Castorp now found himself transported again, the conversation, a real conversation with Pribislav Hippe, came about as follows. The drawing lesson was next, and Hans Castorp noticed that he did not have his pencil with him. Each of his classmates needed his own; but among the members of other classes he did have this or that acquaintance whom he could have approached for a pencil. Most known to him, however, he found, was Pribislav, nearest to him stood this one with whom in silence he had already had so much to do; and with a joyful upswing of his being he resolved to use the opportunity - he called it an opportunity - and ask Pribislav for a pencil. That this would be a rather strange piece of behavior, since in reality he did not know Hippe at all, escaped him, or at any rate he did not trouble himself about it, blinded by a remarkable lack of consideration. And so, in the throng of the clinker-paved yard, he really stood before Pribislav Hippe and said to him:

"Excuse me, can you lend me a pencil?"

And Pribislav looked at him with his Kirghiz eyes above the protruding cheekbones and spoke to him in his pleasantly hoarse voice, without astonishment, or at least without showing astonishment.

"Gladly," he said. "But you must be absolutely sure to give it back to me after the lesson." And he drew his crayon from his pocket, a silver-plated crayon with a ring one had to push upward so that the red-colored lead would grow out of the metal sleeve. He explained the simple mechanism while their two heads bent over it.

"But do not break it!" he added.

What was he thinking? As if Hans Castorp had had any intention of perhaps not returning the pencil, or even of treating it carelessly.

Then they looked at each other smiling, and since nothing more remained to be said, they turned first their shoulders and then their backs to one another and went away.

That was all. But Hans Castorp had never been happier in his life than in that drawing lesson, when he drew with Pribislav Hippe's pencil - with the prospect on top of handing it back afterward to its owner, which followed as a pure extra, unconstrained and self-evident, from what had preceded it. He took the liberty of sharpening the pencil a little, and of the red-lacquered shavings that fell he kept three or four for almost an entire year in an inner drawer of his desk - no one who had seen them would have guessed what significance they had. Incidentally, the return took place in the simplest forms, which was entirely to Hans Castorp's liking, indeed something on which he even prided himself a little - blunted and spoiled as he was by intimate intercourse with Hippe.

"Here," he said. "Many thanks."

And Pribislav said nothing at all, but merely inspected the mechanism in passing and slipped the crayon into his pocket…

Then they had never spoken with one another again, but this one time, thanks to Hans Castorp's spirit of enterprise, it had happened after all…

He tore open his eyes, confused by the depth of his rapture. "I believe I have been dreaming!" he thought. "Yes, that was Pribislav. I have not thought of him for a long time. What became of the shavings? The desk is in the attic, at Uncle Tienappel's at home. They must still be in the little inner drawer at the left rear. I never took them out. I did not even grant them so much attention as to throw them away… It was Pribislav exactly as he lived and breathed. I would not have thought I should ever see him again so clearly. How strangely he resembled her - this one up here! So that is why I am so interested in her? Or perhaps also: was that why I was so interested in him? Nonsense! Beautiful nonsense. I must go, by the way, and quickly too." But he still remained lying, musing and remembering. Then he sat up. "Well then, farewell and have my thanks!" he said, and tears came into his eyes while he smiled. With that he meant to set off; but, hat and stick in hand, he quickly sat down once more, for he had had to notice that his knees did not quite carry him. "Hello," he thought, "I believe this will not do! And I am supposed to be in the dining hall at the lecture on the dot of eleven. Walking here has its beauties, but also its difficulties, it seems. Yes, yes, but I cannot stay here. It is only that I have grown a little lame from lying down; it will get better in motion." And he tried once more to get to his feet, and since he pulled himself properly together, it worked.

All the same, it was a wretched homecoming after so high-spirited a setting out. Repeatedly he had to rest along the way, because he felt his face suddenly turn white, cold sweat step onto his forehead, and the irregular conduct of his heart take his breath away. Thus he struggled miserably down the switchbacks; but when near the sanatorium he reached the valley, he saw clearly and distinctly that he would by no means be able to overcome the extended stretch of road to the "Berghof" by his own strength, and since there was no tramway and no hired carriage showed itself, he asked a carter who was guiding a wagon with empty crates toward "Dorf" to let him climb on. Back to back with the driver, his legs dangling from the wagon, regarded by passersby with astonished sympathy, swaying and nodding in half sleep under the jolts of the vehicle, he moved along, got off at the railway crossing, handed over money without seeing how much or how little, and hastened headlong up the looping drive.

"Dépêchez-vous, monsieur!" said the French doorkeeper. "La conférence de M. Krokowski vient de commencer." And Hans Castorp threw hat and stick into the cloakroom and squeezed himself, hastily and cautiously, his tongue between his teeth, through the barely opened glass door into the dining hall, where the cure-society sat in rows on chairs, while at the right narrow side Dr. Krokowski stood in a frock coat behind a covered table adorned with a water carafe and spoke…