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Politically Suspicious!

Regular variations of the normal day appeared: first a Sunday - and indeed a Sunday with cure-music on the terrace, such as came every fortnight, a marking of the double week, then, into whose second half Hans Castorp had entered from outside. He had arrived on a Tuesday, and so it was the fifth day, a day of springlike character after that adventurous collapse of weather and relapse into winter - tender and fresh, with clean clouds in the pale-blue sky and moderate sunshine over slopes and valley, which had once again taken on a proper summer green, since the fresh snow had after all been condemned to seep away quickly.

It was plain that everyone made an effort to honor and distinguish the Sunday; management and guests supported one another in this endeavor. At morning tea already there was streusel cake; at every place stood a little glass with a few flowers, wild mountain pinks and even alpine roses, which the gentlemen stuck into the buttonholes of their lapels (Public Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund had even put on a black tailcoat with a dotted waistcoat); the ladies' toilettes bore the stamp of festive airiness - Frau Chauchat appeared at breakfast in a flowing lace matinee with open sleeves, in which, while the glass door thundered into the latch, she first made front and, as it were, gracefully presented herself to the hall before making her creeping way to her table, and which suited her so excellently that Hans Castorp's neighbor, the schoolmistress from Königsberg, showed herself quite enthusiastic over it - and even the barbarous married couple from the Bad Russian table had paid regard to the Lord's day, in that the male half had exchanged his leather jacket for a kind of short frock coat and his felt boots for leather footwear; she, to be sure, wore her unclean feather boa today too, but underneath it a green silk blouse with a ruff… Hans Castorp knitted his brows when he caught sight of the two of them, and changed color, to which he was strikingly prone here.

Immediately after second breakfast the cure-music began on the terrace; all sorts of brass and woodwind players gathered there and played by turns briskly and solemnly, almost until the midday meal. During the concert the rest cure was not strictly obligatory. To be sure, some enjoyed the feast for the ears on their balconies, and three or four chairs were occupied in the garden hall as well; but the majority of the guests sat at the little white tables on the covered platform, while the lighter pleasure-seeking set, to whom sitting on chairs may have seemed too respectable, occupied the stone steps that led down into the garden and there developed much cheerfulness: young invalids of both sexes, most of whom Hans Castorp already knew by name or by sight. Hermine Kleefeld belonged to them, as did Herr Albin, who passed around a large flowered box of chocolates and let everyone eat from it while he himself did not eat but, with a paternal expression, smoked cigarettes with golden mouthpieces; further, the thick-lipped youth from the "Half-Lung Association," Fräulein Levi, thin and ivory-colored as she was, an ash-blond young man who answered to the name Rasmussen and let his hands hang at breast height from slack wrists in the manner of fins, Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, a woman dressed in red and of ample physicality, who had likewise joined the young people and into whose brownish nape that tall person with thinning hair, the one who could play pieces from A Midsummer Night's Dream and who now sat behind her with his arms clasping his pointed knees, directed his clouded looks without ceasing; a red-haired young lady from Greece, another of unknown origin with the face of a tapir, the greedy boy with the thick eyeglasses, another boy of fifteen or sixteen who had screwed in a monocle and, when coughing, brought the long-grown, salt-spoon-like nail of his little finger to his mouth, plainly a prize donkey - and still others besides.

This boy with the fingernail, Joachim related softly, had been only very slightly ill when he came - without temperature, and only as a precaution had his father, a physician, sent him up, and according to the Hofrat's judgment he was to have stayed about three months. Now, after three months, he had 37.8 to 38 and was quite ill. But then he lived so unreasonably that he deserved boxings on the ear.

The cousins had a little table to themselves, somewhat apart from the others, for Hans Castorp was smoking with his black beer, which he had brought out from breakfast, and from time to time his cigar tasted a little good to him. Dazed by the beer and by the music, which, as always, caused his mouth to open and his head to incline to one side, he looked with reddened eyes at the carefree spa-life around him, while the consciousness that all these people were inwardly seized by a decay difficult to arrest and that most of them stood in slight fever did not disturb him in the least, but on the contrary lent the whole thing an enhanced strangeness, a certain intellectual charm… At the little tables people drank sparkling artificial lemonade, and on the flight of steps photographs were being taken. Others exchanged postage stamps there, and the red-haired young lady from Greece drew Herr Rasmussen on a pad, but then would not show him the picture and turned back and forth, laughing with broad, widely spaced teeth, so that for a long time he could not manage to snatch the pad from her. Hermine Kleefeld sat with eyes only half open on her step and beat time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper while Herr Albin fastened a little bunch of meadow flowers to her blouse, and the thick-lipped fellow, sitting at Frau Salomon's feet, chatted up to her with his neck twisted, while the thin-haired pianist stared unwaveringly at her nape from behind.

The doctors came and mingled with the cure-society, Hofrat Behrens in a white coat and Dr. Krokowski in a black one. They went along the row of little tables, the Hofrat dropping a comfortable jest at almost every one, so that a wake of cheerful motion marked his path, and then descended to the young people, whose female portion at once gathered around Dr. Krokowski with bobbing and sidelong glances, while the Hofrat, in honor of Sunday, showed the gentlemen's world the trick with his laced boot: he set his enormous foot on a higher step, loosened the laces, grasped them with one hand according to a special method, and knew how to hook them crosswise, without calling the other hand to help, with such dexterity that everyone marveled and several tried in vain to do the same.

Later Settembrini too appeared on the terrace - he came from the dining hall, leaning on his walking stick, today as well in his long shaggy coat and his yellowish trousers, with a fine, alert, and critical expression, looked about, and approached the cousins' table, saying "Ah, bravo!" and asking permission to be allowed to sit with them.

"Beer, tobacco, and music," he said. "There we have your fatherland! I see you have a sense for national mood, Engineer. You are in your element; that pleases me. Allow me to take some part in the harmony of your condition!"

Hans Castorp drew his features together - he had already done so when he had merely caught sight of the Italian. He said:

"But you come late to the concert, Herr Settembrini; it must soon be over. Do you not care for music?"

"Not on command," Settembrini replied. "Not according to the weekly calendar. Not when it smells of the pharmacy and is measured out to me from above for sanitary reasons. I set some store by my freedom, or at least by that remnant of freedom and human dignity left to the likes of us. At such arrangements I am a visiting student, as you are with us on the large scale - I come for a quarter of an hour and go on my way again. That gives me the illusion of independence… I do not say it is more than an illusion, but what do you want, if it affords me a certain satisfaction! With your cousin it is something else. For him it is service. Is it not, Lieutenant, you regard it as belonging to service. Oh, I know, you know the trick of preserving your pride in slavery. A confusing trick. Not everyone in Europe understands it. Music? Did you not ask whether I profess myself a lover of music? Well, if you say 'lover' (actually Hans Castorp did not remember having said it that way), the expression is not badly chosen; it has a touch of tender frivolity. Good then, I accept. Yes, I am a lover of music - by which it is not meant that I particularly esteem it - say, as I esteem and love the word, the bearer of spirit, the instrument, the gleaming ploughshare of progress… Music… it is the half-articulate, the dubious, the irresponsible, the indifferent. Presumably you will object that it can be clear. But nature too can be clear, a little brook too can be clear, and what help is that to us? It is not true clarity; it is a dreamy clarity, saying nothing and binding one to nothing, a clarity without consequences, dangerous because it tempts one to find repose in it… Let music assume the gesture of magnanimity. Good! It will inflame our feeling with that. But the point is to inflame reason! Music is apparently movement itself - nevertheless I suspect it of quietism. Permit me to bring the matter to a point: I harbor a political aversion to music."

Here Hans Castorp could not help slapping his knee and exclaiming that in his life he had never yet heard anything like that.

"Consider it nevertheless!" Settembrini said, smiling. "Music is priceless as a final means of enthusiasm, as an upward- and forward-tearing power, when it finds the spirit prepared beforehand for its effects. But literature must have preceded it. Music alone does not move the world forward. Music alone is dangerous. For you personally, Engineer, it is unconditionally dangerous. I saw it at once in your features when I came."

Hans Castorp laughed.

"Ah, you must not look at my face, Herr Settembrini. You would not believe how the air up here with you bears down on me. It is harder than I thought to acclimatize myself."

"I fear you are deceiving yourself."

"No, how so! The devil knows how tired and hot I still am."

"I still think one must be grateful to the management for the concerts," Joachim said thoughtfully. "You look at the matter from a higher standpoint, Herr Settembrini, so to speak as a writer, and I do not wish to contradict you there. But I still think one must be grateful here for a little music. I am not especially musical at all, and besides the pieces that are played are not particularly grand either - neither classical nor modern, but just simply brass-band music. But it is a pleasant change all the same. It fills a couple of hours so decently, I mean: it divides them and fills them in detail, so that there is something to them after all, while otherwise up here one knocks the hours and days and weeks about one's ears so horribly… You see, such an unpretentious concert number lasts perhaps seven minutes, doesn't it, and they are something for themselves, they have a beginning and an end, they stand out and are in a certain sense preserved from going under so unawares in the general rut. Besides, they are themselves divided again many times, by the figures of the piece, and those again into measures, so that something is always happening and every moment gets a certain meaning to which one can hold, while otherwise… I do not know whether I am saying this rightly…"

"Bravo!" cried Settembrini. "Bravo, Lieutenant! You describe very well an unquestionably moral element in the nature of music, namely this: that through an entirely peculiar and living measurement it lends wakefulness, spirit, and preciousness to the passage of time. Music awakens time; it awakens us to the finest enjoyment of time; it awakens… in this respect it is moral. Art is moral insofar as it awakens. But what if it does the opposite? If it stupefies, lulls to sleep, works against activity and progress? Music can do that too; it also understands the effects of opiates from the ground up. A devilish effect, my gentlemen! The opiate is of the devil, for it creates dullness, persistence, inactivity, servile standstill… There is something questionable about music, my gentlemen. I persist in saying that it is of ambiguous nature. I do not go too far when I declare it politically suspicious."

He spoke further in this manner, and Hans Castorp did listen, but could not quite manage to follow, first because of his tiredness, and then also because he was distracted by the social goings-on among the lighthearted young people there on the steps. Did he see correctly, or how was this, actually? The young lady with the tapir face was occupied in sewing a button onto the knee band of the sports trousers of the boy with the monocle! And meanwhile her breath came heavy and hot with asthma, while he brought his salt-spoon-like fingernail to his mouth, coughing! They were ill, both of them, but nevertheless it testified to peculiar social customs among the young people up here. The music played a polka…