library_books Bookstacks

Rising Anxiety. Of the Two Grandfathers and the Boat Ride in Twilight

The weather was abominably bad - in this respect Hans Castorp had no luck with his fleeting stay in these regions. It did not exactly snow, but for days it rained heavily and hideously, thick fogs filled the valley, and thunderstorms of ridiculous superfluity - for it was in any case so cold that they had even heated the dining hall - discharged themselves with a laboriously rolling reverberation.

"Too bad," Joachim said. "I had thought we might go to the Schatzalp sometime with breakfast, or undertake something else. But it seems it is not to be. Hopefully your last week will be better."

But Hans Castorp answered:

"Let it be. I am not burning for enterprises. My first one did not agree with me especially well. I recover best when I live along into the day, without much variation. Variation is for the long-termers. But I, with my three weeks, what do I need variation for?"

That was how it was; he felt filled and occupied on the spot. If he harbored hopes, then fulfillment as well as disappointment bloomed for him here, and not on any Schatzalp. It was not boredom that plagued him; on the contrary, he began to fear that the end of his stay might appear all too winged. The second week advanced; two thirds of his time would soon have been lived through, and once the third began, one was already thinking of the trunk. The first refreshment of Hans Castorp's sense of time was long past; already the days were beginning to fly away, and they did so although each individual one of them stretched itself in ever-renewed expectation and swelled with quiet, secret experiences… Yes, time is a mysterious thing; there is a state of affairs with it that is hard to make clear!

Will it be necessary to characterize more closely those secret experiences that at once burdened and buoyed Hans Castorp's days? But everyone knows them; they were quite the usual ones in their sensitive nothingness, and in a more reasonable and promising case, one to which the tasteless little song "How wondrously I am often touched" would have been applicable, they could not have played themselves out otherwise.

It was impossible that Madame Chauchat should not have noticed something of the threads stretching from a certain table to hers; and that she should notice something, indeed as much as possible, lay quite unbridledly among Hans Castorp's intentions. We call that unbridled because he was entirely clear about the irrationality of his case. But whoever is in a state such as his was, or was beginning to be, wants them over there to have knowledge of his condition, even if there is neither sense nor understanding in the matter. Such is man.

After Frau Chauchat, then, had two or three times by accident or under magnetic influence turned around toward that table while eating and each time had met Hans Castorp's eyes, she looked over for the fourth time deliberately and met his eyes this time as well. In a fifth case she did not catch him directly; he was just not at his post. Yet he felt at once that she was looking at him, and looked back at her so eagerly that she turned away smiling. Mistrust and delight filled him at the sight of this smile. If she took him for childish, she was mistaken. His need for refinement was considerable. On a sixth occasion, when he guessed, felt, inwardly knew that she was looking over, he pretended to be regarding with penetrating displeasure a pimply lady who had stepped up to his table to chat with the great-aunt, held out iron-fast, for perhaps two or three minutes, and did not give way until he was certain that the Kirghiz eyes over there had let go of him - a curious bit of acting that Frau Chauchat not only might see through but explicitly should see through, so that Hans Castorp's great subtlety and self-command would make her thoughtful… The following came about. During a pause in the meal Frau Chauchat turned around carelessly and surveyed the hall. Hans Castorp had been at his post: their glances met. While they looked at one another - the sick woman indefinitely peering and mocking, Hans Castorp with excited firmness (he even clenched his teeth while he withstood her eyes) - her napkin was about to fall, was on the point of sliding from her lap to the floor. Nervously starting, she reached for it, but his limbs too were seized; he was half torn from his chair, and blindly wanted to rush across eight meters of space and around a table standing between them to help her, as though it would mean a catastrophe if the napkin reached the floor… Just above the flooring she still managed to catch it. But from her bent posture, leaning diagonally toward the floor, the napkin by the corner in her hand and with a darkened expression, evidently vexed by the unreasonable little panic to which she had succumbed and for which she seemed to blame him - she looked back at him once more, noticed his springing posture, his eyebrows torn upward, and turned away smiling.

Over this occurrence Hans Castorp triumphed to the point of high spirits. Yet the reaction did not fail to appear, for Madame Chauchat now did not turn toward the hall at all for a full two days, that is, for the duration of ten meals, and even omitted, upon her entrance, to "present" herself to the public as had otherwise been her habit. That was hard. But since these omissions without any doubt referred to him, a relation was after all plainly present, even if in negative form; and that might suffice.

He saw well enough that Joachim had been completely right with his remark that it was not at all easy to make acquaintances here, except with table companions. For during the one scant hour after dinner in which a certain sociability regularly took place, but which often shrank to twenty minutes, Madame Chauchat without exception sat with her circle, the hollow-chested gentleman, the humorous woolly-haired girl, silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the hanging-shouldered young men, in the background of the little salon that seemed reserved for the "Good Russian table." Joachim too always soon pressed for departure, in order not to shorten the evening rest cure, as he said, and perhaps also for other dietetic reasons that he did not state, but that Hans Castorp guessed and respected. We raised the charge of unbridledness against him, but wherever his wishes might go, social acquaintance with Frau Chauchat was not what he aimed at, and with the circumstances that worked against it he was at bottom in agreement. The indefinitely tense relations that his looking and activity had established between him and the Russian woman were of an extrasocial nature; they obligated one to nothing and were allowed to obligate one to nothing. For a considerable measure of social rejection was quite compatible with them on his side, and the fact that he laid the thought of "Clawdia" beneath the beating of his heart was by far not enough to make the grandson of Hans Lorenz Castorp waver in the conviction that with this stranger, who spent her life separated from her husband and without a wedding ring on her finger at all sorts of health resorts, who carried herself poorly, let the door fall shut behind her, rolled bread pellets, and undoubtedly chewed at her fingers - that with her, let us say, in reality, that is, beyond those secret relations, he could have nothing to do; that deep chasms separated her existence from his; and that he would not stand with her before any criticism he acknowledged. Sensibly, Hans Castorp was wholly without personal arrogance; but an arrogance of a general and more distantly derived sort stood written on his forehead and around his somewhat sleepily looking eyes, and from it sprang the feeling of superiority of which, at the sight of Frau Chauchat's being and nature, he neither could nor would divest himself. It was strange that he became aware of this extensive feeling of superiority especially vividly and perhaps for the first time at all when one day he heard Frau Chauchat speak German - she was standing in the hall after the close of a meal, both hands in the pockets of her sweater, and, as Hans Castorp perceived while passing, was making an effort, in a charming way incidentally, at the German language, Hans Castorp's mother tongue, as he felt with sudden and never-known pride - though not without a simultaneous inclination to sacrifice this pride to the delight with which her graceful bungling and mangling filled him.

In a word: Hans Castorp saw in his silent relation to the negligent member of Those up here a holiday adventure that before the tribunal of reason - of his own reasonable conscience - could raise no claim whatever to approval: chiefly not because Frau Chauchat was, after all, ill, slack, feverish, and inwardly worm-eaten, a circumstance closely connected with the dubiousness of her whole existence and also strongly involved in Hans Castorp's feelings of caution and distance… No, seeking her real acquaintance did not occur to him; and as for the other thing, it would in any case, in a week and a half, when he entered practical work at Tunder & Wilms, come to an end without consequences, for better or worse.

For the time being, however, matters stood with him in such a way that he had begun to regard the emotions, tensions, fulfillments, and disappointments that grew for him out of his tender relations with the patient as the actual meaning and content of his holiday stay, to live wholly for them, and to make his mood dependent on their flourishing. Circumstances gave their care the most benevolent assistance, for one lived together in a restricted space under a fixed daily order binding on everyone, and even though Frau Chauchat was at home on another floor - the first (incidentally, as Hans Castorp heard from the schoolmistress, she held her rest cure in a common reclining hall, namely the one located on the roof, the same one in which Captain Miklosich had recently turned off the light) - the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of encounter was given by the five meals alone, but also otherwise at every step, from morning to evening. And this too, just like the other fact that no cares and efforts blocked the view, Hans Castorp found splendid, even if such being shut in with the favorable accidental also had something oppressive about it.

Yet he even helped things along a little, calculated and placed his head in the service of the matter, in order to improve his luck. Since Frau Chauchat habitually came late to table, he arranged to come late as well, in order to meet her on the way. He delayed himself at his toilet, was not ready when Joachim entered to fetch him, let his cousin go ahead and said he would follow at once. Advised by the instinct of his condition, he waited for a certain moment that seemed to him the right one, and hurried down to the first floor, where he did not use the staircase that formed the continuation of the one that had brought him down, but followed the corridor almost to the end, to the other staircase, which lay near a room door long since known - it was that of No. 7. On this way, along the corridor, from one staircase to the other, every step, so to speak, offered a chance, for at any moment the door in question could open - and it did so repeatedly: with a crash it fell shut behind Frau Chauchat, who for her own person had emerged soundlessly and glided soundlessly toward the stairs… Then she went before him and supported her hair with her hand, or Hans Castorp went before her and felt her gaze on his back, whereupon he felt a tearing in his limbs as well as an ant-running down his spine; but in the wish to show off before her, he pretended that he knew nothing of her and conducted his individual life in vigorous independence - dug his hands into his jacket pockets and, quite unnecessarily, rolled his shoulders, or cleared his throat violently and beat himself on the chest with his fist while doing so - all in order to demonstrate his ease.

Twice he carried the craftiness still further. After he had already taken his place at the dining table, he said, dismayed and annoyed, while feeling himself with both hands: "There, I have forgotten my handkerchief! Now I shall have to trouble myself upstairs once more." And he went back so that he and "Clawdia" might meet one another, which was indeed something different, more dangerous and of sharper charms, than when she went before or behind him. The first time he executed this maneuver, she did measure him with her eyes from some distance, and indeed quite inconsiderately and without bashfulness, from top to bottom; but when she came near she turned her face away indifferently and passed by, so that the result of this meeting was not to be valued highly. The second time, however, she looked at him, and not only from afar - she looked at him the whole time, throughout the whole event, looked him firmly and even somewhat darkly in the face, and even turned her head toward him as she passed - it went through poor Hans Castorp's marrow and bone. Incidentally one should not pity him, since he had wanted it no otherwise and had arranged everything himself. But the encounter seized him powerfully, both while it played itself out and especially afterward; for only when everything was over did he see quite clearly how it had been. Never yet had he had Frau Chauchat's face so near before him, so clearly recognizable in all details: he had been able to distinguish the short little hairs that escaped from the braid of her blond hair, which played a little into metallic red and was wound simply around her head; and only a few handbreadths of space had been between his face and hers, in its wondrous formation, familiar to him however from long ago, which appealed to him like nothing in the world: a formation foreign and full of character (for only the foreign seems to us to have character), of northern exoticism and rich in mystery, inviting fathoming, insofar as its features and proportions were not easy to determine. The decisive thing was probably the emphasis of the high-sitting cheekbone region: it pressed upon the eyes, lying unusually flat and unusually far apart, and drove them a little into slantingness, while at the same time it furnished the cause of the soft concavity of the cheeks, which in turn, from its side and indirectly, produced the slightly protruding luxuriance of the lips. But then there had especially been the eyes themselves, those narrowly and (so Hans Castorp found) simply magically cut Kirghiz eyes, whose color was the gray-blue or blue-gray of distant mountains, and which sometimes, with a certain side-glance that did not serve for seeing, could darken in a melting way wholly into something veiled and nocturnal - Clawdia's eyes, which from the nearest proximity had regarded him inconsiderately and somewhat darkly, and in position, color, and expression were so strikingly and frighteningly like Pribislav Hippe's! "Like" was not the right word at all - they were the same eyes; and the breadth of the upper half of the face too, the pressed-in nose, everything, except for the reddened whiteness of the skin, the healthy color of the cheeks, which in Frau Chauchat however only feigned health and, as with everyone up here, was nothing but a superficial product of the rest cure in the open air - everything was just as with Pribislav, and in no other way had he looked at him when they passed one another in the schoolyard.

That was disturbing in every sense; Hans Castorp was enraptured by the encounter, and at the same time he felt something like rising anxiety, an oppression of the same kind as being shut in with the favorable accidental in a narrow space caused him: this too, that the long-forgotten Pribislav met him again up here as Frau Chauchat and looked at him with Kirghiz eyes, was like being shut in with something inevitable or inescapable - inescapable in a blissful and anxious sense. It was hopeful and at the same time uncanny, yes threatening, and a feeling of need for help came over young Hans Castorp; within him there took place indefinite and instinctive movements that one might have described as a looking around, a groping and searching for help, for advice and support; he thought one after another of various persons of whom it might perhaps be beneficial to think.

There was Joachim, the good, honorable Joachim at his side, whose eyes in these months had taken on so sad an expression, and who sometimes shrugged his shoulders so contemptuously and violently as he had never done before - Joachim with the "Blue Henry" in his pocket, as Frau Stöhr was accustomed to call this implement, with a face so stubbornly shameless that it horrified Hans Castorp's soul every time… So honest Joachim was there, whom Hofrat Behrens teased and tormented to get away and be able to do his longed-for service in the "plain" or the "flatland," as they here called the world of the healthy with a slight but clear accent of contempt. In order to arrive at it more quickly and save time, with which people here dealt so extravagantly, for the time being he kept the cure-service with all conscientiousness - did so for the sake of his speedy recovery, without question, but, as Hans Castorp sometimes believed he sensed, a little also for the sake of the cure-service, which after all was a service like any other, and fulfillment of duty was fulfillment of duty. So in the evenings Joachim already pressed away from sociability after a quarter of an hour and into the rest cure, and that was good, for his military exactitude came in a certain sense to the aid of Hans Castorp's civilian mind, which otherwise, senselessly and without prospect, might gladly have taken part in sociability somewhat longer, with a view toward the little Russian salon. But that Joachim was so urgently concerned to shorten the evening sociability had yet another, secret reason, one that Hans Castorp understood exactly since he had learned to understand so exactly Joachim's blotchy paling and that peculiarly pitiful way in which his mouth distorted itself at certain moments. For Marusja too, eternally ready to laugh, Marusja with the little ruby on her beautiful finger, the orange perfume, and the high, worm-eaten breast, was mostly present at the sociability; and Hans Castorp understood that this circumstance drove Joachim away because it attracted him too much, in a dreadful way. Was Joachim also "shut in" - even more narrowly and oppressively than he himself, since Marusja with her orange-scented cloth, on top of everything else, also sat with them five times a day at the same dining table? In any case Joachim had far too much to do with himself for his existence actually to have been inwardly helpful to Hans Castorp. His daily flight from sociability had an honorable effect, but anything but a reassuring one upon him, and then there were moments when it also seemed to him that Joachim's good example with respect to fidelity to duty in the cure-service, and the expert instruction in it that he gave him, had their questionable side.

Hans Castorp had not yet been on the spot two weeks, but it seemed longer to him, and the daily order of Those up here, which Joachim at his side observed with such service-piousness, had begun in his eyes to take on the stamp of a holy-self-evident inviolability, so that life down in the flatland, seen from here, appeared almost strange and wrong. Already he had acquired fine dexterity in the handling of the two blankets with which, in cold weather during the rest cure, one made oneself into an even parcel, a proper mummy; little was lacking before he equaled Joachim in the sure skill and art of striking them around himself according to rule, and he almost had to wonder at the thought that down in the plain no one knew anything of this art and prescription. Yes, that was curious - but at the same time Hans Castorp wondered that he found it curious, and that unrest which inwardly made him look around for advice and support rose in him anew.

He had to think of Hofrat Behrens and of his sine pecunia advice to live exactly as the patients did and even to measure himself too - and of Settembrini, who had laughed so loudly into the air over this advice and then quoted something from The Magic Flute. Yes, he thought of these two as well, by way of trial, to see whether it did him good. Hofrat Behrens was a white-haired man, after all; he could have been Hans Castorp's father. In addition he was head of the institution, the highest authority - and paternal authority was what young Hans Castorp felt a restless need for in his heart. And yet, when he tried, it would not succeed for him to think of the Hofrat with childlike trust. He had buried his wife here, a sorrow from which he had temporarily become somewhat strange, and then he had remained in the place because the grave bound him, and besides because he himself had caught something. Was that over now? Was he healthy and unambiguously minded to make people healthy so that they could return to the flatland quite soon and do service? His cheeks were constantly blue, and actually he looked as though he had over-temperature. But that might rest on deception, and only the air might be to blame for this facial color: Hans Castorp himself, after all, felt here day in, day out a dry heat without having fever, so far as he could judge without a thermometer. To be sure, when one heard the Hofrat speak, one could at times again believe in over-temperature; there was something not quite right with his manner of speech: it sounded so brisk and jovial and comfortable, but there was something peculiar in it, something exalted, especially if one took the blue cheeks into consideration, as well as the watering eyes, which looked as though he were still weeping over his wife. Hans Castorp remembered what Settembrini had said about the Hofrat's "melancholy" and "viciousness," and that he had called him a "confused soul." That might be malice and swaggering; but he nevertheless found that it was not especially strengthening to think of Hofrat Behrens.

But then of course there was still this Settembrini himself, the opposition man, windbag, and "homo humanus," as he called himself, who with many full-sounding words had rebuked him for calling illness and stupidity together a contradiction and a dilemma for human feeling. How did matters stand with him? And was it beneficial to think of him? Hans Castorp well remembered how in several of the excessively lively dreams that filled his nights up here he had taken offense at the Italian's fine, dry smile, which curled beneath the beautiful rounding of his mustache, how he had scolded him as a hurdy-gurdy man and tried to push him away because he was "disturbing here." But that had been in dream, and the waking Hans Castorp was another, less uninhibited than the one in the dream. In waking it might be something else - perhaps he did well to make inward trial with Settembrini's novel being, with his rebelliousness and criticism, although it was lachrymose and garrulous. He himself had called himself a pedagogue; evidently he wished to exert influence; and young Hans Castorp longed heartily to be influenced - which, to be sure, need not go so far as letting Settembrini determine him to pack his trunk and depart before the time, as the latter had lately proposed in all seriousness.

Placet experiri, he thought to himself, smiling, for he still understood that much Latin without being allowed to call himself a homo humanus. And so he kept an eye on Settembrini and listened willingly and not without testing attention to all the things he offered on encounters such as incidentally occurred during the measured cure promenades to the bench by the mountain wall or down toward "Platz," or on other occasions, for example when Settembrini, after the meal was ended, rose first and in his checked trousers, a toothpick between his lips, strolled through the hall with the seven tables in order, against all prescription and practice, to visit a little at the cousins' table. He did it by taking up position in a graceful posture, feet crossed, and chatting while gesticulating with the toothpick. Or he also drew up a chair, took a seat at a corner between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress on the one side or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson on the other, and watched as the nine table companions consumed their dessert, which he seemed to have renounced.

"I ask admittance into this noble circle," he said, shaking the cousins' hands and including the remaining persons in a bow. "That brewer over there… not to speak of the despair-inducing sight of the brewer's wife. But this Herr Magnus - just now he delivered a lecture in folk psychology. Would you like to hear? 'Our dear Germany is a great barracks, certainly. But there is much efficiency behind it, and I would not exchange our solidity for the politeness of the others. What good is all politeness to me if I am cheated front and back?' In this style. I am at the edge of my strength. Then opposite me sits a poor creature with cemetery roses on her cheeks, an old maid from Transylvania, who speaks without interruption of her 'brother-in-law,' a person of whom no one knows anything nor wants to know. In short, I can bear no more; I have made myself scarce."

"You took to your banner in flight," said Frau Stöhr; "I can imagine that."

"Exactly!" cried Settembrini. "The banner! I see a different wind blows here - no doubt, I have come before the right forge. In flight, then, I took it up… If only one knew how to place one's words like that! - May I inquire after the progress of your health, Frau Stöhr?"

It was dreadful how Frau Stöhr adorned herself. "Great God," she said, "it is always the same, the gentleman knows himself. One takes two steps forward and three back - once one has sat off five months, the old man comes and lays half a year on top. Ah, they are torments of Tantalus. One pushes and pushes, and when one thinks one is at the top…"

"Oh, that is beautiful of you! You finally grant poor Tantalus a little variety! By way of exchange you let him roll the famous marble for once! That is what I call true goodness of heart. But how is it, Madame, mysterious things are going on with you. One has heard stories of double-going, astral bodies… I have not believed in them until now, but what is happening with you makes me uncertain…"

"It seems the gentleman wants to take his amusement with me."

"Not at all! I am not thinking of it! First reassure me about certain dark sides of your existence, and then we shall be able to speak of amusement! Yesterday evening between half past nine and ten I take a little exercise in the garden - while doing so I look along the balconies - the electric lamp on yours glows through the darkness. You were consequently in the rest cure, according to duty, reason, and prescription. 'There lies our beautiful patient,' I say to myself, 'and faithfully observes the ordinance, so that she may return as soon as possible into the arms of Herr Stöhr.' And a few minutes ago, what do I hear? That at the same hour you were seen in the cinematógrafo" (Herr Settembrini pronounced the word in Italian, with the accent on the fourth syllable) "- in the cinematógrafo of the Kurhaus arcades, and afterward still in the confectioner's over sweet wine and some meringues, and indeed…"

Stöhr writhed in her shoulders, giggled into her napkin, jabbed Joachim Ziemßen and silent Dr. Blumenkohl in the sides with her elbows, winked slyly-confidentially, and in every way displayed block-stupid self-satisfaction. In the evenings, in order to deceive the supervision, she was accustomed to put her burning table lamp out on the balcony, sneak away secretly, and pursue her diversions down in the English Quarter. Her husband was waiting for her in Cannstatt. Incidentally, she was not the only patient who practiced this stratagem.

"…and indeed," Settembrini continued, "these meringues - in whose company did you taste them? In the company of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest! I am assured he wears a corset, but my God, how little that weighs here! I implore you, Madame, where were you? You are double! In any case you had fallen asleep, and while the earthly part of your being performed the rest cure alone, the spiritual part amused itself in the company of Captain Miklosich and with his meringues…"

Frau Stöhr twisted and bristled like someone being tickled.

"One does not know whether one should wish the reverse," Settembrini said. "That you had enjoyed the meringues alone and practiced the rest cure with Captain Miklosich…"

"Hee, hee, hee…"

"Do the ladies and gentlemen know the story from the day before yesterday?" the Italian asked abruptly. "Someone was fetched away - fetched by the devil, or actually by his Frau Mama, an energetic lady; she pleased me. It is young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat up there at Mademoiselle Kleefeld's table - you see, his place is empty. It will be filled again soon enough, I have no worry, but Anton is gone on storm-wings, in a flash and before he knew it. A year and a half he had been here - at sixteen; six months had just been added to him. And what happens? I do not know who had let a word flow to Madame Schneermann; in any case she had got wind of the conduct of her little son in Baccho et ceteris. Unannounced she appears on the scene, a matron - three heads taller than I, white-haired and wrathful, pulls Herr Anton down a couple of boxes on the ear without speaking, takes him by the collar and sets him on the train. 'If he is to go to ruin,' she says, 'he can do it down below too.' And off it goes home."

People laughed, insofar as they sat within earshot, for Herr Settembrini told the story drolly. He showed himself up to date on the latest news, although he behaved so critically and mockingly toward the communal life of Those up here. He knew everything. He knew the names and approximately also the life circumstances of new arrivals; he reported that yesterday a rib resection had been performed on this or that man or woman, and had it from the best source that from autumn on patients over 38.5 degrees would no longer be accepted. Last night, according to his story, Madame Capatsoulias's little dog from Mytilene had sat down on the button of the electric light signal on his mistress's night table, from which much running about and tumult had arisen, especially since Madame Capatsoulias had been found not alone, but in the company of Assessor Düstmund from Friedrichshagen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl had to smile over this story, pretty Marusja almost suffocated in her orange-scented cloth, and Frau Stöhr screamed shrilly while pressing her left breast with both hands.

But Lodovico Settembrini also spoke with the cousins about himself and his origins, whether on walks, during evening sociability, or after midday table had ended, when the great majority of patients had already left the hall and the three gentlemen remained for a while at their end of the table, while the hall daughters cleared away and Hans Castorp smoked his Maria Mancini, whose spice he was beginning to taste a little again in the third week. Attentively testing, perplexed, but willing to let himself be influenced, he listened to the Italian's stories, which opened to him a strange, wholly novel world.

Settembrini spoke of his grandfather, who in Milan had been an advocate, but chiefly a great patriot, and had represented something like a political agitator, orator, and contributor to periodicals - he too an opposition man, like the grandson, yet he had carried on the thing in a larger, bolder style. For while Lodovico, as he himself remarked with bitterness, found himself dependent on heckling the life and doings in the International Sanatorium Berghof, exercising mocking criticism upon them and lodging protest in the name of a beautiful and deed-ready humanity, that other one had given governments trouble, had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which then held his dismembered fatherland under the spell of dull servitude, and had been an eager member of certain secret societies spread over Italy - a Carbonaro, as Settembrini declared with suddenly lowered voice, as though it were dangerous even now to speak of it. In short, this Giuseppe Settembrini presented himself, according to the grandson's stories, to the two listeners as a dark, passionate, and subversive existence, as a ringleader and conspirator; and for all the respect they politely made an effort to show, they did not quite succeed in banishing from their features an expression of distrustful aversion, indeed of repugnance. To be sure, the circumstances were particular: what they heard was long past, almost a hundred years; it was history, and from history, especially ancient history, the nature of which they were hearing here, the phenomenon of desperate courage for freedom and unbending hatred of tyrants, was theoretically familiar to them, although they had never thought to come into such immediately human contact with it. Also, as they heard, with this grandfather's rebelliousness and conspiratorial activity there had been joined a great love for his fatherland, which he wished to know united and free - indeed, his subversive activity had been the fruit and outflow of this respectable attachment; and however strange the mixture of rebelliousness and patriotism struck the cousins, one as much as the other - for they were accustomed to equate patriotic feeling with a preserving sense of order - they nevertheless had to admit to themselves that, as things had stood there and then, rebellion may have been equivalent to civic virtue and loyal establishedness to sluggish indifference toward the commonwealth.

But Grandfather Settembrini had been not only an Italian patriot, but a fellow citizen and fellow fighter of all peoples thirsting for freedom. For after the failure of a certain attempted coup of hand and state undertaken in Turin, in which he had participated with word and deed, and after escaping Prince Metternich's catchpoles only by the narrowest margin, he had used the time of his banishment to fight and bleed in Spain for the constitution and in Greece for the independence of the Hellenic people. Here Settembrini's father had come into the world - which was perhaps why he had become so great a humanist and lover of classical antiquity - born, incidentally, of a mother of German blood, for Giuseppe had married the girl in Switzerland and taken her with him on his further adventures. Later, after ten years of exile, he had been able to return home and had worked in Milan as an advocate, but had by no means renounced calling the nation through the spoken and written word, in verse and prose, to freedom and to the establishment of the unified republic, drafting state-overturning programs with passionately dictatorial sweep and in a clear style proclaiming the union of the liberated peoples for the establishment of universal happiness. A detail that Settembrini, the grandson, mentioned made a special impression on young Hans Castorp: namely that Grandfather Giuseppe, throughout his life, had shown himself among his fellow citizens exclusively in black mourning clothes, for he was a mourner, he had said, for Italy, his fatherland, which languished in misery and servitude. At this news Hans Castorp had to think, as he had incidentally already done a couple of times before by way of comparison, of his own grandfather, who likewise, as long as the grandson knew him, had always worn black, but in a thoroughly different sense from this grandfather here: he thought of the old-fashioned costume with which Hans Lorenz Castorp's actual being, belonging to a past time, had provisionally and while indicating its non-belonging to the present adapted itself, until in death it had solemnly entered into its true and appropriate form (with the plate ruff). Two strikingly different kinds of grandfathers those had truly been! Hans Castorp thought about this, while his eyes fixed themselves and he cautiously shook his head, so that it could be interpreted just as well as a sign of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as of perplexity and negation. He also honestly guarded himself from condemning what was foreign, but held himself to letting comparison and establishment suffice. He saw the narrow head of old Hans Lorenz in the hall bending thoughtfully over the faint-gold round of the baptismal basin, the standing-wandering heirloom - with rounded mouth, for his lips formed the prefix "Ur," that dull and pious sound which called to mind places where one fell into a reverently forward-rocking gait. And he saw Giuseppe Settembrini, the tricolor in his arm, with brandished saber and black gaze vowingly turned toward heaven, storming at the head of a band of freedom fighters against the phalanx of despotism. Both probably had their beauty and honor, he thought, all the more striving for fairness because he felt himself personally or half personally a little partisan. For Grandfather Settembrini had fought for political rights; but to his own grandfather, or at least to his forefathers, all rights had originally belonged, and the rabble had wrested them from them over the course of four centuries with force and phrases… There they had both gone always in black, the grandfather in the north and the one in the south, and both for the purpose of placing a strict distance between themselves and the bad present. But the one had done it out of piety, in honor of the past and of death, to which his being belonged; the other, by contrast, out of rebellion and in honor of a progress hostile to piety. Yes, those were two worlds or regions of the heavens, Hans Castorp thought, and as he stood as it were between them, while Herr Settembrini told his story, and looked testingly now into the one, now into the other, he thought he had experienced it once before. He remembered a solitary boat ride in evening twilight on a Holstein lake, in late summer, some years ago. It had been seven o'clock, the sun was already down, the nearly full moon in the east already risen above the bushy banks. Then for ten minutes, while Hans Castorp rowed himself along over the still waters, a confusing and dreamlike constellation had prevailed. In the west there had been bright day, a glassily sober, decided daylight; but if he turned his head, he had looked into an equally decided, most magical moonlit night, interwoven with damp mists. The strange relation had existed perhaps a scant quarter of an hour before it balanced itself in favor of night and the moon, and with cheerful astonishment Hans Castorp's dazzled and vexed eyes had gone from one lighting and landscape to the other, from day into night and from night back into day. That, then, was what he had to think of.

A great legal scholar, he further thought, Advocate Settembrini could hardly have become, given his way of life and his extensive activity. But the general principle of law, as the grandson credibly made out, had animated him from childhood to the end of his life, and Hans Castorp, although at present not exactly sharp in the head and organically strongly claimed by a six-course Berghof meal, made an effort to understand how Settembrini meant it when he called this principle "the source of freedom and progress." Under the latter Hans Castorp had hitherto understood something like the development of hoisting machinery in the nineteenth century; and he found indeed that Herr Settembrini did not estimate such things lowly, which his grandfather evidently had not done either. The Italian paid high honor to the fatherland of his two listeners in respect to the fact that gunpowder had been invented there, which had made the armor of feudalism into junk, as well as the printing press: for this had made possible the democratic dissemination of ideas - that is, the dissemination of democratic ideas. Thus he praised Germany in this respect and insofar as the past was in question, even if he believed he should fairly award the palm to his own country, since while the other peoples still drowsed in superstition and servitude, it had first unfurled the banner of enlightenment, education, and freedom. But when he paid much reverence to technology and transportation, Hans Castorp's personal field of work, as he had already done at his first meeting with the cousins by the bench on the slope, it did not seem to be for the sake of these powers themselves, but in consideration of their significance for the moral perfection of human beings - for he joyfully declared that he ascribed such significance to them. Insofar as technology, he said, more and more subjugated nature and, through the connections it created, the expansion of road networks and telegraphs, conquered climatic differences, it proved itself the most reliable means of bringing peoples nearer to one another, promoting their mutual acquaintance, initiating human adjustment among them, destroying their prejudices, and finally bringing about their general union. The human race came from darkness, fear, and hatred, but on a gleaming way it moved forward and upward toward a final state of sympathy, inner brightness, goodness, and happiness, and on this way technology was the most helpful vehicle, he said. But as he spoke thus, he brought together in one emission of breath categories that Hans Castorp had hitherto been accustomed to think only far apart from one another. Technology and morality! he said. And then he truly spoke of the Savior of Christianity, who had first revealed the principle of equality and union, whereupon the printing press had mightily promoted the spread of this principle and finally the great French state revolution had raised it to law. This struck young Hans Castorp, if for indefinite reasons, nevertheless in fact most definitely as confused, although Herr Settembrini framed it in such clear and swelling words. Once, the latter related, once in his life, and indeed at the beginning of his best manhood, his grandfather had felt right heartily happy, and that had been at the time of the Paris July Revolution. Loudly and publicly he had then spoken the word that all people would one day set those three days of Paris beside the six days of the creation of the world. Here Hans Castorp could not help striking the table with his hand and wondering down to the ground of his soul. That one should set three summer days of the year 1830, on which the Parisians had given themselves a new constitution, beside the six in which God the Lord had divided the firmament from the waters and created the eternal heavenly lights as well as flowers, trees, birds, fish, and all life, seemed to him strong; and even afterward, alone with his cousin Joachim, expressly and in conversation, he found it exceedingly strong, indeed downright offensive.

But he was of good will to let himself be influenced, in the sense of the phrase that it is pleasant to make experiments, and so he put reins on the protest that his piety and taste raised against the Settembrinian arrangement of things, considering that what seemed blasphemous to him could be called boldness and what struck him as tasteless might have been high-heartedness and noble exuberance, at least there and then: as, for example, when Grandfather Settembrini had called the barricades the "people's throne" and declared that the task was "to consecrate the citizen's pike at the altar of humanity."

Hans Castorp did not explicitly know why he listened to Herr Settembrini, but he knew it. Something like a feeling of duty was involved, besides that holiday irresponsibility of the traveler and visitor who does not harden himself against any impression and lets things come near him, in the consciousness that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow he will spread his wings again and return to the accustomed order: something like a prescription of conscience, then, and to be precise, the prescription and admonition of a somehow bad conscience, determined him to listen to the Italian, one leg crossed over the other and drawing on his Maria Mancini, or when the three of them climbed from the English Quarter toward the Berghof.

According to Settembrini's arrangement and presentation, two principles lay in struggle for the world: power and right, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the principle of persistence and that of fermenting movement, of progress. One could call the one the Asiatic principle and the other the European, for Europe was the land of rebellion, criticism, and transformative activity, while the eastern continent embodied immobility, inactive repose. There was no doubt whatever to which of the two powers victory would finally fall - it was to that of enlightenment, of rational perfecting. For humanity carried ever new peoples along on its gleaming way, conquered ever more earth in Europe itself, and began to penetrate into Asia. Yet much was still lacking to its full victory, and great and noble exertions still had to be made by the well-disposed, by those who had received the light, until only the day first came when in those lands of our continent too, which in truth had experienced neither an eighteenth century nor an 1789, the monarchies and religions would collapse. But this day would come, Settembrini said and smiled finely beneath his mustache - it would come, if not on doves' feet, then on eagles' wings, and dawn as the morning red of universal fraternity among peoples under the sign of reason, science, and law; it would bring the holy alliance of bourgeois democracy, the shining counterpart to that triply infamous alliance of princes and cabinets of which Grandfather Giuseppe had been the personal mortal enemy - in a word, the world republic. To this final goal, however, it was above all necessary to strike the Asiatic, the servile principle of persistence in the center and life-nerve of its resistance, namely in Vienna. Austria had to be struck on the head and destroyed, first in order to take revenge for the past, and then in order to set in motion the dominion of right and happiness on earth.

This last turn and conclusion of Settembrini's melodious outpourings no longer interested Hans Castorp at all; it displeased him, indeed touched him painfully like a personal or national embitterment whenever it returned - to say nothing of Joachim Ziemßen, who, when the Italian entered this channel, turned his head away with darkened brows and no longer listened, sometimes even reminded them of cure-service or tried to divert the conversation. Hans Castorp too did not feel bound to give such aberrations attention - evidently they lay outside the boundary of that by which a prescription of conscience admonished him to let himself be influenced by way of experiment, and admonished him so audibly that when Herr Settembrini sat down with them or joined them outdoors, he himself invited him to express himself about his ideas.

These ideas, ideals, and strivings of will, Settembrini remarked, were family tradition in his house. For all three had devoted their lives and their powers of mind to them, grandfather, father, and grandson, each in his own way: the father no less than Grandfather Giuseppe, although he had not, like the latter, been a political agitator and freedom fighter, but a quiet and delicate scholar, a humanist at his desk. What, then, was humanism? It was love of man, nothing more, and with that it was also politics, was also rebellion against everything that sullied and degraded the idea of man. He had been reproached with an exaggerated valuation of form; but he cultivated beautiful form too solely for the sake of human dignity, in shining contrast to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into hatred of man and superstition, but also into shameful formlessness; and from the very beginning he had defended the cause of man, earthly interests, freedom of thought and joy in life, and had held that heaven might fairly be left to the sparrows. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist, and he was identical with that Satanas to whom Carducci had composed his hymn… Ah, my God, the cousins should have heard the old enemy of the Church in Bologna prick and thunder against the Christian sentimentality of the Romantics! Against Manzoni's sacred hymns! Against the shadow-and-moonshine poetry of the Romanticismo, which he had compared to the "pale heavenly nun Luna"! Per Bacco, it had been a high delight! And they should also have heard how he, Carducci, interpreted Dante - he had celebrated him as a citizen of a great city who had defended, against asceticism and world-denial, active power, revolutionary and world-improving. For the poet had not honored the sickly and mystagogical shadow of Beatrice with the name "Donna gentile e pietosa"; rather, that was the name of his wife, who in the poem embodied the principle of this-worldly knowledge, of practical life-work…

So Hans Castorp had now heard this and that about Dante too, and indeed from the best source. He did not rely on it quite firmly, in view of the mediator's windbaggery; but that Dante had been an alert city-dweller was at any rate worth hearing. And then he listened further as Settembrini spoke of himself and explained that in his, the grandson Lodovico's, person the tendencies of his immediate forefathers, the civic one of the grandfather and the humanistic one of the father, had now united, in that he had become a man of letters, a free writer. For literature was nothing other than just this: it was the union of humanism and politics, which took place all the more naturally since humanism itself was already politics and politics humanism… Here Hans Castorp pricked up his ears and made an effort to understand it properly; for he might now hope to see through Brewer Magnussen's whole lack of instruction and learn in what respect literature was after all something other than "beautiful characters." Had his listeners ever heard, Settembrini asked, of Herr Brunetto, Brunetto Latini, city clerk of Florence around 1250, who had written a book about virtues and vices? This master had first given the Florentines polish and taught them to speak, as well as the art of guiding their republic according to the rules of politics. "There you have it, my gentlemen!" cried Settembrini. "There you have it!" And he spoke of the "word," of the cult of the word, of eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. For the word was the honor of man, and only it made life worthy of man. Not only humanism - humanity altogether, all human dignity, human respect, and human self-respect was inseparably bound up with the word, with literature - ("You see," Hans Castorp later said to his cousin, "you see that in literature it depends on the beautiful words? I noticed that at once.") - and so politics too was bound up with it, or rather: politics proceeded from the alliance, the unity of humanity and literature, for the beautiful word produced the beautiful deed. "In your country," Settembrini said, "two hundred years ago, you had a poet, a splendid old chatterer, who laid great weight on beautiful handwriting because he thought such handwriting led to beautiful style. He should have gone a little further and said that a beautiful style leads to beautiful actions." To write beautifully, that meant almost already to think beautifully too, and from there it was not much farther to acting beautifully. All civilization and moral perfecting arose from the spirit of literature, this spirit of human honor, which at the same time was also the spirit of humanity and of politics. Yes, all this was one, was one and the same power and idea, and it could be summarized in one name. What was this name? Well, this name was composed of familiar syllables whose meaning and majesty, however, the cousins had certainly never yet rightly grasped - it was: Civilization! And as Settembrini let this word leave his lips, he threw up his small yellow right hand like someone proposing a toast.

Young Hans Castorp found all this worth hearing, noncommittally and more by way of experiment, to be sure, but in any case he found that it was worth hearing, and he expressed himself in this sense to Joachim Ziemßen too, who, however, at that moment had the thermometer in his mouth and so could answer only indistinctly, afterward also being much too occupied with reading the figure and entering it in the chart to be able to express himself on Settembrini's aspects. Hans Castorp, as we said, took good-willed notice of them and opened his inner self to them for testing: from which above all it becomes clear how advantageously the waking man differs from the dullly dreaming one - as which Hans Castorp had already several times called Herr Settembrini a hurdy-gurdy man to his face and tried with all his might to push him from the spot because he was "disturbing here"; as a waking man, however, he listened to him politely and attentively and, legally minded, sought to balance and hold down the resistances that wanted to rise in him against the mentor's arrangements and representations. For that certain resistances stirred in his soul shall not be denied: they were such as had been present there from earlier, originally and always, as well as such as arose especially from the present state of affairs, from his partly indirect, partly secret experiences among Those up here.

What is man; how easily his conscience deceives itself! How well he understands how to hear permission for passion even out of the voice of duty! Out of a feeling of duty, for the sake of fairness, of balance, Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini and examined benevolently his aspects on reason, the republic, and beautiful style, ready to let himself be influenced by them. But all the more permissible did he find it afterward to let his thoughts and dreams run freely again in another, in an opposite direction - indeed, to speak out our whole suspicion or our whole insight, he had perhaps listened to Herr Settembrini for the very purpose of obtaining from his conscience a free pass that it had originally not wanted to issue to him. But what or who was located on this other side, opposite to patriotism, human dignity, and beautiful literature, toward which Hans Castorp now believed he was again permitted to direct his meditation and activity? There was… Clawdia Chauchat - slack, worm-eaten, and Kirghiz-eyed; and as Hans Castorp thought of her (incidentally, "thought" is an all too restrained expression for the way he turned inwardly toward her), it seemed to him again as though he sat in the boat on that Holstein lake and looked from the glassy daylight of the western bank, with vexed and dazzled eye, over into the moonlit night of the eastern heavens, threaded through with mist.