by Thomas Mann
They all bowed to thank him and made ready to obey his command. Those squatting on the ground sprang to their feet, those sitting on the bridge railing jumped down. The slight Javanese in his bowler and fur-collared coat gathered up the dishes and what was left of the meal. In the same tight order in which they had arrived, they now returned along the damp, needle-strewn path, and emerged from woods disfigured by lichen onto the road, where their carriages stood waiting.
This time Hans Castorp climbed in with the master and his companion, sitting across from the couple and beside good old Ferge, to whom all higher things were utterly foreign. Almost nothing was said during the ride home. Mynheer sat with his jaw slack, his hands palm down on the plaid traveling blanket spread over both his and Clavdia’s knees. Settembrini and Naphta got out and said their good-byes before the carriages moved on across the tracks and the little brook. Wehsal rode alone in the second carriage as it wound its way up the looping drive to the portal of the Berghof, where they all parted.
Did Hans Castorp sleep more lightly, more fitfully that night because of some inner alertness of which his soul knew nothing? Certainly the slightest deviation from the Berghof’s customary nocturnal peace, the tiniest muffled disturbance, even the barely perceptible sound of someone moving in the distance, was enough to bring him wide awake and make him sit up in bed. He had been awake for a good while when there was a knock at his door; it was shortly after two. He answered at once—energetic, fully alert, not drowsy in the least. It was the high, quavering voice of one of the nurses employed by the sanatorium, who asked that he come immediately to the second floor at Frau Chauchat’s request. With even greater energy, he declared he would obey the call; he leapt out of bed, jumped into his clothes, brushed his hair from his brow with his fingers, and walked downstairs—not slowly, not quickly, uncertain less about what the hour would demand than how it would demand it.
He found the door to Peeperkorn’s parlor open, as was the door to the Dutchman’s bedroom, where all the lights were on. Both doctors, Head Nurse von Mylendonk, Madame Chauchat, and the valet were present. The Malayan was not dressed as usual, but was got up in a kind of Javanese folk costume—a shirtlike jacket with wide stripes and long, loose sleeves, a bright-colored skirt instead of trousers, a cone-shaped hat of yellow fabric atop his head, and a necklace of amulets across his chest; there he stood, arms folded, immobile, to the left of the head of the bed, where Pieter Peeperkorn lay on his back, his arms flung wide. Entering now, Hans Castorp turned pale as he took in the scene. Frau Chauchat had her back to him. She was sitting on a low chair at the foot of the bed, elbows propped on the quilt, chin in hand, fingers clutching her lower lip, eyes fixed on her traveling companion’s face.
“Evenin’, my boy,” said Behrens, who had been engaged in a hushed conversation with Dr. Krokowski and the head nurse, and now greeted him with a melancholy nod and a skew of his little white moustache. He was wearing his clinical smock—a stethoscope stuck up out of the breast pocket—embroidered slippers, and no collar. “No go,” he added in a whisper. “Job done. Step up closer. Cast him an expert eye. You’ll have to admit it was beyond the reach of medical art.”
Hans Castorp approached the bed on tiptoe. The Malayan watched his every move without turning his head, but the whites of his eyes were clearly visible. With a quick sidelong glance of his own, he discovered that Frau Chauchat was paying him no attention, and so he stood in his usual pose beside the bed—weight on one leg, hands clasped before the abdomen, head tilted to one side—gazing down in thoughtful reverence. Under the red silk quilt, Peeperkorn lay dressed in his woolen shirt, just as Hans Castorp had so often seen him. The hands had turned a blackish blue, as had parts of the face, resulting in considerable disfigurement, although the regal features were unaffected. The eyes were closed in peace, but the idol-like tracery of creases, four or five tense horizontal lines that turned down at right angles at the temples and had been formed by the habits of a lifetime, stood out in strong relief on the high brow encircled by white flames. The pained, ragged lips were slightly open. The blue coloration indicated sudden heart congestion, a convulsive and apoplectic arrest of all vital functions.
Hans Castorp stood there piously for a while, using the time to take in the situation, hesitating to change his pose, waiting for the “widow” to address him. But when she did not, he decided not to disturb her for now and looked back over his shoulder to the group of others in attendance. The director nodded his head toward the door to the parlor. Hans Castorp followed him out.
“Suicide?” he asked in a low, businesslike voice.
“You said it,” Behrens replied with a dismissive gesture, and then added, “Top to bottom. Superlative job. Have you ever seen anything like this in the notions department?” he asked, reaching into his smock pocket and pulling out an oddly shaped etui, from which he extracted a small object that he now presented to the young man. “I never have. But it’s worth a look. Never too old to learn. Whimsical and inventive. I took it from his hand. Careful. Just a drop on bare skin leaves blisters.”
Hans Castorp turned the puzzling object between his fingers. It was made of steel, ivory, gold, and rubber—curious handiwork. It had two curved, shiny steel tines with extremely sharp points, between them a coiled segment of gold-inlaid ivory with tines of its own, which were more pliant or flexible to some degree and could be bent inward. The whole thing ended in a bulb of semihard black rubber. It was only a few inches long.
“What is it?” Hans Castorp asked.
“That,” Behrens replied, “is a well-constructed hypodermic syringe. Or, to put it another way, a mechanical copy of the dentures of the spectacled cobra. Do you understand? You don’t look as if you understand,” he said, while Hans Castorp continued to stare in dazed amazement at the bizarre instrument. “Those are the fangs. They are not that massive, but they come equipped with a capillary, a very tiny channel, that emerges here, as you can clearly see, just above the tip. And of course, these channels have an opening at the root of the fang as well, which is connected to the rubber gland by a duct running through this ivory middle section. When the bite is made, the other teeth are pushed back a little, as you can clearly see, and exert pressure on the reservoir, pressing its contents into the channels, so that the moment the fangs enter the flesh, the dose is injected into the bloodstream. It’s quite simple, once you can actually see it. Someone just has to come up with the idea. It was probably produced according to his own specifications.”
“I’m sure it was,” Hans Castorp said.
“The dose cannot have been all that large,” the director went on. “But what is lacking in quantity, can be made up for in—”
“Dynamics,” Hans Castorp finished the sentence for him.
“There you have it. What it was exactly, we’ll have to investigate. I am looking forward to the results with some curiosity, there is doubtless much we shall learn. What do you want to bet that our exotic on guard duty in there—who just happened to don his best for tonight—could tell us exactly what’s what? I assume what we have here is a mixture of animal and vegetable material—good stuff, indeed, the best, since it must pack one thundering wallop. By all indications, it must have taken his breath away at once, paralysis of the respiratory system, you know, rapid suffocation, presumably without great pain or agony.”
“God grant it was so,” Hans Castorp said piously, handing the eerie little implement back to the director with a sigh. He returned to the bedroom.
Only the Malayan and Madame Chauchat were there now. Clavdia raised her head this time as the young man approached the bed again. “You had a right to be called,” she said.
“Very kind of you,” he said, adopting formal pronouns himself, “and it was the correct thing to do. He offered me the brotherhood of informal pronouns. I am so deeply ashamed now to say that I was embarrassed to acknowledge it in front of the others and used circumlocutions. Were you with him in the last moments?”
�
�His valet notified me after it was all over,” she answered.
“He was a man of such stature,” Hans Castorp began again, “that, for him, the failure of feeling in the face of life was a cosmic catastrophe, a divine disgrace. For you should know that he regarded himself as God’s instrument of marriage. That was a bit of royal foolishness. But when one is deeply moved, one has the courage to say things that may sound crass and irreverent, but are more solemn than authorized words of piety.”
“C’est une abdication,” she said. “He knew of our folly, didn’t he?”
“It was impossible for me to dispute it. He had guessed it from my refusal to kiss you on the brow in his presence. His presence is more symbolic than real at this moment, but will you permit me to do so now?” She thrust her head slightly toward him, eyes closed, as if just blinking. He put his lips to her brow. The Malayan watched this little scene, rolling his brown animal eyes to one side until the whites showed.
THE GREAT STUPOR
Yet once more we hear Director Behrens’s voice—let us listen closely. We are hearing it for perhaps the last time. At some point even this story will end; it has lasted quite a long time—or rather, its content-time is rolling along so fast that there is no stopping it now and even its musical time is running out. Perhaps there will be no further opportunity to lend an ear to the cheerful cadences of our idiomatic Rhadamanthus.
He said to Hans Castorp: “Castorp, old pal, you’re bored. I see you every day pulling that long face, tedium written all over it. You’re jaded, Castorp. You’ve been pampered with thrills, and if you don’t get a first-class kick every day, you sulk and fret about in the doldrums. Am I right or wrong?”
Hans Castorp said nothing, and in doing so only revealed the gloom within.
“I’m right, as always, “ Behrens said, answering his own question. “And before you start spreading the poison of imperial tedium, my malcontent citizen, you’re going to see that God and man have not deserted you and that medical authority has an eye on you, an unblinking eye, my good man, that its one ceaseless concern is your diversion. Old man Behrens is still here, after all. Well, all joking aside, my boy, I have an idea about your case. I’ve spent, God knows, sleepless nights coming up with it. You might even call it a revelation—and indeed I see my idea as holding great promise: no more and no less than an unexpectedly speedy detoxification and triumphant return home.
“My, what big eyes you have,” he continued after a brief rhetorical pause, although Hans Castorp’s eyes had not widened at all, but simply gazed at the director rather drowsily and absentmindedly, “and haven’t the vaguest what old man Behrens might mean. I mean this: something’s not quite right about your case, Castorp, that can’t have escaped your keen powers of observation, either. Something’s not quite right, because for some time now your symptoms of toxification have not squared with the undeniable improvement in your localized condition—and I didn’t start meditating on that just yesterday, either. We have here your latest photo. Let us hold the wizardry up to the light. You see, even the worst grouser and crepehanger, as His Imperial Majesty likes to say, won’t find much to object to there. A few foci have been fully reabsorbed, the pocket has grown smaller and is more sharply defined, which, being a well-informed patient, you know indicates healing. On the strength of these findings, then, one can come up with no real explanation for the waywardness of your body temperature. The physician sees himself compelled to explore new causes.”
Hans Castorp’s nod expressed no more than polite curiosity.
“And now, Castorp, you’re saying to yourself: Old man Behrens is going to have to admit he botched the treatment. But you’d be barking up the wrong tree—wrong about the facts, wrong about old man Behrens, too. The treatment wasn’t botched, its orientation was merely a bit one-sided, perhaps. I think it likely that from the very first your symptoms should not have been traced exclusively to tuberculosis, and I draw that conclusion from my presumption that they cannot be traced to it at all now. Some other source of disturbance must be present. In my opinion, you have a coccus infection.
“I am profoundly persuaded,” the director reiterated more strongly upon observing the nods Hans Castorp offered in response, “that you have a strep infection—which is no immediate cause for alarm, by the way.”
(There could be no question of alarm. The expression on Hans Castorp’s face was, rather, more a sort of ironic acknowledgment—either of the brilliant conclusions reached or of the new worthy status hypothetically conferred upon him by the director.)
“No reason for panic,” the latter said, varying his advice. “Everyone has cocci. Every ass has streptococci. You’ve nothing to boast of there. We have learned only recently that one can have streptococci in the blood and yet somehow not show any notable symptoms of infection. Though many of my colleagues do not yet know it, we are on the verge of discovering that one can also have tuberculosis in the blood with no consequences whatever. We aren’t more than three steps away from seeing tuberculosis as a disease of the blood.”
Hans Castorp found that quite remarkable.
“And so when I say ‘strep,’ ” Behrens began anew, “you should not picture the standard severe symptoms, of course. We will have to do a bacteriological’ blood test to see if these poor things but thine own have even taken up residence. But the only way we can learn whether strep is the cause of your febrility—always assuming that it is present—is to observe the effects of a strepto-vaccine therapy that we shall likewise inaugurate. That is the path before us, my good friend, and I repeat, it holds promise of great, quite unanticipated results. Recovery from infections of this sort can be as rapid as the cure for tuberculosis is protracted. And if you respond to these injections at all, you will be in the pink of health within six weeks. What do you say now? Has old man Behrens been holding up his end or not?”
“It is only a hypothesis so far,” Hans Castorp said languidly.
“A provable hypothesis. A highly fertile hypothesis,” the director rejoined. “You will see just how fertile it is when the cocci start growing in our cultures. We’ll tap your keg tomorrow afternoon, Castorp. We’ll bleed a vein with all the style of the old village barber. It’s all kinds of fun, and can have the most blessed effects on both body and soul.”
Hans Castorp declared himself prepared to be diverted and thanked Behrens nicely for keeping such a steady eye out. His head tilted toward one shoulder, he watched the director row away. The boss’s little speech had come at a critical moment. Rhadamanthus had been very close to the mark in interpreting his guest’s expression and mood, and his new initiative was intended—expressly intended, he did not deny it at all—to help Hans Castorp move beyond the dead standstill at which he found himself of late, as was obvious in his body language, so clearly reminiscent of Joachim’s in the days when certain wild, defiant decisions were forming inside him.
And we can say more. It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he had come to this dead standstill, but that the world, all of it, the “whole thing,” was in much the same state—or rather, he found it difficult up here to separate the particular from the general. Ever since the eccentric conclusion to his relationship with a certain personality and all the changes that conclusion had set into motion in the sanatorium; ever since Clavdia Chauchat’s renewed departure from the society of those up here, including a respectful, considered farewell to her master’s surviving “brother” exchanged beneath the shadow cast by the tragedy of a great failure—ever since that turning point, it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life, as if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing. The demon’s name was Stupor.
It will be said that the narrator is laying
it on too thick, being too romantic in associating stupor with demonic forces, even ascribing to it some sort of mystic horror. And yet we are not fabricating tales here, but are keeping exactly to our prosaic hero’s personal experience—knowledge of which has been granted to us in ways that, to be sure, elude all investigation, but that plainly prove that under certain circumstances stupor can take on such character and instill such feelings. Hans Castorp looked around him—and what he saw was indeed uncanny and malicious. And he knew what it was he saw: life without time, without care or hope, life as a stagnating hustle-bustle of depravity, dead life.