The Magic Mountain (45 page)

“I believe you,” Behrens responded. “The lyrnph is the most refined, the most rarefied, the most intimate of the body juices. I dare say you had an inkling of the fact in your mind when you asked. People talk about the blood, and the mysteries of its composition, and what an extraordinary fluid it is. But it is the lymph that is the juice of juices, the very essence, you understand, ichor, blood-milk,
crème de la crème;
as a matter of fact, after a fatty diet it does look like milk.” And he went on, in his lively and whimsical phraseology, to gratify Hans Castorp’s desire. And first he characterized the blood, a serum composed of fat, albumen, iron, sugar and salt, crimson as an opera-cloak, the product of respiration and digestion, saturated with gases, laden with waste products, which was pumped at 98.4° of heat from the heart through the blood-vessels, and kept up metabolism and animal warmth throughout the body—in other words, sweet life itself. But, he said, the blood did not come into immediate contact with the body cells. What happened was that the pressure at which it was pumped caused a milky extract of it to sweat through the walls of the bloodvessels, and so into the tissues, so that it filled every tiny interstice and cranny, and caused the elastic cell-tissue to distend. This distension of the tissues, or
turgor
, pressed the lymph, after it had nicely swilled out the cells and exchanged matter with them, into the
vasa lymphatica
, the lymphatic vessels, and so back into the blood again, at the rate of a litre and a half a day. He went on to speak of the lymphatic tubes and absorbent vessels; described the secretion of the breast milk, which collected lymph from legs, abdomen, and breast, one arm, and one side of the head; described the very delicately constructed filters called lymphatic glands which were placed at certain points in the lymphatic system, in the neck, the arm-pit, and the elbow-joint, the hollow under the knee, and other soft and intimate parts of the body. “Swellings may occur in these places,” Behrens explained. “Indurations of the lymphatic glands, let us say, in the knee-pan or the arm-joint, dropsical tumours here and there, and we base our diagnosis on them—they always have a reason, though not always a very pretty one. Under such circumstances there is more than a suspicion of tubercular congestion of the lymphatic vessels.” Hans Castorp was silent a little space.

“Yes,” he said, then, in a low voice, “it is true, I might very well have been a doctor. The flow of the breast milk—the lymph of the legs—all that interests me very, very much. What is the body?” he rhapsodically burst forth. “What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What is he made of? Tell us this afternoon, Herr Hofrat, tell us exactly, and once and for all, so that we may know!”

“Of water,” answered Behrens. “So you are interested in organic chemistry too? The human body consists, much the larger part of it, of water. No more and no less than water, and nothing to get wrought up about. The solid parts are only twenty-five per cent of the whole, and of that twenty are ordinary white of egg, protein, if you want to use a handsomer word. Besides that, a little fat and a little salt, that’s about all.” “But the white of egg—what is that?”

“Various primary substances: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur. Sometimes phosphorus. Your scientific curiosity is running away with itself. Some albumens are in composition with carbohydrates; that is to say, grape-sugar and starch. In old age the flesh becomes tough, that is because the collagen increases in the connective tissue—the lime, you know, the most important constituent of the bones and cartilage. What else shall I tell you? In the muscle plasma we have an albumen called fibrin; when death occurs, it coagulates in the muscular tissue, and causes the
rigor mortis.”

“Right-oh, I see, the
rigor mortis
,” Hans Castorp said blithely. “Very good, very good. And then comes the general analysis—the anatomy of the grave.”

“Yes, of course. But how well you put it! Yes, the movement becomes general, you flow away, so to speak—remember all that water! The remaining constituents are very unstable; without life, they are resolved by putrefaction into simpler combinations, anorganic.”

“Oxidization too. The same. Yes, young man, life too is principally oxidization of the cellular albumen, which gives us that beautiful animal warmth, of which we sometimes have more than we need. Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter—
une destruction organique,
as some Frenchman with his native levity has called it. It smells like that, too. If we don’t think so, our judgment is corrupted.” “And if one is interested in life, one must be particularly interested in death, mustn’t one?”

“Why? Young man, what you are saying now sounds far from humanistic.” “Form is folderol.”

“Well, you are certainly in great form to-day—you’re regularly kicking over the traces. But I must drop out now,” said the Hofrat. “I am beginning to feel melancholy,” and he laid his huge hand over his eyes. “I can feel it coming on. You see, I’ve drunk coffee with you, and it tasted good to me, and all of a sudden it comes over me that I am going to be melancholy. You gentlemen must excuse me. It was an extra occasion, I enjoyed it no end—”

The cousins had sprung up. They reproached themselves for having taxed the Hofrat’s patience so long. He made proper protest. Hans Castorp hastened to carry Frau Chauchat’s portrait into the next room and hang it once more on the wall. They did not need to re-traverse the garden to arrive at their own quarters; Behrens directed them through the building, and accompanied them to the dividing glass door. In the mood that had come over him so unexpectedly, his goggling eyes blinked, and the bone of his neck stuck out, both more than ever; his upper lip, with the clipped, onesided moustache, had taken on a querulous expression.

As they went along the corridors Hans Castorp said to his cousin: “Confess that it was a good idea of mine.”

“It was a change, at least,” responded Joachim. “And you certainly took occasion to air your views on a good many subjects. It was a bit complicated for me. It is high time now that we went in to the rest-cure, we shall have at least twenty minutes before tea. You probably think it is folderol to pay so much attention to it, now you’ve taken to kicking over the traces. But you don’t need it so much as I do, after all.”

AND now came on, as come it must, what Hans Castorp had never thought to experience: the winter of the place, the winter of these high altitudes. Joachim knew it already: it had been in full blast when he arrived the year before—but Hans Castorp rather dreaded it, however well he felt himself equipped. Joachim sought to reassure him.

“You must not imagine it grimmer than it is,” he said, “not really arctic. You will feel the cold less on account of the dryness of the air and the absence of wind. It’s the thing about the change of temperature above the fog line; they’ve found out lately that it gets warmer in the upper reaches, something they did not know before. I should say it is actually colder when it rains. But you have your sleeping-bag, and they turn on the heat when they absolutely must.”

And in fact there could be no talk of violence or surprises; the winter came mildly on, at first no different from many a day they had seen in the height of summer. The wind had been two days in the south, the sun bore down, the valley seemed shrunken, the side walls at its mouth looked near and bald. Clouds came up, behind Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn, and drove north-eastwards. It rained heavily. Then the rain turned foul, a whitish-grey, mingled with snow-flakes—soon it was all snow, the valley was full of flurry; it kept on and on, the temperature fell appreciably, so that the fallen snow could not quite melt, but lay covering the valley with a wet and threadbare white garment, against which showed black the pines on the slopes. In the dining-room the radiators were lukewarm. That was at the beginning of November—All Souls’—and there was no novelty about it. In August it had been even so; they had long left off regarding snow as a prerogative of winter. White traces lingered after every storm in the crannies of the rocky Rhätikon, the chain that seemed to guard the end of the valley, and the distant monarchs to the south were always in snow. But the storm and the fall in the temperature both continued. A pale grey sky hung low over the valley; it seemed to dissolve in flakes and fall soundlessly and ceaselessly, until one almost felt uneasy. It turned colder by the hour. A morning came when the thermometer in Hans Castorp’s room registered 44°, the next morning it was only 40°. That was cold. It kept within bounds, but it persisted. It had frozen at night; now it froze in the day-time as well, and all day long; and it snowed, with brief intervals, through the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh days. The snow mounted apace, it became a nuisance. Paths had been shovelled as far as the bench by the watercourse, and on the drive down to the valley; but these were so narrow that you could only walk single file, and if you met anyone, you must step off the pavement and at once sink knee-deep in snow. A stoneroller drawn by a horse, with a man at his halter, rolled all day long up and down the streets of the cure, while a yellow diligence on runners, looking like an old-fashioned post-coach, plied between village and cure, with a snow-plough attached in front, shovelling the white masses aside. The world, this narrow, lofty, isolated world up here, looked now well wadded and upholstered indeed: no pillar or post but wore its white cap; the steps up to the entrance of the Berghof had turned into an inclined plane; heavy cushions, in the drollest shapes, weighed down the branches of the Scotch firs—now and then one slid off and raised up a cloud of powdery white dust in its fall. Round about, the heights lay smothered in snow; their lower regions rugged with the evergreen growth, their upper parts, beyond the timber line, softly covered up to their many-shaped summits. The air was dark, the sun but a pallid apparition behind a veil. Yet a mild reflected brightness came from the snow, a milky gleam whose light became both landscape and human beings, even though these latter did show red noses under their white or gaily-coloured woollen caps.

In the dining-room the onset of winter—the “season” of the region—was the subject of conversation at all seven tables. Many tourists and sportsmen were said to have arrived and taken up residence at the hotels in the Dorf and the Platz. The height of the piled-up snow was estimated at two feet; its consistency was said to be ideal for skiing. The bob-run, which led down from the north-western slope of the Schatzalp into the valley, was zealously worked on, it would be possible to open it in the next few days, unless a thaw put out all calculations. Everyone looked forward eagerly to the activities of these sound people down below—to the sports and races, which it was forbidden to attend, but which numbers of the patients resolved to see, by cutting the rest-cure and slipping out of the Berghof. Hans Castorp heard of a new sport that had come from Scandinavia, “ski-jöring”: it consisted in races in which the participants were drawn by horses while standing in their skis. It was to see this that so many of the patients had resolved to slip out.—There was talk too of Christmas.

Christmas! Hans Castorp had never once thought of it. To be sure, he had blithely said, and written, that he must spend the winter up here with Joachim, because of what the doctors had discovered to be the state of his health. But now he was startled to realize that Christmas would be included in the programme—perhaps because (and yet not entirely because) he had never spent the Christmas season anywhere but in the bosom of the family. Well, if he must he must; he would have to put up with it. He was no longer a child; Joachim seemed not to mind, or else to have adjusted himself uncomplainingly to the prospect; and, after all, he said to himself, think of all the places and all the conditions in which Christmas has been celebrated before now! Yet it did seem to him rather premature to begin thinking about Christmas even before the Advent season, six weeks at least before the holiday! True, such an interval was easily overleaped by the guests in the dining-hall: it was a mental process in which Hans Castorp had already some facility, though he had not yet learned to practise it in the grand style, as the older inhabitants did. Christmas, like other holidays in the course of the year, served them for a fulcrum, or a vaulting-pole, with which to leap over empty intervening spaces. They all had fever, their metabolism was accelerated, their bodily processes accentuated, keyed up—all this perhaps accounted for the wholesale way they could put time behind them. It would not have greatly surprised him to hear them discount the Christmas holiday as well, and go on at once to speak of the New Year and Carnival. But no—so capricious and unstable as this they were not, in the Berghof dining-room. Christmas gave them pause, it gave them even matter for concern and brain-racking. It was customary to present Hofrat Behrens with a gift on Christmas eve, for which a collection was taken up among the guests—and this gift was the subject of much deliberation. A meeting was called. Last year, so the old inhabitants said, they had given him a travelling-trunk; this time a new operating-table had been considered, an easel, a fur coat, a rocking-chair, an inlaid ivory stethoscope. Settembrini, asked for suggestions, proposed that they give the Hofrat a newly projected encyclopædic work called
The Sociology of Suffering;
but he found only one person to agree with him, a book-dealer who sat at Hermine Kleefeld’s table. In short, no decision had been reached. There was difficulty about coming to an agreement with the Russian guests; a divergence of views arose. The Muscovites declared their preference for making an independent gift. Frau Stöhr went about for days quite outraged on account of a loan of ten francs which she inadvisedly laid out for Frau Iltis at the meeting, and which the latter had “forgotten” to return. She “forgot” it. The shades of meaning Frau Stöhr contrived to convey in this word were many and varied, but one and all expressive of an entire disbelief in Frau Iltis’s lack of memory, which, it appeared, had been proof against the hints and proddings Frau Stöhr freely admitted having administered. Several times she declared she would resign herself, make Frau Iltis a present of the sum. “I’ll pay for both of us,” she said. “Then
my
skirts will be cleared!” But in the end she hit upon another plan and communicated it to her table-mates, to their great delight: she had the “management” refund her the ten francs and insert it in Frau Iltis’s weekly bill. Thus was the reluctant debtor outwitted, and at least this phase of the matter settled.