When he came up, he asked, in a still, small voice: “Did you ever hear the like of that?”
But it was plain that Hans Castorp had. It was plain that whatever James could tell him would not make him “feel the cold.” So James broke off, and to his nephew’s further, mildly interested query answered: “Oh, nothing.” But from hour to hour he developed a new habit: of peering diagonally upwards, with drawn brows and puckered lips, then suddenly turning his head to repeat the same gaze in the opposite direction. Had the interview with the Hofrat also gone off differently from James’s expectations? Had it lost its character as a private interview, had the subject shifted from Hans Castorp to James Tienappel? One might think so. The Consul showed himself in high spirits. He talked a great deal, laughed without reason, struck his nephew with his fist in the pit of the stomach, shouting: “Hullo there, old fellow!” Between times he had that look, first here and then suddenly there. But there came to be another, more definite goal to his glances, at table, on their walks, and in the salon of an evening.
We have heard of a certain Frau Redisch, wife of a Polish industrialist, who had sat at the table with Frau Salomon, absent without leave, and the greedy schoolboy with the round spectacles. The Consul had scarcely noticed her at first, and indeed she was just a rest-hall dame, like another—a shortish brunette of abundant forms, no longer of the youngest, even slightly grey, but with a coquettish double chin and lively brown eyes. In point of culture she was far from being able to hold her own with Frau Consul Tienappel down below. So much is certain. But the Consul, after Sunday supper, in the hall, made the discovery, thanks to the
décolleté
of Frau Redisch’s spangled black frock, that her bosom was very white and voluptuous, the breasts pressed together so that the crease between them was visible for some way; and the mature and elegant gentleman was as much shaken by this discovery as though it possessed for him a new and undreamed-of significance. He sought and made acquaintance with Frau Redisch; conversed with her at length, first standing and then sitting, and went up to bed singing. Next day Frau Redisch wore no spangled frock, her bosom was shrouded; but the Consul knew what he knew, and stuck by his discovery. He sought to intercept the lady on her walks, and strolled beside her in conversation, bending towards and over her in the most gallant and pointed way; he drank to her at table and she responded, smiling so much as to show several gold fillings in her teeth; he spoke of her to his nephew, and said she was a divine creature—whereupon he burst out in song. And all this Hans Castorp let pass, with perfect equanimity, as much as to say that it was all regular and true to form. But it could not strengthen James’s authority over his junior, nor add lustre to his embassy. The meal at which he saluted Frau Redisch by lifting his glass—twice in fact, during it, once at the fish and once at the sherbet—was one which the Hofrat partook of at Hans Castorp’s table, in the course of his turn round the seven, at each of which his place at the upper end was reserved. He sat folding his giant hands between Herr Wehsal and the hunch-backed Mexican, with whom he spoke Spanish, for he could talk in almost any language, even Turkish and Hungarian. He sat, with his little onesided moustache and his blue, goggling, bloodshot eyes, and looked on at Consul Tienappel saluting Frau Redisch with his glass of Bordeaux. Afterwards, as the meal progressed, the Hofrat made a little speech, incited thereunto by James, who unexpectedly asked him, down the whole length of the table, what was the process of physical decomposition. The Hofrat was at home in that field, the physical was so to speak his domain, he was the king of it; would he not tell them what happened when the body decomposed?
“In the first place,” the Hofrat complied, putting his elbows on the table and bowing over his folded hands, “in the first place, your belly bursts. You lie there on your chips and sawdust, and you bloat; the gases swell you up, puff you all out, the way frogs do when bad little boys fill them up with air. You get to be a regular balloon; the skin of your belly can’t stand it any more, it bursts. You go pop. You relieve yourself mightily, like Judas Iscariot when he fell from the bough and all his bowels gushed out. And after that you are fit for society again. If you got leave to come back, you could visit your friends without being offensive. You are thoroughly stunk out. After that you’re perfectly refined, like the burghers of Palermo, hanging in the cellars of the Capucins outside Porta Nuova: quite the gentlemen they are, all dried up and elegant, everybody respects them. The main thing is to get well stunk out.”
“Certainly, of course,” said the Consul. “Thanks very much.” The next morning he had vanished.
He was off, gone down with the first little train to the flat-land—though not without having put his affairs in order—that we would not suggest. He had paid his bill, and the fee for the fumigation of his room; then, in all haste, without a syllable to his relative, he had packed his hand-bags—probably the night before, or even in the dawning, when everybody else was asleep—and when Hans Castorp entered his uncle’s room at the hour for early breakfast, he found it empty.
Arms akimbo, he stood and said: “Well, well!” And a pensive smile overspread his features. “Yes, yes,” he said, and nodded. Somebody had taken to his heels. In headlong haste, breathless, as though the moment of resolution must not be let slip, he had flung his things together and made off. Not with his cousin by his side, not after fulfilment of his lofty mission, but glad to save even himself by flight, the goodman had deserted to the flat-land—well, pleasant journey to you, Uncle James!
Hans Castorp let no one suspect his ignorance of his uncle’s plans. Particularly not the lame concierge who had taken his uncle to the station. From Lake Constance James sent back a card, saying that he had had a telegram requiring his immediate return for business reasons. He had not liked to disturb his cousin (a polite lie). And he wished him a continued pleasant sojourn at House Berghof. Was that said in mockery? If so, Hans Castorp found it highly disingenuous, for his uncle had been in no jesting mood when he cut short his stay. No, he had become inwardly aware—one could conceive him paling at the thought—that even as it was, after only a week up here, he would find eyerything down below wrong and out of place, and that the feeling would last a considerable time before readjustment set in: it would seem to him unnatural to go to his office, instead of taking a prescribed walk after breakfast, and thereafter lying ritually wrapped, horizontal in a balcony. And this dread perception had been the immediate ground of his flight.
Thus ended the campaign of the flat-land to recover its lost Hans Castorp. Our young man did not conceal from himself that the total failure of this embassy marked a crisis in the relations between himself and the world below. It meant that he gave it up, finally and with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders; it meant, for himself, the consummation of freedom—the thought of which had gradually ceased to make him shudder.
Operationes Spirituales
LEO NAPHTA came from a little place near the Galician-Volhynian border. His father, of whom he spoke with respect, obviously with the feeling that he was now remote enough from his native scene to view it with impartial benevolence, had been the village
schochet
, or slaughterer—a calling different indeed from that of the gentile butcher, who was labourer and tradesman, whereas Leo’s father was an official, and the holder of a spiritual office. Elie Naphta, after being tested by the rabbi in his pious proficiency, had been empowered by him to slaughter suitable animals after the Mosaic law and according to Talmudic prescription. The performance of his ritual task had imparted something priestly to his being; and his blue eyes, which the son described as sending out gleams like stars, had held in their depth a wealth of silent spiritual fervour. The solemnity of his bearing spoke of that early time when the killing of animals had been in actual fact a priestly office. Leo, or Leib, as he had been called in his childhood, had been allowed to watch in the court-yard while the father carried out his task, aided by his helper, a powerful youth of the athletic Jewish type, beside whom the slender Elie with his round blond beard seemed still more fragile and delicate. Standing near the victim, which was hobbled and bound indeed, but not stunned, he would lift the mighty slaughter-knife and bring it to rest in a deep gash close to the cervical vertebra; while the assistant held the quickly filling basins to receive the gushing, steaming blood, and the child looked on at the sight with that childish gaze which often pierces through the sense into the essential, and may have been in an unusual degree the gift of the starry-eyed Elie’s son. He knew that Christian butchers had to stun their cattle with a blow from a club before killing them, and that this regulation was made in order to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Yet his father, so fine and so intelligent by comparison with those louts, and starry-eyed as never one of them, did his task according to the Law, striking down the creature while its senses were undimmed, and letting its life-blood well out until it sank. The boy Leib felt that the stupid
goyim
were actuated by an easy and irreverent good nature, which paid less honour to the deity than did his father’s solemn mercilessness; thus the conception of piety came to be bound up in his mind with that of cruelty, and the idea of the sacred and the spiritual with the sight and smell of spurting blood. For he probably saw that his father had not chosen his bloody trade out of the same brutal tastes that moved the lusty gentile butcher or his own Jewish assistant to find gratification in it, but rather on spiritual grounds, and in a sense bespoken by the starry eyes.
Yes, Elie Naphta had been a brooding and refining spirit; a student of the
Torah
, but a critic as well, discussing the Scriptures with his rabbi—with whom he not infrequently disagreed. In his village, and not only among those of his own creed, he had passed for something unusual, for a man of more than common knowledge— knowledge for the most part of holy things, but possibly also of matters that might not be quite canny, and anyhow were not in the ordinary run. There was something irregular, schismatic, about him, something of the familiar of God, a Baal-Shem or Zaddik, a miracle-man. Once he had actually cured a woman of a malignant sore, and another time a boy of spasms, simply by means of blood and invocations. But it was precisely this aura of an uncanny piety, in which the odour of his blood-boltered calling played a part, that proved his destruction. There had been the unexplained death of two gentile boys, a popular uprising, a panic of rage—and Elie had died horribly, nailed crucifix-wise on the door of his burning home. His tuberculous, bedridden wife, the boy Leo, and four brothers and sisters, all wailing and lamenting with upflung arms, had fled the country.
Not utterly and entirely penniless, thanks to the father’s foresight, the little troop came to rest in a small town of the Vorarlberg. Frau Naphta found work in a cottonspinning factory, where she laboured as long as her strength held out, while the children attended the common school. The mental pabulum purveyed by this establishment probably answered to the needs of Leo’s brothers and sisters; but for him, the eldest, it was quite insufficient. From his mother he had the seeds of his lung disease; from his father, besides his slenderness of build, an extraordinary intelligence: mental gifts that were from the first bound up with instinctive aspirations, a lofty ambition, and an ardent yearning for the more refined side of life, which caused him to reach out passionately beyond the sphere of his origin. The fourteen- and fifteen-year-old lad managed to get hold of books out of school hours, and with lawless avidity continued to educate himself and feed his growing and impatient mind. He thought and uttered things which made the failing mother draw her head down crookedly between her shoulders and look at him with both wasted hands flung out. His person and the answers he gave at religious instruction drew upon him the attention of the district rabbi, and this devout and learned man received him as a private pupil, gratifying his taste for form by instruction in Hebrew and the classics, his logical turn by mathematics. But the good man was ill paid for his pains; as time went on, it became ever clearer that he had nourished a viper in his bosom. As once between Elie Naphta and his rabbi, so it was here. They fell out, exasperation on religious and philosophical grounds ensued and grew more and more embittered; the upright cleric had everything to endure from the irritability, captiousness, scepticism, and cutting dialectic of young Leo. Added to that, the lad’s turn for sophistry and his insatiable intellect had latterly taken on a revolutionary cast. An acquaintance with the son of a social-democratic member of the Reichsrat, and with this popular hero himself, turned his thoughts on politics, and made him apply his passion for logic to the field of social criticism. He said things that made the hair stand up on the head of the good Talmudist, who in politics was entirely loyal, and gave the final blow to the relations between master and pupil. In brief it came to this: that Leo was cast out, forbidden to cross the threshold of his master’s study—precisely at the time when Rahel Naphta lay dying.
And then, immediately after the mother’s passing, Leo made the acquaintance of Father Unterpertinger. The sixteen-year-old lad sat lonely on a bench in the park district of the Margaretentop, as it was called, a small height on the bank of the Ill, overlooking the town, whence one had a pleasant spreading view over the valley of the Rhine. He sat there lost in troubled and bitter thoughts of his fate and his future, when a member of the teaching staff of the Morning Star, the
pensionnat
of the Society of Jesus, out for a walk, sat down near him, put down his hat on the bench, crossed one leg over the other under his cassock, and after reading his breviary awhile began a conversation which waxed very lively, and proved in the end a decisive factor in Leo’s destiny. The Jesuit, a much-travelled and cultured person, a judge and fisher of men, pedagogue by passion and conviction, pricked up his ears at the scornful tone, the clearly articulated sentences, in which the poor Jewish lad answered his first questions. A keen and tortured intellect breathed in the words, and, probing further, the good father discovered a command of fact and a caustic elegance of thought made only the more surprising by the ragged exterior of the youth. They spoke of Karl Marx, whose
Capital
Leo had studied in a cheap edition; and passed from him to Hegel, of whom or about whom he had also read enough to be able to say something striking. Whether from a general tendency to paradox, or with intent to be courteous, he called Hegel a “Catholic thinker”; and on the father’s laughing query how that could be substantiated, since Hegel, as Prussian State philosopher, must surely be counted definitely with the Protestants, the boy replied that precisely the phrase “State philosopher” strengthened his position, and justified his characterization in a religious, though, of course, not in a churchly-dogmatic sense.
For
(Leo loved the conjunction, it came from his mouth with a triumphant, ruthless ring, his eyes flashing behind his spectacles every time he could bring it in) politics and Catholicism were, as conceptions, psychologically akin, both of them belonging to a category which embraced all that was objective, feasible, empirical, with an issue into active life. Opposed to it stood the Protestant, the pietistic sphere, which had its origin in mysticism. Jesuitism, he added, clearly betrayed the political, the pedagogical element in Catholicism; the Society had always regarded statecraft and education as its rightful domain. And he cited Goethe, who, rooted in Protestantism and assuredly Protestant as he was, had yet, by virtue of his objectivity and his doctrine of action, possessed a strongly Catholic side. He had defended auricular confession, and as an educator had been well-nigh Jesuitical.
Naphta may have said these things out of conviction, or because they were clever, or because, being a poor lad, he knew how adroit flattery could be made to serve his ends. The Father laid less stress on their intrinsic value than upon the general ability of which they gave evidence. Their talk had been prolonged, the Father soon possessed himself of the facts of Leo’s personal situation, and finished by inviting the youth to visit him at the school.
And thus it was vouchsafed to Naphta to enter the precincts of the Stella Matutina. It is quite conceivable that he had already long since coveted the scholarly and social charms of that atmosphere; and now, by this turn of affairs, he had won a new master and patron far better calculated than the old one to prize and promote his peculiar aptitudes, a master cool by nature, whose value lay in his cosmopolitanism; an entry into whose circle now became the object of the Jewish lad’s desire. Like many gifted people of his race, Naphta was both natural aristocrat and natural revolutionary; a socialist, yet possessed by the dream of shining in the proudest, finest, most exclusive and conventional sphere of life. That first utterance which the society of a Catholic theologian had tempted from him was—however comparative and analytical in form—in substance a declaration of affection for the Roman Church, as a power at once spiritual and aristocratic (in other words anti-material), at once superior and inimical to worldly things (in other words, revolutionary). And the homage he thus paid was genuine, and profound; for, as he himself explained, Judaism, by virtue of its secular and materialistic leanings, its socialism, its political adroitness, had actually more in common with Catholicism than the latter had with the mystic subjectivity and self-immolation of Protestantism; the conversion of a Jew to the Roman Catholic faith was accordingly a distinctly less violent spiritual rupture than was that of a Protestant. Sundered from the shepherd of his original fold, orphaned, forsaken, full of craving after freer air and forms of existence upon which his native gifts gave him a claim, Naphta, who was long past the age of consent, was so impatient for profession that he saved his patron all the trouble of winning this soul—or rather, this extraordinary head—for his sect. Even before Leo’s baptism he had, at the Father’s instigation, found temporary lodgment in the Stella Matutina, where he was given food for both body and mind; and had migrated hither with the greatest equanimity, and the callousness of the born aristocrat, leaving his brothers and sisters to the care of the Poor Guardians and a destiny suited to their lesser gifts.
The property of the establishment was extensive, comprising in its buildings space for four hundred pupils, with wood and meadow land, half a dozen playing-fields, farm buildings, and stalls for hundreds of cows. The institution was at once boardingschool, model farm, athletic training-school, foster-mother of future scholars, and temple of the muses—for there were constant performances of plays and music. The life was both monastic and manorial. With its discipline and elegance, its quiet good cheer, its well-being, its intellectual atmosphere, and the precision of its varied daily regimen, it soothed and flattered the lad Leo’s deepest instincts. He was exaggeratedly happy. He ate excellent meals in a spacious refectory where the rule of silence obtained—as in the corridors of the establishment—and in the centre of which a young prefect sat on a raised platform and read aloud. Leo’s zeal in his classes was fiery; and despite the weakness of his chest he made every effort to hold his own in the games and sports. He went devotedly to early mass, and took part in the Sunday service with a fervour which must have been gratifying to his priestly teachers. His social bearing was no less satisfactory to them. And on high days and holy-days, after the cake and wine, he made one of the long line of pupils who, in grey and green uniform with a stripe on the trousers, high collar and kepi, went walking in the country.
He thrilled with gratitude at the consideration they showed him, in respect of his origin, his infant Christianity, and his personal fortunes. No one in the institution seemed to know that he was an object of charity. The rules of the house favoured the concealment of his homeless and family-less state. It was forbidden to send parcels of food or sweets to the pupils; if any came, they were divided and Leo received his share with the others. And the cosmopolitanism of the institution prevented his race from being perceptible. There were other young exotics among the pupils, such as the Portuguese South-Americans, who looked even more “Jewish” than he did, and thus the idea did not come up. An Ethiopian prince had been received at the same time with Naphta; he had woolly hair, and was distinctly Moorish in appearance, though most distinguished.
In class Leo expressed the desire to study theology, in order to prepare himself for membership in the Society, in case he should be found worthy. In consequence, his place was changed from the “second school,” where the food and living conditions were more modest, to the first, where he was served by waiters at table, and had a cubicle between a Silesian nobleman, the Count of Harbuval and Chamaré, and the young Marquis di Rangoni-Santacroce from Modena. He passed his examinations brilliantly, and, true to his resolve, quitted the pupil-life of the school to enter upon his noviciate in near-by Tisis, where he led a life of service and humility, silent subordination and religious discipline, and imbibed therefrom a spiritual relish fully equal to the fanatical expectations of his early years.