Mynheer Peeperkorn
(Continued)
MYNHEER PEEPERKORN remained in House Berghof the whole winter—what there was left of it—and on into the spring; and there took place, among others, a memorable excursion (in which Settembrini and Naphta joined) into the Fluela valley, to see the waterfall. This occurred at the end of his stay. At the end? Did he remain no longer, then? No. He went away? Yes—and no. How yes and no? Pray let us have no prying into secrets—in the fullness of time we shall know. We are aware that Lieutenant Ziemssen died, not to speak of other less admirable performers of the dance of death. Then Peeperkorn’s malignant tropical fever carried him off? No, not so—but why so impatient? Let us not forget the condition of life as of narration: that we can never see the whole picture at once—unless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge. Let us at least pay time so much honour as the nature of our story permits—little enough, in all conscience; for it has begun to rush pell-mell and helter-skelter; or, if the words suggest too much noise and confusion, shall we say it is going like the wind? The little hand on time’s clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it. Yet how much logical clarity, how much pure light of reason have we opposed to the stealing vague? Not by chance, may we say, have we kept company with intellectual lights like Naphta and Settembrini, instead of surrounding ourselves with incoherent Peeperkorns! And this leads us to a comparison, which in many respects, notably that of scale, must result in favour of this latest arrival on the scene. It did so in Hans Castorp’s own mind. He lay, considering matters, in his loge, and admitted to himself that his two over-vocal mentors, the self-elected guardians of his soul, were dwarfed beside Pieter Peeperkorn. Almost he inclined to call them what Peeperkorn in his royal cups had called him, Hans Castorp—chatterboxes. He was well pleased that hermetic pedagogy should have given him this too: contact with an out-and-out personality.
True, this personality was the companion of Clavdia Chauchat’s travels, and as such a greatly disturbing element. But that was another matter, and one which Hans Castorp did not allow to prejudice his judgment. He persisted in his sincere and respectful if also rather forward sympathy for this man on the grand scale, regardless of his partnership in the travelling-trunks of the woman of whom once, on a carnival night, Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil. That was his way; though we know some people, male and female, will not understand such a lack of sensibility, preferring that our hero should hate Peeperkorn, avoid him, call him an old dotard, a drivelling old sot. Instead of which we see him by Peeperkorn’s bedside in his attacks of fever—prattling to him (the word applies to his own share in the conversation, not the majestic Peeperkorn’s) and with the receptivity of inquiring youth on his travels, letting himself be played on by the power of the personality. All this Hans Castorp did, and all this we report of him, indifferent to the danger that someone may thereby be reminded of Ferdinand Wehsal, who once was wont to carry Hans Castorp’s overcoat. The comparison is not pertinent—for our hero was no Wehsal. Depths of self-abasement were not his line. But he was no “hero” either: which is to say, he would never let his relation to the masculine be conditioned by the feminine. True to our principle of making him out neither better nor worse than he was, we assert that he simply declined—not expressly and consciously, but quite naïvely, declined to let his judgment of his own sex be perverted by romantic considerations. Nor his sense of what was formative in experience. The female sex may find this offensive; we believe Frau Chauchat did feel some involuntary chagrin over the fact—a biting remark or so escaped her, to which we shall refer later on. But surely it was this very characteristic of his which rendered him so irresistible an object for pedagogic rivalry.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay grievously ill, the day after that evening of cards and champagne we have described—and no wonder. Nearly all the participants in those long-drawn-out, exhausting revels were the same. Hans Castorp was no exception, his head ached to splitting; which did not prevent him from paying a visit to the bedside of his last night’s host. He craved permission through the Malay, whom he met in the corridor; and it was readily granted.
He entered the Dutchman’s double bedroom through the salon which separated it from Frau Chauchat’s. It was larger and more luxuriously furnished than most of the Berghof rooms, with satin-upholstered arm-chairs and curly-legged tables. A thick, soft carpet covered the floor, and the beds—they were not the usual hygienic dyingbed of the establishment, but very stately indeed, of polished cherry-wood with brass mounting, and above them hung a little canopy without curtains, like one umbrella sheltering both.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay in one of the two; its red satin coverlet was strewn with papers, books, and letters, and he was reading the
Telegraaf
through his horn-rimmed pince-nez with the high nose-piece. The coffee-machine stood on a chair at the bedside, and a half-empty bottle of the same simple effervescent red wine was on the night-table, among vials of medicine. Hans Castorp was rather put off to see the Dutchman wearing not a white night-shirt, but a long-sleeved woollen vest, buttoned at the wrists and collar-less, cut round in the neck, and clinging to the old man’s powerful torso, his broad shoulders and breast. This undress threw into even greater relief the splendid humanity of his head on the pillow; in it he looked more remote than ever from the conventional and middle-class, suggesting on the one hand the
homme du peuple
, on the other a portrait-bust.
“By all means, young man,” he said, taking off the horn spectacles by the nosepiece. “Come in. Don’t mention it—on the contrary.” Hans Castorp sat down by the bed, and concealed his surprise—for it was that rather than admiration which he felt, however sympathetically—under a burst of cordial and lively chatter, which Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent
disjecta membra
and much play of gesture. He looked very “poorly,” yellow and in evident distress; a good deal affected by the attack of fever he had had toward morning, and the subsequent exhaustion—in part undoubtedly the result of his last night’s bout. “We were pretty—last night, you know—carried it pretty far,” he said. “But you are—Good. With you there were no further—but my age, and the condition I am in—my child,” he turned with mild yet quite perceptible severity to Frau Chauchat, who just then entered the room from the salon, “very well, very well indeed. Very. But I repeat—ought to have been prevented.” Something like an approach to his regal fit of rage rose in face and voice. The injustice, the unreason of the reproof were obvious to anybody who tried to imagine the storm that would have burst on the head of one seriously thinking to disturb him in his drink. But such are the moods of the great. Frau Chauchat moved to and fro in the room, after greeting Hans Castorp, who rose as she entered, without a handshake, but with a smile and nod, and a “Pray don’t disturb yourself”—in his
tête
à-tête
, that was, with Mynheer. She busied herself about the room, summoned the Malay to take the coffee-machine, then withdrew awhile, and on her return, softfooted, took part standing in the others’ talk. Hans Castorp got an impression that she was there on guard. It was all very well for her to come back to the Berghof in company with a personality. But when the long-suffering lover took leave to evince regard for the personality, as man for man, then she betrayed uneasiness in pointed phrases like “Pray don’t disturb yourself” and the like. They cost Hans Castorp a smile, which he bent his head to hide, though inwardly aglow. Peeperkorn poured him out a glass of wine from the bottle on the night-table. Under the circumstances the best thing, in the Dutchman’s opinion, was to begin where one had left off; and that innocent effervescent wine had the same effect as soda-water. They touched glasses. Hans Castorp, as he drank, looked at the freckled, sea-captain’s hand, with its pointed nails, the woollen band buttoned round the wrist. It took up the glass, carried it to the thick, cracked lips; the throat, so like a statue’s and yet rather like a day labourer’s, worked up and down as it swallowed the wine. Peeperkorn indicated the medicine bottle on the table, a brown liquid, of which he took a spoonful from Frau Chauchat’s hand. It was an antipyretic, chiefly quinine, he baid. He made his guest try its characteristic bitter and pungent taste; and had much to say in praise of the wonderworking, germ-destroying properties of the drug, its tonic quality, its wholesome effect in regulating the temperature. It slowed down protein catabolism, promoted assimilation, in short it was a boon to mankind, a wonderful cordial, tonic and stimulant—an intoxicant as well, for one could get quite tipsy on it, he said, making the last night’s suggestive gesture of fingers and head like a pagan priest at his ritual dance.
Yes, a wonderful substance, cinchona. It had not been three hundred years since European pharmacology made its acquaintance; not a century since the alkaloid had been isolated which was its active principle; isolated and, to a certain extent, analysed, for it would be too much to say that chemistry knew all there was to know about it, or was in a position to reproduce it synthetically. Our pharmacology need not be too arrogant over its science; for the state of its knowledge on the subject of quinine was a fair example of the rest. It had various facts about the operation of this or that drug; but was very often embarrassed to know the causes of the effect produced. If the young man were to survey the field of our toxicological knowledge, he would find that no one could tell him anything of the elementary properties conditioning the effects of the so-called poisons. For example, take the venom of snakes: all that was known of these animal substances was that they belonged to the albuminoid group, and consisted of various proteids, none of which produced a violent effect, except in this certain—and most uncertain—combination. Introduced into the blood-circulation, the effect was astonishing indeed, considering how far we were from being accustomed to think of albumen as a poison. The truth was, Peeperkorn said, and lifted his head from the pillow, elevated the arabesques on his brow, and gave point to his remarks by the little circle and the upright finger-tips—the truth was, in the world of matter, that all substances were the vehicle of both life and death, all of them were medicinal and all poisonous, in fact therapeutics and toxicology were one and the same, man could be cured by poison, and substances known to be the bearer of life could kill at a thrust, in a single second of time.
He spoke very impressively, and with unwonted coherence, of drugs and poisons, and Hans Castorp listened and nodded; less concerned with the content of his speech—he seemed to have the subject much at heart—than with silently exploring this extraordinary personality, which in the end remained as inexplicable as the operation of the snake-poison he was discussing. In the world of matter, Peeperkorn said, everything depended on dynamics, all else being entirely hypothetical. Quinine was one of the medicinal poisons; one of the strongest of these. Four grammes could make one deaf and giddy and short-winded; it acted like atropine on the visual organs, it was as intoxicating as alcohol; workers in quinine factories had inflamed eyes and swollen lips and suffered from affections of the skin. Peeperkorn described the cinchona, the quinine-tree, in the primeval forests of the Cordilleras, three thousand metres above sea-level. Its bark, called Peruvian or Jesuits’ bark, came late to Spain, long after the natives of South America knew its use. He spoke of the enormous quinine plantations owned by the Dutch government in Java, whence yearly many million pounds of the coils of reddish bark, like cinnamon, were shipped to Amsterdam and London. In fact, said Peeperkorn, bark, the wood-fibre itself, from the epidermis to the cambium, contained, almost always, extraordinary dynamic virtue, for good or evil. The knowledge of drugs possessed by the coloured races was far superior to our own. In certain islands east of Dutch New Guinea, youths and maidens prepared a love charm from the bark of a tree—it was probably poisonous, like the manzanilla tree, or the
antiaris toxicaria
, the deadly upas-tree of Java, which could poison the air round with its steam and fatally stupefy man and beast. This bark they powdered and mixed with coconut shavings, rolled the mixture into a sheet and toasted it, then sprinkled a brew in the face of the reluctant one, who was straightway inflamed with love for the sprinkler. Sometimes it was the bark of the root that contained the principle, as was the case with a certain creeper growing in the Malay Archipelago, called
strychnos tieuté
, from which the natives prepared the
upas
radsha
, by adding snake-venom. This drug caused immediate death when introduced into the circulation—as for instance by means of an arrow—but nobody could explain how it operated. All that seemed clear was that the upas had a dynamic relation with strychnine… Peeperkorn, by this time, was sitting erect in his bed; now and then, with a hand that slightly trembled, conveying the wineglass to his cracked lips, to take great, thirsty draughts. He went on to speak of the “crows’-eye” tree of the Coromandel Coast, from the orange-yellow berries of which—the crows’ eyes—was extracted the most powerful alkaloid of all, strychnine. His voice sank to a whisper, and the great folds of his brow rose high, as he described to Hans Castorp the ash-grey boughs, the strikingly glossy foliage and yellow-green blossoms; the picture of this tree conjured up in the mind’s eye of the young man was luridly, almost hysterically garish—it made him shudder. But here Frau Chauchat intervened, saying it was not good for Mynheer Peeperkorn to talk any longer, it tired him too much. She disliked to interfere, but Hans Castorp would forgive her if she suggested that they had had enough for the time. The young man accordingly took his leave. But often, in the months that followed, did Hans Castorp sit by the bed of that kingly man, when he kept it after an attack of fever; Frau Chauchat being within hearing, as she moved about the rooms, and sometimes taking part with a few words. They spent much time together when Peeperkorn was free of fever; for the Dutchman, on his good days, seldom failed to gather round him a select company, to play and drink and otherwise divert themselves and rejoice the inner man. These reunions took place either in the salon, as on the first occasion, or in the restaurant; and Hans Castorp had a habitual place between the great man and his languid companion. They even went abroad together, took walks with Herr Ferge and Wehsal, Naphta and Settembrini, those opposed spirits, whom they could hardly fail to meet. Hans Castorp counted himself fortunate in presenting them to Peeperkorn, and even, in the end, to Clavdia Chauchat. He troubled not at all whether the acquaintance was to these pedagogues’ liking or not. Secure in the knowledge that they needed a tree whereon to sharpen their pedagogical tusks, he reckoned on their putting up even with unwelcome society, in order to continue in enjoyment of his own.