“Your own as well,” Behrens said. “Your ‘plasticity’—so far as you have any—is fat too, though of course not to the same extent as with a woman. With us fat is only about five percent of the body weight, in females it is one sixteenth of the whole. Without that subcutaneous cell structure of ours, we should all be nothing but fungoid growths. It disappears, with time, and then come the unaesthetic wrinkles in the drapery. The layer is thickest on the female breast and belly, on the front of the thighs, everywhere, in short, where there is a little something for heart and hand to take hold of. The soles of the feet are fat and ticklish.”
Hans Castorp turned the cylindrical coffee-mill about in his hands. It was, like the rest of the set, Indian or Persian rather than Turkish; the style of the engraving showed that, with the bright surface of the pattern standing out against the purposely dulled background. He looked at the design, without immediately seeing what it was. When he did, he blushed unawares.
“Yes, that is a set for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “I keep it locked up, you see, my kitchen queen might hurt her eyes looking at it. It won’t do you gentlemen any harm, I take it. It was given to me by a patient, an Egyptian princess who once honoured us with a year or so of her presence. You see, the pattern repeats itself on the whole set. Pretty roguish, what?”
“Yes, it is quite unusual,” Hans Castorp answered. “Ha ha! No, it doesn’t trouble me. But one can take it perfectly seriously; solemnly, in fact—only then it is rather out of place on a coffee-machine. The ancients are said to have used such motifs on their sarcophagi. The sacred and the obscene were more or less the same thing to them.”
“I should say the princess was more for the second,” Behrens said. “Anyhow she still sends me the most wonderful cigarettes, superfinissimos, you know, only sported on first-class occasions.” He fetched the garish-coloured box from the cupboard and offered them. Joachim drew his heels together as he received his cigarette. Hans Castorp helped himself to his; it was unusually large and thick, and had a gilt sphinx on it. He began to smoke—it was wonderful, as Behrens had said.
“Tell us some more about the skin,” he begged the Hofrat; “that is, if you will be so kind.” He had taken Frau Chauchat’s portrait on his knee, and was gazing at it, leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips. “Not about the fat-layer, we know about that now. About the human skin in general, that you know so well how to paint.”
“About the skin. You are interested in physiology?”
“Very much. Yes, I’ve always felt a good deal of interest in it. The human body—yes, I’ve always had an uncommon turn for it. I’ve sometimes asked myself whether I ought not to have been a physician—it wouldn’t have been a bad idea, in a way. Because if you are interested in the body, you must be interested in disease—specially interested, isn’t that so? But it doesn’t signify, I might have been such a lot of things—for example, a clergyman.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes, I’ve sometimes had the idea I should have been decidedly in my element there.”
“How did you come to be an engineer, then?”
“I just happened to—it was more or less outward circumstances that decided the matter.”
“Well, about the skin. What do you want to hear about your sensory sheath? You know, don’t you, that it is your outside brain—ontogenetically the same as that apparatus of the so-called higher centres up there in your cranium? The central nervous system is nothing but a modification of the outer skin-layer; among the lower animals the distinction between central and peripheral doesn’t exist, they smell and taste with their skin, it is the only sensory organ they have. Must be rather nice—if you can put yourself in their place. On the other hand, in such highly differentiated forms of life as you and I are, the skin has fallen from its high estate; it has to confine itself to feeling ticklish; that is to say, to being simply a protective and registering apparatus—but devilishly on the qui vive for anything that tries to come too close about the body. It even puts out feelers—the body hairs, which are nothing but hardened skin cells—and they get wind of the approach of whatever it is, before the skin itself is touched. Just between ourselves, it is quite possible that this protecting and defending function of the skin extends beyond the physical. Do you know what makes you go red and pale?”
“Not very precisely.”
“Well, neither do we, ‘very precisely,’ to be frank—at least, as far as blushing is concerned. The situation is not quite clear; for the dilatory muscles which are presumably set in action by the vasomotor nerves haven’t yet been demonstrated in relation to the blood-vessels. How the cock really swells his comb, or any of the other well-known instances come about, is still a mystery, particularly where it is a question of emotional influences in play. We assume that a connection subsists between the outer rind of the cerebrum and the vascular centre in the medulla. Certain stimuli—for instance, let us say, like your being powerfully embarrassed, set up the connection, and the nerves that
