So much, however, was true, that he had always liked ships. As a small boy he had filled the pages of his notebooks with drawings of fishing-barks, five-masters and vegetable-barges. When he was fifteen, he had had a front seat at the christening ceremony of the new double-screw steamer Hansa. He had watched her leave the ways at Blohm and Voss’s, and afterwards made quite a happy watercolour of the graceful ship, done with a good deal of attention to detail, and a loving and not unskillful treatment of the glassy green, rolling waves. Consul Tienappel hung it in his private office, and somebody told him that it showed talent, that the artist might develop into a good marine painter—a remark which the Consul could safely repeat to his ward, for Hans Castorp only laughed good-humouredly, and not for a moment considered letting himself in for a career of being eccentric and not getting enough to eat.
“You haven’t so much, you know,” his Uncle Tienappel would say to him. “James and Peter will get most of what I have; that is to say, it stops in the business, and Peter will draw his interest. What belongs to you is well invested, and brings you in something safe. But it’s no joke living on your interest today, unless one has at least five times what you have; and if you want to be somebody here in this town and live as you have been brought up to, you’ll have to earn a good bit more to put with it, you mark my words, my son.”
Hans Castorp marked them. He looked about for a profession suitable in his own eyes and those of his fellow citizens. And when he had once chosen—it came about at the instance of old Wilms, of the firm of Tunder and Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel at the Saturday whist-table that young Castorp ought to study shipbuilding; it would be a good idea, he could come into his office and he would keep an eye on him—when he had once chosen, he thought very highly of his calling. It was, to be sure, confoundedly complicated and fatiguing, but all the same it was very first-rate, very solid, very important. And certainly, being peaceful in his tastes, he preferred it to that of his cousin Ziemssen, the son of his mother’s half-sister, who was bent on being an officer. But Joachim Ziemssen was rather weak in the chest, and for that reason a calling which would keep him in the open, and in which there was no mental strain or fatigue to speak of, might be quite the right thing for him, Hans Castorp thought with easy condescension. He had the greatest respect for work—though personally he found that he tired easily.
And here we revert to our suggestion of a few pages back: the idea that an unfavourable influence exerted upon a man’s personal life by the times in which he lives may even extend to his physical organism. Hans Castorp respected work—as how should he not have? It would have been unnatural. Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else that was estimable. It was the principle by which one stood or fell, the Absolute of the time; it was, so to speak, its own justification. His regard for it was thus religious in its character, and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter, whether he loved it; and that he could not do, however great his regard, the simple reason being that it did not agree with him. Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighted with the leaden load of effort; lying spacious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one’s teeth and conquer, one after the other. These conflicting sentiments on the subject of work had, strictly speaking, to be reconciled. Is it, perhaps, possible, if he had been able to believe in work as a positive value, a self-justifying principle, believe in it in the very depth of his soul, even without being himself conscious of doing so, that his body as well as his spirit—first the spirit and through it the body as well—would have been able to devote itself to his task with more of joy and constancy, would have been able to find peace therein? Here again is posed the question of Hans Castorp’s mediocrity or more than mediocrity, to which we would give no hard and fast answer. For we do not set up as the young man’s encomiast, and prefer to leave room for the other view: namely, that his work stood somewhat in the way of his unclouded enjoyment of his Maria Mancini.
To military service he was not inclined. His being revolted against it, and found ways of making difficulties. It may be, too, that Staff Medical Officer Dr. Eberding, who visited at Harvestehuderstrasse, heard from Consul Tienappel, in the course of conversation, that young Castorp was leaving home to begin his technical studies, and would find a call to the colours a very sensible interruption to his labours.
Working slowly and deliberately—he kept up his soothing habit
