When he came home for the holidays, very clean, very well dressed, with a little red-blond moustache that became his sleepy, young patrician face, obviously en route to a considerable position in life, people looked at him, the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community and made it their business to know all about family and social relations—and that, in a self-governing city-state, meant most of the population—they looked him well over, his fellow citizens, and asked themselves what public role young Castorp was destined to fill. He had traditions, his name was old and good, they would certainly have to reckon with him one day, as a political factor. Some day he would sit in the Assembly, or on the Board of Directors, he would help make the laws, he would occupy some honourable office and share the burdens of sovereignty. He would belong to the executive branch, perhaps, or the Finance or Building Commission. His voice would be listened to, his vote would count. It would be interesting to see what party he would choose. Appearances were deceiving, but he did not look as a man does whom the democrats can count on; and his likeness to his grandfather was unmistakable. Would he take after him, and be a drag, a conservative element? It was quite possible—but so was the opposite. He was an engineer, studying shipbuilding; on the technical side, in touch with world commerce. He might turn out to be a radical, a reckless spender, a profane destroyer of old buildings and landscape beauties. He might be as unfettered as a Jew, as irreverent as an American; he might prefer a ruthless break with tradition to a considered development of natural resources; he might incline to plunge the state into foolhardy experimentation. All that was conceivable. Was it in his blood to feel that their Worships in the Senate, before whom the double sentry at the Rathaus presented arms, were likely to know best in all contingencies; or would he side with the opposition in the Assembly? In his blue eyes, under their reddish-brown brows, his fellow citizens read no answer to their curious questioning. And he probably knew none himself, Hans Castorp, this still unwritten page.
When he took the journey upon which we have encountered him, he was in his twenty-third year. He had spent four semesters at the Dantzig Polytechnic, four more at the technical schools of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, and had just previously passed his first final, quite respectably, if without any fanfare of trumpets. And now he was preparing to enter the firm of Tunder and Wilms, as volunteer apprentice, in order to get his practical training in the shipyards.
But at this point his life took the following turn. He had had to work hard and steadily for his examination, and came home looking rather paler than a man of his blond, rosy type should do. Dr. Heidekind scolded, and insisted on a change of air; a complete change, not a stay at Norderney or Wyk on Föhr—that would not mend matters this time, he said; if they wanted his advice, it was that Hans Castorp should go for a few weeks to the high mountains before he took up his work in the yards.
Consul Tienappel told his nephew and foster-son he approved of the plan, only that in that case they would part company for the summer, for wild horses couldn’t drag him into the high mountains. They were not for him; he required a reasonable atmospheric pressure, else he might get an attack. Hans Castorp would be good enough to go by himself—let him pay his cousin Ziemssen a visit.
It was an obvious suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill—not ill like Hans Castorp, but in all seriousness, critically. There had been a great scare, in fact. He had always been subject to feverish catarrh, and one day he actually spat blood; whereupon he had been rushed off to Davos, heels over head, to his great distress and affliction, for he had just then arrived within sight of the goal of all his hopes. Some semesters long, he had complied with the wish of his family and studied law; then, yielding to irresistible inward urging, he had changed over, presented himself as ensign and been accepted. And now, for the past five months, he had been stuck in the International Sanatorium Berghof (directing physician Hofrat Behrens) and was bored half sick, as he wrote home on postcards. If Hans Castorp wanted to do himself a good turn before he entered his post at Tunder and Wilms’s, what more natural than that he should go up to Davos and keep his poor cousin company for a while—it would be agreeable on both sides.
It was midsummer before he made up his mind to go. Already the last week in July.
He left for a stay of three weeks.
Chapter III
Drawing the Veil
He had been so utterly weary, he had feared to oversleep; but he was on his legs rather earlier than usual, and had a superfluity of leisure in which to perform the accustomed ritual of his morning toilet, in which a rubber tub, a wooden bowl of green lavender soap, and the accompanying little brush played the principal parts. He had even time
