The Magic Mountain

talk about his sugar-beet plantation, and the pretty girls who worked it. On Hans Castorp’s either side sat the wedded pair from Halle, Magnus the brewer and his wife, about whom melancholy hung as a cloud, because they had no tolerance for certain important products of metabolism: he sugar, she albumen. Their spirits, particularly the sallow Frau Magnus’s, were proof against any ray of cheer; forlornity exhaled from her like damp from a cellar; even more than Frau Stöhr she represented that unedifying union of dullness and disease, which had offended Hans Castorp’s soul⁠—under correction from Herr Settembrini. Herr Magnus was livelier and chattier, though only in a vein intolerable to the Italian’s literary sense. He was inclined to choler too, and often clashed with Herr Wenzel on political and other grounds. The nationalistic aspirations of the Czech exasperated him; again, the latter declared himself in favour of prohibition, and made moral remarks about the brewing industry, while Herr Magnus, very red in the face, defended from the hygienic viewpoint the unexceptionableness of the drink with which his interests were bound up. At such moments as these, Herr Settembrini’s light and humorous touch had often preserved the amenities; but Hans Castorp, in his place, found his authority little able to cope with the situation.

With only two of his tablemates had he personal relations: Anton Karlowitsch Ferge from St. Petersburg, that good-natured sufferer, was one, on his left. He had things to tell, under his bushy, red-brown moustaches, about the manufacture of rubber shoes; about distant regions in the polar circle, about perpetual winter at the North Cape. Hans Castorp and he sometimes made their daily round together. The other, who joined them as occasion offered, and who sat next the humpbacked Mexican, at the far end of the table, was the man from Mannheim, with the thin hair and poor teeth⁠—Ferdinand Wehsal by name, and merchant by calling⁠—whose eyes had rested with such dismal longing upon Frau Chauchat’s pleasing person, and who since that carnival night had sought Hans Castorp’s company.

He did so with meek persistence, with a deprecating devotion which was even repugnant to Hans Castorp, understanding as he did its involved origins; but to which he felt himself humanly bound to respond. Blandly, then, and aware that even a lifting of the brows would suffice to make the poor-spirited creature cringe and shrink away, he suffered Wehsal’s fawning presence, and the latter lost no chance to make himself agreeable. He suffered the man to carry his overcoat as they went on their walks together, and Wehsal did this devotedly; suffered even the conversation of the Mannheimer, which was depressing to a degree. Wehsal had an itch to raise questions like this: would there be any sense in making a declaration of love to a woman whom one adored, but who made absolutely no response⁠—a declaration, in other words, of hopeless love? What did his companion think? For his part, he thought well of the idea, he thought there would be boundless happiness in the experience. Even if the act of confession aroused nothing but disgust, and involved great humiliation, still it insured a moment of intimate contact with the beloved object. The confidence drew her into the circle of his passion, and if after that all was indeed over, yet the loss was paid for by the despairing bliss of the moment; for the avowal was an act of force, the more satisfying the greater the resistance it encountered. At this point a darkening of Hans Castorp’s brows made Wehsal desist, though it had more reference to the presence of the good-natured Ferge, with his shrinking from the higher flights of conversation, than to any moral censorship on the part of our hero. Unwilling to make him out as either better or worse than he really was, we feel bound to mention that the wretched Wehsal, one evening when they were alone, prayed him, with pallid lips, for the love of God to tell him what had taken place after the mardi gras festivities, and Hans Castorp had good-naturedly complied, without, as the reader may imagine, introducing any wanton or flippant element into his recital. Still, there seems every reason, on our part and on his, not to go into it very much, and we will only add that thereafter Wehsal carried his friend’s overcoat with even more self-abnegation than before.

So much of our Hans’s tablemates. The seat at his right was vacant, was only occupied for a few days by a guest, such as he himself had once been, a visiting relative from below, an envoy, one might say⁠—no other than Hans’s uncle James Tienappel.

It was uncanny, to have suddenly sitting next him a delegate and ambassador from home, exhaling from the very weave of his English suit of clothes the atmosphere of that old life in the “upper” world so far below. But it was bound to come. For a long time Hans Castorp had silently reckoned with the possibility of an advance from the flat-land, and even been fairly sure what personal shape it would take. It was, in fact, not difficult to guess who would come, for Peter, the seafaring man, was almost out of the question, while as for Great-uncle Tienappel himself, it was no less true than ever that wild horses could not drag him to a spot from the atmospheric pressure of which he had everything to fear. No, James was the man to be sent with a commission from home to search out the truant⁠—and his advent had been expected even earlier. After Joachim had returned alone, and told the family circle what the state of things was, the visit had been due and overdue, and thus Hans Castorp was not in the slightest degree nonplussed when, scarcely two weeks after his cousin left, the concierge handed him a telegram. He opened it with foreknowledge of its contents, and read the announcement of James Tienappel’s impending arrival. He had business in