James Tienappel, whom Hans Castorp addressed by turns as “Uncle James” and “James,” was a long-legged man close to the forties, dressed in good English suiting and florid linen; with thinnish canary-yellow hair, blue eyes set close together, a close-clipped, straw-coloured moustache, and carefully manicured hands. He had continued to live in the old Consul’s roomy villa in Harvestehuder Way, though he had been a husband and father for some years, having taken a wife from his own social sphere, of his own highly civilized and elegant type, with the same soft, quick, pointedly polite manner of speech. In his own sphere he passed for a very energetic, cautious and—despite his refined ways—coldly practical man of business. But outside it—when he travelled south, for instance—he displayed a kind of eager pliancy, a quick and friendly readiness to step outside his own personality, which was by no means a sign of the insecurity of his own culture, but rather betrayed a conviction of its sufficiency, and a desire to correct his own aristocratic limitations; it evidenced a wish not to show surprise at new ways, even when he found them extraordinary past belief. “Certainly, of course,” he would hasten to remark, so that nobody might say of him that with all his elegance he was limited. He had come up here on a definite practical mission, to see how matters stood with his dilatory young kinsman, to “prize him loose,” as he put it to himself, and take him back home. But he was conscious that he was operating on foreign territory; and the first few minutes up here had made him suspect that he was a guest in a sphere quite foreign to him, and more instead of less self-assured than his own. His business instincts conflicted with his good breeding—the more keenly the more he was aware of the self-confident poise of the institutional life.
All this Hans Castorp had realized when he replied to the Consul’s wire with an inward “Don’t mention it!” But we must not suppose that he consciously practised on his uncle with the strange properties of the place. He had been too long a part of it; it was not he who wielded them against the aggressor, but they him. Everything—from the moment when an emanation from his nephew had first whispered to the Consul that his undertaking had small chance of success—everything about the situation fulfilled itself, simply, inevitably, up to the end, and Hans Castorp accompanied the process with his melancholy, fatalistic smile.
On the first morning, at breakfast, the host made his guest acquainted with his circle of tablemates. Afterwards James met the Hofrat, who came paddling through the dining-room, with the black and pale assistant in his wake, strewing on all sides his regular rhetorical question: “Slept well?” He met the Hofrat, and from his lips heard that not only had it been a clipper of an idea to come on a visit to his marooned cousin, but that he served his own interest even better in so coming, for that he was totally anaemic was plain to any eye. He, Tienappel, anaemic?—“Ray‑ther so,” said Behrens, and putting up a forefinger pulled down the skin under James’s eye. “Ray‑ther so!” he reiterated. The avuncular guest would be turning a clever trick to stretch himself out on his balcony for a few weeks and do his best to emulate the good example set him by his nephew. In his condition he could do nothing sharper than to act as though he had a slight case of tuberculosis pulmonum—it was always present anyhow. “Certainly, of course,” replied the Consul hastily; and as the Hofrat paddled off, he gazed after the man and his neck-bone, with open mouth and mien sedulously polite, for quite a while, his nephew standing by, utterly unmoved, unscathed. They took the prescribed walk, as far as the watercourse and back, after which James Tienappel experienced his first rest-cure. Hans Castorp lent him one of his camel’s-hair rugs, in addition to James’s own plaid; he himself found one cover quite enough this fine autumn weather. And instructed him step by step in the traditional art of putting on rugs; yes, after he had got the Consul all nicely mummified, deliberately undid him again, to the end that he should pack himself up alone, with Hans Castorp lending a helping hand. Then the adept taught the catechumen how to attach the linen parasol to his chair and adjust it against the sun.
The Consul was pleased to be jocose. The spirit of the flat-land was still strong within him, and he made merry over his lesson, as he had earlier over the prescribed exercise after breakfast. But when he saw the peaceful, uncomprehending smile with which his nephew met his jests, a smile in which was mirrored all the serene self-assurance of the local tradition, alarm laid hold on him. He feared, actually, the impairment of his business energy, and hastily resolved to have the decisive conversation with the Hofrat as soon as possible and get it over—that very afternoon if it could be done, while he still possessed and could bring to bear the strength of conviction which he had brought with him from below. He distinctly felt that this was weakening, that his own good breeding had joined hands against him with the spirit of the place.
And furthermore he felt that it had been superfluous for the Hofrat to advise him, on account of his anaemia, to live during his stay here as the patients did. For, it
