The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding present. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the well-conducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to question their validity, would be absurd, dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the “evil principle,” to the young man in whose fate we are interested, and whom he had once subtly called “life’s delicate child.” We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought of duty, the law of life. Yes, lawgiving wisdom, in marking off the limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man’s soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp’s account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin’s zeal, called “doggedness” by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?
Mynheer Peeperkorn
Mynheer Peeperkorn, an elderly Dutchman, spent some time at House Berghof, that establishment which, in its prospectus, so correctly described itself as “international.” Pieter Peeperkorn—such was his name, so he called himself, as for instance, “Pieter Peeperkorn will now take unto himself a Hollands gin”—was a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a coffee-planter. His slightly faded nationality is scarcely sufficient ground for introducing him at this late day into our story. God knows we have had racial mixtures aplenty in the famous cure conducted with such many-tongued efficiency by Herr Hofrat Behrens! There was the Egyptian princess who had given the Hofrat the extraordinary coffee-machine and sphinx cigarettes, a sensational person with cropped hair and beringed fingers yellow with nicotine, who went about—except at the main meal of the day, for which she made full Parisian toilet—in a sack coat and well-pressed trousers; and who scorned the world of men, to lay hot and heavy, though fitful siege to an insignificant little Romanian Jewess called plain Frau Landauer, while Lawyer Paravant for her royal highness’s beaux yeux neglected his mathematics and altogether played the fool for love. This princess, in addition to her own colourful personality, had among her little suite a Moorish eunuch, a weak and sickly man, who yet, despite his basic and constitutional lack—upon which Caroline Stönr loved to dwell—clung to life more desperately than most, and was quite inconsolable over the conclusions Hofrat Behrens drew from the transparency they made of his dusky inside.
Mynheer Peeperkorn, then, compared with such phenomena, might seem well-nigh colourless. And it is true that this part of our story might, like an earlier chapter, bear the caption “A Newcomer.” But the reader need not fear that in him another occasion for pedagogic strife has arrived upon the scene. No, Mynheer Peeperkorn was not the man to be the bearer of logical confusion. He was quite a different man, as we shall see. Yet he brought sore dismay and perplexity upon the hero of our tale, as will shortly be very evident.
Mynheer Peeperkorn arrived at the Dorf station by the same evening train as Frau Chauchat. They drove up in the same sleigh to House Berghof, and supped together in the restaurant. The arrival, in short, was not only coincident but concurrent, and continued in that sense, Mynheer taking his place beside the returned wanderer at the “good” Russian table, opposite the doctor’s seat—the place Popoff had occupied, what time he performed his wild and equivocal antics. The companionship troubled our good Hans Castorp—that it should turn out like this had never entered his mind. The Hofrat, after his own fashion, had announced the day and hour of Clavdia’s return. “Well, Castorp, old top,” he said, “there’s always a reward for faithful waiting. Tomorrow the little puss will be slinking back—I’ve had a dispatch.” But
