“By all means, young man,” he said, taking off the horn spectacles by the nosepiece. “Come in. Don’t mention it—on the contrary.” Hans Castorp sat down by the bed, and concealed his surprise—for it was that rather than admiration which he felt, however sympathetically—under a burst of cordial and lively chatter, which Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent disjecta membra and much play of gesture. He looked very “poorly,” yellow and in evident distress; a good deal affected by the attack of fever he had had toward morning, and the subsequent exhaustion—in part undoubtedly the result of his last night’s bout.
“We were pretty—last night, you know—carried it pretty far,” he said. “But you are—Good. With you there were no further—but my age, and the condition I am in—my child,” he turned with mild yet quite perceptible severity to Frau Chauchat, who just then entered the room from the salon, “very well, very well indeed. Very. But I repeat—ought to have been prevented.” Something like an approach to his regal fit of rage rose in face and voice. The injustice, the unreason of the reproof were obvious to anybody who tried to imagine the storm that would have burst on the head of one seriously thinking to disturb him in his drink. But such are the moods of the great. Frau Chauchat moved to and fro in the room, after greeting Hans Castorp, who rose as she entered, without a handshake, but with a smile and nod, and a “Pray don’t disturb yourself”—in his tête-à-tête, that was, with Mynheer. She busied herself about the room, summoned the Malay to take the coffee-machine, then withdrew awhile, and on her return, soft-footed, took part standing in the others’ talk. Hans Castorp got an impression that she was there on guard. It was all very well for her to come back to the Berghof in company with a personality. But when the long-suffering lover took leave to evince regard for the personality, as man for man, then she betrayed uneasiness in pointed phrases like “Pray don’t disturb yourself” and the like. They cost Hans Castorp a smile, which he bent his head to hide, though inwardly aglow. Peeperkorn poured him out a glass of wine from the bottle on the night-table. Under the circumstances the best thing, in the Dutchman’s opinion, was to begin where one had left off; and that innocent effervescent wine had the same effect as soda-water. They touched glasses. Hans Castorp, as he drank, looked at the freckled, sea-captain’s hand, with its pointed nails, the woollen band buttoned round the wrist. It took up the glass, carried it to the thick, cracked lips; the throat, so like a statue’s and yet rather like a day labourer’s, worked up and down as it swallowed the wine. Peeperkorn indicated the medicine bottle on the table, a brown liquid, of which he took a spoonful from Frau Chauchat’s hand. It was an antipyretic, chiefly quinine, he said. He made his guest try its characteristic bitter and pungent taste; and had much to say in praise of the wonder-working, germ-destroying properties of the drug, its tonic quality, its wholesome effect in regulating the temperature. It slowed down protein catabolism, promoted assimilation, in short it was a boon to mankind, a wonderful cordial, tonic and stimulant—an intoxicant as well, for one could get quite tipsy on it, he said, making the last night’s suggestive gesture of fingers and head like a pagan priest at his ritual dance.
Yes, a wonderful substance, cinchona. It had not been three hundred years since European pharmacology made its acquaintance; not a century since the alkaloid had been isolated which was its active principle; isolated and, to a certain extent, analysed, for it would be too much to say that chemistry knew all there was to know about it, or was in a position to reproduce it synthetically. Our pharmacology need not be too arrogant over its science; for the state of its knowledge on the subject of quinine was a fair example of the rest. It had various facts about the operation of this or that drug; but was very often embarrassed to know the causes of the effect produced. If the young man were to survey the field of our toxicological knowledge, he would find that no one could tell him anything of the elementary properties conditioning the effects of the so-called poisons. For example, take the venom of snakes: all that was known of these animal substances was that they belonged to the albuminoid group, and consisted of various proteids, none of which produced a violent effect, except in this certain—and most uncertain—combination. Introduced into the blood-circulation, the effect was astonishing indeed, considering how far we were from being accustomed to think of albumen as a poison. The truth was, Peeperkorn said, and lifted his head from the pillow, elevated the arabesques on his brow, and gave point to his remarks by the little circle and the upright fingertips—the truth was, in the world of matter, that all substances were the vehicle of both life and death, all of them were medicinal and all poisonous, in fact therapeutics and toxicology were one and the same, man could be cured by poison, and substances known to be the bearer of life could kill at a thrust, in a single second of time.
He spoke very impressively, and with unwonted coherence, of drugs and poisons, and Hans Castorp listened and nodded; less concerned with the content of his speech—he seemed to have the subject much at heart—than with silently exploring this extraordinary personality, which in the end remained as inexplicable as the operation of the snake-poison he was discussing. In the world of matter, Peeperkorn said, everything depended on dynamics, all else being entirely hypothetical. Quinine was one of the medicinal poisons; one of the strongest of these. Four grams could make one deaf and giddy
