and short-winded; it acted like atropine on the visual organs, it was as intoxicating as alcohol; workers in quinine factories had inflamed eyes and swollen lips and suffered from affections of the skin. Peeperkorn described the cinchona, the quinine-tree, in the primeval forests of the Cordilleras, three thousand metres above sea-level. Its bark, called Peruvian or Jesuits’ bark, came late to Spain, long after the natives of South America knew its use. He spoke of the enormous quinine plantations owned by the Dutch government in Java, whence yearly many million pounds of the coils of reddish bark, like cinnamon, were shipped to Amsterdam and London. In fact, said Peeperkorn, bark, the wood-fibre itself, from the epidermis to the cambium, contained, almost always, extraordinary dynamic virtue, for good or evil. The knowledge of drugs possessed by the coloured races was far superior to our own. In certain islands east of Dutch New Guinea, youths and maidens prepared a love charm from the bark of a tree—it was probably poisonous, like the manzanilla tree, or the
antiaris toxicaria, the deadly
upas-tree of Java, which could poison the air round with its steam and fatally stupefy man and beast. This bark they powdered and mixed with coconut shavings, rolled the mixture into a sheet and toasted it, then sprinkled a brew in the face of the reluctant one, who was straightway inflamed with love for the sprinkler. Sometimes it was the bark of the root that contained the principle, as was the case with a certain creeper growing in the Malay Archipelago, called
strychnos tieuté, from which the natives prepared the
upas-radsha, by adding snake-venom. This drug caused immediate death when introduced into the circulation—as for instance by means of an arrow—but nobody could explain how it operated. All that seemed clear was that the
upas had a dynamic relation with strychnine … Peeperkorn, by this time, was sitting erect in his bed; now and then, with a hand that slightly trembled, conveying the wineglass to his cracked lips, to take great, thirsty draughts. He went on to speak of the “crows’-eye” tree of the Coromandel Coast, from the orange-yellow berries of which—the crows’ eyes—was extracted the most powerful alkaloid of all, strychnine. His voice sank to a whisper, and the great folds of his brow rose high, as he described to Hans Castorp the ash-grey boughs, the strikingly glossy foliage and yellow-green blossoms; the picture of this tree conjured up in the mind’s eye of the young man was luridly, almost hysterically garish—it made him shudder. But here Frau Chauchat intervened, saying it was not good for Mynheer Peeperkorn to talk any longer, it tired him too much. She disliked to interfere, but Hans Castorp would forgive her if she suggested that they had had enough for the time. The young man accordingly took his leave. But often, in the months that followed, did Hans Castorp sit by the bed of that kingly man, when he kept it after an attack of fever; Frau Chauchat being within hearing, as she moved about the rooms, and sometimes taking part with a few words. They spent much time together when Peeperkorn was free of fever; for the Dutchman, on his good days, seldom failed to gather round him a select company, to play and drink and otherwise divert themselves and rejoice the inner man. These reunions took place either in the salon, as on the first occasion, or in the restaurant; and Hans Castorp had a habitual place between the great man and his languid companion. They even went abroad together, took walks with Herr Ferge and Wehsal, Naphta and Settembrini, those opposed spirits, whom they could hardly fail to meet. Hans Castorp counted himself fortunate in presenting them to Peeperkorn, and even, in the end, to Clavdia Chauchat. He troubled not at all whether the acquaintance was to these pedagogues’ liking or not. Secure in the knowledge that they needed a tree whereon to sharpen their pedagogical tusks, he reckoned on their putting up even with unwelcome society, in order to continue in enjoyment of his own.
And he was not wrong in thinking that the members of this motley group would at least get used to not getting used to each other. Strangeness, tension, even suppressed hostility there was of course enough between them; it is surely rather remarkable that a comparatively insignificant personality could have held them together. That he did so must be laid to a certain shrewd geniality native to him, which found everything fish that came to his net, and not only bound to him people of the most diverse tastes and characters, but exerted enough power to bind them to each other.
Again, how involved were the relations between the various members of our group! Let us con them a little, as Hans Castorp himself did, with shrewd, yet friendly eye, as they went their ways together. There was the unhappy Wehsal, consumed by his louring passion for Frau Chauchat; who grovelled before Peeperkorn and Hans Castorp, the one on grounds of the past, the other for the sake of the compelling present. And there was Clavdia Chauchat herself, charming, soft-stepping invalid, the property of Peeperkorn—surely by choice and conviction, yet uneasy and sharp-tongued to see her carnival cavalier on such good terms with her sovereign lord. The irritation was probably the same in kind as that which coloured her feeling toward Herr Settembrini, the humanist and haranguer, whom she could not abide, calling him arrogant, not “hu‑man.” Dearly would she have liked to ask this mentor of Hans Castorp’s the meaning of certain words in his own Mediterranean tongue, of which, though less contemptuously, she was as ignorant as he of hers: the words he had flung after the altogether nice young German, quite correct and of good family, on that carnival night when at length he had summoned courage to approach her.—Hans Castorp was in love up to his ears,
