Hans Castorp stood awhile, reverently, observing all this; hesitating to move, expectant of being addressed by the “widow.” As he was not, and could not bring himself to disturb her, he turned toward the little group of other persons present. Behrens jerked his head in the direction of the salon, and Hans Castorp followed him thither.
“Suicide?” he asked, subdued but terse.
“Rather,” said the Hofrat, with a shrug, and added: “up to the hilt. To the nth power. Have you ever seen a toy like this before?” he went on, and drew out of the pocket of his smock an irregularly shaped case, from which he took a small object and presented it to the young man’s notice. “Nor I either. But it is well worth seeing. We live and learn. It’s a fantastic little gadget, and ingenious. I took it out of his hand. Take care, if it drips on your skin it will blister.”
Hans Castorp turned the puzzling little object in his hands. It was made of steel, gold, ivory, and rubber, wonderful to see. There were two curving prongs of bright steel, extremely sharp-pointed; a slightly spiral centre portion of gold-inlaid ivory, in which the prongs were somewhat movable and could sink up to a point; and a bulb of semi-hard black rubber. The whole thing was only about two inches long.
“What is it?” Hans Castorp asked.
“That,” answered Behrens, “is an organized hypodermic syringe. Or, if you like, it is a copy of the mechanism of the cobra’s bite. Understand? You don’t seem to,” he went on, as Hans Castorp continued to stare at the bizarre little instrument. “These are the teeth. They are not solid all the way, there is a canal inside, the thickness of a hair; you can see the issue of it quite plainly, here just above the point. They are also open at the base, of course, and communicate with the excretory duct of the bulb, which runs into the ivory middle part. When the teeth bite, they sink in a little, and the pressure on the reservoir shoots the contents into the canals, so that the poison gets into circulation the moment the fangs sink in the flesh. Perfectly simple, when you see it like that; you just have to get the idea. He probably had it made after his own design.”
“Surely,” Hans Castorp said.
“The amount must have been very small,” continued the Hofrat. “What it lacked in quantity it made up for in—”
“Dynamic,” Hans Castorp finished for him.
“Well, yes. What it was we shall soon find out. It will be worth knowing too, it has something curious to teach us. Shall we wager that the native on duty over there, who dressed himself up like that for the night’s work, could tell us all we want to know? I suspect it is a combination of animal and vegetable poisons, the most powerful known, for it must have worked like lightning. Everything points to its having taken away his breath, paralysed his respiration, you know, quick suffocation, probably easy and painless.”
“God grant it,” said Hans Castorp piously, handed the uncanny toy back to the Hofrat and returned to the bedchamber.
Madame Chauchat and the Malay were there alone. And this time Clavdia lifted her face toward the young man as he neared the bed.
“You had a right to be called,” she said.
“It was kind of you,” he answered, “and you are right.” He availed himself of the third person plural as used by the peoples of the cultured West. “We were brothers. I feel shamed in the depth of my soul that I tried to hide it, and used circumlocutions before other people. Were you with him at the last?”
“The servant called me when all was over,” she answered.
“He was built on such a grand scale,” Hans Castorp began again, “that he considered it a blasphemy, a cosmic catastrophe, to be found wanting in feeling. For you must know, he regarded himself as the instrument of God’s marriage. That was a piece of majestic tomfoolery—when one is moved one can say things that sound crass and irreverent, but are after all more solemn than the conventional religious formulas.”
“C’est une abdication,” she said. “He knew of our folly?”
“I was not able to prevent it, Clavdia. He guessed, when I refused to kiss you on the forehead, in his presence. At this moment, his presence is rather symbolic than actual—but will you let me do it now?”
She moved her head toward him, in a little nod, the eyes closed. He pressed his lips on her brow. The brown, doglike eyes of the Malay servant watched the scene, rolling sidewise, until the whites showed.
The Great God Dumps
Once more we hear Herr Hofrat Behren’s voice—let us give it our ear. For we hear it perhaps for the last time. Some day even the story itself will come to an end. Long has it lasted; or, rather, the pace of its contentual time has so increased that there is no more holding it, even its musical time is running out. Perhaps we shall have no further
