Free The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

perspective of columns and Gothic arches. There he stood, his chin lowered, his mouth drawn down, his blue, thoughtful eyes, the bags heavy beneath them, directed into the distance; he was clad in a robelike black jacket, hanging open at the front, edged in fur along the hem and lapels, and reaching well below his knees. Emerging from under its wide, braid-trimmed, puffy sleeves was a second set of tight-fitting sleeves of simpler fabric, ending in lace cuffs that covered the hands to the knuckles. He had pulled black silk stockings over his skinny old-man’s legs, and on his feet he wore shoes with silver buckles. Around his neck, however, lay a wide, starched, heavily pleated ruff, slanted forward, but sloping upward on both sides, beneath which, to top it all, could be seen a pleated batiste jabot and a vest. Under one arm he carried an old-fashioned, broad-brimmed hat that tapered to a point.
    It was a splendid portrait, painted by a renowned artist, executed tastefully in the style—as suggested by its subject—of the old masters and awakening in the observer all sorts of images of the late Middle Ages in the Spanish Netherlands. Little Hans Castorp had often studied it, not with any artistic acumen of course, but with a certain more general, even penetrating understanding; and although he had only once seen his grandfather in real life in the fashion pictured there on canvas—just for a brief moment as part of a dignified procession into the town hall—he could not help, as we have said, regarding this pictorial presence as his authentic and real grandfather, seeing in the everyday one a temporary, imperfectly adapted improvisation, so to speak. From that perspective, the lapses and eccentricities in his everyday appearance were apparently mere imperfections, or inept adaptations, were the vestiges or hints of a pure and true nature that could not be totally eradicated. Granted, his stiff collar and high, white necktie were old-fashioned; but such a term could never be applied to that marvelous article of clothing—he meant the Spanish ruff—of which the former were merely present-day traces. And it was the same with the peculiar rounded top hat that his grandfather wore in public, which on some higher plane of reality corresponded to the broad-brimmed felt hat in the picture—or the long, pleated frock coat, whose genuine prototype little Hans Castorp found in the fur- and braid-trimmed robe.
    And so when the day came to say farewell, in his heart of hearts little Hans Castorp was relieved to see his grandfather decked out in his authentic perfection. It was in the dining room, the same room where they had so often sat across the table from one another; in the middle of the room Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay in a silver-trimmed coffin, atop a bier surrounded and besieged with wreaths. He had battled pneumonia to the end, had battled long and obstinately, even though, to all appearances, he had accommodated himself only in part to contemporary life; but now here he lay in state—one could not be sure whether triumphant or vanquished, but in any case, with a stern, satisfied look on his face, though it was greatly changed, his nose looking pinched after his struggles; his lower body shrouded under a coverlet, on which lay a palm frond; his head propped up on the silk pillow so that his chin rested most handsomely in the indentation at the front of the ceremonial ruff. And in his hands—half hidden by lace cuffs, the fingers looking cold and inanimate despite their artificially natural pose—someone had placed an ivory cross, upon which his eyes, beneath their lowered lids, seemed to be fixed.
    Hans Castorp had seen his grandfather several times in the early stages of his last illness, but then no more toward the end. He had been spared any sight of the struggle, which had taken place primarily at night, and had been touched by it only indirectly—the anxious atmosphere in the house, old Fiete’s reddened eyes,