Free The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Page B

stuff with the consistency of cheese, gazed at the face and hands of what had been his grandfather. And just then a fly settled on the inert forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete circumspectly shooed it off, though avoiding actually touching the forehead; a shadow of respectability darkened his face, as if he should not know, and did not want to know, what he was doing—an expression of propriety, which apparently was related to Grandfather’s being only a body and nothing more. All the same, after a long, looping flight, the fly came to rest again on Grandfather’s fingers, sitting up pertly very close to the ivory cross. And while all this was going on, Hans Castorp thought he could smell more clearly than before those faint, but very peculiar and persistent fumes that he knew from before, and which, to his shame, always reminded him of a school chum who suffered from an offensive affliction that made everyone avoid him, the same odor that the tuberose scent was supposed to cover up on the sly, but was unable to do, for all its lovely, austere richness.
    He returned several times to stand by the body: one time all alone, except for old Fiete; a second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and his two uncles James and Peter; and then a third time as well, when a group of workmen from the harbor in their Sunday best stood for a few moments beside the coffin to take leave of the former head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral and a dining room full of people; dressed in his Spanish ruff, Pastor Bugenhagen from Saint Michael’s, the man who had baptized Hans Castorp, performed the service, and afterward he spoke to little Hans Castorp in very friendly tones as they sat together in the coach, the one right behind the hearse and the first in a long, long procession. And with that, this part of Hans Castorp’s life came to an end as well, and a very short time later he changed homes and neighborhoods—for the second time now in his young life.
AT THE TIENAPPELS’/HANS CASTORP’S MORAL STATE
    The change did not work to his detriment, because he moved in with Consul Tienappel, his legal guardian, and lacked for nothing—certainly not in any personal sense, or for that matter, as regarded the supervision of his larger interests, about which he still knew nothing. Consul Tienappel, an uncle of little Hans’s late mother, acted as executor for the Castorp estate, putting the property up for sale, taking charge of liquidating the firm Castorp and Son, Imports and Exports, realizing from these transactions some four hundred thousand marks—Hans Castorp’s inheritance, which the consul then invested in gilt-edged securities. At the beginning of each quarter, he deducted from the interest earned—without any prejudice to his sense of family ties—a commission of 2 percent.
    Set well back from Harvestehuder Weg, the Tienappel home was fronted by a large garden; to the rear it looked out on a lawn where not the tiniest weed was permitted, a public promenade with roses, and beyond it, the river. Although he owned a fine coach, the consul walked to work in the old city every morning, just to get a little exercise, because he sometimes suffered from congestion of the blood in his head; and he returned home by the same route at five each evening, when, in most civilized fashion, the Tienappels sat down to dinner. He was a heavyset man who always dressed in the best English fabrics. His watery-blue eyes were bulgy behind gold-rimmed spectacles, he had a ruddy nose, a gray seaman’s beard, and he wore a sparkling diamond on the stubby little finger of his left hand. His wife had been dead for years. He had two sons, Peter and James—the one in the navy and seldom at home, the other an employee in the family wine business and the designated heir of the firm. The house had been kept for many years now by Schalleen, the daughter of a goldsmith in Altona, who always