Read Online The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann - Free Book Online

right angles to the dining room, would have been disproportionately deep, with only one window to the street. This was why one quarter of its length had been partitioned off, forming the “den,” a dim, narrow room lit by a skylight and furnished with only a few items: a whatnot stand for the senator’s cigar cabinet, a card table with a drawer full of enticing objects—a deck of whist cards, game tokens, scorecards with little hinged stands, a slate and chalk styluses, paper cigar holders, and other things, too—and finally, set back in one corner, a rococo china cabinet made of rosewood, with yellow silk curtains pulled across the inside of its window-panes.
    “Grampa,” little Hans Castorp might say once they were in the den, raising himself up on tiptoe and stretching to reach the old man’s ear, “please show me the baptismal bowl.”
    And his grandfather, who had already pushed back the long, soft flap of his frock coat and pulled a bundle of keys from his trouser pocket, now opened the china cabinet, from whose interior rose a fragrance the boy found both strange and pleasant. All sorts of objects that had fallen out of use, which made them all the more captivating, were kept inside: a pair of sinuous silver candlesticks; a broken barometer, its wooden case carved with figures; an album of daguerreotypes; a cedar chest for liqueurs; a little Turk in a bright silk costume, whose body was rigid to the touch but contained a mechanism that, though it had long since fallen into disrepair, had once enabled him to run across the table; a model of an old-fashioned ship; and way at the bottom, a rattrap no less. But from the middle shelf, the old man took a heavily tarnished, round silver bowl set on a silver plate and showed the boy both pieces, separating them and turning them both about in his hands, all the while reciting a story he had told many times before.
    The bowl and the plate were not originally a set, as one could plainly see and as the boy was now instructed yet again; but they had been used together, his grandfather said, for around a hundred years now, ever since the bowl had been acquired. The bowl was beautiful, its lines simple and elegant, fashioned according to the austere taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and massive, it rested on round feet, its interior lined with gold, though the yellow luster had faded with the years. The only ornamentation was an embossed wreath of roses and serrated leaves around its rim. As for the plate, one could read its much greater age right on its surface. There stood “1650” in ornate numbers, and framing the date were all sorts of curlicued engraved lines, done in the “modern fashion” of the period, bombastic and capricious arabesques and crests that were half stars, half flowers. The underside, however, was inscribed in a variety of ever-changing scripts with the names of those heads of the household who had been its owners over the course of time. There were seven names in all now, each rounded out with the date of inheritance, and the old man in the white necktie pointed with his ringed forefinger as he read off each of them to his grandson. His father’s name was there, as was in fact his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s; and now that syllable came doubled, tripled, and quadrupled from the storyteller’s mouth; and the boy would lay his head to one side, his eyes fixed and full of thought, yet somehow dreamily thoughtless, his lips parted in drowsy devotion, and he would listen to the great-great-great-great—that somber sound of the crypt and buried time, which nevertheless both expressed a reverently preserved connection of his own life in the present to things now sunk deep beneath the earth and simultaneously had a curious effect on him: the same effect visible in the look on his face. The sound made him feel as if he were breathing the moldy, cool air of Saint Catherine’s Church or the crypt in Saint Michael’s,