Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/695

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THE DIAL

December 1922

TRISTAN

BY THOMAS MANN

Translated from the German by Scofield Thayer
and Kenneth Burke

SO this is the Einfried Sanatorium! White and rectilinear, with its expanse of main buildings and side wings, it lies in the centre of a broad park that is delightfully fitted out with grottoes, arbours, and pavilions made of bark. And above and beyond the slate roofs, the hills rise bulkily against the sky. They are green with pines, and gently irregular.

This institution is still run by Dr Leander. With his black, double-pointed beard, which is as coarse and matted as the horsehair used for stuffing furniture, with his thick, glistening spectacles and his air of having been chilled by science, hardened, and filled with a subdued, cautious pessimism—with all this he maintains a forceful and conclusive jurisdiction over his patients. His patients—items that were too weak to make laws for themselves and keep them, but had given themselves completely over to him that they might gain support from his rigidity.

As to Fräulein von Osterloh—she functions with an unwearying devotion as housekeeper. Great heavens! how urgently she keeps on rushing up stairs and down stairs, from one end of the institute to the other! She has charge of the kitchen and the store-room, goes through the wash, gives orders to the servants, and sets the table of the establishment from the standpoints of economy, health, tastiness, and of the outward appearance of things. She manages with an agitated meticulousness; and in her excessive industry there lies concealed a steady reproach for the whole world of men, since