The Magic Mountain — Chapter 3

Chapter 4 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

Decorous Gloom

Hans Castorp had feared he might sleep away the time, since he had been so exceedingly tired, but he was on his feet earlier than needful and had leisure in abundance to give ample attention to his morning habits, highly civilized habits, among which a rubber basin as well as a wooden bowl with green lavender soap and its accompanying straw brush played a principal part, and to combine with the business of cleansing and bodily care that other business of unpacking and putting things in order. While he drew the silvered razor over his cheeks covered with perfumed lather, he remembered his confused dreams and, smiling indulgently, shook his head at so much nonsense with the feeling of superiority belonging to the man who shaves himself in the daylight of reason. He did not, to be sure, feel particularly well rested, but fresh with the young day.

While drying his hands, he stepped out onto the balcony with powdered cheeks, in his _file d’écosse_ drawers and red saffian slippers, onto the balcony that ran the whole length and was divided into the separate room sections only by means of opaque glass partitions that did not quite project as far as the railing. The morning was cool and cloudy. Long banks of mist lay motionless before the heights to either side, while massive clouds, white and grey, hung low over the farther mountains. Here and there patches and streaks of blue sky were visible, and when a glance of sun fell in, the little place on the valley floor gleamed white against the dark fir forests of the slopes. Somewhere there was morning music, probably in the same hotel where there had also been a concert last evening. Choral chords sounded over, muted; after a pause a march followed, and Hans Castorp, who loved music with all his heart because it affected him in much the same way as his breakfast porter, namely by calming him profoundly, benumbing him, persuading him to doze, listened with pleasure, his head inclined to one side, his mouth open, and his eyes somewhat reddened.

Below, the looping road by which he had come to the sanatorium last evening wound upward. Short-stemmed, star-shaped gentian stood in the wet grass of the slope. Part of the terrace had been fenced off as a garden; there were gravel paths there, flower-beds, and an artificial rocky grotto at the foot of a stately silver fir. A hall roofed with sheet metal, in which reclining chairs stood, opened southward, and beside it a flagpole painted reddish brown had been set up, on whose cord the flag at times unfurled itself, a fanciful flag, green and white, with the emblem of the healing art, a serpent staff, in the middle.

A woman was walking about in the garden, an elderly lady of gloomy, indeed tragic appearance. Entirely clad in black and with a black veil wound about her disordered black-and-grey hair, she wandered restlessly and with uniform speed along the paths, on bent knees and with arms hanging stiffly forward, and stared straight ahead from below with coal-black eyes, beneath which flaccid pouches of skin hung, her brow furrowed crosswise. Her ageing face, with its southern pallor and large, careworn mouth drawn down to one side, reminded Hans Castorp of the picture of a famous tragic actress that he had once seen, and it was uncanny to behold how the black-pale woman, evidently without knowing it, adapted her long, sorrowful strides to the beat of the march music sounding across.

Hans Castorp gazed down at her in thoughtful sympathy, and it seemed to him as though her mournful appearance darkened the morning sun. At the same time, however, he also became aware of something else, something audible, noises coming from the neighboring room on the left, the room of the Russian married couple, according to Joachim, and these likewise seemed ill suited to the cheerful, fresh morning, seeming rather to sully it with a sort of sticky impurity. Hans Castorp remembered that he had heard such things already last evening, but his weariness had prevented him from attending to them. It was a struggling, a giggling, and a panting, whose offensive nature could not long remain hidden from the young man, although at first, out of good nature, he strove to construe it harmlessly. One might have given this good nature other names too, for example the somewhat insipid one of purity of soul, or the grave and beautiful one of modesty, or the disparaging names of unwillingness toward truth and sneakishness, or even that of a mystical awe and piety; there was something of all these in Hans Castorp's attitude toward the noises next door, and physiognomically it expressed itself in a decorous darkening of his features, as though he might not and would not know anything of what he was hearing there: an expression of propriety not wholly original, which, however, he was wont to assume on certain occasions.

With this expression, then, he withdrew from the balcony into the room, so as no longer to overhear proceedings that seemed to him grave, indeed shattering, though they made themselves known under cover of giggling. But in the room the doings beyond the wall were only the more clearly audible. It was a chase about the furniture, it seemed; a chair went clattering over, they seized one another, there was slapping and kissing, and to this was added the fact that now it was the strains of a waltz, the worn melodious phrases of a street tune, that from outside and far away accompanied the unseen scene. Hans Castorp stood there, towel in hand, and listened against his better will. And suddenly he blushed beneath his powder, for what he had plainly foreseen had come to pass, and the game had now beyond all doubt passed over into the animal. Good Lord, thunder and lightning! he thought, turning away to finish his toilet with movements made intentionally noisy. Well then, they are husband and wife, in God's name, so far things are in order. But in broad morning, that is going rather far. And I feel quite as if they had kept no peace even last evening. After all, they are ill, since they are here, or at least one of them, so that some restraint would be in place. But what is really scandalous, of course, he thought angrily, is that the walls are so thin and one hears everything so plainly; it is an untenable state of affairs! Cheaply built, naturally, shamefully cheaply built! I wonder whether I shall see the people later on, or even be introduced to them? That would be embarrassing in the highest degree. And here Hans Castorp was astonished, for he noticed that the flush which had risen a moment before into his freshly shaven cheeks would not leave them, or at any rate not the sensation of warmth that had accompanied it, but stood fixed there and was nothing other than that dry heat of face from which he had suffered last evening, of which sleep had rid him, and which on this occasion had set in again. This did not dispose him more kindly toward the neighboring married couple; rather, with protruded lips he muttered a highly condemnatory word against them and then committed the mistake of cooling his face once more with water, which considerably worsened the trouble. Thus it came about that his voice wavered morosely when he answered his cousin, who had rapped on the wall and called out to him, and that on Joachim's entrance he scarcely made the impression of a refreshed and morning-cheerful man.

Breakfast

"Morning," said Joachim. "So that was your first night up here. Are you satisfied?"

He was ready to go out, dressed sportingly, in stoutly made boots, and carried his ulster over his arm, with the flat bottle showing through the side pocket. He had no hat today either.

"Thank you," Hans Castorp replied, "it will do. I do not wish to pass judgment. I dreamed somewhat confusedly, and then the house has the drawback of being very thin-walled, which is rather tiresome. Who is the woman in black out there in the garden?"

Joachim knew at once who was meant.

"Oh, that is _Tous-les-deux_," he said. "That is what she is generally called here among us, for it is the only thing one ever hears from her. A Mexican woman, you know; she cannot speak a word of German and scarcely any French either, only a few scraps. She has been here five weeks with her eldest son, an utterly hopeless case who will now go under pretty quickly; he has it everywhere, poisoned through and through, one may say, and at the end it looks something like typhoid, says Behrens; ghastly for everyone concerned in any event. A fortnight ago the second son came up because he wanted to see his brother once more, an extraordinarily handsome fellow, by the way, like the other one too; both are extraordinarily handsome fellows, with such glowing eyes, the ladies were quite beside themselves. Well, the younger one had apparently coughed a little down below already, but otherwise had been quite lively. And scarcely is he here when, what do you think, he gets a temperature, 39.5 at once, the highest fever, you understand, takes to his bed, and if he gets up again, says Behrens, then he has more luck than sense. In any case it had been the very highest time, he says, that he came up... Yes, and since then the mother goes about like that whenever she is not sitting with them, and if one speaks to her she always says only '_Tous les deux!_' because she cannot say anything more, and at the moment there is no one here who understands Spanish."

"So that is her story," said Hans Castorp. "I wonder whether she will say it to me as well when I make her acquaintance? That would certainly be odd, I mean, it would be comic and uncanny at the same time," he said, and his eyes were as they had been yesterday: they seemed hot and heavy to him, as though he had long been weeping, and they again had that gleam which the gentleman rider's novel cough had kindled in them. Indeed, it seemed to him as though only now had he regained his connection with yesterday, as though he were, so to speak, back in the picture, which on waking had not at first really been the case. He was ready, moreover, he declared, dripping a little lavender water onto his handkerchief and dabbing his forehead and the region beneath his eyes with it. "If it suits you, we can go to breakfast _tous les deux_," he joked with a feeling of extravagant high spirits, whereupon Joachim looked at him gently and smiled in a peculiar way, melancholically and somewhat mockingly, it seemed, though why was his own affair.

After Hans Castorp had satisfied himself that he had tobacco with him, he took stick, coat, and hat, this as well, out of defiance, for he was far too certain of his own mode of life and breeding to submit so readily and for a mere three weeks to strange and new customs, and so they went, went down the stairs, and in the corridors Joachim pointed out this door and that and named the occupants, German names and others of all manner of foreign sound, adding brief remarks upon their character and the seriousness of their cases.

They also met people who were already coming back from breakfast, and whenever Joachim said good morning to someone, Hans Castorp politely raised his hat. He was tense and nervous, like a young man on the point of presenting himself to many strangers and tormented in the process by the distinct feeling that he had dull eyes and a red face, which, however, was only partly true, for he was rather pale.

"Before I forget!" he said suddenly with a certain blind eagerness. "You may perfectly well introduce me to the lady in the garden if it happens to work out that way; I have nothing against that. Let her by all means say _tous les deux_ to me; it does not trouble me in the least, I am prepared and understand the meaning and shall make the proper face for it. But with the Russian married couple I do not wish to become acquainted, do you hear? I expressly do not wish it. They are extremely ill-mannered people, and if I am to live next to them for three weeks and it could not be arranged otherwise, still I do not wish to know them; it is my good right, and I forbid it with the utmost determination..."

"Very well," said Joachim. "Have they disturbed you so much, then? Yes, they are barbarians in a sense, uncivilized in a word, I told you so beforehand. He always comes to meals in a leather jacket, worn shiny, I tell you; I am always astonished that Behrens does not put a stop to it. And she is not the neatest either, in spite of her feather hat... Besides, you can be quite easy, they sit far away from us, at the bad Russian table, for there is a good Russian table where only the finer Russians sit, and there is scarcely any possibility that you will come across them, even if you wanted to. It is not easy at all, in general, to make acquaintances, if only because there are so many foreigners among the guests, and I myself personally know only a few, though I have been here all this time."

"Which of the two is ill?" asked Hans Castorp. "He or she?"

"He, I think. Yes, only he," said Joachim, noticeably distracted, while they laid aside their things at the cloak stands outside the dining room. And then they entered the bright, shallow-vaulted room, where voices buzzed, utensils clattered, and the dining-room maids hurried about with steaming pots.

Seven tables stood in the dining room, most of them lengthwise, only two set crosswise. They were larger tables, for ten persons each, although the places were not everywhere complete. Only a few steps diagonally into the room, and Hans Castorp was already at his place: it had been laid for him at the narrow end of the table standing in the middle at the front, between the two crosswise ones. Standing erect behind his chair, Hans Castorp bowed stiffly and amiably toward the table companions to whom Joachim ceremoniously introduced him, and whom he scarcely saw, much less had their names penetrated his consciousness. Only Frau Stöhr's person and name did he register, and that she had a red face and greasy ash-blond hair. One could readily believe her capable of such lapses of cultivation, so stubbornly ignorant was the expression on her face. Then he sat down and noted with approval that first breakfast here was treated as a serious meal.

There were pots of preserves and honey, bowls of rice pudding and oatmeal porridge, platters of scrambled eggs and cold meat; butter had been set out generously, someone lifted the glass cover from a weeping Swiss cheese to cut some of it, and a bowl of fresh and dried fruit stood into the bargain in the middle of the table. A dining-room maid in black and white asked Hans Castorp what he would like to drink: cocoa, coffee, or tea. She was as small as a child, with an old, long face, a dwarf, as he recognized with alarm. He looked at his cousin, but since the latter only shrugged shoulders and brows with equanimity, as though he meant to say: "Well, and what of it?" he submitted to the facts, asked with particular politeness for tea, because it was a dwarf who was asking him, and began to eat rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar, while his eyes ranged over the other foods, which he longed to sample, and over the company at the seven tables, Joachim's colleagues and companions in fate, all of them inwardly ill and breakfasting as they chattered.

The dining hall was done in that modern taste which knows how to lend the most matter-of-fact simplicity a certain fantastical touch. It was not very deep in proportion to its length, and was encircled by a sort of gallery in which sideboards stood and which opened toward the inner room with the tables in broad arches. The pillars, panelled to half their height in wood with a sandalwood finish and then smoothly whitewashed, like the upper part of the walls and the ceiling, bore brightly coloured bands, simple and cheerful stencil patterns that continued along the wide-spanned ribs of the shallow vault. Several chandeliers, electric ones of polished brass, adorned the hall, each consisting of three hoops laid one above another, joined by delicate interlacing work, while about the lowest of them milk-glass shades went round in a circle like little moons. There were four glass doors: on the opposite narrow side two that opened out upon a veranda in front, a third at the far left that led straight into the front hall, and then the one through which Hans Castorp had entered from a corridor, since Joachim had brought him down by another staircase than the evening before.

On his right he had an unprepossessing creature in black, with a downy complexion and faintly heated cheeks, in whom he saw something like a seamstress or house dressmaker, perhaps also because she breakfasted exclusively on coffee and butter rolls, and because from time immemorial he had associated the notion of a house dressmaker with that of coffee and butter rolls. On his left sat an English miss, likewise already no longer young, very ugly, with thin, chilled fingers, reading roundly written letters from home and drinking a blood-coloured tea with them. Beyond her came Joachim, and then Frau Stoehr in a Scottish wool blouse. She kept her left hand clenched near her cheek while she ate, and was visibly exerting herself, when she spoke, to assume an air of refined cultivation by drawing back her upper lip from her narrow, long rabbit teeth. A young man with a thin moustache and an expression as though he had something bad-tasting in his mouth sat down beside her and breakfasted in complete silence. He came in when Hans Castorp was already seated, dipped his chin to his chest once in greeting as he walked, without looking at anyone, and took his place, flatly refusing by his behaviour to be introduced to the new guest. Perhaps he was too ill still to have any feeling or respect for such outward formalities, or indeed to take any interest at all in his surroundings. For a moment, opposite him, sat an extraordinarily thin, fair-haired young girl, who emptied a bottle of yoghurt onto her plate, spooned up the milk dish, and immediately went away again.

The conversation at table was not lively. Joachim chatted formally with Frau Stoehr; he inquired after her condition and learned, with proper regret, that it left much to be desired. She complained of "listlessness." "I am so limp!" she said drawlingly, mincing in an uncultivated way. Besides, she had already had 37.3 on rising, and what then would it be by afternoon. The supposed dressmaker acknowledged the same bodily temperature, but declared that, on the contrary, she felt excited, inwardly strained and restless, as though something special and decisive were before her, which was not the case at all, but rather a physical agitation without spiritual causes. She could hardly be a house dressmaker after all, for she spoke very correctly and almost learnedly. In any case, Hans Castorp found this excitement, or at least the expression of it, somehow unsuitable, indeed almost offensive, in so inconspicuous and insignificant a creature. One after another he asked the seamstress and Frau Stoehr how long they had already been up here, the former having lived in the establishment for five months, the latter for seven; then he gathered up his English in order to learn from his English neighbour what sort of tea she was drinking there, it was rose-hip tea, and whether it tasted good, which she affirmed with almost stormy emphasis, and after that he looked out into the hall, where people were coming and going: first breakfast was not a strictly communal meal.

He had felt a certain fear of shocking impressions, but found himself disappointed: things went on here in the hall in quite a cheerful fashion, and one had no sense of being in a place of wretchedness. Tanned young people of both sexes came trilling in, spoke with the serving girls, and set upon their breakfast with robust appetite. There were older persons too, married couples, an entire family with children that spoke Russian, and half-grown boys as well. Almost all the women wore close-fitting jackets of wool or silk, so-called sweaters, white or coloured, with rolling collars and side pockets, and it looked pretty when they stood talking with both hands buried in those side pockets. At several tables photographs were being passed around, new snapshots no doubt, taken by themselves; at another they were exchanging postage stamps. They spoke of the weather, of how they had slept, and of what they had measured in their mouths in the morning. Most of them were merry, probably for no particular reason, but only because they had no immediate cares and were together in considerable numbers. Some, to be sure, sat at table with their heads propped in their hands and stared before them. They were left to stare, and no one paid any attention to them.

Suddenly Hans Castorp gave an irritated and affronted start. A door had slammed, it was the door at the far left leading straight into the hall; someone had let it bang to, or even flung it shut behind him, and that was a sound Hans Castorp could not endure at any price, a thing he had hated all his life. Perhaps this hatred was grounded in upbringing, perhaps in an inborn idiosyncrasy; enough, he abominated the slamming of doors and could have struck anyone who allowed himself such a transgression in his hearing. In this case the door was fitted besides with little panes of glass, and that intensified the shock: it was a crash and a clatter. Faugh, thought Hans Castorp furiously, what damned slovenliness is this! Since, however, at that same moment the seamstress addressed a remark to him, he had no time to determine who the culprit had been. But folds stood between his fair brows, and his face was painfully distorted while he answered her.

Joachim asked whether the doctors had already come through. Yes, they had been there once already, someone answered; they had left the hall almost at the moment when the cousins had come in. Then they would go and not wait, said Joachim. An opportunity for an introduction would surely present itself in the course of the day. But at the door they almost collided with Hofrat Behrens, who came striding rapidly in, followed by Dr. Krokowski.

"Hoppla, look out, gentlemen!" said Behrens. "That might easily have ended badly for the corns on both sides." He spoke with a strong Low German accent, broad and chewing his words. "So this is _you_," he said to Hans Castorp, whom Joachim presented with heels drawn together; "well then, pleased to meet you." And he gave the young man his hand, which was as large as a shovel. He was a bony man, a good three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, already completely white on top, with a protruding nape, large, prominent, bloodshot blue eyes in which tears swam, a turned-up nose, and a closely clipped moustache drawn awry as the result of a one-sided puckering of the upper lip. What Joachim had said of his cheeks was fully borne out; they were blue. His head therefore made a highly coloured effect against the white surgeon's coat he wore, a belted smock reaching below the knees, which left visible beneath it his striped trousers and a pair of colossal feet in yellow, somewhat worn lace-up boots. Dr. Krokowski too was in professional dress, only his smock was black, of a black lustre fabric, shirtlike, with elastic bands at the wrists, and heightened his pallor not a little. He behaved in a purely assisting capacity and took no part whatever in the greeting, yet a critical tension in his mouth showed that he found his subordinate relation a strange one.

"Cousins?" asked the Hofrat, pointing his hand back and forth between the young men and looking upward from below with his bloodshot blue eyes. "Well now, is he going to swear to the calfskin too?" he said to Joachim, indicating Hans Castorp with his head. "Lord preserve us, no, what? I saw at once," and now he addressed Hans Castorp directly, "that you've got something civilian about you, something comfortable, nothing so rattling-with-arms as this troop-leader here. You'd make a better patient than he does, I'll wager that. I can tell at once of anybody whether he can turn out a usable patient, for talent is required, talent belongs to everything, and this myrmidon here hasn't the least bit of talent either. For drilling, I don't know, but for being ill, none at all. Would you believe he always wants to get away? Endlessly he wants to get away, badgers me and plagues me and cannot wait to let himself be driven hard down there. Such zeal! He won't even present us with half a little year. And yet it really is quite nice here with us, now do say so yourself, Ziemssen, whether it isn't quite nice here! Well, your cousin will know better how to appreciate us, he'll enjoy himself well enough. There is no lack of ladies either, we have the loveliest ladies here. At least from the outside some of them are positively picturesque. But _you_ ought to acquire a little more colour, do you hear, otherwise you'll be left behind with the ladies! Green may well be the golden tree of life, but as a complexion green is not quite the proper thing. Totally anaemic, naturally," he said, stepping up to Hans Castorp without ceremony and drawing down one of his eyelids with forefinger and middle finger. "Naturally totally anaemic, as I said. Do you know something? It was not at all stupid of you to leave your Hamburg to itself for a while. It is a most obliging institution, this Hamburg; with its moist-cheerful meteorology it is always supplying us with a nice contingent. But if I may offer you an unauthoritative piece of advice on this occasion, entirely _sine pecunia_, you understand, then while you are here, just do everything your cousin does. In your case one can do nothing wiser than live for a while as though with a slight _tuberculosis pulmonum_, and put on a little protein. The odd thing with us here is the protein metabolism. Although the general combustion is heightened, the body nevertheless lays on protein. Well then, and you slept well, Ziemssen? Fine, eh? So now off on your constitutional stroll! But not more than half an hour! And afterward stick the mercury cigar into your face! Write it all down neatly, Ziemssen! Officially! Conscientiously! On Saturday I want to see the chart! Your cousin should begin taking his temperature too, at once. Measuring can never do any harm. Good morning, gentlemen! Pleasant conversation! Good morning... good morning..." And Dr. Krokowski joined him as he sailed on farther, swinging his arms, the palms turned entirely backward, asking to right and left whether people had slept "beautifully," which was answered in the affirmative on all sides.

Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Gaiety

"A very nice man," said Hans Castorp, as after a friendly greeting with the limping concierge, who was sorting letters in his lodge, they stepped out through the portal into the open air. The portal lay on the south-eastern flank of the whitewashed building, whose middle section rose a storey above the two wings and was crowned by a short clock tower roofed in slate-coloured sheet iron. One did not touch the fenced garden on leaving the house here, but was at once out in the open, facing slanting mountain meadows composed of scattered, moderately tall spruces and crouching mountain pines flattened against the ground. The path they took, indeed the only one worth considering apart from the carriage road falling away into the valley, led them with a slight rise to the left past the rear of the sanatorium, the kitchen and service side, where iron refuse bins stood by the railings of the cellar steps, continued a good way farther in the same direction, then described a sharp knee and led more steeply to the right up the sparsely wooded slope. It was a hard, reddish-coloured path, still somewhat damp, with blocks of stone lying here and there along its edge. The cousins by no means had the promenade to themselves. Guests who had finished breakfast immediately after them followed on their heels, and whole groups, on their way back, came toward them with the tramping tread of people descending.

"A very nice man!" repeated Hans Castorp. "He has such a brisk way of speaking; I enjoyed listening to him. 'Mercury cigar' for 'thermometer' is excellent, I understood it at once. But now I shall light a real one," he said, stopping short, "I can't bear it any longer! I haven't smoked anything decent since yesterday noon. Excuse me a moment!" And from his automobile-leather case adorned with a silver monogram he took a Maria Mancini, a fine specimen from the top layer, flattened on one side as he particularly liked it, clipped the tip with a small square-cutting instrument that he wore on his watch-chain, set his pocket lighter aflame, and kindled the fairly long cigar, blunt at the end, with a few devoted puffs. "There!" he said. "Now we can continue the constitutional stroll, so far as I am concerned. You naturally do not smoke, out of sheer zeal."

"I never smoke," answered Joachim. "Why should I begin smoking here of all places?"

"I do not understand that!" said Hans Castorp. "I do not understand how anyone can fail to smoke; he deprives himself, so to speak, of the best part of life, and in any case of a most eminent pleasure! When I wake, I rejoice that during the day I shall be allowed to smoke, and when I eat, I rejoice in it again; indeed I can say that I really eat only in order to be able to smoke, though of course that is putting it too strongly. But a day without tobacco would be for me the summit of flatness, a completely dreary and charm-less day, and if in the morning I had to say to myself, there will be nothing to smoke today, I believe I should not have the courage to get up at all; honestly, I should stay where I was. You see, if one has a cigar that burns properly, naturally it must not leak air at the side or draw badly, that is irritating in the highest degree, I mean, if one has a good cigar, then one is really safe, literally nothing can happen to one. It is exactly as when one is lying by the sea; then one is simply lying by the sea, is one not, and needs nothing further, neither work nor amusement. Thank God people smoke all over the world, it is nowhere unknown, so far as I know, wherever one might happen to be cast. Even the polar explorers equip themselves liberally with smoking stores for their hardships, and that always touched me sympathetically when I read of it. For one may fare very badly; let us suppose, for instance, that I were in a miserable way, but so long as I still had my cigar, I should endure it, I know that, it would carry me through."

"All the same it is rather weak," said Joachim, "that you are so attached to it. Behrens is perfectly right: you are a civilian. He probably meant it more as praise, but you are a hopeless civilian, that is the truth of it. Besides, you are healthy and can do as you like," he said, and his eyes grew tired.

"Yes, healthy apart from the anemia," said Hans Castorp. "It was rather rich, certainly, the way he told me I look green. But it is true; I have noticed it myself, that compared with you people up here I am positively green; at home I did not observe it so much. And then again it is very nice of him to give me advice so readily, quite _sine pecunia_, as he puts it. I am perfectly willing to make up my mind to do as he says and model myself altogether on your way of life - for what else indeed should I do among you up here, and after all it can do no harm if, in God's name, I put on some protein, though it sounds a little repulsive, you must grant me that."

Joachim coughed a few times as they walked - the climb seemed after all to tax him. When he set about it for the third time, he stopped with knitted brows. "Just go on ahead," he said. Hans Castorp hastened to walk on and did not look round. Then he slackened his pace and at last almost stood still, since it seemed to him that he must have gained a considerable lead on Joachim. But he did not look round.

A troop of guests of both sexes came toward him - he had seen them up above, halfway up the slope, coming along the level path; now they were tramping downward, straight toward him, and letting their various voices be heard. There were six or seven persons of mixed ages, some very young, a couple already somewhat further on in years. He looked them over with his head tilted to one side, while thinking of Joachim. They were bareheaded and brown, the ladies in coloured sweaters, the gentlemen for the most part without overcoats and even without sticks, like people who step a few paces outside the house without ceremony and with their hands in their pockets. Since they were going downhill, which requires no seriously sustaining exertion, but only a cheerful braking and bracing of the legs so as not to break into a run and stumble - indeed, really nothing more than letting oneself fall - their gait had something buoyant and reckless about it, which communicated itself to their expressions, to their whole appearance, so that one might well wish to belong among them.

Now they were with him, and Hans Castorp saw their faces clearly. They were not all sunburnt; two ladies stood out by reason of their pallor: one thin as a stick and ivory-faced, the other smaller and fat, disfigured by liver-spots. They all looked at him with one common, impudent smile. A tall young girl in a green sweater, with badly dressed hair and stupid, only half-open eyes, brushed close past Hans Castorp, almost touching him with her arm. And as she did so she whistled... No, that was madness! She whistled at him, only not with her mouth, which she did not purse at all; on the contrary, she kept it tightly shut. The whistling came out of her while she looked at him, stupidly and with half-closed eyes - an extraordinarily unpleasant whistling, harsh, sharp, and yet hollow, prolonged and falling in tone toward the end, so that it recalled the music of those fairground rubber piglets which plaintively let out the air blown into them and collapse; it issued somehow and incomprehensibly from her chest, and then she had passed on with her company.

Hans Castorp stood rigid and stared into the distance. Then he turned hastily round and at least grasped this much, that the abominable thing must have been a jest, a prearranged piece of teasing, for he saw by the shoulders of those moving away that they were laughing, and a squat young fellow with thick lips, who, with both hands in his trouser pockets, was holding his jacket hitched up in a rather unseemly fashion, even turned his head back toward him quite openly and laughed... Joachim had come up. He greeted the group, according to his chivalrous habit almost coming to attention and bowing with his heels drawn together, and then stepped, with a gentle look, to his cousin.

"Why ever that face?" he asked.

"She whistled!" answered Hans Castorp. "She whistled out of her belly as she passed me; will you explain that to me?"

"Oh," said Joachim, laughing dismissively. "Not out of her belly, nonsense. That was Kleefeld, Hermine Kleefeld; she whistles with the pneumothorax."

"With what?" asked Hans Castorp. He was extraordinarily agitated and did not quite know in what sense. He wavered between laughter and tears as he added: "You cannot expect me to understand your patois."

"Then do come on!" said Joachim. "I can perfectly well explain it to you as we walk. You are standing there as if rooted! It is something from surgery, as you may imagine, an operation frequently performed up here. Behrens has great practice in it... When one lung is very badly damaged, you understand, while the other is sound or comparatively sound, the diseased one is for a time dispensed from its activity, in order to spare it... That is to say: one is cut open here, somewhere at the side - I do not know the exact spot, but Behrens has a magnificent knack of it. And then gas is let into one, nitrogen, you know, and so the caseated lung is put out of action. Naturally the gas does not hold out long; every fortnight or so it has to be renewed - one gets, as it were, refilled, that is how you must picture it. And if that is done for a year or longer, and everything goes well, then through rest the lung may recover. Not always, of course; it is in fact a risky business. But they say fine results have already been achieved with pneumothorax. All those you just saw have it. Frau Iltis was there too - the one with the liver-spots - and Fräulein Levi, the thin one, you remember; she lay in bed so long. They have joined together, for naturally something like pneumothorax binds people together, and call themselves the 'Half-Lung Club'; by that name they are known. But the pride of the club is Hermine Kleefeld, because she can whistle with the pneumothorax - that is a gift of hers, not everyone can do it by any means. How she manages it, I cannot tell you either; she herself cannot describe it clearly. But when she has walked fast, then she can whistle out of her inside, and naturally she uses it to frighten people, especially newly arrived patients. I believe, by the way, that she wastes nitrogen in the process, for every eight days she has to be refilled."

Now Hans Castorp laughed; at Joachim's words his agitation had decided in favour of the cheerful, and as, while walking, he covered his eyes with his hand and bent forward, his shoulders were shaken by a quick, soft fit of giggling.

"Are they registered too?" he asked, and speaking did not come easily to him; from the laughter he was holding back, it sounded plaintive and softly wailing. "Have they statutes? It is a pity you are not a member too; then they might admit me as a guest of honour or as a... drinking companion... You ought to ask Behrens to put you partly out of action. Perhaps you too would be able to whistle, if you set your mind to it; after all, it must surely be something one can learn... It is the funniest thing I have heard in my life!" he said, heaving a deep sigh. "Yes, forgive me for speaking so of it, but they themselves are in the very best spirits, your pneumatic friends! The way they came along... And to think that it was the 'Half-Lung Club'! 'Tiuu,' she whistles at me - an extraordinary person! But that is sheer high spirits! Why are they so high-spirited? Tell me that, will you?"

Joachim sought for an answer. "Good Lord," he said, "they are so _free_... I mean, after all they are young people, and time plays no part for them, and then they may die. Why should they be making serious faces? I sometimes think: illness and dying are not really serious; they are more a sort of idling about. Strictly speaking, seriousness exists only in life down below. I believe that in time you will come to understand that, once you have been up here longer."

"Certainly," said Hans Castorp. "I am indeed quite sure of it. I have already conceived a very great interest in you people up here, and when one is interested, you know, understanding comes of itself... But whatever is the matter with me? It does not taste right!" he said, looking at his cigar. "All this time I have been asking myself what is wrong with me, and now I see that it is Maria that does not taste right to me. It tastes like papier-mache, I assure you; it is exactly as if one had a completely disordered stomach. It really is incomprehensible! To be sure, I ate an unusually large breakfast, but that cannot be the reason, for when one has eaten too much, it actually tastes particularly good at first. Do you suppose it may come from my having slept so restlessly? Perhaps that has put me out of order. No, I absolutely must throw it away!" he said after another attempt. "Every draw is a disappointment; there is no use in my forcing it." And after hesitating another moment, he threw the cigar down the slope among the damp pine-wood. "Do you know what, in my conviction, it is connected with?" he asked... "In my firm conviction it is connected with this confounded heat in my face, from which I have been suffering again ever since I got up. The devil knows, I keep feeling as if my face were crimson with shame... Did you have that too when you arrived?"

"Yes," said Joachim. "At first I felt rather strange too. Never mind it! I told you already that it is not so easy to settle in among us. But you will come right again. You see, the bench stands nicely. Let us sit down a bit and then go home; I have to take the rest cure."

The path had become level. It now ran in the direction of Davos Platz, about a third of the way up the slope, and afforded between tall, narrowly grown, wind-bent pines a view of the town, which lay whitish in a brighter light. The plainly timbered bench on which they sat leaned against the steep mountainside. Beside them water gurgled and splashed downhill in an open wooden trough.

Joachim wanted to instruct his cousin in the names of the cloud-wreathed Alpine summits that seemed to close the valley to the south, pointing them out with the tip of his mountain stick. But Hans Castorp glanced only fleetingly in that direction; he sat bent forward, tracing figures in the sand with the ferrule of his silver-mounted town cane, and wished to know something else.

"What I wanted to ask you -" he began... "So the patient in my room had only just died when I arrived. Have there been many other deaths since you have been up here?"

"Several certainly," answered Joachim. "But they are handled discreetly, you understand; one learns nothing of them, or only later and by chance; when someone dies, it is done in the strictest secrecy, out of consideration for the patients and especially also for the ladies, who would otherwise easily have fainting fits. If someone dies next to you, you do not notice it at all. And the coffin is brought in very early, while you are still asleep, and the person concerned is taken away only at such times too, for instance during meals."

"Hm," said Hans Castorp, and went on drawing. "So something of the sort goes on behind the scenes."

"Yes, one may say so. But lately - it is now, wait a moment, possibly eight weeks ago -"

"Then you cannot say lately," remarked Hans Castorp dryly and alertly.

"What? Then not lately. But you are exact. I only guessed the number. So some time ago I did once look behind the scenes, by pure chance; I remember it as if it were today. That was when they brought the little Hujus, a Catholic, Barbara Hujus, the Viaticum, the sacrament for the dying, you know, extreme unction. She was still up when I arrived here, and she could be uproariously merry, such a hoyden, very much like a schoolgirl. But then things went rapidly downhill with her; she did not get up again, she lay three rooms away from mine, and her parents came, and then the priest arrived. He came while everyone was at tea, in the afternoon; there was not a soul in the corridors. But just fancy, I had overslept; I had fallen asleep during the main rest cure and had not heard the gong, so that I was a quarter of an hour late. There I was, then, at the decisive moment not where everyone else was, but had got behind the scenes, as you say; and as I go along the corridor, there they come toward me, in lace surplices and with a cross in front, a golden cross with lanterns; one of them carried it in front as though it were the jingling staff before a Janissary band."

"That is no comparison," said Hans Castorp, not without severity.

"It struck me that way. I was involuntarily reminded of it. But just listen further. So they come toward me, march, march, at the double, three of them if I am not mistaken; in front the man with the cross, then the clergyman, spectacles on his nose, and then a boy with a censer. The clergyman held the Viaticum against his breast; it was covered, and he held his head rather humbly on one side, for it is their Most Holy."

"Precisely for that reason," said Hans Castorp. "Precisely for that reason I am surprised that you can bring yourself to speak of a jingling staff."

"Yes, yes. But just wait; if you had been there, you would not know either what sort of face you ought to make in remembering it. It was the kind of thing one might dream about -"

"In what respect?"

"In this way. So I ask myself how I am to behave in the circumstances. I had no hat on to take off -"

"There, you see!" Hans Castorp interrupted him quickly once more. "There, you see, that one ought to have a hat on! Naturally I noticed that none of you wear one up here. But one ought to put one on, so that one may take it off on occasions where it is proper. But what happened next?"

"I placed myself against the wall," said Joachim, "in a decent attitude, and bowed a little when they were abreast of me - it was just in front of little Hujus's room, number twenty-eight. I believe the clergyman was pleased that I greeted them; he thanked me very politely and took off his cap. But at the same time they are already stopping, and the altar-boy with the censer knocks, and then he lifts the latch and lets his chief go first into the room. And now imagine, and picture to yourself, my horror and what I felt! At the moment when the priest sets foot across the threshold, there breaks out in there such a hue and cry, such shrieking - you have never heard the like - three, four times in succession, and after that a screaming without pause or break, evidently from a wide-open mouth, ahhh; there was such misery in it and such terror and protest that it cannot be described, and in between there was such hideous pleading too, and all at once it becomes hollow and muffled, as though it had sunk into the earth and were coming from deep in the cellar."

Hans Castorp had turned violently toward his cousin. "Was that Hujus?" he asked, upset. "And what do you mean, 'from the cellar'?"

“She had crawled under the blanket!” said Joachim. “Imagine my feelings! The clergyman stood close to the threshold and spoke soothing words — I can see him still, he kept pushing his head forward and then drawing it back again. The cross-bearer and the acolyte were still standing in the doorway and could not get in. And I could see into the room between them. It is a room just like yours and mine, the bed stands to the left of the door against the side wall, and at the head of it stood people, the relatives of course, the parents, and they too talked down at the bed to quiet her; one saw nothing in it but a shapeless mass that begged and protested horribly and kicked with its legs.”

“You say she kicked with her legs?”

“With all her might! But it did her no good, she had to have the last sacrament. The priest went up to her, and the other two came in as well, and the door was drawn shut. But before that I still saw the Hujus girl's head come into view for a second, with tangled light-blond hair, and stare at the priest with wide-open eyes, such pale eyes, quite without colour, and with an Ah and an Ooh go back under the sheet.”

“And you tell me this only now?” said Hans Castorp after a pause. “I don't understand how you failed to come round to it yesterday evening already. But, good God, she must still have had a great deal of strength, the way she defended herself. That takes strength, after all. One ought not to send for the priest before a person is quite weak.”

“She was weak, too,” Joachim replied. “... Ah, there would be much to tell; it is hard to make the first choice among it all ... Weak she certainly was, it was only fear that gave her so much strength. She was simply terribly afraid, because she noticed that she was to die. She was a young girl, after all, so in the end one must excuse it. But men too sometimes carry on like that, which is of course an unpardonable slackness. Behrens knows how to handle them, by the way; he has the right tone in such cases.”

“What sort of tone?” asked Hans Castorp, drawing his brows together.

“‘Don't make such a fuss!’ he says,” answered Joachim. “At least that is what he said to one of them the other day — we know it from the head nurse, who was there and helped hold the dying man down. It was one of those who at the very last made a hideous scene and absolutely refused to die. Then Behrens rounded on him: ‘Kindly don't make such a fuss!’ he said, and at once the patient grew quiet and died quite peacefully.”

Hans Castorp slapped his hand on his thigh and flung himself against the back of the bench, looking up at the sky.

“Well, listen to that, it really is a bit thick!” he cried. “He goes at him and simply says to him: ‘Don't make such a fuss!’ To a dying man! That really is thick! A dying man is in a certain way venerable, after all. One cannot simply, just like that ... A dying man is so to speak sacred, I should think!”

“I don't want to deny it,” said Joachim. “But if he behaves in such a slack way after all ...”

“No!” Hans Castorp persisted, with a vehemence out of all proportion to the resistance offered him. “No one shall talk me out of it, that a dying man is something more noble than any lout who goes about laughing and earning money and stuffing his belly! It won't do —” and his voice wavered most strangely. “It won't do that one should simply, just like that —” and his words were smothered in the laughter that seized and overwhelmed him, yesterday's laughter, a deep-welling, body-shaking, boundless laughter that closed his eyes and pressed tears out from between his lids.

“Pst!” Joachim went suddenly. “Be quiet!” he whispered, and secretly nudged the helplessly laughing man in the side. Hans Castorp looked up through his tears.

Along the path from the left came a stranger, a slight, dark-haired gentleman with a handsomely twisted black moustache and light-checked trousers, who, having come up, exchanged a morning greeting with Joachim — his own was precise and melodious — and remained standing before him with crossed feet, leaning on his stick, in a graceful attitude.

Satana

His age would have been hard to guess; it must have lain somewhere between thirty and forty, for although his general appearance had a youthful effect, his hair was already shot with silver at the temples and noticeably thinned further up: two bald bays receded on either side of the narrow, sparse parting and heightened his forehead. His suit — those wide, light-yellowish checked trousers and a shaggy, over-long coat with two rows of buttons and very large lapels — was far from laying claim to elegance; his rounded, turned-down stand-up collar, too, showed itself already somewhat roughened at the edges from frequent laundering, his black cravat was worn, and evidently he wore no cuffs at all — Hans Castorp recognized it by the limp way in which the sleeves hung about his wrists. Nevertheless he saw clearly that he had a gentleman before him; the cultivated expression of the stranger's face, his free, indeed handsome bearing, left no doubt of it. But this mixture of shabbiness and grace, with black eyes into the bargain and the softly curving moustache, at once reminded Hans Castorp of certain foreign musicians who at Christmastime played in the courtyards at home and, with velvet eyes turned upward, held out their slouch hats so that ten-pfennig pieces might be thrown down to them from the windows. “A barrel-organ man!” he thought. And so he was not surprised at the name he was given to hear when Joachim rose from the bench and, with some embarrassment, introduced them:

“My cousin Castorp — Herr Settembrini.”

Hans Castorp had likewise risen in greeting, the traces of his excess of mirth still upon his face. But the Italian begged them both in courteous words not to let themselves be disturbed in their comfort, and pressed them back into their seats, while he himself remained standing before them in his agreeable pose. He smiled as he stood there and regarded the cousins, and Hans Castorp in particular, and that fine, somewhat mocking deepening and crimping of the one corner of his mouth beneath the full moustache, there where it curved upward in a handsome arc, was of peculiar effect: it enjoined, as it were, clarity of mind and alertness, and sobered the intoxicated Hans Castorp on the instant, so that he was ashamed. Settembrini said:

“The gentlemen are in high spirits — with reason, with reason. A splendid morning! The sky is blue, the sun is laughing —” and with a light and well-executed sweep of his arm he raised his small, yellowish hand toward the sky, while at the same time he sent a slanting, cheerful glance up there as well. “One might indeed forget where one finds oneself.”

He spoke without a foreign accent; only by the exactness of his articulation could one at most have recognized the foreigner. His lips formed the words with a certain relish. One listened to him with pleasure.

“And the gentleman has had a pleasant journey to us?” he turned to Hans Castorp ... “Is one already in possession of one's sentence? I mean: has the gloomy ceremony of the first examination already taken place?” — Here he would have had to fall silent and wait, if it had mattered to him to hear an answer; for he had put his question, and Hans Castorp was making ready to reply. But the stranger went straight on asking: “Did it turn out leniently? From your inclination to laughter —” and he was silent a moment, while the crimping of the corner of his mouth deepened, “divergent conclusions may be drawn. How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus clapped upon you?” — The word “clapped” took on a particularly droll air in his mouth. — “Shall I guess? Six? Or nine straight off? One is not stingy here ...”

Hans Castorp laughed in astonishment, while he tried to recall who Minos and Rhadamanthus had been again. He answered:

“But how do you mean? No, you are mistaken, Herr Septem—”

“Settembrini,” the Italian corrected, clearly and with a flourish, bowing humorously.

“Herr Settembrini — I beg your pardon. No, then, you are mistaken. I am not ill at all. I am only visiting my cousin Ziemßen for a few weeks and mean to take the opportunity to rest up a little as well —”

“Bless my soul, you are not one of us? You are healthy, you are only attending here as a guest, like Odysseus in the realm of shades? What boldness, to descend into the depths where the dead dwell void and senseless —”

“Into the depths, Herr Settembrini? I really must protest! Why, I have climbed a good five thousand feet up here to you —”

“That only seemed so to you! Upon my word, it was a delusion,” said the Italian with a decisive movement of his hand. “We are creatures who have sunk deep, are we not, Lieutenant?” he turned to Joachim, who was not a little pleased by this form of address, but sought to hide the fact and replied composedly:

“We really have grown somewhat simple, I suppose. But in the end one can pull oneself together again.”

“Yes, of you I believe it; you are a decent fellow,” said Settembrini. “So, so, so,” he said three times with a sharp s, turning again toward Hans Castorp, and then clicked his tongue as many times softly against his upper palate. “See, see, see,” he said thereupon, likewise three times and with a sharp s-sound, gazing so unwaveringly into the newcomer's face that his eyes fell into a fixed and sightless set; and then, enlivening his glance again, he continued:

“So you come up quite voluntarily to us who have come down in the world, and mean to grant us the pleasure of your company for a time. Well, that is fine. And what term have you in view? I do not ask delicately. But it would interest me to hear how much a man sentences himself to when he has the deciding of it himself and not Rhadamanthus!”

“Three weeks,” said Hans Castorp with a somewhat vain lightness, since he noticed that he was envied.

“_O dio_, three weeks! Did you hear that, Lieutenant? Is there not almost something impertinent in saying: I am coming here for three weeks and then travelling away again? We do not know the measure of the week, my dear sir, if I may instruct you. Our smallest unit of time is the month. We reckon in the grand style — that is a privilege of the shades. We have others, and they are all of a similar quality. May I ask what profession you practise down below in life — or more correctly, perhaps: for which one you are preparing yourself? You see, we lay no fetters upon our curiosity. Curiosity too we count among our privileges.”

“By all means,” said Hans Castorp. And he gave the information.

“A shipbuilder! But that is magnificent!” cried Settembrini. “Be assured that I find it magnificent, although my own capacities lie in another direction.”

“Herr Settembrini is a man of letters,” said Joachim by way of explanation, and somewhat embarrassed. “He wrote the obituary of Carducci for the German papers — Carducci, you know.” And he grew still more embarrassed, since his cousin looked at him in astonishment and seemed to say: And what do you know of Carducci? Just as little as I do, I should think.

“That is correct,” said the Italian with a nod of his head. “I had the honour of telling your countrymen of the life of that great poet and freethinker when it had come to its close. I knew him, I may call myself his pupil. In Bologna I sat at his feet. To him I owe whatever cultivation and cheerfulness I call my own. But we were speaking of you. A shipbuilder! Do you know that you are growing visibly in my eyes? You sit there of a sudden as the representative of a whole world of labour and of practical genius!”

“But Herr Settembrini — I am really still a student and am only just beginning.”

“Certainly, and every beginning is hard. Indeed, all work is hard that deserves the name, is it not?”

“Yes, the devil knows that!” said Hans Castorp, and it came from his heart.

Settembrini quickly raised his brows.

“You call even upon the devil,” he said, “to confirm it? Upon Satan in person? Do you know, too, that my great teacher addressed a hymn to him?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Hans Castorp, “to the devil?”

“To him himself. It is sung at times in my country, on festive occasions. _O salute, o Satana, o Ribellione, o forza vindice della Ragione ..._ A glorious song! But it was hardly this devil whom you had in mind, for he stands on excellent terms with work. The one you meant, and who abhors work because he has cause to fear it, is presumably that other one, of whom it is said that one should not give him one's little finger —”

All this had a very strange effect upon the good Hans Castorp. Italian he did not understand, and the rest was no more comfortable to him. It smacked of a Sunday sermon, although it was delivered in a light and jesting conversational tone. He looked at his cousin, who cast down his eyes, and then said:

“Oh, Herr Settembrini, you take my words far too exactly. That about the devil was only a manner of speaking of mine, I assure you!”

“Somebody must have wit,” said Settembrini, gazing melancholically into the air. But reviving again, brightening and turning gracefully aside, he went on:

“In any case I am surely right in concluding from your words that you have chosen there a profession as strenuous as it is honourable. Good God, I am a humanist, a homo humanus, I understand nothing of ingenious matters, sincere though the respect is that I pay you. But I can well imagine that the theory of your subject demands a clear and keen head, and its practice a whole man — is it not so?”

"Certainly it is so, yes, there I can agree with you unreservedly," answered Hans Castorp, involuntarily making an effort to speak with a little eloquence. "The demands are colossal nowadays, one had better not make it quite clear to oneself how severe they are, or one might truly lose heart. No, it is no joke. And when, into the bargain, one is not exactly the strongest ... I am only a guest here, but the strongest I am not precisely either, and I should be lying if I wished to maintain that working agrees with me so very excellently. On the contrary, it takes a good deal out of me, that I must say. Really well I only feel, actually, when I am doing nothing whatever——"

"Now, for example?"

"Now? Oh, now I am still so new up here — somewhat bewildered, as you can imagine."

"Ah, — bewildered."

"Yes, and I did not sleep quite properly either, and then the first breakfast was really too ample ... I am accustomed to a proper breakfast, to be sure, but today's was, it seems, too compact for me, _too rich_, as the English say. In short, I feel somewhat oppressed, and above all my cigar refused to taste right to me this morning — just imagine! That happens to me as good as never, only when I am seriously ill — and now today it tasted to me like leather. I had to throw it away, there was no point in my forcing it. Are you a smoker, if I may ask? No? Then you cannot imagine what a vexation and a disappointment that is for someone who from his youth up has been so particularly fond of smoking as I ..."

"I am without experience in this field," replied Settembrini, "and with this inexperience I find myself, moreover, in no bad company. A number of noble and sober spirits have abhorred smoking tobacco. Carducci, too, did not love it. But there you will find understanding with our Rhadamanthus. He is an adherent of your vice."

"Well — vice, Herr Settembrini ..."

"Why not? One must name things with truth and force. That strengthens and heightens life. I too have vices."

"And so Hofrat Behrens is a connoisseur of cigars? A charming man."

"You find him so? Ah, then you have already made his acquaintance?"

"Yes, a while ago, as we were setting out. It was almost something like a consultation, but _sine pecunia_, you know. He saw at once that I am rather anaemic. And then he advised me to live here exactly as my cousin does, to lie a great deal on the balcony, and I am to take my temperature along with him at once, he said."

"Really?" cried Settembrini ... "Excellent!" he cried up into the air, leaning back with a laugh. "How does it go in the opera of your master? 'A birdcatcher am I indeed, forever merry, heigh-ho, hop-sa-sa!' In short, that is most amusing. You will follow his advice? Doubtless. How should you not. A devil of a fellow, this Rhadamanthus! And truly 'forever merry', even if at times a little forcedly so. He inclines to melancholy. His vice does not agree with him — otherwise, moreover, it would be no vice — smoking tobacco makes him melancholy, which is why our venerable Frau Oberin has taken his supplies into safekeeping and doles out to him only small daily rations. It is said to happen that he succumbs to the temptation to steal from them, and then he falls prey to melancholy. In a word: a confused soul. Do you know our Oberin already too? No? But that is a fault! You do wrong not to sue for her acquaintance. Of the lineage of those von Mylendonk, my dear sir! From the Medicean Venus she is distinguished by this, that where the goddess has her bosom, she is in the habit of wearing a cross ..."

"Ha, ha, excellent!" laughed Hans Castorp.

"Her Christian name is Adriatica."

"That too?" cried Hans Castorp ... "Listen, that is remarkable! Von Mylendonk, and then Adriatica. It sounds as though she must long since have been dead. It has downright a mediaeval air about it."

"My esteemed sir," answered Settembrini, "there is a good deal here that 'has a mediaeval air', as you are pleased to express it. I for my part am convinced that our Rhadamanthus made this fossil the head overseer of his palace of terrors purely and simply out of an artistic feeling for style. For he is an artist — you did not know that? He paints in oils. What would you, it is not forbidden, is it, everyone is free to do so ... Frau Adriatica tells everyone who cares to hear it, and the others as well, that in the middle of the thirteenth century a Mylendonk was abbess of a convent at Bonn on the Rhine. She herself cannot have beheld the light of the world much after that date ..."

"Ha, ha, ha! But I find you mocking, Herr Settembrini."

"Mocking? You mean: malicious. Yes, malicious I am a little——," said Settembrini. "My sorrow is that I am condemned to squander my malice upon such wretched objects. I hope you have nothing against malice, Engineer? In my eyes it is the most brilliant weapon of reason against the powers of darkness and of ugliness. Malice, my dear sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism signifies the origin of progress and of enlightenment." And in a trice he began to speak of Petrarch, whom he called the "father of the modern age."

"But we must go to the rest cure now," said Joachim circumspectly.

The man of letters had accompanied his words with graceful movements of the hand. Now he rounded off this play of gesture with a motion that pointed to Joachim, and said:

"Our lieutenant urges us to duty. Let us go, then. We have the same way — 'to the right, which strives upward toward the walls of Dis the mighty'. Ah, Virgil, Virgil! Gentlemen, he is unsurpassed. I believe in progress, certainly. But Virgil commands epithets such as no modern possesses ..." And as they set out on the way home he began to declaim Latin verses in Italian pronunciation, but broke off when some young girl, a daughter of the little town, as it seemed, and by no means particularly pretty, came toward them, and betook himself to a rakish smiling and trilling. "T, t, t," he clicked his tongue. "Ei, ei, ei! La, la, la! You sweet little beetle, will you be mine? Just look, 'her eye sparkles with a slippery light'——," he quoted — God knew what it was — and sent a kiss of the hand after the girl's embarrassed back.

That is a regular windbag, thought Hans Castorp, and he abode by that opinion, too, when Settembrini, after his gallant fit, began again to talk scandal. Chiefly he had it in for Hofrat Behrens, gibed at the size of his feet, and dwelt upon his title, which he had received from a prince suffering from tuberculosis of the brain. Of that prince's scandalous manner of life the whole region spoke to this day, but Rhadamanthus had shut one eye, both eyes, every inch a Hofrat. Did the gentlemen know, by the way, that he was the inventor of the summer season? Yes, he and no other. Honour where honour is due. Formerly only the most faithful of the faithful had held out in this valley through the summer. Then "our humorist" had recognized with incorruptible acuteness that this grievance was nothing but the fruit of a prejudice. He had set up the doctrine that, at least so far as _his_ institution came into question, the summer cure was not only not less to be recommended, but even particularly efficacious and downright indispensable. And he had known how to get this theorem abroad among people, had composed popular articles upon it and launched them into the press. Since then business went as briskly in summer as in winter. "Genius!" said Settembrini. "In-tu-i-tion!" said he. And then he ran through the remaining sanatoriums of the place and praised in biting fashion the acquisitive sense of their proprietors. There was Professor Kafka ... Every year, at the critical season of the thaw, when many patients demanded to depart, Professor Kafka found himself compelled to go away quickly for another week, promising to see to the discharges after his return. But then he stayed away six weeks, and the poor wretches waited, whereby, be it noted in passing, their bills grew larger. Kafka was sent for as far as Fiume, but he would not travel before five thousand good Swiss francs had been guaranteed, over which a fortnight passed. Then, a day after the arrival of the celebrissimo, the patient died. As for Doctor Salzmann, he said of Professor Kafka that he did not keep his syringes clean enough and gave the patients mixed infections. He drove on rubber tyres, said Salzmann, so that his dead should not hear him — whereupon Kafka in turn asserted that at Salzmann's the patients were pressed to accept "the vine's exhilarating gift" in such quantities — namely, likewise for the rounding-out of their bills — that the people died like flies, and indeed not of phthisis, but of drinker's liver ...

So it went on, and Hans Castorp laughed heartily and good-naturedly at this torrent of glib slanders. The Italian's flow of talk sounded peculiarly agreeable in its unconditional purity and correctness, free of every dialect. The words came firm, neat, and as though newly created from his mobile lips; he relished the cultivated, bitingly nimble turns and forms of which he availed himself, indeed even the grammatical inflection and declension of the words, with an evident satisfaction that communicated itself and put one in a cheerful humour, and he seemed far too clear and present of mind ever once to misspeak himself.

"You speak so drolly, Herr Settembrini," said Hans Castorp, "so vividly — I do not know what I should call it."

"Plastically, is it not?" the Italian returned, fanning himself with his handkerchief, although it was rather cool. "That will be the word you are seeking. I have a plastic manner of speaking, you mean to say. But stop!" he cried. "What do I see! There walk our judges of hell! What a sight!"

The walkers had already put the bend of the road behind them once more. Whether it was to be thanked to Settembrini's discourse, to the downward slope of the road, or whether they had in truth gone less far from the sanatorium than Hans Castorp had believed — for a way that we go for the first time is considerably longer than the same way when we already know it —: in any case the march back had gone by with surprising speed. Settembrini was right, it was the pair of physicians who were striding down there across the open ground along the rear side of the sanatorium, in front the Hofrat in his white coat, with his neck jutting out and his hands moving like oars, on his track Dr. Krokowski in his black smock, and looking about him all the more self-consciously in that clinical usage obliged him to keep behind the chief on his rounds.

"Ah, Krokowski!" cried Settembrini. "There he goes and knows all the secrets of our ladies. Pray observe the delicate symbolism of his dress. He goes clad in black in order to intimate that his most peculiar field of study is the night. That man has but one thought in his head, and it is a dirty one. Engineer, how does it come about that we have not yet spoken of him at all! You have made his acquaintance?"

Hans Castorp affirmed it.

"Well, and? I am beginning to suspect that he too pleased you."

"I really do not know, Herr Settembrini. I have as yet only met him in passing. And then, too, I am not very quick of judgment. I look at people and think: So that is what you are? Very well then."

"That is dullness of mind!" answered the Italian. "Judge! For that nature has given you eyes and understanding. You found that I spoke maliciously; but if I did so, it happened perhaps not without a pedagogic intention. We humanists all have a pedagogic vein ... Gentlemen, the historical connection between humanism and pedagogy proves their psychological one. One should not take from the humanist the office of education — one cannot take it from him, for with him alone is the tradition of the dignity and beauty of man. Once he relieved the priest, who in gloomy and misanthropic times was permitted to arrogate to himself the guidance of youth. Since then, gentlemen, absolutely no new type of educator has arisen. The humanistic Gymnasium — call me reactionary, Engineer, but in principle, _in abstracto_, I beg you to understand me rightly, I remain its adherent ..."

He continued to expound this even in the lift, and fell silent only when the cousins left the elevator on the second floor. He himself rode on up to the third, where, as Joachim related, he inhabited a small room looking out to the rear.

"He has no money, then?" asked Hans Castorp, who was accompanying Joachim. Things looked exactly the same at Joachim's as over in his own room.

"No," said Joachim, "that he probably has not. Or only just so much as to be able to defray his stay here. His father was a man of letters as well, you know, and I believe the grandfather too."

"Yes, well then," said Hans Castorp. "Is he actually seriously ill?"

"It is not dangerous, so far as I know, but obstinate, and it keeps coming back. He has had it for years now and was away once in between, but soon had to report back again."

"Poor fellow! And he seems so enthusiastic about working. Tremendously talkative he is withal, he passes so easily from the one thing to the other. With the girl he was rather forward, it embarrassed me for the moment. But what he said afterwards about human dignity sounded capital, quite as at a ceremonial occasion. Are you often together with him?"

Sharpness of Thought

But Joachim could answer only in a hampered and indistinct fashion. He had taken from a red leather case lined with velvet, which lay on his table, a small thermometer, and had put the lower end, filled with mercury, into his mouth. He held it under his tongue on the left side, so that the glass instrument protruded from his mouth slanting upward. Then he made his indoor toilet, put on shoes and a jacket of the litewka sort, took a printed chart from the table together with a pencil, and further a book, a Russian grammar — for he was pursuing Russian, because, as he said, he hoped for professional advantage from it — and thus equipped he took his place outside on the balcony in the reclining chair, throwing a camel-hair blanket only lightly over his feet.

It was hardly needed: already during the last quarter of an hour the layer of cloud had grown thinner and thinner, and the sun broke through, so summery warm and dazzling that Joachim shielded his head with a white linen sunshade which, by means of a small and ingenious contrivance, could be fastened to the arm of the chair and adjusted according to the position of the sun. Hans Castorp praised this invention. He wanted to await the result of the measurement and meanwhile looked on at how everything was done; he examined too the fur sack that leaned in a corner of the loggia (Joachim made use of it on cold days), and, his elbows on the balustrade, looked down into the garden, where the common rest hall was now peopled with patients stretched out reading, writing and chatting. One saw, moreover, only a part of the interior, some five chairs.

"But how long does it take, then?" asked Hans Castorp, and turned round.

Joachim held up seven fingers.

"They must surely be up — seven minutes!"

Joachim shook his head. Somewhat later he took the thermometer out of his mouth, looked at it, and said as he did so:

"Yes, when one keeps watch on it, on time, then it passes very slowly. I am really rather fond of the measuring, four times a day, because in doing it one notices what a minute actually is, or even a whole seven of them — up here, where one knocks the seven days of the week about one's ears so frightfully."

"You say 'actually'. You cannot say 'actually'," Hans Castorp rejoined. He sat with one thigh on the balustrade, and the whites of his eyes were veined with red. "Time is not 'actually' anything at all. If it seems long to one, then it is long, and if it seems short to one, then it is short, but how long or short it is in reality, nobody knows." He was by no means accustomed to philosophizing, and nevertheless felt the urge to do so.

Joachim contradicted him.

"How so? No. We do measure it, after all. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month is up, then it is up for you and for me and for all of us."

"Then pay attention," said Hans Castorp, and even held his forefinger up beside his bleary eyes. "A minute, then, is as long as it seems to you while you are taking your temperature?"

"A minute is as long ... it _lasts_ as long as the second hand needs in order to describe its circle."

"But it needs quite different lengths of time — for our feeling! And in fact ... I say: taken in fact," repeated Hans Castorp, and pressed his forefinger so hard against his nose that he bent its tip completely over, "that is a motion, a motion in space, is it not? Stop, wait! So we measure time by means of space. But that is precisely the same as if we wished to measure space by time — which after all only quite unscientific people do. From Hamburg to Davos is twenty hours — yes, by railway. But on foot, how long is it then? And in thought? Not a second!"

"Listen," said Joachim, "what is the matter with you? I believe it is telling on you here with us?"

"Be quiet! My head is very sharp today. What, then, is time?" asked Hans Castorp, and bent the tip of his nose so violently to one side that it turned white and bloodless. "Will you tell me that for once? Space we perceive with our organs, with the sense of sight and the sense of touch. Very well. But which is our organ of time? Will you just point that out to me? You see, there you are stuck fast. But how are we to measure something of which, strictly speaking, we can state absolutely nothing, not a single property! We say: time runs on. Very well, let it run on, then. But in order to be able to measure it ... wait! In order to be measurable, it would have to run on _uniformly_, and where is it written that it does so? For our consciousness it does not, we assume that it does merely for the sake of order, and our measures are after all mere convention, permit me for once ..."

"Good," said Joachim, "then it is presumably mere convention too that I have four marks too many here on my thermometer! But on account of these five marks I have to lounge about up here and cannot do my service; that is a disgusting fact!"

"Have you 37.5?"

"It is going down again already." And Joachim made the entry on his chart. "Yesterday evening it was almost 38; that was your arrival. Everyone who gets a visitor has a rise. But it is a blessing all the same."

"I am going now too," said Hans Castorp. "I still have a quantity of thoughts about time in my head — it is a whole complex, I may well say. But I do not want to excite you with it now, since you have too many marks in any case. I shall retain it all, and we can come back to it later, perhaps after breakfast. When it is breakfast time you will call me, I suppose. I too am going into the rest cure now; it does not hurt, thank God." And with that he went past the glass partition over into his own loggia, where likewise a deck chair with a little table had been set up, fetched "_Ocean steamships_" and his beautiful, soft plaid rug checked in dark red and green from the neatly tidied room, and settled himself down.

He too had very soon to put up the sunshade; as soon as one lay down, the burning of the sun became unbearable. But one lay quite uncommonly comfortably, as Hans Castorp at once established with pleasure — he could not remember that so agreeable a deck chair had ever come his way. The frame, a little old-fashioned in form — which, however, was mere playfulness of taste, for the chair was plainly new — consisted of reddish-brown polished wood, and a mattress with a soft, calico-like cover, in fact composed of three high cushions, reached from the foot end up over the back. Besides this there was fastened to it, by means of a cord, a neck roll, neither too firm nor too yielding, with an embroidered linen cover, which was of a particularly beneficial effect. Hans Castorp propped one arm on the broad, smooth surface of the side rest, blinked and rested, without calling upon "_Ocean steamships_" for his entertainment. Seen through the arches of the loggia, the harsh and barren but brightly sunlit landscape outside had the effect of a painting, and as though framed. Hans Castorp contemplated it thoughtfully. Suddenly something occurred to him, and he said aloud into the silence:

"It was a dwarf woman, was it not, who waited upon us at first breakfast."

"Hush," said Joachim. "Not so loud. Yes, a dwarf woman. And?"

"Nothing. We had not spoken about it at all yet."

And then he went on dreaming. It had already been ten o'clock when he lay down. An hour passed. It was an ordinary hour, not long, not short. When it had elapsed, a gong sounded through house and garden, first far off, then nearer, then far off again.

"Breakfast," said Joachim, and one heard that he was getting up.

Hans Castorp too ended the rest cure for this time and went into the room to make himself a little presentable. The cousins met in the corridor and went down. Hans Castorp said:

"Well, the lying was excellent. What sort of chairs are those, then? If they are to be had here, I shall take one back with me to Hamburg; one lies upon it as though in heaven. Or do you think that Behrens has had them made expressly to his own specifications?"

Joachim did not know. They laid aside their things and entered the dining hall for the second time, where the meal was already in full swing again.

The hall shimmered white with sheer milk: at every place stood a large glass, a good half-litre full.

"No," said Hans Castorp, when he had again taken his place at his end of the table between the seamstress and the Englishwoman and had resignedly unfolded his napkin, although he was still so heavily laden from first breakfast. "No," he said, "God help me, I cannot drink milk at all, and least of all now. Is there perhaps no porter to be had?" And it was to the dwarf woman that he turned first, politely and delicately, with this question. Unfortunately there was none. But she promised to bring Kulmbach beer, and brought it too. It was thick, black, brown-foaming, and made the best of substitutes for porter. Hans Castorp drank of it thirstily from a tall half-litre glass. With it he ate cold sliced meats on toast. Once more porridge had been set out, and once more much butter and fruit. He at least let his eyes rest upon it, since he was not capable of taking any of it. He also observed the company of guests — the masses were beginning to divide for him; individual persons stood out.

His own table was complete, save for the upper place opposite him, which, as he had himself instructed, was the doctor's place. For the physicians, whenever their time in any way permitted, took part in the common meals and changed tables in doing so: at the head of every one such a doctor's place was kept free. Just now neither of the two was present; it was said that they were at an operation. Again the young man with the moustache came in, sank his chin once upon his breast, and sat down with a careworn, closed expression. Again the fair, thin one sat in her place and spooned up yoghurt as though this were her only food. Beside her this time sat a little, sprightly old lady who talked away in the Russian tongue at the silent young man, who looked at her sorrowfully and answered in no other way than by nodding his head, making meanwhile that face as though he had something bad-tasting in his mouth. Opposite him, on the other side of the old lady, another young girl was placed — pretty she was, of blooming complexion and high bosom, with chestnut-brown hair pleasantly arranged in waves, round, brown, childlike eyes, and a small ruby on her lovely hand. She laughed a great deal and likewise spoke Russian, nothing but Russian. Her name was Marusja, as Hans Castorp heard. Furthermore he noticed in passing that Joachim, with a stern expression, cast down his eyes whenever she laughed and talked.

Settembrini appeared through the side entrance and strode, curling his moustache, to his place, which lay at the end of the table that stood obliquely in front of Hans Castorp's. His table companions burst into ringing laughter as he sat down; probably he had said something malicious. The members of the "Half-Lung Club" too Hans Castorp recognized again. Hermine Kleefeld, with vacant eyes, made her way over to her table there beyond, in front of one of the veranda doors, and greeted the thick-lipped youth who a while ago had so unbecomingly hitched up his jacket. The ivory-coloured Levi sat beside the fat and liver-spotted Iltis among strangers at the table standing crosswise to the right of Hans Castorp.

"There are your neighbours," said Joachim softly to his cousin, leaning forward ... The couple passed close by Hans Castorp to the last table on the right, the "Bad Russian table", that is, where a family with an ugly boy was already devouring great heaps of porridge. The man was slightly built and had grey and hollow cheeks. He wore a brown leather jacket and on his feet clumsy felt boots with buckle fastenings. His wife, likewise small and dainty, in a bobbing feathered hat, tripped along on tiny little high-heeled boots of Russia leather; a soiled boa of birds' feathers lay about her neck. Hans Castorp observed the two with a want of consideration that was otherwise foreign to him and that he himself felt to be brutal; yet it was precisely the brutality of it that suddenly afforded him a certain pleasure. His eyes were at once dull and intrusive. When at that same moment the glass door on the left fell shut, crashing and rattling as at first breakfast, he did not start as he had that morning, but only made a sluggish grimace; and when he wished to turn his head in that direction, he found that this cost him far too much effort and that it was not worth the trouble. Thus it came about that this time too he did not arrive at the discovery of who it was that handled the door so slovenly.

The fact of the matter was that the breakfast beer, which otherwise had only a moderately befogging effect upon his constitution, today stupefied and paralysed the young man completely — it brought forth consequences as though he had received a blow on the forehead. His eyelids were as heavy as lead, his tongue did not properly obey the simplest thought when out of politeness he attempted to chat with the Englishwoman; even to alter the direction of his gaze demanded a great effort of self-command, and there was this besides, that the abominable burning of his face had now fully attained yesterday's degree again: his cheeks seemed to him swollen with heat, he breathed heavily, his heart pounded like a muffled hammer, and if he did not suffer particularly under all this, it was because his head was in such a condition as though he had taken two or three breaths of chloroform. That Dr. Krokowski did after all appear at breakfast and take his place at his table, opposite him, he noticed only as in a dream, although the doctor repeatedly fixed him with a sharp eye while he conversed in Russian with the ladies on his right — whereupon the young girls, namely the blooming Marusja as well as the thin yoghurt-eater, submissively and bashfully cast down their eyes before him. For the rest, Hans Castorp bore himself honourably, as goes without saying; since his tongue showed itself refractory, he preferred to keep silent, and handled knife and fork with even a particular decorum. When his cousin nodded to him and rose, he stood up as well, bowed blindly to his table companions, and went out behind Joachim with a firm step.

"When is there rest cure again?" he asked, as they left the house. "That is the best thing here, so far as I can see. I wish I were lying again on my excellent chair. Are we going far on our walk?"

One Word Too Many

"No," said Joachim, "far I am not permitted to go at all. At this hour I always go a little way down, through the village and as far as Platz, if I have time. One sees shops and people and buys what one needs. One lies down for another hour before the midday meal, and then one lies again until four o'clock — be quite easy about it."

They went down the drive in the sunshine and crossed the watercourse and the narrow track, the mountain shapes of the right-hand slope of the valley before their eyes: the "Kleines Schiahorn", the "Grüne Türme", and the "Dorfberg", which Joachim named by name. Over there, at some height, lay the walled cemetery of Davos-Dorf — Joachim pointed this out as well with his stick. And they gained the main street, which, raised by one storey above the floor of the valley, ran along the terraced slope.

There could, incidentally, scarcely be any talk of a village; in any case, nothing of it remained but the name. The health resort had devoured it, continually expanding toward the entrance of the valley, and that part of the whole settlement which was called “Dorf” merged imperceptibly and indistinguishably into the part designated “Davos Platz.” Hotels and boarding houses, all amply furnished with covered verandas, balconies, and rest-cure galleries, as well as small private houses in which rooms were to let, stood on either side; here and there were new buildings; at times, too, the development ceased, and the road afforded a view over the valley’s open meadowlands ...

Hans Castorp, in his longing for the familiar, beloved stimulus of life, had lit another cigar, and, probably thanks to the beer he had drunk, was able, to his inexpressible satisfaction, to catch here and there something of the aroma he yearned for: only rarely and faintly, to be sure—it required a certain nervous exertion to receive even an intimation of pleasure, and the abominable taste of leather remained overwhelmingly predominant. Unable to reconcile himself to his impotence, he struggled for a while after the enjoyment that either denied itself to him altogether or showed itself only mockingly, as a distant intimation, and at last, wearied and disgusted, threw the cigar away. Despite his dazed condition, he felt under an obligation of politeness to make conversation, and for that purpose tried to recall the excellent things he had earlier had to say about “time.” But it proved that he had forgotten the entire “complex” without remainder and no longer harboured the slightest thought about time in his head. Instead, he began to speak of bodily matters, and in a somewhat peculiar fashion.

“When do you take your temperature again?” he asked. “After the meal? Yes, that is a good time. The organism is in full activity then; whatever there is must show itself. Behrens’s asking me to take mine as well was surely only a joke, listen—Settembrini laughed at it at the top of his lungs; it would make absolutely no sense. I do not even have a thermometer.”

“Well,” said Joachim, “that would be the least difficulty. You need only buy one. Thermometers are to be had everywhere here, in almost every shop.”

“But what for! No, I do not mind the rest cure; I am quite willing to join in with that, but taking my temperature would be too much for a mere visitor—I think I shall leave that to you people up here. If only I knew,” Hans Castorp continued, bringing both hands to his heart like a lover, “why I have had such palpitations all this time—it is so disquieting; I have been wondering about it for quite a while. You see, one’s heart pounds when some extraordinary joy lies ahead, or when one is frightened—in short, when one is emotionally stirred, does it not? But when one’s heart begins pounding entirely of its own accord, without cause or meaning and, so to speak, on its own account, I find that positively uncanny; understand me, it is as if the body were going its own ways and no longer had any connection with the soul, rather like a dead body, which is not really dead either—there is no such thing—but even leads a very lively life, namely on its own account: its hair and nails continue to grow, and besides that, physically and chemically, as I have been told, an exceedingly brisk activity is supposed to prevail within it ...”

“What expressions you use,” said Joachim, reproving him with deliberation. “A brisk activity!” And perhaps in doing so he was taking a little revenge for the rebuke he had received that morning on account of the “bell-tree.”

“But that is how it is! It _is_ an exceedingly brisk activity! Why should you take offence at that?” Hans Castorp asked. “Besides, I mentioned it only in passing. All I meant to say was that it is uncanny and tormenting when the body lives on its own account, without any connection with the soul, and makes itself important, as it does with palpitations that have no motive. One positively searches for a meaning for them, for an emotion that belongs to them, some feeling of joy or fear by which they might, so to speak, be justified—at least that is how it is with me; I can speak only for myself.”

“Yes, yes,” said Joachim with a sigh, “I suppose it is rather like having a fever—then, too, an especially ‘brisk activity’ prevails in the body, to use your expression, and it may well be that one involuntarily looks about for some emotion, as you say, that will give the activity a halfway reasonable meaning ... But we are talking such unpleasant stuff,” he said in a trembling voice, and broke off; whereupon Hans Castorp merely shrugged his shoulders, in precisely the manner in which he had first seen Joachim do so the previous evening.

They walked on in silence for a while. Then Joachim asked:

“Well, how do you like the people here? I mean those at our table?”

Hans Castorp assumed an indifferently appraising expression.

“Good heavens,” he said, “they do not strike me as very interesting. I believe there are more interesting people sitting at the other tables, though perhaps it only seems that way. Frau Stöhr ought to have her hair washed; it is so greasy. And that Mazurka there, or whatever her name is, strikes me as rather silly. She is forever stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth because she cannot stop giggling.”

Joachim laughed aloud at the mangling of the name.

“‘Mazurka’ is excellent!” he cried. “Her name is Marusja, if you please—which is the same as Marie. Yes, she really is too high-spirited,” he said. “And yet she has every reason to be more sedate, for she is by no means slightly ill.”

“One would never think so,” said Hans Castorp. “She is in such fine shape. She certainly does not look consumptive.” And he tried to exchange a jaunty glance with his cousin, but found that Joachim’s sunburnt face had taken on the mottled colouring assumed by sunburnt faces when the blood drains from them, and that his mouth had twisted in a peculiarly piteous fashion—into an expression that inspired a vague alarm in young Hans Castorp and caused him at once to change the subject and inquire about other persons, while hastening to forget Marusja and the expression on Joachim’s face, in which he succeeded completely.

The Englishwoman with the rose-hip tea was called Miss Robinson. The seamstress was not a seamstress at all, but a teacher at a state secondary school for girls in Königsberg, and this was the reason she expressed herself so correctly. Her name was Fräulein Engelhart. As for the lively old lady, Joachim himself did not know her name, long though he had already been up here. In any event she was the great-aunt of the young girl who ate yoghurt and with whom she lived permanently at the sanatorium. But the sickest of those at the table was Dr. Blumenkohl, Leo Blumenkohl from Odessa—the young man with the moustache and the careworn, guarded expression. He had been up here for whole years already ...

They were now walking on an urban pavement—the main street of an international meeting place, as was plain to see. Strolling patients passed them, mostly young people: gentlemen in sporting clothes and without hats, ladies likewise hatless and wearing white skirts. Russian and English could be heard. Shops with elegant display windows lined both sides of the street, and Hans Castorp, whose curiosity was fiercely contending with his burning weariness, forced his eyes to see and lingered for a long time before a gentleman’s outfitter in order to establish that its display was thoroughly up to date.

Then came a rotunda with a covered gallery, in which an orchestra was giving a concert. This was the Kurhaus. Matches were in progress on several tennis courts. Long-legged, clean-shaven young men in sharply pressed flannel trousers, with rubber-soled shoes and bare forearms, were playing against tanned girls dressed in white, who, running forward, stretched steeply upward in the sunlight to strike the chalk-white ball high out of the air. A haze like flour dust hung over the well-kept playing grounds. The cousins sat down on an empty bench to watch the play and criticize it.

“I suppose you do not play here?” Hans Castorp asked.

“I am not allowed to,” Joachim replied. “We have to lie down, always lie down ... Settembrini is forever saying that we live horizontally—that we are horizontals, he says; it is one of his feeble jokes. The people playing there are healthy, or else they are doing it against orders. In any case, they do not play very seriously—more for the sake of the costumes ... And as for things being forbidden, there are other forbidden games played here: poker, you understand, and in one hotel or another _petits chevaux_ as well. At our place the penalty is expulsion; it is supposed to be the most harmful thing of all. But some people still run down after the evening inspection to place their bets. The prince from whom Behrens received his title is said to have done it all the time too.”

Hans Castorp scarcely heard him. His mouth stood open, for he could not breathe properly through his nose, although he did not have a cold. His heart hammered out of time with the music, which he dimly perceived as tormenting. And amid this sensation of disorder and discord he began to fall asleep, until Joachim urged that they go home.

They made their way back almost without speaking. Hans Castorp even stumbled a few times on the level road and smiled ruefully at it, shaking his head. The limping attendant took them up to their floor in the lift. They parted outside number thirty-four with a brief “Goodbye.” Hans Castorp steered through his room and out onto the balcony, where, just as he was, he dropped into the reclining chair and, without adjusting the position in which he had fallen, sank into a heavy half-slumber, painfully animated by the rapid beating of his heart.

Naturally, a Woman!

How long this lasted he did not know. When the appointed time came, the gong sounded. But it did not yet summon them directly to the meal; it merely warned them to make ready, as Hans Castorp knew, and so he remained lying there until the metallic booming swelled and receded a second time. When Joachim came through the room to fetch him, Hans Castorp wanted to change his clothes, but Joachim would no longer permit it. He hated and despised unpunctuality. How did one expect to make progress and recover sufficiently to return to duty, he said, if one was too feeble even to keep to mealtimes? In this, of course, he was right, and Hans Castorp could only point out that he was not ill, but was, on the other hand, sleepy in the highest degree. He merely washed his hands in haste; then they went down to the dining hall for the third time.

The guests streamed in through both entrances. They came through the veranda doors over there as well, which stood open, and soon they were all seated at the seven tables as though they had never risen from them. This, at least, was Hans Castorp’s impression—a purely dreamlike and irrational impression, of course, which his clouded head was nevertheless unable to resist for a moment and in which he even took a certain pleasure; for several times during the meal he tried to call it back to mind, with the result of achieving complete self-deception. The lively old lady was again addressing Dr. Blumenkohl, who sat diagonally opposite her, in her blurred mode of speech, while he listened with a worried expression. Her thin great-niece was at last eating something other than yoghurt, namely the smooth _Crème d’orge_ that the dining-room girls had served in soup plates; yet she took only a few spoonfuls and then left it standing. The pretty Marusja stuffed her little handkerchief, which exhaled a perfume of oranges, into her mouth to stifle her giggles. Miss Robinson was reading the same letters, written in a rounded hand, that she had read that morning. Evidently she knew not a word of German and had no desire to know any. With a chivalrous bearing, Joachim said something to her in English about the weather, which she answered in chewing monosyllables before relapsing into silence. As for Frau Stöhr in her Scottish woollen blouse, she had been examined that morning and gave an account of it, affecting coyness in an uncultivated fashion and drawing her upper lip back from her rabbit teeth. At the upper right, she complained, she had a noise; moreover, beneath the left armpit the sound was still considerably shortened, and “the Old Man” had said that she must remain another five months. In her lack of cultivation she called Hofrat Behrens “the Old Man.” She also displayed indignation that “the Old Man” was not sitting at her table today. According to the “tournee” (she presumably meant the rota), it was her table’s turn at midday today, whereas “the Old Man” was once again sitting at the neighbouring table on the left—(and Hofrat Behrens was indeed sitting there, folding his enormous hands before his plate). But then, of course, that was where fat Frau Salomon from Brussels had her place, who came to meals low-cut every day of the week, and “the Old Man” evidently found that pleasing, although she, Frau Stöhr, could not understand why, since at every examination he could see as much of Frau Salomon as he pleased. Later she related in an agitated whisper that the previous evening the light had been put out in the upper communal rest-cure gallery—the one situated on the roof—and for purposes which Frau Stöhr described as “transparent.” “The Old Man” had noticed and had thundered so loudly that he could be heard throughout the establishment. But naturally he had once again failed to discover the culprits, although one did not need to have studied at a university to guess that it had, of course, been that Captain Miklosich from Bucharest, for whom it could never be dark enough in female company—a man devoid of any and all cultivation, although he wore a corset, and in his essential nature simply a beast of prey—yes, a beast of prey, Frau Stöhr repeated in a stifled voice, as sweat broke out upon her forehead and upper lip. The relations in which Frau Consul-General Wurmbrand from Vienna stood to him were known throughout Dorf and Platz—one could scarcely continue to speak of _mysterious_ relations. For not only did the captain sometimes come to the Consul-General’s room in the morning while she was still in bed, whereupon he would remain throughout her entire toilette, but on the previous Tuesday he had not _left_ Frau Wurmbrand’s room until four o’clock in the morning—the nurse attending young Franz in number nineteen, whose pneumothorax had recently gone wrong, had caught him at it herself and, overcome with shame, had missed the door she was seeking, so that she suddenly found herself in the room of Public Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund ... Finally, Frau Stöhr held forth at some length about a “cosmic establishment” down in the town where she bought her mouthwash—Joachim stared rigidly down at his plate ...

The luncheon was both masterfully prepared and abundant in the highest degree. Including the nourishing soup, it consisted of no fewer than six courses. The fish was followed by a substantial meat dish with accompaniments, then a separate platter of vegetables, roast poultry after that, a sweet no less delicious than the one served the previous evening, and finally cheese and fruit. Every dish was passed twice—and not in vain. Plates were filled and food consumed at all seven tables—a lion’s appetite prevailed beneath the vaulting, a ravenous hunger that might have been a pleasure to behold had it not at the same time produced an effect somehow uncanny, indeed repulsive. It was displayed not only by the lively ones, who chattered and pelted one another with little balls of bread, but also by the silent and gloomy, who in the intervals propped their heads in their hands and stared. A half-grown creature at the neighbouring table on the left, a schoolboy to judge by his years, with sleeves too short and thick, perfectly circular spectacle-lenses, cut everything he heaped upon his plate beforehand into a mash and medley; then bent over it and devoured, from time to time thrusting his napkin behind his spectacles to wipe his eyes—one could not tell what there was to dry, whether sweat or tears.

Two incidents occurred during the great meal and aroused Hans Castorp’s attention, so far as his condition permitted. First, the glass door slammed again—it was during the fish. Hans Castorp started in exasperation and then told himself with angry fervour that this time he absolutely must identify the culprit. He did not merely think it; he formed the words with his lips, so grave was his concern. I must know! he whispered with exaggerated passion, so that both Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress looked at him in astonishment. And as he did so, he turned the whole upper part of his body to the left and opened wide his blood-engorged eyes.

It was a lady who was crossing the dining-room, a woman—or rather, probably, a young girl—only of medium height, in a white sweater and coloured skirt, with reddish-blond hair simply braided and wound about her head. Hans Castorp saw little of her profile, almost nothing. She walked without a sound, which stood in curious contrast to the noise of her entrance, walked with a peculiarly stealthy tread and her head somewhat thrust forward towards the last table on the left, which stood at right angles to the veranda door—the “Good Russian Table,” that is—keeping one hand in the pocket of her close-fitting woollen jacket, while the other she raised to the back of her head to support and arrange her hair. Hans Castorp looked at this hand—he had a keen sense and a critical eye for hands, and was accustomed, upon making a new acquaintance, to direct his attention first to that part of the body. The hand supporting the hair was not especially ladylike, not so tended and refined as women’s hands were wont to be in young Hans Castorp’s social sphere. Rather broad and short-fingered, it had something primitive and childlike about it, something of a schoolgirl’s hand; its nails evidently knew nothing of manicure, but were cut plainly and honestly, likewise as a schoolgirl’s might be, and along their edges the skin appeared somewhat roughened, almost as though the little vice of nail-biting were practised here. Hans Castorp, however, perceived this more by intuition than by actually seeing it—the distance was, after all, too great. The latecomer greeted her table companions with a nod and, as she took her seat on the inner side of the table, with her back to the room and beside Dr. Krokowski, who presided there, she turned her head over her shoulder, her hand still at her hair, and surveyed the company—whereupon Hans Castorp fleetingly observed that she had broad cheekbones and narrow eyes.... A vague memory of something and someone lightly and momentarily touched him when he saw this....

Naturally—a female! thought Hans Castorp, and once again he expressly muttered it to himself, so that the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, understood what he said. The meagre old maid smiled with emotion.

“That is Madame Chauchat,” she said. “She is so careless. An enchanting woman.” And as she spoke, the downy flush upon Fräulein Engelhart’s cheeks deepened by a shade—which, incidentally, always happened as soon as she opened her mouth.

“French?” Hans Castorp asked sternly.

“No, she is Russian,” said Engelhart. “Perhaps her husband is French, or of French descent; I do not know for certain.”

Hans Castorp, still irritated, asked whether _that_ man over there might be the husband, pointing to a gentleman with drooping shoulders at the Good Russian Table.

Oh no, he was not here, the schoolmistress replied. Indeed, he had never yet been here and was wholly unknown.

“She ought to shut the door properly!” said Hans Castorp. “She always lets it slam. It is thoroughly ill-mannered.”

And since the schoolmistress received the rebuke with a humble smile, as though she herself were the guilty party, nothing further was said of Madame Chauchat.—

The second occurrence consisted in Dr. Blumenkohl’s temporarily leaving the dining-room—that was all. Suddenly the faintly disgusted expression on his face intensified; he gazed at some point more anxiously than usual, then pushed back his chair with an unassuming movement and went out. Here, however, Frau Stöhr’s gross lack of cultivation displayed itself in its fullest light, for, probably out of vulgar satisfaction that she was less ill than Blumenkohl, she accompanied his departure with comments half pitying, half contemptuous. “Poor man!” she said. “He will soon be breathing his last. He has to confer with the Blue Henry again already.” Without the least effort to overcome herself, and with an obstinately ignorant expression, she brought the grotesque name “the Blue Henry” across her lips, and Hans Castorp felt a mixture of horror and an impulse to laugh when she said it. Dr. Blumenkohl, however, returned after a few minutes in the same unassuming attitude in which he had gone out, resumed his seat, and continued eating. He too ate a great deal, twice of every dish, silently and with an anxiously closed expression.

Then luncheon was over: thanks to skilful service—for the dwarf in particular was a creature of strangely nimble feet—it had lasted only a little over an hour. Hans Castorp, breathing heavily and scarcely knowing how he had come upstairs, was once more lying in the excellent chair in his balcony-box, for after the meal came rest cure until tea—the most important one of the day, indeed, and to be strictly observed. Between the opaque glass partitions separating him from Joachim on the one side and the Russian married couple on the other, he lay drowsing with a pounding heart and drew breath through his mouth. When he used his handkerchief, he found it reddened with blood, but had not the strength to consider the matter, although he was somewhat anxious about himself and by nature a little inclined to hypochondriacal fancies. He had lit another Maria Mancini and this time smoked it to the end, whether it tasted as it ordinarily did or not. Dizzy, oppressed, and dreamily bemused, he reflected how very strangely things were going with him up here. Twice or thrice his breast was shaken by inward laughter at the ghastly name Frau Stöhr had employed in her ignorance.

Herr Albin

Down in the garden, the fanciful banner bearing the serpent-staff lifted now and then in a breath of wind. The sky had once more become uniformly overcast. The sun was gone, and at once the air had turned almost inhospitably cool. The communal rest hall appeared to be fully occupied; conversation and giggling prevailed down there.

“Herr Albin, I implore you, put away that knife, put it in your pocket—there will be an accident with it!” lamented a high, tremulous feminine voice. And:

“My dear Herr Albin, for God’s sake, spare our nerves and take that dreadful instrument of murder out of our sight!” a second voice interposed—whereupon a fair-headed young man who, with a cigarette in his mouth, sat sideways upon the foremost reclining-chair, replied in an insolent tone:

“Not a bit of it! Surely the ladies will permit me to play a little with my knife! Yes, certainly, it is an exceptionally sharp knife. I bought it in Calcutta from a blind magician.... He could swallow it, and immediately afterwards his boy dug it out of the ground fifty paces away.... Would you like to see? It is far sharper than a razor. One need only touch the edge, and it goes into one’s flesh as though through butter. Wait, I shall show it to you more closely....” And Herr Albin stood up. A chorus of shrieks arose. “No, now I shall fetch my revolver!” said Herr Albin. “That will interest you more. A positively devilish thing. Such penetrating power.... I shall fetch it from my room.”

“Herr Albin, Herr Albin, do not do it!” several voices clamoured. But Herr Albin had already emerged from the rest hall to go to his room—mere youth, loose-limbed and lanky, with a rosy child’s face and narrow strips of whisker beside his ears.

“Herr Albin,” a lady called after him, “fetch your paletot instead, put it on, do it for my sake! You lay ill with pneumonia for six weeks, and now you sit here without an overcoat and do not even cover yourself, and smoke cigarettes! That is tempting God, Herr Albin, upon my honour!”

But he merely laughed scornfully as he went, and after only a few minutes he returned with the revolver. At that they shrieked even more foolishly than before, and one could hear that several of them tried to leap from their chairs, became entangled in their blankets, and fell.

“You see how small and bright it is,” said Herr Albin, “but when I press here, it bites....” A fresh outcry. “It is loaded with live ammunition, naturally,” Herr Albin continued. “The six cartridges are lodged in this cylinder here, which turns one chamber farther with every shot.... Incidentally, I do not keep the thing for amusement,” he said when he noticed that the effect was wearing off; he slipped the revolver into his breast pocket and sat down again upon his chair with one leg crossed over the other, lighting a fresh cigarette. “By no means for amusement,” he repeated, compressing his lips.

“Then what for? What for?” asked voices trembling with apprehension. “Horrible!” one voice suddenly cried, and Herr Albin nodded.

“I see you are beginning to understand,” he said. “Indeed, that is what I keep it for,” he continued lightly, after drawing in a quantity of smoke, despite his recent pneumonia, and blowing it out again. “I keep it ready for the day when this whole tedious business becomes too boring for me and I shall have the honour of most respectfully taking my leave. The matter is fairly simple.... I have devoted some study to it and am quite clear in my own mind as to the best way of managing it. (At the word ‘managing,’ a cry rang out.) The region of the heart is out of the question.... I cannot quite apply the muzzle comfortably there.... Besides, I prefer to extinguish consciousness upon the spot, namely by introducing such a pretty little foreign body into this interesting organ....” And Herr Albin pointed with his forefinger to his close-cropped blond skull. “One must apply it here—” Herr Albin drew the nickel-plated revolver from his pocket once more and tapped his temple with the muzzle—“here, above the artery.... Even without a mirror it is a straightforward affair....”

A many-voiced, imploring protest arose, into which even violent sobbing mingled.

“Herr Albin, Herr Albin, put away the revolver, take the revolver from your temple—it is unbearable to look at! Herr Albin, you are young, you will recover, you will return to life and enjoy universal popularity, upon my honour! Only put on your coat, lie down, cover yourself, take your cure! Do not drive the bath attendant away again when he comes to rub you down with alcohol! Give up cigarette-smoking, Herr Albin; listen, we beg for your life, your young and precious life!”

But Herr Albin was inexorable.

“No, no,” he said, “leave me be, it is all right, I thank you. I have never refused a lady anything, but you must see that there is no use putting a spoke in the wheel of fate. I am in my third year here.... I am sick of it and will play along no longer—can you blame me? Incurable, ladies—look at me as I sit here: I am incurable—the Hofrat himself scarcely troubles any longer to conceal it, except for form’s sake. Allow me the little measure of licence that follows for me from that fact! It is like school, when it had been settled that one was to be kept back, and one was no longer called upon and had nothing more to do. I have now finally attained that happy condition once again. I need do nothing more, I no longer count, I laugh at the whole affair. Would you like some chocolate? Help yourselves! No, you are not depriving me; I have masses of chocolate in my room. Eight boxes of chocolates, five bars of Gala Peter, and four pounds of Lindt chocolate are up there—all of it sent to me by the ladies of the sanatorium during my pneumonia....”

From somewhere a bass voice called for quiet. Herr Albin gave a short laugh—a fluttering, abruptly broken laugh. Then silence fell in the rest hall, so complete a silence that it was as though a dream or apparition had dissolved; and the words that had been spoken echoed strangely in the stillness. Hans Castorp listened to them until they had wholly died away, and although he had a vague impression that Herr Albin was a coxcomb, he could not suppress a certain envy of him. That simile drawn from school life had particularly impressed him, for he himself had once been kept back in the lower second form, and he well remembered the somewhat disgraceful but humorous and agreeably neglected condition he had enjoyed when, in the fourth term, he had abandoned the race and been able to “laugh at the whole affair.” Since his reflections were dull and confused, it is difficult to define them precisely. Principally it seemed to him that honour possessed considerable advantages, but that disgrace had no fewer—indeed, that the advantages of the latter were of a positively boundless kind. And as, by way of experiment, he put himself in Herr Albin’s condition and imagined what it must be like to be finally rid of the pressure of honour and to enjoy for ever the bottomless advantages of disgrace, the young man was startled by a sensation of desolate sweetness that for a time excited his heart to an even more hurried pace.

Satan Makes Dishonourable Proposals

Later he lost consciousness. According to his pocket watch it was half past three when conversation behind the glass partition on his left awoke him: Dr. Krokowski, who at this hour made the rounds without the Hofrat, was speaking Russian there with the ill-mannered couple, inquiring, as it seemed, after the husband’s condition and asking to see his temperature chart. But then he did not continue on his way through the balcony loggias; instead, he made a circuit around Hans Castorp’s compartment, returning to the corridor and entering Joachim’s room through the door. That he should thus be given a wide berth and passed over was, after all, felt by Hans Castorp as somewhat hurtful, although he had certainly no desire for a private interview with Dr. Krokowski. Of course, he was healthy and therefore did not count—for up here, he thought, matters were so ordered that whoever had the honour of being healthy was of no account and was not consulted; and this vexed young Castorp.

After Dr. Krokowski had remained with Joachim for two or three minutes, he proceeded along the balcony, and Hans Castorp heard his cousin say that they could now get up and prepare for afternoon tea. “Very well,” he said, and rose. But the long spell of lying down had made him extremely dizzy, and the cheerless half-sleep had once more heated his face painfully, while otherwise he was inclined to shiver—perhaps he had not covered himself warmly enough.

He washed his eyes and hands, put his hair and clothes in order, and joined Joachim in the corridor.

“Did you hear that Herr Albin?” he asked as they descended the stairs ...

“Naturally,” said Joachim. “The man ought to be disciplined. Disturbing the entire midday rest with his chatter and agitating the ladies so badly that he sets them back by weeks. A gross act of insubordination. But who wants to play informer? Besides, most people welcome that sort of talk as entertainment.”

“Do you think it possible,” Hans Castorp asked, “that he will carry out his ‘clean and simple business,’ as he calls it, and introduce a foreign body into himself?”

“Oh, yes,” Joachim replied, “it is not altogether impossible. Such things do happen up here. Two months before I came, a student who had already been here a long time hanged himself in the woods over there after a general examination. There was still a great deal of talk about it during my first days.”

Hans Castorp yawned in agitation.

“Yes, I do not feel well here among you,” he declared, “I cannot claim that I do. I think it possible that I may not be able to stay—that I shall have to leave, you know. Would you still hold it against me?”

“Leave? Whatever are you thinking of!” cried Joachim. “Nonsense. When you have only just arrived. How can you judge by the first day?”

“Good God, is it still only the first day? I feel exactly as though I had been up here with you for a long—long time.”

“Now do not start brooding over time again!” said Joachim. “You made me thoroughly confused this morning.”

“No, set your mind at rest, I have forgotten everything,” Hans Castorp replied. “The whole complex. My mind is no longer in the least sharp either; that is over ... And now there is tea.”

“Yes, and afterward we shall walk back to the bench from this morning.”

“In God’s name. But I hope we do not meet Settembrini again. I am incapable of taking part in any cultivated conversation today, I warn you beforehand.”

In the dining-room every beverage that could conceivably come into question at this hour was being poured. Miss Robinson was once again drinking her blood-red rose-hip tea, while the great-niece ate yoghurt with a spoon. There were milk, tea, coffee, chocolate, even meat broth besides, and everywhere the guests, who had spent two hours lying down since the sumptuous midday meal, were busily spreading butter upon large slices of raisin cake.

Hans Castorp had ordered tea and dipped rusks into it. He also tried a little jam. He examined the raisin cake closely, but literally shuddered at the thought of eating any. Once more he sat in his place in the hall with its simple-minded, brightly coloured vaulting and its seven tables—for the fourth time. A little later, at seven o’clock, he sat there for the fifth time, and then it was a matter of dinner. Into the interval, which was brief and insubstantial, fell a walk to that bench against the mountainside, beside the trickling water—the path was now thickly populated by patients, so that the cousins frequently had to exchange greetings—and another rest cure on the balcony, lasting a fleeting and empty hour and a half. Hans Castorp shivered violently throughout it.

For dinner he changed his clothes conscientiously and then, seated between Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress, ate julienne soup, baked and roasted meats with their accompaniments, two pieces of a cake containing everything imaginable: macaroon pastry, buttercream, chocolate, fruit purée, and marzipan, and some very good cheese on pumpernickel. Once more he ordered a bottle of Kulmbach beer with it. But when he had emptied half his tall glass, he recognized clearly and distinctly that he belonged in bed. His head was roaring, his eyelids were like lead, his heart beat like a little kettledrum, and, to his torment, he imagined that pretty Marusja, leaning forward and concealing her face in the hand with the little ruby, was laughing at _him_, although he had made such strenuous efforts to give her no occasion whatever for doing so. As though from a great distance he heard Frau Stöhr relating or asserting something that seemed to him such outrageous nonsense that he fell into confused doubt as to whether his hearing was still sound, or whether Frau Stöhr’s utterances were perhaps being transformed into absurdity inside his head. She declared that she knew how to prepare twenty-eight different fish sauces—she had the courage to vouch for it, although her own husband had warned her against speaking of the matter. “Do not speak of it!” he had said. “No one will believe you, and if they do believe you, they will find it ridiculous!” And yet today, for once, she meant to say it and openly confess that there were twenty-eight fish sauces she knew how to make. This seemed dreadful to poor Hans Castorp; he started, put a hand to his forehead, and entirely forgot to finish chewing and swallow a mouthful of pumpernickel and Chester cheese that he had in his mouth. It was still there when they rose from the table.

They went out through the glass door on the left, that fatal door which always slammed shut and led directly into the front hall. Almost all the guests took this route, for it appeared that at the hour after dinner a species of social life took place in the hall and the adjoining salons. The majority of the patients stood about conversing in small groups. Games were in progress at two folding tables covered in green baize: dominoes at one and bridge at the other, where only young people were playing, among them Herr Albin and Hermine Kleefeld. There were also several entertaining optical devices in the first salon: a stereoscopic peep-show, through whose lenses one beheld the photographs mounted within it—a Venetian gondolier, for example—in rigid and bloodless corporeality; secondly, a telescope-shaped kaleidoscope, to whose lens one applied an eye in order, merely by lightly manipulating a wheel, to conjure up brightly coloured stars and arabesques in magical succession; and finally a revolving drum into which strips of cinematographic film were placed and through whose apertures, if one looked in from the side, one could observe a miller fighting with a chimney-sweep, a schoolmaster chastising a boy, a leaping tightrope-walker, and a peasant couple dancing the Ländler. Hans Castorp, his cold hands upon his knees, looked for some time into each of the devices. He also lingered awhile at the bridge table, where the incurable Herr Albin handled the cards with drooping corners of the mouth and airily disdainful gestures of a man of the world. In one corner sat Dr. Krokowski, engaged in fresh and cordial conversation with a semicircle of ladies that included Frau Stöhr, Frau Iltis, and Fräulein Levi. The occupants of the Good Russian table had withdrawn into the adjoining smaller salon, separated from the games room only by portières, and there formed an intimate clique. Besides Madame Chauchat, they comprised a languid gentleman with a blond beard, a concave chest, and bulging eyeballs; a deeply brunette girl of an original and humorous type, with gold earrings and a tangled mass of woolly hair; Dr. Blumenkohl, who had joined them; and two other young men with sloping shoulders. Madame Chauchat wore a blue dress with a white lace collar. She sat, the centre of her group, upon the sofa behind the round table at the rear of the little room, her face turned toward the games room. Hans Castorp, who could not regard the ill-mannered woman without disapproval, thought to himself: She reminds me of something, but I cannot say what ... A tall man of about thirty, with thinning hair, played the wedding march from the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” three times in succession upon the little brown pianoforte; and when several ladies asked him to play it again, he began the melodious piece for the fourth time, after gazing deeply and silently into the eyes of each in turn.

“May one inquire after your health, Engineer?” asked Settembrini, who had been strolling among the guests with his hands in his trouser pockets and now stepped before Hans Castorp ... He was still wearing his grey, napped coat and his light checked trousers. He smiled as he addressed him, and once again Hans Castorp experienced something like a sobering sensation at the sight of that finely and mockingly curled corner of the mouth beneath the curve of the black moustache. For the rest, he stared at the Italian rather stupidly, his mouth slack and his eyes veined with red.

“Oh, it is you,” he said. “The gentleman from our morning walk, whom we met by that bench up there ... beside the watercourse ... Naturally, I recognized you at once. Would you believe,” he continued, although he well understood that he ought not to have said it, “that for the first instant then I took you for an organ-grinder? ... That was of course sheer nonsense,” he added, seeing that Settembrini’s gaze had assumed an expression of cool scrutiny, “a frightful piece of stupidity, in a word! Indeed, it is utterly incomprehensible even to me how in the world I could ...”

“Do not distress yourself; it is of no consequence,” Settembrini replied, after silently contemplating the young man for another moment. “And how, then, have you passed your day—the first of your sojourn at this pleasure resort?”

“Very well, thank you. Entirely according to regulations,” Hans Castorp replied. “Predominantly in the ‘horizontal manner,’ as I am told you are fond of calling it.”

Settembrini smiled.

“It may be that I have occasionally expressed myself in those terms,” he said. “Well, and did you find this mode of life diverting?”

“Diverting and tedious, whichever you please,” Hans Castorp replied. “At times it is difficult to distinguish between the two, you know. I was by no means bored—the life you lead up here is far too animated for that. One hears and sees so many novel and remarkable things ... And yet, on the other hand, I feel as though I had been here not merely one day but for quite a long time—as though I had actually grown older and wiser here already; that is how it seems to me.”

“Wiser as well?” said Settembrini, raising his brows. “Will you permit me the question: how old are you, in fact?”

But behold, Hans Castorp did not know! At that moment he did not know how old he was, despite violent, indeed desperate efforts to recollect. To gain time, he asked for the question to be repeated and then said:

“... I ... how old? I am in my twenty-fourth year, of course. I shall soon be twenty-four. Forgive me, I am tired!” he said. “And tiredness does not begin to describe my condition. Do you know the feeling when one is dreaming and knows that one is dreaming and tries to wake, yet cannot wake? That is precisely how I feel. I absolutely must have a fever; I can explain it to myself in no other way. Would you believe that my feet are cold all the way up to my knees? If one may put it like that, for naturally the knees are no longer part of the feet—forgive me, I am confused to the highest degree, and after all it is scarcely surprising when one is assailed first thing in the morning with ... with the pneumothorax, and afterward listens to the speeches of that Herr Albin, and in a horizontal position into the bargain. Just imagine, I constantly feel as though I could no longer quite trust my five senses, and I must say that embarrasses me even more than the heat in my face and the cold feet. Tell me candidly: do you think it possible that Frau Stöhr knows how to make twenty-eight fish sauces? I do not mean whether she can actually make them—I consider that out of the question—but whether she really did claim as much at table just now, or whether it only seemed so to me—that is all I should like to know.”

Settembrini looked at him. He seemed not to have listened. Once again his eyes had “stared themselves fixed,” had fallen into a fixed and sightless attitude, and, as that morning, he said “so, so, so” and “indeed, indeed, indeed,” three times each—mockingly reflective and with a sharp sibilance.

“Twenty-four, you said?” he then asked ...

“No, twenty-eight!” said Hans Castorp. “Twenty-eight fish sauces! Not sauces in general, but fish sauces in particular—that is the monstrous part.”

“Engineer!” said Settembrini, angrily and admonishingly. “Collect yourself and spare me this disreputable nonsense! I know nothing of it and wish to know nothing of it.—In your twenty-fourth year, you said? Hm ... permit me one further question, or an unassuming suggestion, if you prefer. Since your stay appears not to agree with you, since you seem to be unwell among us both physically and, unless I am wholly mistaken, in spirit as well—how would it be if you renounced the prospect of growing older here; in short, if you packed your things again this very night and tomorrow took yourself off by one of the scheduled express trains?”

“You mean I ought to leave?” Hans Castorp asked ... “When I have only just arrived? But no—how can I judge by the first day?”

As he spoke, his eyes happened to fall upon the adjoining room, where he saw Frau Chauchat from the front, her narrow eyes and broad cheekbones. What, he thought, what and whom in all the world does she remind me of? But despite some effort, his weary head could find no answer to the question.

“Naturally it is not altogether easy for me to acclimatize myself up here among you,” he continued, “that was surely to be expected; and to throw up the sponge at once, merely because I may be a little confused and feverish for a few days—why, I should be ashamed of myself, I should feel downright cowardly, and besides, it would be contrary to all reason—no, say so yourself . . .”

All at once he spoke with great urgency, moving his shoulders excitedly, and seemed intent on inducing the Italian formally to withdraw his proposal.

“I salute reason,” Settembrini replied. “And, incidentally, I salute courage as well. What you say is certainly worthy of a hearing; it would be difficult to raise any cogent objection to it. Indeed, I have observed some truly splendid cases of acclimatization. Last year, for instance, there was Fräulein Kneifer, Ottilie Kneifer, of an excellent family, the daughter of a high-ranking government official. She had been here for some eighteen months and had settled in so admirably that, when her health was completely restored—for that does happen, one occasionally recovers one’s health up here—even then she would not leave at any price. She implored the Hofrat with all her heart to let her remain; she could not and would not go home, she said; here was her home, here she was happy. But as there was a heavy demand for accommodation and her room was needed, her entreaties were in vain, and they persisted in discharging her as cured. Ottilie developed a high fever; she made her chart rise most creditably. But they unmasked her by exchanging the usual thermometer for a ‘Silent Sister’—you do not yet know what that is: it is a thermometer without a scale; the physician checks it by laying a measure against it and then draws the curve himself. Ottilie, my dear sir, had 36.9; Ottilie was free of fever. So she bathed in the lake—it was early May at the time, we were having night frosts, and the lake was not precisely ice-cold; strictly speaking, it stood a few degrees above freezing. She remained in the water for a good while, in the hope of contracting this or that—but the result? She was healthy and remained so. She departed in grief and despair, deaf to her parents’ words of comfort. ‘What am I to do down below?’ she cried repeatedly. ‘Here is my home!’ I do not know what became of her . . . But it seems to me that you are not listening, Engineer? Unless I am entirely mistaken, you are having some difficulty keeping on your feet. Lieutenant, here is your cousin!” he said, turning to Joachim, who had just come up. “Take him to bed! He combines reason with courage, but this evening he is a little indisposed.”

“No, really, I understood everything!” Hans Castorp protested. “So the Silent Sister is merely a column of mercury, without any scale at all—you see, I have grasped it perfectly!” But then he did go upstairs with Joachim in the lift, together with several other patients—the evening’s sociability was over, the company dispersed and repaired to lounges and loggias for the evening rest cure. Hans Castorp accompanied Joachim to his room. Beneath his feet, the corridor floor with its coconut-fibre runner performed gentle undulations, but he did not find them particularly unpleasant. He sat down in Joachim’s large flowered armchair—there was one just like it in his own room—and lit a Maria Mancini. It tasted of glue, coal, and many other things, but not as it ought; nevertheless he went on smoking it as he watched Joachim prepare for the rest cure, putting on his Lithuanian-looking house jacket, drawing an old overcoat over it, and then carrying his bedside lamp and Russian exercise book out onto the balcony, where he switched on the little lamp and, with the thermometer in his mouth, began wrapping himself with astonishing dexterity in two large camel-hair blankets spread over the reclining chair. Hans Castorp watched with genuine admiration at the skill with which he accomplished it. He folded the blankets over himself one after the other, first lengthwise from the left up beneath his armpit, then from below over his feet, and finally from the right, so that in the end he formed a perfectly regular, smooth parcel, from which only his head, shoulders, and arms emerged.

“You do that splendidly,” said Hans Castorp.

“It comes with practice,” Joachim replied, holding the thermometer firmly between his teeth as he spoke. “You will learn it too. Tomorrow we absolutely must get you a couple of blankets. You can use them again down below, and up here they are indispensable, especially since you have no fur sleeping-bag.”

“But I am not going to lie on the balcony at night,” Hans Castorp declared. “I shall not do it, I warn you now. It would seem altogether too peculiar to me. Everything has its limits. And after all, I must somehow make it clear that I am only visiting you up here. I shall sit here a little longer and smoke my cigar, as is proper. It tastes abominable, but I know that it is good, and that will have to suffice me for today. It is nearly nine now—though unfortunately, to be exact, it is not even nine yet. But once it is half past nine, matters will have reached the point where one can go to bed at something approaching a normal hour.”

A shudder of cold ran through him—one, and then several more in rapid succession. Hans Castorp sprang up and hurried to the thermometer on the wall, as though bent on catching it _in flagranti_. By Réaumur the room stood at nine degrees. He felt the pipes and found them dead and cold. He muttered something incoherent to the effect that, August though it might be, it was a disgrace that there was no heating, for what mattered was not the name of the month one happened to be writing, but the prevailing temperature, and that was such as to make him freeze like a dog. Yet his face was burning. He sat down again, rose once more, murmured a request for permission to take Joachim’s bedcover, and, seated in the chair, spread it over the lower half of his body. Thus he sat, feverish and shivering, tormenting himself with the repulsively flavoured cigar. A great sense of misery came over him; he felt as though never in his life had he fared so badly. “This is sheer misery!” he muttered. Yet in the midst of it he was suddenly touched by an extraordinarily extravagant feeling of joy and hope, and after experiencing it he remained sitting there merely to wait and see whether it might not return. But it did not return; only the misery remained. And so at last he rose, tossed Joachim’s cover back onto the bed, muttered through a contorted mouth something like “Good night!” and “Mind you don’t freeze to death!” and “You’ll come and fetch me for breakfast, I suppose,” and staggered across the corridor to his own room.

As he undressed he sang softly to himself, though not from cheerfulness. Mechanically and without proper attention, he performed the little manipulations and civilized duties of his nightly toilet, poured pale-red mouthwash from his travelling flask into a glass and gargled discreetly, washed his hands with his fine, mild violet soap, and put on the long batiste nightshirt embroidered with the letters H C on the breast pocket. Then he lay down and extinguished the light, letting his hot, distracted head fall back upon the American woman’s death-pillow.

He had expected with the utmost certainty to sink immediately into sleep, but this proved a miscalculation; and his eyelids, which earlier he had scarcely been able to keep open, now refused altogether to remain closed, but flew open with restless twitchings whenever he lowered them. It was not yet his accustomed bedtime, he told himself, and besides, he had probably lain down too much during the day. Moreover, someone was beating a carpet outside—which was hardly likely and was, in fact, not happening at all; it proved instead to be his heart, whose beating he heard outside himself and far away in the open air, exactly as though a carpet were being thrashed out there with a plaited cane beater.

The room had not yet grown entirely dark; the glow from the little lamps outside in the loggias—Joachim’s and those of the couple from the Bad Russian table—fell through the open balcony door. And as Hans Castorp lay on his back, his eyelids blinking, an impression suddenly recurred to him, one isolated impression of the day, an observation he had at once tried, in alarm and delicacy of feeling, to forget. It was the expression Joachim’s face had assumed when Marusja and her physical attributes had been mentioned—that quite peculiarly plaintive distortion of his mouth, together with the blotchy paling of his sun-browned cheeks. Hans Castorp understood and saw through what it meant, understood and saw through it in so novel, searching, and intimate a fashion that the cane beater outside doubled its strokes both in speed and force, and almost drowned the strains of the evening serenade at the “Platz”—for there was another concert at that hotel down below; a symmetrically constructed and insipid operetta tune sounded across through the darkness, and Hans Castorp whistled along with it under his breath (for it is possible to whistle in a whisper), while beneath the feather bedcover his cold feet beat time.

That, of course, was not the proper way to fall asleep, and Hans Castorp now felt no inclination to do so at all. Ever since he had understood in so novel and vivid a fashion why Joachim had changed colour, the world had seemed new to him, and that feeling of extravagant joy and hope touched him once more in his innermost being. Besides, he was still waiting for something, without properly asking himself what. But when he heard the neighbours to right and left ending their evening rest cure and seeking their rooms, exchanging the horizontal position outside for the horizontal position within, he expressed to himself the conviction that the barbarous married couple would keep the peace. I can go quietly to sleep, he thought. They will keep the peace this evening; I expect it with the utmost certainty! But they did not; nor had Hans Castorp honestly thought they would—indeed, to tell the truth, he personally, for his own part, would not even have understood them if they had kept the peace. Nevertheless, he indulged in voiceless exclamations of the most vehement astonishment at what he heard. “Outrageous!” he cried without a sound. “This is enormous! Who could have thought such a thing possible?” And in between he once more joined, with whispering lips, in the insipid operetta melody that came sounding stubbornly across.

Later, slumber came. But with it came tangled dream-images, even more tangled than those of the first night, from which he frequently started up in fright or in pursuit of some confused notion. He dreamed that he saw Hofrat Behrens wandering along the garden paths with bent knees and arms hanging stiffly forward, adapting his long and somehow desolate-looking strides to distant marching music. When the Hofrat stopped before Hans Castorp, he was wearing spectacles with thick, perfectly circular lenses and babbled incoherently. “A civilian, of course,” he said, and without asking permission pulled down Hans Castorp’s eyelid with the index and middle fingers of his enormous hand. “An honourable civilian, as I noticed at once. But not without talent, by no means without talent for heightened general combustion! Wouldn’t stint the years, the brisk little years of service up here with us! Well then, hop to it, gentlemen, and off we go promenading!” he cried, thrusting both his enormous index fingers into his mouth and whistling upon them with such peculiarly melodious effect that the schoolmistress and Miss Robinson came flying through the air from different directions in diminutive form and perched upon his shoulders, one on the right and one on the left, just as they sat to the right and left of Hans Castorp in the dining hall. Thus the Hofrat went bounding away, while reaching behind his spectacles with a napkin to wipe his eyes—though no one knew what there was to dry, whether sweat or tears.

Then it seemed to the dreamer that he was in the school courtyard where for so many years he had spent the intervals between lessons, and was on the point of borrowing a pencil from Madame Chauchat, who was likewise present. She gave him the red-painted pencil, only half its original length and fitted into a silver holder, admonishing Hans Castorp in her pleasantly husky voice to be certain to return it after the lesson; and when she looked at him with her narrow blue-grey-green eyes above the broad cheekbones, he tore himself violently out of the dream, for now he had it and wanted to hold fast to the person and thing of which she reminded him so vividly. He hurriedly secured the recognition for the morrow, for he felt sleep and dream closing about him once again, and soon found himself compelled to seek refuge from Dr. Krokowski, who was pursuing him in order to undertake a dissection of his soul, at which Hans Castorp felt a mad, a truly senseless terror. Hampered in his flight, he fled from the doctor past the glass walls and through the balcony loggias, leapt down into the garden at the risk of his life, and in his extremity even tried to climb the reddish-brown flagpole; he awoke sweating at the moment when his pursuer seized him by the trouser-leg.

Scarcely, however, had he calmed himself a little and fallen asleep again than matters assumed the following form for him. He was endeavouring to shoulder Settembrini out of the way, as the latter stood there smiling—finely, drily, and mockingly, beneath his full black moustache, just where it curved handsomely upwards; and it was this very smile that Hans Castorp perceived as an infringement. “You are in the way!” he heard himself say distinctly. “Away with you! You are nothing but an organ-grinder, and you are in the way here!” But Settembrini would not be shouldered from the spot, and Hans Castorp was still standing there, pondering what was to be done, when quite unexpectedly he was granted the excellent insight into what time actually was: namely, nothing other than a Silent Sister, a column of mercury entirely without a scale, for those who wished to cheat—whereupon he awoke with the firm intention of communicating this discovery to his cousin Joachim on the morrow.

Amid such adventures and discoveries the night passed; and Hermine Kleefeld, Herr Albin, and Captain Miklosich—the last of whom carried Frau Stöhr away in his jaws and was pierced through with a spear by Public Prosecutor Paravant—also played their confused parts in it. But one dream Hans Castorp dreamed twice that night, both times in exactly the same form—the last time toward morning. He was sitting in the hall with the seven tables when, amid the most tremendous crashing, the glass door slammed shut and Madame Chauchat entered, wearing her white sweater, one hand in her pocket and the other at the back of her head. But instead of going to the Good Russian table, the ill-bred woman moved soundlessly toward Hans Castorp and silently extended her hand for him to kiss—not the back of her hand, however, but the palm; and Hans Castorp kissed her hand, her unrefined, slightly broad, short-fingered hand, with its roughened skin along the sides of the nails. Then once again, from head to foot, he was penetrated by that feeling of wild sweetness which had arisen in him when, experimentally, he had felt himself relieved of the burden of honour and had enjoyed the bottomless advantages of disgrace—this he now experienced once more in his dream, only with immeasurably greater force.