The Magic Mountain — Chapter 4

Chapter 5 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

A Necessary Purchase

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin ironically on the third day ...

There had been a frightful collapse in the weather.

The second day the visitor had spent entirely up here had been splendidly summery. The sky shone deep blue above the lance-like topmost shoots of the firs, while the village on the valley floor shimmered glaringly in the heat, and the chiming of the cows, wandering about and cropping the short, sun-warmed meadow grass from the slopes, filled the air with cheerful tranquillity. The ladies had appeared at first breakfast in delicate washing blouses, some even with openwork sleeves, which did not become them all equally well—Frau Stöhr, for example, was decidedly ill suited by them; her arms were too spongy, and airy clothing was simply not for her. The gentlemen of the sanatorium, too, had acknowledged the fine weather in various ways through their attire. Alpaca jackets and linen suits had made their appearance, and Joachim Ziemßen had worn ivory-coloured flannel trousers with his blue coat, a combination that lent his appearance a wholly military stamp. As for Settembrini, he had repeatedly declared his intention of changing his suit. “Devil take it!” he had said while strolling down into the village with the cousins after luncheon, “how the sun burns! I see I shall have to dress more lightly.” But however elegantly he had expressed himself, he had continued to wear his long, rough-wool coat with its broad lapels and his checked trousers—probably all the wardrobe he possessed.

On the third day, however, it was exactly as though nature had been overthrown and all order turned upon its head; Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. It was after the principal meal, and they had been at the rest cure for twenty minutes, when the sun hastily concealed itself, ugly peat-brown clouds rose above the south-eastern ridges, and a wind of alien constitution, cold and startling to the very bones, as though it came from unknown regions of ice, suddenly swept through the valley, overturned the temperature, and inaugurated an entirely new regime.

“Snow,” said Joachim’s voice from behind the glass partition.

“What do you mean, ‘snow’?” Hans Castorp asked. “You don’t mean to say it is going to snow now?”

“Certainly,” Joachim replied. “We know that wind. When it comes, there will be sledging.”

“Nonsense!” said Hans Castorp. “Unless I am mistaken, it is the beginning of August.”

But Joachim had spoken truly, initiated as he was into local conditions. For within a few moments, amid repeated peals of thunder, a tremendous driving snow began—a flurry so dense that everything seemed enveloped in white vapour, and scarcely anything could still be seen of village or valley.

It continued snowing all afternoon. The central heating was lit, and while Joachim brought his fur sack into use and refused to let his service to the cure be disturbed, Hans Castorp took refuge inside his room, drew a chair up to the warmed pipes, and from there, frequently shaking his head, gazed out at the havoc. By the following morning it was no longer snowing; but although the outdoor thermometer stood several degrees above freezing, the snow had remained a foot deep, so that a complete winter landscape spread itself before Hans Castorp’s astonished eyes. They had allowed the heating to go out again. The temperature in the room was six degrees above freezing.

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin with bitter irony ...

“One cannot say that,” Joachim replied matter-of-factly. “God willing, there will still be some fine summer days. Even in September that is perfectly possible. But the thing is that the seasons up here are not so very different from one another, you know; they mingle, so to speak, and pay no heed to the calendar. In winter the sun is often so strong that one sweats and takes off one’s coat while out walking, and in summer—well, you can already see for yourself what summer is sometimes like up here. And then the snow—it throws everything into confusion. It snows in January, but not much less in May, and it snows in August too, as you observe. On the whole, one may say that no month passes without snow; that is a proposition one can rely upon. In short, there are winter days and summer days and days of spring and autumn, but proper seasons, strictly speaking, are something we do not have up here.”

“What a splendid confusion,” said Hans Castorp. Wearing galoshes and a winter overcoat, he went down into the village with his cousin to procure blankets for the rest cure, for it was clear that in such weather his plaid would not suffice. For a moment he even considered whether he ought not to proceed to the purchase of a fur sack, but then decided against it—indeed, he recoiled, as it were, from the thought.

“No, no,” he said, “let us keep to the blankets! I shall be able to make use of them again down below, and everyone has blankets; there is nothing particularly unusual or exciting about them. But a fur sack is something far too specialized—understand me: if I were to acquire a fur sack, I should feel as though I meant to settle down here and already belonged among you, so to speak ... In short, all I mean is that it would be absolutely not worth while to buy a fur sack specially for these few weeks.”

Joachim agreed, and so, in a handsome and well-stocked shop in the English Quarter, they purchased two camel-hair blankets of the kind Joachim had, an exceptionally long and wide make, pleasantly soft and of a natural colour, and gave instructions that they be sent immediately to the sanatorium, to the International Sanatorium “Berghof,” room door 34. Hans Castorp intended to use them for the first time that very afternoon.

Naturally, this was during the interval after second breakfast, for otherwise the daily schedule afforded no opportunity to go down into the village. It was raining now, and the snow in the streets had turned into a splashing slush of ice. On the way back they overtook Settembrini, who, beneath an umbrella though bareheaded, was likewise making for the sanatorium. The Italian looked yellow and was visibly in an elegiac mood. In pure and well-formed phrases he lamented the cold, the wet, from which he suffered so bitterly. If only they would heat the place! But those wretched potentates allowed the heating to go out as soon as it ceased to snow—a mindless rule, a mockery of all reason! And when Hans Castorp objected that he imagined a moderate room temperature must be one of the principles of the cure—the intention was evidently to prevent the patients from growing soft—Settembrini answered with the most vehement scorn. Ah yes, indeed, the principles of the cure. The sublime and inviolable principles of the cure! Hans Castorp truly spoke of them in the proper tone, namely that of religious devotion and submissiveness. It was merely striking—though striking in an entirely gratifying sense—that precisely those principles among them enjoyed such unconditional veneration as accorded exactly with the economic interests of the potentates, whereas one was inclined to shut an eye to those in which this was less decidedly the case ... And while the cousins laughed, Settembrini began to speak of his late father, in connection with the warmth for which he yearned.

“My father,” he said, lingeringly and with rapture—“he was so refined a man, sensitive in body as in soul! How he loved his little warm study in winter; he loved it with all his heart. It always had to be kept at twenty degrees Réaumur by means of a little stove glowing red-hot, and when, on cold, wet days, or on those when the cutting tramontane was blowing, one entered from the corridor of the little house, the warmth settled about one’s shoulders like a gentle cloak, and one’s eyes filled with tears of well-being. The little study was crammed with books and manuscripts, among them treasures of great value, and amid those riches of the mind he stood in his blue-flannel dressing gown at the narrow writing desk and devoted himself to literature—slight and small of person, a good head shorter than I, imagine! but with thick tufts of grey hair at his temples and a nose so long and fine ... What a Romance scholar, gentlemen! One of the foremost of his time, a connoisseur of our language such as few have been, a Latin stylist without equal, a _uomo letterato_ after Boccaccio’s own heart ... Scholars came from far away to confer with him, one from Haparanda, another from Krakow; they came expressly to Padua, our city, to pay him homage, and he received them with gracious dignity. He was also a poet of distinction, who in his leisure hours composed tales in the most elegant Tuscan prose—a master of the _idioma gentile_,” said Settembrini with the utmost relish, slowly letting the syllables of his native land melt upon his tongue and moving his head to and fro as he did so. “He cultivated his little garden after the example of Virgil,” he continued, “and whatever he said was sound and beautiful. But warm, warm he had to have it in his study, or else he trembled and might even shed tears of vexation because they allowed him to freeze. And now imagine, Engineer, and you, Lieutenant, what I, my father’s son, must suffer in this accursed and barbarous place, where the body shivers with cold at the height of summer and degrading impressions incessantly torture the soul! Ah, it is hard! What specimens surround us! That foolish devil’s minion of a Hofrat. Krokowski”—and Settembrini behaved as though the word threatened to break his tongue—“Krokowski, that shameless confessor, who hates me because my human dignity forbids me to lend myself to his priest-ridden abominations ... And at my table ... What company I am forced to dine among! On my right sits a brewer from Halle—Magnus is his name—with a moustache resembling a bundle of hay. ‘Spare me your literature!’ he says. ‘What does it offer? Fine characters! What am I to do with fine characters? I am a practical man, and fine characters are scarcely ever met with in life.’ That is the conception of literature he has formed. Fine characters ... O Mother of God! His wife, opposite him, sits there losing albumen while sinking deeper and deeper into stupor. It is a filthy misery ...”

Without having exchanged a word on the matter, Joachim and Hans Castorp were of one mind concerning these speeches: they found them querulous and disagreeably seditious, though entertaining too, of course—indeed, improving in their audacious and keen-edged rebelliousness. Hans Castorp laughed good-naturedly at the “bundle of hay” and also at the “fine characters,” or rather at the comically desperate manner in which Settembrini spoke of them. Then he said:

“Goodness, yes, the company is bound to be a little mixed in an establishment like this. One cannot choose one’s neighbours at table—where would that lead? At our table there is such a lady too ... Frau Stöhr—I suppose you know her? She is murderously uncultivated, that must be said, and sometimes one scarcely knows where to look when she chatters on like that. And at the same time she complains a great deal about her temperature and how listless she is, and unfortunately hers is probably not at all a mild case. It is so peculiar—ill and stupid—I do not know whether I am expressing myself correctly, but it strikes me as altogether extraordinary when someone is stupid and then ill as well, when the two come together; that must surely be the most dismal thing in the world. One has absolutely no idea what sort of face to make at it, for one would like to meet an invalid with seriousness and respect, would one not? Illness is, after all, something venerable, in a certain sense, if I may say so. But when stupidity keeps intruding with ‘formulus’ and ‘cosmic institution’ and blunders of that kind, then one truly no longer knows whether to laugh or weep; it is a dilemma for human feeling, and so wretched that I cannot begin to express it. I mean, it does not rhyme, it does not fit together; one is not accustomed to imagining the two combined. One thinks that a stupid person ought to be healthy and ordinary, and that illness ought to make a person refined and clever and exceptional. That is how one generally imagines it. Is it not? I am probably saying more than I can answer for,” he concluded. “It is only because we happened upon the subject ...” And he became confused.

Joachim too was somewhat embarrassed, and Settembrini remained silent with raised eyebrows, giving the impression that, out of courtesy, he was awaiting the end of the speech. In reality he was intent upon allowing Hans Castorp to lose his thread completely before he replied:

“Sapristi, Engineer, you are displaying philosophical gifts I should never have suspected in you! According to your theory, you must be less healthy than you give yourself out to be, since you plainly possess intellect. Permit me, however, to observe that I cannot follow your deductions, that I reject them—indeed, that I stand in genuine hostility toward them. As you see me here, I am somewhat intolerant in matters of the mind, and would rather be reproached as a pedant than leave unopposed opinions that seem to me so deserving of opposition as those you have just advanced ...”

“But, Herr Settembrini ...”

“Per—mit me ... I know what you wish to say. You wish to say that you did not mean it so seriously, that the views you advanced are not unreservedly your own, but that you merely seized, as it were, upon one of the possible views floating in the air, in order irresponsibly to try yourself out in it for once. That is in keeping with your age, which may still lack manly resolution and for the present experiment with all manner of standpoints. _Placet experiri_,” he said, pronouncing the _c_ in “_Placet_” softly, in the Italian fashion. “A good maxim. What gives me pause is only the fact that your experiment should move precisely in this direction. I doubt that chance governs here. I fear the presence of an inclination which threatens to harden into a trait of character unless it is opposed. I therefore feel obliged to correct you. You remarked that illness coupled with stupidity was the most dismal thing in the world. I can grant you that. I too prefer an intelligent invalid to a consumptive blockhead. But my protest begins when you regard illness in conjunction with stupidity as, so to speak, a fault of style, an aberration of taste on nature’s part, and a _dilemma for human feeling_, as you were pleased to express it. When you appear to consider illness something so noble and—what was your word?—so _venerable_ that it simply _does not rhyme with stupidity_. That too was your expression. Well then, no! Illness is in no way noble, in no way venerable—such a conception is itself illness, or leads to it. Perhaps I shall most surely awaken your abhorrence of it by telling you that it is old and ugly. It comes down to us from superstitious and contrite ages in which the idea of humanity had degenerated into a caricature and been degraded—ages of fear, to which harmony and well-being appeared suspect and diabolical, while infirmity amounted to a charter granting admission to the Kingdom of Heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have dispelled these shadows that lay upon the soul of mankind—not yet entirely; they are still contending with them today. But this struggle is called work, my dear sir, earthly work, work for the earth, for the honour and interests of humanity; and, steeled anew each day in such a struggle, those powers will liberate mankind completely and lead it, along the paths of progress and civilization, towards an ever brighter, gentler, and purer light.”

Good heavens, Hans Castorp thought, disconcerted and ashamed, why, this is an aria! What have I done to provoke it? It does strike me as rather dry, though. And why is he forever going on about work? It is always work with him, although it has precious little to do with the matter at hand. And he said:

“Very fine, Herr Settembrini. It is positively worth hearing, the way you know how to put it. One could not possibly express it more—more vividly, I mean.”

“Reversion,” Settembrini resumed, lifting his umbrella over the head of a passer-by, “spiritual reversion to the views of those dark and tormented ages—believe me, Engineer, that is an illness, an illness exhaustively investigated, for which science possesses various names, one drawn from the language of aesthetics and psychology, another from that of politics—technical terms which are beside the point and which you may readily dispense with. But since in the life of the mind everything is connected and one thing proceeds from another, since one cannot offer the devil one’s little finger without his taking the whole hand, and the whole man along with it ... since, on the other hand, a sound principle can produce nothing but sound results, no matter which principle one chooses as one’s starting point—then impress it upon yourself that illness, far from being something noble, something altogether too venerable to be tolerably associated with stupidity, signifies rather _degradation_—yes, a painful degradation of man, an affront to the idea of man, which one may spare and tend in the individual case, but to honour it intellectually is an _aberration_—impress that upon yourself!—an aberration and the beginning of every intellectual aberration. That woman whom you mentioned—I decline to burden my memory with her name—Frau Stöhr, then, thank you—this ridiculous woman, in short—it is not her case, it seems to me, that places human feeling, as you said, in a dilemma. Ill and stupid—in God’s name, that is misery itself; the matter is simple, and nothing remains but pity and a shrug of the shoulders. The dilemma, my dear sir, the _tragedy_, begins where nature has been cruel enough to shatter the harmony of a personality—or to make it impossible from the outset—by joining a noble spirit, eager for life, to a body unfit for life. Do you know Leopardi, Engineer—or you, Lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my country, a hunchbacked, sickly man with a soul originally great, but continually humiliated by the wretchedness of his body and dragged down into the lowlands of irony, whose lamentations rend the heart. Listen to this!”

And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the beautiful syllables melt upon his tongue, moving his head to and fro and sometimes closing his eyes, unconcerned that his companions understood not a word. He was visibly intent upon savouring his own memory and pronunciation and displaying them to advantage before his listeners. At last he said:

“But you do not understand; you hear without apprehending the painful meaning. Leopardi the cripple, gentlemen—feel this in its entirety—was above all deprived of woman’s love, and it was doubtless this in particular that rendered him incapable of arresting the withering of his soul. The radiance of fame and virtue faded for him; nature appeared evil to him—indeed, she _is_ evil, stupid and evil, and in this I concede that he was right—and he despaired—it is terrible to say it—he despaired of science and progress! There you have tragedy, Engineer. There you have your ‘dilemma for human feeling’—not in that woman over there—I refuse to trouble my memory with her name ... Do not speak to me of the ‘spiritualization’ that illness may produce; in God’s name, do not! A soul without a body is as inhuman and dreadful as a body without a soul; and besides, the former is the rare exception and the latter the rule. As a rule it is the body that grows rankly, that usurps all importance, all life, and emancipates itself in the most repulsive fashion. A man who lives as an invalid is _nothing but_ body; therein lie the inhumanity and the degradation—in most cases he is no better than a cadaver ...”

“Curious,” Joachim suddenly said, leaning forward to look at his cousin, who was walking on Settembrini’s other side. “You said something very much like that yourself the other day.”

“Did I?” said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it may well be that something of the sort has crossed my mind too.”

Settembrini was silent for several paces. Then he said:

“So much the better, gentlemen. So much the better, if that is the case. It was far from my intention to expound any original philosophy to you—that is not my office. If our Engineer has already made a corresponding observation on his own account, this merely confirms my supposition that he is an intellectual dilettante, that, after the manner of gifted youth, he is for the present merely experimenting with the possible views. The gifted young man is not a blank sheet; rather, he is a sheet upon which everything, the right as well as the wrong, has already been written, as it were, in sympathetic ink; and it is the educator’s task resolutely to develop the right, while permanently effacing, by appropriate influence, the false that seeks to emerge. The gentlemen have been shopping?” he asked in a changed and lighter tone ...

“No, nothing more,” said Hans Castorp, “that is ...”

“We bought a couple of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim replied indifferently.

“For the rest cure ... In this beastly cold ... I am supposed to join in for the few weeks I am here,” Hans Castorp said with a laugh, looking at the floor.

“Ah, blankets, rest cure,” said Settembrini. “So, so, so. Well, well, well. Indeed: _Placet experiri_!” he repeated with Italian pronunciation, and took his leave, for, greeted by the limping concierge, they had entered the sanatorium, and in the hall Settembrini turned aside towards the common rooms to read the newspapers before luncheon, as he said. He appeared intent on playing truant from the second rest cure.

“Good Lord!” said Hans Castorp when he and Joachim were standing in the lift. “He really is a pedagogue—why, he said himself the other day that he had a streak of it in him. One has to be frightfully careful with him not to say one word too many, or else one is treated to an elaborate lesson. But it certainly is worth hearing how he knows how to speak; every word leaps so round and appetizing from his mouth—I always have to think of fresh bread rolls when I listen to him.”

Joachim laughed.

“You had better not tell him that. I think he would be disappointed to learn that his lessons make you think of bread rolls.”

“You think so? Well, that is by no means certain. I always have the impression that it is not the lessons alone that matter to him—perhaps they come only second—but chiefly the speaking itself, the way he makes the words leap and roll ... so resiliently, like rubber balls ... and that he is by no means displeased if one pays particular attention to that as well. Brewer Magnus is probably rather stupid with his ‘beautiful characters,’ but Settembrini ought to have said what it is that really matters in literature. I did not care to ask and expose my ignorance; I know nothing much about it, after all, and until now I had never seen a man of letters. But if it is not the beautiful characters that matter, then evidently it is the beautiful words—that is the impression I get in Settembrini’s company. What vocabulary he uses! Without the least embarrassment he speaks of ‘virtue’—just imagine! In all my life I have never taken that word upon my lips, and even at school we always said merely ‘valour’ whenever the book had ‘_virtus_.’ Something contracted inside me, I must say. And then it makes me a little nervous when he rails like that—against the cold, and Behrens, and Frau Magnus because she is losing protein, and, in short, against everything. He is an opposition man; I saw that at once. He hacks away at everything established, and there is always something disreputable about that—I cannot help it.”

“That is how you put it,” Joachim replied thoughtfully. “But then again it has something proud about it too, something that does not seem at all disreputable; on the contrary, he is surely a man who respects himself—or mankind in general—and that is what I like about him; to my mind there is something decent in it.”

“You are right there,” said Hans Castorp. “He even has something _stern_ about him—one often grows quite uncomfortable because one feels—let us say: under scrutiny; yes, that is not at all a bad expression. Would you believe that I had the feeling all along that he disapproved of my buying blankets to lie in, that he had some objection to it and was in some fashion taking offence?”

“No,” said Joachim, astonished and deliberate. “How could that possibly be? I cannot imagine it.” And then, with the thermometer in his mouth, he went off, bag and baggage, to the rest cure, while Hans Castorp at once began to wash and change for luncheon—there was, in any case, barely an hour left before it.

Digression on the Sense of Time

When they came upstairs again after the meal, the parcel containing the blankets was already lying on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room, and for the first time that day he made use of them—the practised Joachim instructed him in the art of wrapping himself up, as everyone did up here and as every newcomer had to learn at once. One spread the blankets, first one and then the other, over the reclining chair, so that a generous length of them hung down to the floor at the foot. Then one took one’s place and began to fold the inner blanket about oneself: first lengthwise, up beneath the armpit; then from below over the feet, for which one had to bend forward while seated and take firm hold of the folded end with both hands; and then from the other side, the doubled flap at the feet having to fit neatly against the lengthwise edge if the greatest possible smoothness and regularity were to be achieved. Thereafter one observed precisely the same procedure with the outer blanket—its manipulation was somewhat more difficult, and Hans Castorp, a bungler and novice, groaned not a little as, bending down and stretching himself out again, he practised the movements he was being taught. Only a very few veterans, Joachim said, could fling _both blankets at once_ about themselves in three sure movements; but that was a rare and envied skill, requiring not only years of practice but also a natural gift. At this expression Hans Castorp could not help laughing as he let himself fall back with an aching spine; and Joachim, who did not at once understand what was amusing, looked at him uncertainly, but then laughed as well.

“There,” he said, when Hans Castorp lay in the chair, jointless and cylindrical, the yielding bolster beneath his neck, exhausted by all the gymnastics, “even if it were twenty degrees below freezing now, no harm could come to you.” And then he went behind the glass partition to wrap himself up as well.

Hans Castorp had his doubts about the twenty degrees of frost, for he was decidedly cold; shudders repeatedly ran through him as he gazed through the wooden arches into the seeping, drizzling wetness outside, which at every moment seemed on the point of turning back into snowfall. How strange, moreover, that amid all this dampness his cheeks should still feel so dry and fever-hot, as though he were sitting in an overheated room. He also felt ridiculously exhausted by the exercises with the blankets—indeed, “_Ocean steamships_” trembled in his hands whenever he held it before his eyes. After all, he was not so exceedingly healthy either—totally anaemic, as Hofrat Behrens had said, and that, no doubt, was why he was so prone to feeling cold. Yet these disagreeable sensations were counterbalanced by the great comfort of his position, by those almost mysterious and not readily analysable qualities of the reclining chair which Hans Castorp had acclaimed so highly at his very first trial and which proved themselves again and again in the happiest fashion. Whether it was due to the nature of the upholstery, the proper inclination of the backrest, the suitable height and breadth of the arm supports, or merely to the judicious consistency of the neck-roll—enough, no more humane provision could possibly have been made for the well-being of resting limbs than by means of this excellent reclining chair. And so there was contentment in Hans Castorp’s heart at the thought that two empty and securely sheltered hours lay before him, those hours of the principal rest cure, sanctified by the rules of the house, which, although he was only a guest up here, he found an institution entirely suited to his nature. For he was patient by temperament, could readily endure long periods without occupation, and loved, as we shall remember, free time that was not made to be forgotten, consumed, and driven away by stupefying activity. At four came afternoon tea with cake and preserves, then a little exercise in the open air, after that another rest in the chair, and at seven dinner, which, like meals in general, brought with it certain tensions and spectacles to which one could look forward; afterward, a glance or two into the stereoscopic peep-show, the kaleidoscopic telescope, and the cinematographic drum... Hans Castorp already had the course of the day at his fingertips, though it would have been saying far too much to claim that he had yet “settled in,” as the phrase goes.

There is, fundamentally, something curious about this process of settling in at a strange place, this—however laborious it may be—adaptation and alteration of one’s habits, to which one submits almost for its own sake and with the express intention of abandoning it again, scarcely has it been completed, or at any rate soon afterward, and returning to one’s former condition. Such things are inserted into the main continuity of life as an interruption and interlude, and for the purpose of “recreation,” that is to say, as a renewing and revolutionary exercise of the organism, which was in danger, and already on the point, of growing pampered, slack, and dull amid the unarticulated sameness of its mode of life. But on what, then, are this slackening and dulling founded when routine continues too long without interruption? Not so much on physical and mental fatigue and wear caused by the demands of life—for these, simple rest would provide the restorative remedy; rather, it is something of the soul, it is the experience of time, which, under conditions of uninterrupted uniformity, threatens to be lost, and which is so closely akin and bound to the feeling of life itself that the one cannot be weakened without the other suffering a wretched impairment as well. Many erroneous notions are current concerning the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that interest and novelty of content “drive away” time—that is, shorten it—whereas monotony and emptiness burden and retard its passage. This is not unconditionally true. Emptiness and monotony may indeed lengthen the moment and the hour and make them “boring,” yet they shorten and dissipate the great and greatest masses of time, even to the point of nothingness. Conversely, a rich and interesting content may well shorten and lend wings to the hour and even to the day; but on the larger scale it bestows breadth, weight, and solidity upon the passage of time, so that eventful years pass much more slowly than those poor, empty, weightless ones which the wind drives before it and which fly away. What is called boredom is therefore, in reality, rather a morbid brevity of time arising from monotony: under uninterrupted uniformity, great stretches of time shrink together in a manner that terrifies the heart to death; if one day is like every other, then all are like one, and under perfect uniformity the longest life would be experienced as quite brief and would have flown by before one knew it. Habit is a falling asleep, or at least a fatigue, of the sense of time; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while later life runs and races by with ever greater speed, that too must be founded upon habit. We know very well that the introduction of altered and novel habits is the sole means of preserving our life, of refreshing our sense of time, of achieving a rejuvenation, reinforcement, and retardation of our experience of time, and thereby a renewal of our feeling of life altogether. This is the purpose of a change of place and air, of a journey to the baths, the restorative power of variation and episode. The first days in a new place of residence have a youthful—that is to say, a strong and ample—pace; they amount to some six or eight. Then, in proportion as one “settles in,” a gradual shortening makes itself felt: whoever clings to life, or, more accurately, would like to cling to life, may observe with horror how the days begin once more to grow light and to _scurry_ past; and the final week, of four, let us say, possesses an uncanny rapidity and transience. To be sure, the refreshing of the sense of time then continues beyond the interlude and makes itself felt anew when one has returned to routine: the first days at home, too, following the change, are once more experienced as new, ample, and youthful—but only a very few of them; for one settles back into routine more rapidly than one settles into its suspension, and if the sense of time is already weary with age or—an indication of an original frailty of life—was never strongly developed, it falls asleep again very quickly, and after only twenty-four hours it is as though one had never been away and the journey had been the dream of a night.

These observations are inserted here only because young Hans Castorp had something similar in mind when, after a few days, he said to his cousin (looking at him as he did so with red-veined eyes):

“It is, and remains, comical how long time seems at first, in a strange place. That is... Naturally there can be no question of my being bored; on the contrary, I may fairly say that I am enjoying myself royally. But when I look back—retrospectively, I mean, understand me correctly—it seems to me as though I had already been up here for no one knows how long; and all the way back to when I arrived and did not understand at once that I was here, and you were still saying, ‘Just get out!’—do you remember?—that seems to me a whole eternity. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with measurement or with the intellect at all; it is purely a matter of feeling. Naturally it would be absurd to say, ‘I believe I have been here for two months already’—that would be nonsense. All I can say is simply: ‘A very long time.’”

“Yes,” Joachim replied, the thermometer in his mouth, “I benefit from it too; since you have been here, I can cling to you, so to speak.” And Hans Castorp laughed at Joachim’s saying this so simply, without explanation.

He Tries His Hand at French Conversation

No, he had by no means settled in as yet: neither as regarded his knowledge of life here in all its peculiarities—a knowledge which he could not possibly acquire in so few days and which, as he told himself (and also said to Joachim), he unfortunately would not be able to acquire even in three weeks—nor as regarded the adaptation of his organism to the exceedingly peculiar atmospheric conditions prevailing among “those up here”; for this adaptation came hard to him, exceedingly hard—indeed, it seemed to him that it had no intention of taking place at all.

The normal day was clearly articulated and solicitously organised; one soon fell into the routine and acquired facility once one submitted to its machinery. Within the framework of the week, however, and of larger units of time, it was subject to certain regular variations, which appeared only by degrees, one occurring for the first time after another had already repeated itself; and as for the individual, everyday appearance of things and faces, Hans Castorp still had something to learn at every step: to observe more closely what he had regarded only superficially, and to absorb the new with youthful receptivity.

Those bulbous vessels with short necks, for example, which stood in the corridors before certain doors and upon which his eye had fallen on the very evening of his arrival, contained oxygen—Joachim explained this when asked. There was pure oxygen inside, at six francs the cylinder, and the reviving gas was administered to the dying for the purpose of one last stimulation and prolongation of their strength—they sipped it through a tube. For behind the doors before which such cylinders stood lay dying persons, or “_moribundi_,” as Hofrat Behrens said when Hans Castorp once encountered him on the first floor—the Hofrat came rowing along the corridor in his white coat and with blue cheeks, and they went upstairs together.

“Well, well, our disinterested spectator!” said Behrens. “And how are you doing? Do we find favour beneath your scrutinising gaze? You honour us, you honour us. Yes, our summer season has something to it; it is no mean specimen. Cost me something, too, to give it a bit of a push. Still, it is a pity you do not mean to stay for the winter with us—you intend to remain only eight weeks, I hear? Oh, three? But that is merely a flying visit; hardly worth taking your things off for. Well, as you please. But it is a pity you will not be staying for the winter, because the Hotevoleh,” he said, with a jocularly impossible pronunciation, “the international Hotevoleh down there in Platz, does not arrive until winter, after all, and you ought to see it; it would do something for your cultivation. Enough to make you roll about laughing, the way those fellows leap on their footboards. And then the ladies—good Lord, the ladies! As bright as birds of paradise, I tell you, and wonderfully dashing... But now I must go to my Moribundus,” he said, “here in twenty-seven. Final stage, you know. Going out through the middle. Five dozen flasks of oxygen he has sucked dry yesterday and today, the gourmand. But by noon he will probably go _ad penates_. Well, my dear Reuter,” he said as he entered, “how would it be if we broke the neck of another one...” His words died away behind the door as he pulled it shut. But for one moment Hans Castorp had seen, in the background of the room, the waxen profile of a young man with a thin beard upon the pillow, who had slowly rolled his enormous eyeballs toward the door.

It was the first Moribundus Hans Castorp had ever seen in his life, for both his parents and his grandfather had, at the time, died behind his back, so to speak. How dignified the young man’s head had lain upon the pillow, with its chin-beard thrust upward! How significant had been the gaze of his overlarge eyes as he slowly turned them toward the door! Still wholly absorbed in that fleeting sight, Hans Castorp involuntarily tried to make his own eyes as large, significant, and slow as the Moribundus’s while he continued toward the stairs; and with these eyes he looked at a lady who had emerged from a door behind him and overtook him at the head of the staircase. He did not recognise Madame Chauchat at once. She smiled softly at the eyes he was making, then steadied the braid at the back of her head with one hand and descended the stairs before him, noiselessly, supplely, and with her head somewhat thrust forward.

* * * * *

He made almost no acquaintances during those first days, nor for a long time afterward. On the whole, the daily routine was not favourable to such things; moreover, Hans Castorp was of a reserved disposition, felt himself to be a guest and “disinterested spectator” up here, as Hofrat Behrens had called him, and was for the most part quite content with Joachim’s conversation and company. The nurse in the corridor, to be sure, craned her neck after them for so long that Joachim, who had occasionally granted her a little conversation before, introduced his cousin to her. With the cord of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, she spoke not merely affectedly but in a positively tormented manner, and upon closer inspection gave the impression that her reason had suffered under the torture of boredom. It was very difficult to get away from her again, for she displayed a morbid dread of the conversation’s ending and, as soon as the young men showed signs of moving on, clung to them with hurried words and glances, and even with a desperate smile, so that out of compassion they remained standing beside her. She spoke at great length about her papa, who was a jurist, and her cousin, who was a physician—evidently in order to present herself in a favourable light and proclaim her origins in the educated classes. As for her patient there behind the door, he was the son of a Coburg doll manufacturer, Rotbein by name, and lately young Fritz’s illness had settled in his intestines. That was hard on everyone concerned, as the gentlemen could surely imagine; especially when one came from an academic household and possessed the sensitivity of the higher classes, it was hard. And one must never turn one’s back... Only the other day, what did the gentlemen suppose? She returned from a brief outing—she had gone merely to procure a little tooth powder—and found the patient sitting up in bed, with a glass of thick, dark beer before him, a salami sausage, a coarse hunk of black bread, and a cucumber! His family had sent him all these delicacies from home to build up his strength. But the next day, naturally, he had been more dead than alive. He was hastening his own end. Yet that would mean deliverance only for him, not for her—Nurse Berta, incidentally, was her name, though in reality she was Alfreda Schildknecht—for _she_ would then simply be assigned to another patient, at a more or less advanced stage, here or in some other sanatorium; that was the prospect opening before her, and no other prospect opened at all.

Yes, said Hans Castorp, her profession was certainly difficult, but also rewarding, he should think.

Certainly, she replied, it was rewarding—rewarding, but very difficult.

Well, all the best to Herr Rotbein. And the cousins made to leave.

But then she clung to them with words and glances, and it was so pitiful to see how she strained to detain the young men a little longer that it would have been cruel not to grant her another respite.

“He is asleep!” she said. “He does not need me. So I stepped out into the corridor for a few brief minutes...” And she began to complain about Hofrat Behrens and the tone he adopted toward her, which was altogether too familiar to accord with her origins. She greatly preferred Herr Dr. Krokowski—she called him soulful. Then she returned once more to her papa and her cousin. Her brain yielded nothing further. In vain she struggled to detain the cousins a little longer, suddenly making an effort to raise her voice and almost beginning to scream whenever they showed signs of leaving—they finally slipped away from her and went. But the nurse continued watching them for a while, her upper body bent forward and her gaze avidly sucking, as though she meant to draw them back to her with her eyes. Then a sigh wrested itself from her breast, and she returned to her patient’s room.

Apart from this, the only further acquaintance Hans Castorp made in those days was the black-pallid lady, the Mexican woman whom he had seen in the garden and who was called “_Tous les deux_.” It did indeed come to pass that he too heard from her lips the mournful formula that had become her nickname; but since he had prepared himself, he maintained a good composure and afterward was able to feel satisfied with himself. The cousins encountered her before the main entrance as they set out upon the prescribed morning walk after first breakfast. Wrapped in a black cashmere shawl, her knees bent, she was pacing to and fro there in long, restlessly wandering strides, and against the black veil wound about her silver-threaded hair and tied beneath her chin, her ageing face, with its large, careworn mouth, showed a dull white. Joachim, hatless as usual, greeted her with a bow, and she slowly acknowledged it, while the horizontal furrows in her narrow forehead deepened as she peered at them. Noticing a new face, she stopped and, softly nodding her head, awaited the young men’s approach; for evidently she considered it necessary to learn whether the stranger knew of her fate and to receive his expression of feeling upon it. Joachim introduced his cousin. From beneath her mantilla she extended a hand to the guest—a lean, yellowish, heavily veined hand adorned with rings—and continued to gaze at him, nodding. Then it came:

“_Tous les dé, monsieur_,” she said. “_Tous les dé vous savez ..._”

“_Je le sais, madame_,” Hans Castorp answered in subdued tones. “_Et je le regrette beaucoup._”

The loose pouches of skin beneath her jet-black eyes were larger and heavier than any he had ever seen on a human being. A faint, withered scent emanated from her. His heart felt subdued and solemn.

“_Merci_,” she said, with a rattling articulation that accorded strangely with the brokenness of her being, while one corner of her large mouth drooped tragically far downward. Then she withdrew her hand beneath the mantilla, inclined her head, and resumed her pacing. But as they walked on, Hans Castorp said:

“You see, it did not affect me at all; I managed her perfectly well. In general I manage people of that kind quite well, I believe; by nature I understand how to deal with them—do you not think so too? I even believe that, on the whole, I get on better with sorrowful people than with cheerful ones; God knows why that is—perhaps because I am an orphan, after all, and lost my parents so early—but when people are grave and sorrowful and death is involved, it does not really oppress or embarrass me; instead I feel in my element and, in any case, more at ease than when everything is so brisk and hearty, which suits me less. The other day I thought: it really is absurd of the ladies here to have such a horror of death and everything connected with it that one has anxiously to shield them from it and bring the Viaticum while they happen to be eating. No, for shame, that is childish. Do you not rather like the sight of a coffin? I rather like to see one now and then. I find a coffin a positively beautiful piece of furniture, even when it is empty; but when someone is lying in it, then to my eyes it is downright solemn. Funerals have something so edifying about them—I have often thought that instead of going to church, one ought to go to a funeral when one wants a little edification. People wear good black clothes and take off their hats and look at the coffin and conduct themselves gravely and devoutly, and no one is allowed to make feeble jokes, as they do everywhere else in life. I like that very much, when at last they are a little devout. Sometimes I have even asked myself whether I ought not to have become a pastor—in a certain way, I believe, it would not have suited me badly ... I hope I made no mistake in the French I spoke?”

“No,” Joachim said. “_Je le regrette beaucoup_ was perfectly correct, as far as it went.”

Politically Suspect!

Regular variations upon the normal day now presented themselves: first a Sunday—and indeed a Sunday with sanatorium music upon the terrace, such as occurred every fortnight, thus marking the double week into whose second half Hans Castorp had entered from outside. He had arrived on a Tuesday, and so this was the fifth day, a day of vernal character after that fantastic plunge in the weather and relapse into winter—delicate and fresh, with neat clouds in the pale-blue sky and moderate sunshine over slopes and valley, which had once more assumed their proper summer green, since the new snow had, after all, been condemned to rapid dissolution.

It was plain that everyone was intent upon honouring and distinguishing the Sunday; management and guests supported each other in this endeavour. Crumb cake was served with the morning tea; at every place stood a little glass containing a few flowers, wild mountain pinks and even alpine roses, which the gentlemen put into the buttonholes of their lapels (Public Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund had even donned a black swallowtail coat with a spotted waistcoat); the ladies’ toilettes bore the stamp of festive airiness—Frau Chauchat appeared at breakfast in a flowing lace matinée with open sleeves, in which, while the glass door crashed into its lock, she first stood facing the room and presented herself to the company, as it were, with graceful formality before proceeding with stealthy tread to her table, and which became her so remarkably well that Hans Castorp’s neighbour, the schoolmistress from Königsberg, was quite enraptured by it—and even the barbarous married couple at the Bad Russian Table had paid tribute to the Lord’s Day, inasmuch as the male half had exchanged his leather jacket for a sort of short frock coat and his felt boots for leather shoes, though _she_, to be sure, still wore her grubby feather boa today, but beneath it a green silk blouse with a ruff ... Hans Castorp knitted his brows when he caught sight of the pair and changed colour, as he was strikingly prone to do up here.

Immediately after second breakfast the sanatorium music began upon the terrace; an assortment of brass and woodwind players had assembled there and played by turns in brisk and sustained measure, almost until luncheon. During the concert the rest cure was not strictly obligatory. A number of guests did enjoy the feast for the ears from their balconies, and three or four chairs in the garden lounge were occupied as well; but the majority sat at the little white tables upon the covered platform, while a light-hearted smart set, to whom sitting upon chairs may have seemed too respectable, occupied the stone steps leading down into the garden and displayed much high spirits there: young invalids of both sexes, most of whom Hans Castorp already knew by name or sight. Hermine Kleefeld was among them, as was Herr Albin, who passed round a large flowered box of chocolates and allowed everyone to eat from it, while he himself ate none, but smoked gold-tipped cigarettes with a paternal air; there was also the thick-lipped young man from the “Half-Lung Club,” Fräulein Levi, thin and ivory-coloured as she was, an ash-blond young man who answered to the name of Rasmussen and let his hands hang at chest height like flippers from limp wrists, Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, an amply built woman dressed in red who had likewise joined the young people, and upon whose brownish nape that tall fellow with thinning hair, who could play from the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and now sat behind her with his arms clasped about his pointed knees, kept his dreary gaze incessantly fixed; a red-haired young lady from Greece, another of unknown origin with the face of a tapir, the voracious boy with the thick spectacle lenses, another boy of fifteen or sixteen who wore a monocle and, when he coughed, raised to his mouth the long-grown, salt-spoon-like nail of his little finger—evidently a monumental ass—and several others besides.

This boy with the fingernail, Joachim related in an undertone, had been only very slightly ill when he arrived—without a temperature—and had been sent up merely as a precaution by his father, a physician, and, in the Hofrat’s judgement, was to have remained for about three months. Now, after three months, his temperature was between 37.8 and 38, and he was quite ill. But then he lived so irrationally that he deserved a box on the ears.

The cousins had a little table to themselves, somewhat apart from the others, for Hans Castorp was smoking with the black beer he had brought out from breakfast, and from time to time his cigar tasted tolerably good to him. Dazed by the beer and by the music, which as always caused his mouth to open and his head to incline to one side, he contemplated with reddened eyes the carefree life of the health resort all around him; nor was he in the least disturbed by the consciousness—on the contrary, it lent the whole scene a heightened strangeness, a certain intellectual fascination—that all these people were inwardly seized by a decay difficult to arrest and that most of them were running a slight fever ... Sparkling artificial lemonade was drunk at the little tables, and photographs were being taken upon the outdoor steps. Others exchanged postage stamps there, and the red-haired young lady from Greece drew Herr Rasmussen on a sketch pad, but then refused to show him the picture and twisted this way and that, laughing with her broad, widely spaced teeth, so that for a long while he could not wrest the pad from her. Hermine Kleefeld sat upon her step with her eyes only half open and beat time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper while Herr Albin fastened a little bunch of meadow flowers to her blouse, and the Thick-Lipped One, seated at Frau Salomon’s feet, chatted up at her with his neck twisted, while the thin-haired pianist stared fixedly at her nape from behind.

The physicians came and mingled with the company taking the cure, Hofrat Behrens in a white coat and Dr. Krokowski in a black one. They passed along the row of tables, the Hofrat dropping a genial jest at nearly every one, so that a wake of cheerful animation marked his course, and then descended to the young people, whose female contingent at once crowded around Dr. Krokowski with swaying movements and sidelong glances, while the Hofrat, in honour of Sunday, showed the gentlemen his trick with his laced boot: he planted his enormous foot upon a higher step, loosened the laces, grasped them in one hand according to a particular technique, and contrived, without bringing the other hand to his aid, to hook them crosswise with such dexterity that everyone marvelled and several tried in vain to imitate him.

Later Settembrini too appeared upon the terrace—leaning upon his walking stick, he came out of the dining room, today as always in his frieze coat and yellowish trousers, with a refined, alert, and critical expression, looked about him, and approached the cousins’ table, saying, “Ah, bravo!” and asking permission to join them.

“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he said. “There we have your fatherland! I see that you possess a feeling for the national mood, Engineer. You are in your element, and that gives me pleasure. Allow me to partake a little in the harmony of your condition!”

Hans Castorp composed his features—indeed, he had already done so at the mere sight of the Italian. He said:

“But you have come late to the concert, Herr Settembrini; it must soon be over. Are you not fond of music?”

“Not upon command,” Settembrini replied. “Not according to the weekly calendar. Not when it smells of the dispensary and is allotted to me from above on sanitary grounds. I set some store by my freedom, or at least by that remnant of freedom and human dignity which remains to people like us. At such events I attend as a visitor, just as you, on the larger scale, are visiting among us—I come for a quarter of an hour and then go my way again. That gives me the illusion of independence ... I do not say it is more than an illusion, but what would you have, if it affords me a certain satisfaction! With your cousin it is another matter. For him it is duty. Is it not, Lieutenant? You regard it as part of your duty. Oh, I know, you understand the trick of preserving your pride in servitude. A bewildering trick. Not everyone in Europe understands it. Music? Did you not ask whether I professed myself a lover of music? Well, when you say ‘lover’ (Hans Castorp could not actually remember having used the word), the expression is not ill chosen; it has a touch of tender frivolity. Very well, then, I accept. Yes, I am a lover of music—which is not to say that I particularly respect it—as, for instance, I respect and love the word, the bearer of the spirit, the instrument, the gleaming ploughshare of progress ... Music ... it is the half-articulate, the dubious, the irresponsible, the indifferent. Presumably you will object that it can be clear. But nature too can be clear, a brooklet too can be clear, and what good does that do us? It is not true clarity; it is a dreamy clarity, saying nothing and binding one to nothing, a clarity without consequences, dangerous because it tempts us to rest content with it ... Let music assume the gesture of magnanimity. Very well! It will inflame our feelings. What matters, however, is to inflame reason! Music appears to be movement itself—and yet I suspect it of quietism. Let me put the matter in its most extreme form: I harbour a political aversion to music.”

At this Hans Castorp could not refrain from slapping his knee and exclaiming that in all his life he had never heard the like.

“Consider it nevertheless!” Settembrini said with a smile. “Music is invaluable as the ultimate means of arousing enthusiasm, as a power that sweeps us upward and onward, when it finds the mind already prepared for its effects. But literature must have preceded it. Music alone does not advance the world. Music alone is dangerous. For you personally, Engineer, it is unconditionally dangerous. I saw it in your features the instant I arrived.”

Hans Castorp laughed.

“Oh, you must not judge by my face, Herr Settembrini. You cannot imagine what the air up here is doing to me. I am finding it harder to acclimatize than I expected.”

“I fear you are deceiving yourself.”

“No, how so! The devil knows why I am still so tired and hot.”

“Still, I think one ought to be grateful to the management for the concerts,” Joachim said judiciously. “You view the matter from a higher standpoint, of course, Herr Settembrini—as a man of letters, so to speak—and I shall not contradict you there. But I do think one must be grateful up here for a little music. I am not particularly musical at all, and besides, the pieces they play are nothing very splendid—neither classical nor modern, but merely brass-band music. Yet it is a welcome diversion. It fills out a few hours quite respectably; I mean, it divides them up and fills them out in detail, so that they have some substance after all, whereas otherwise up here one simply beats the hours and days and weeks about one’s ears in the most dreadful fashion ... You see, an unpretentious concert number like that lasts perhaps seven minutes, does it not, and those minutes are something in themselves, they have a beginning and an end, they stand apart and are, as it were, preserved from sinking unawares into the general slovenly drift. Moreover, they are subdivided many times over, by the figures of the piece, and these in turn into bars, so that something is always happening and every moment acquires a certain meaning to which one can hold fast, whereas otherwise ... I do not know whether I am expressing myself properly ...”

“Bravo!” cried Settembrini. “Bravo, Lieutenant! You have described very well an indisputably moral element in the nature of music: namely, that by measuring the passage of time in a manner peculiarly full of life, it bestows upon it wakefulness, spirit, and preciousness. Music awakens time; it awakens us to the most exquisite enjoyment of time; it awakens ... to that extent it is moral. Art is moral insofar as it awakens. But what if it does the opposite? If it stupefies, lulls to sleep, works against activity and progress? Music can do that as well; it is thoroughly versed in the effects of opiates. A diabolical effect, gentlemen! The opiate is of the devil, for it engenders dullness, inertia, inactivity, servile stagnation ... There is something questionable about music, gentlemen. I maintain that its nature is ambiguous. I do not go too far when I declare it politically suspect.”

He continued speaking in this vein, and Hans Castorp listened, though he was not really able to follow him, partly on account of his weariness, and partly because he was distracted by the social proceedings among the frivolous young people there on the steps. Was he seeing correctly, or what was going on? The young lady with the tapir face was engaged in sewing a button onto the knee-band of the monocled youth’s sporting breeches! And as she did so, her breath came hard and hot with asthma, while _he_, coughing, raised his salt-spoon-shaped fingernail to his mouth! They were both ill, certainly, but even so it testified to strange social customs among the young people up here. The music was playing a polka ...

Hippe

Thus Sunday stood apart. Its afternoon was distinguished, moreover, by carriage excursions undertaken by various groups of guests: after tea several pairs of horses toiled up the loop of the road and halted before the main entrance to collect those who had ordered them—chiefly Russians, and Russian ladies at that.

“Russians are always going for drives,” Joachim said to Hans Castorp—they were standing together before the entrance, watching the departures for their amusement. “Now they are off to Clavadell, or the lake, or the Flüela Valley, or Klosters; those are the usual destinations. We might go for a drive ourselves sometime while you are here, if you like. But for the present, I think you have enough to do settling in and have no need of expeditions.”

Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his trouser pockets. Thus he watched the small, lively old Russian lady take her place in a carriage with her thin grandniece and two other ladies; they were Marusja and Madame Chauchat. The latter had put on a light dust-coat with a belt across the back, but wore no hat. She seated herself beside the old lady on the rear seat, while the young girls took the backward-facing places. All four were merry, their mouths moving incessantly in their soft, almost boneless language. They talked and laughed over the carriage rug, which they divided among themselves with some difficulty, and over the Russian confectionery the grandaunt had brought as provisions in a little wooden box padded with cotton wool and paper lace, and which she was already offering round ... With keen interest Hans Castorp distinguished Frau Chauchat’s veiled voice. As always when the negligent woman came before his eyes, that resemblance for which he had searched awhile, and which had dawned upon him in a dream, was once more confirmed ... Marusja’s laughter, however, the sight of her round brown eyes peering childishly over the little cloth with which she covered her mouth, and of her high bosom, which was said to be by no means slightly diseased within, reminded him of something else, something disturbing, that he had seen recently; and so, cautiously and without moving his head, he glanced sideways at Joachim. No, thank God, Joachim’s face was not as blotched as it had been then, nor were his lips now so pitiably contorted. But he was looking at Marusja—and in a posture, with an expression in his eyes, that could not possibly be called military; on the contrary, they appeared so mournful and self-oblivious that they had decidedly to be classified as civilian. Presently, however, he pulled himself together and glanced quickly at Hans Castorp, who had just time enough to turn his eyes away and send them wandering somewhere into the air. He felt his heart pounding as he did so—without motive and on its own account, as was simply its habit here.

The remainder of Sunday offered nothing extraordinary, except perhaps the meals, which, since they could hardly be made richer than usual, displayed at least a heightened refinement in their dishes. (At luncheon there was a _chaud-froid_ of chicken, garnished with crayfish and halved cherries; with the ice came _pâtisserie_ in little baskets woven of spun sugar, and there was fresh pineapple as well.) In the evening, after drinking his beer, Hans Castorp felt still more exhausted, chilly, and heavy-limbed than on the preceding days; shortly before nine he bade his cousin good night, hastily drew the feather-bed up over his chin, and fell asleep as though struck down.

The very next day, however—the first Monday, that is, which the visitor spent up here—brought a further regularly recurring variation in the daily routine: namely, one of those lectures which Dr. Krokowski delivered every fortnight in the dining-room before the entire adult, German-speaking, and non-moribund public of the Berghof. As Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, these formed a series of connected lectures, a course of popular science under the general title “Love as a Pathogenic Force.” The instructive entertainment took place after second breakfast, and, as Joachim further explained, it was not permissible—or was at least regarded with the highest disfavour—to absent oneself from it; which was why it was considered an astonishing piece of effrontery that Settembrini, though more proficient in German than anyone else, not only never attended the lectures but also expressed himself upon them in the most disparaging terms. As for Hans Castorp, he resolved at once to be present, principally out of courtesy, but also from undisguised curiosity. Beforehand, however, he did something wholly misguided and ill-advised: he took it into his head to go for a long walk on his own, which agreed with him far worse than he could possibly have imagined.

“Now, just listen!” were his first words when Joachim entered his room that morning. “I can see that things cannot go on like this with me. I have had enough of the horizontal mode of life—the blood simply falls asleep in one’s veins. With you it is naturally quite different: you are a patient, and I certainly do not mean to tempt you. But directly after breakfast I intend to take a proper walk, if you do not mind—a few hours at random, out into the world. I shall put a bite for second breakfast in my pocket, and then I shall be independent. We shall see whether I am not a different fellow when I come home.”

“Very well!” said Joachim, seeing that the other was in earnest about his desire and resolution. “But do not overdo it, I advise you. Things are different here from what they are at home. And be back punctually for the lecture!”

In reality it was not merely physical reasons that had prompted young Hans Castorp’s undertaking. It seemed to him that the heated state of his head, the bad taste he generally had in his mouth, and the capricious pounding of his heart were due far less to the difficulties of acclimatization than to such things as the goings-on of the Russian couple next door, the talk of the ailing and foolish Frau Stöhr at table, the gentleman rider’s soft cough, which he heard daily in the corridors, Herr Albin’s pronouncements, the impressions he had received of the social customs of the suffering young people, the expression on Joachim’s face when he looked at Marusja, and other perceptions of the kind. He thought it must be beneficial to escape the charmed circle of the Berghof for once, to breathe deeply in the open air and stir himself vigorously, so that when one was tired in the evening one might at least know why. And so, full of enterprise, he parted from Joachim when the latter, after breakfast, set out upon his dutifully measured constitutional to the bench by the watercourse, and marched off down the carriage road on his own path, swinging his stick.

It was a cool, overcast morning—about half past eight. As he had intended, Hans Castorp breathed deeply of the pure morning air, that fresh and light atmosphere which entered without effort and was without any scent of moisture, without substance, without memories ... He crossed the stream and the narrow-gauge railway, reached the irregularly built-up road, immediately left it again, and took a meadow path which ran for only a short distance over level ground and then led obliquely and fairly steeply up the slope on the right. The ascent delighted Hans Castorp; his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back from his forehead with the crook of his stick, and when, looking back from a certain height, he caught sight in the distance of the lake’s bright surface, past which he had travelled on his journey up, he began to sing.

He sang the pieces that happened to be at his command, all manner of popularly sentimental songs of the kind found in student and gymnastic-club songbooks, among them one containing the lines:

“The bards should sing of love and wine, Yet virtue praise more often”—

at first singing them softly and humming, then loudly and with all his strength. His baritone was brittle, but today he thought it beautiful, and the singing inspired him more and more. If he had begun too high, he resorted to piping head-notes, and these too seemed beautiful to him. When his memory failed him, he extricated himself by fitting the melody with whatever meaningless syllables and words came to hand, which he sent into the air with the shaping mouth and resplendent palatal r of an operatic singer; and finally he proceeded, as regarded both words and notes, to improvise altogether, even accompanying his production with operatic gestures of the arms. Since it is very strenuous to climb and sing at the same time, his breath soon grew short and failed him more and more. But from idealism, for the sake of the beauty of song, he mastered his distress and, amid frequent sighs, gave his utmost, until at last, in the extremity of breathlessness, blind, with nothing but a coloured shimmer before his eyes and his pulses racing, he sank down beneath a thick pine—after such great exaltation suddenly the prey of profound dejection, a misery bordering upon despair.

When, his nerves tolerably steadied once more, he set out to continue his walk, the nape of his neck trembled very vigorously, so that at his youthful age he wagged his head in precisely the same fashion as old Hans Lorenz Castorp had once done. The phenomenon gave him a warm sense of remembrance of his deceased grandfather, and, far from finding it repugnant, he took pleasure in imitating that venerable manner of supporting the chin by which the old man had sought to control the trembling of his head, and which had so appealed to the boy in former days.

He climbed still higher, in serpentine turns. The ringing of cowbells drew him on, and he found the herd as well; it was grazing near a log hut whose roof was weighted with stones. Two bearded men came towards him with axes on their shoulders, and parted when they had drawn near. “Well, farewell, and thank you!” one said to the other in a deep, guttural voice, shifted his axe to the opposite shoulder, and began descending towards the valley without a path, his footsteps cracking among the firs. It had sounded so strange in that solitude, that “farewell, and thank you,” and had touched dreamily upon Hans Castorp’s senses, dazed as they were by climbing and singing. He repeated it softly, endeavouring to imitate the guttural, solemnly awkward dialect of the mountaineer, and climbed a little way beyond the alpine hut, for he was intent upon reaching the tree line; but after glancing at his watch he abandoned the undertaking.

He followed a path to the left, in the direction of the town, which ran level and then descended. A forest of tall conifers received him, and as he wandered through it he even began to sing a little once more, though cautiously and although his knees trembled still more strangely on the descent than they had before. But on emerging from the wood he found himself, to his surprise, before a magnificent scene that opened before him: an intimately enclosed landscape of peaceful grandeur and pictorial beauty.

Along a shallow, stony bed a mountain stream came down from the height on the right, poured foaming over blocks disposed like terraces, and then flowed more tranquilly onwards towards the valley, picturesquely spanned by a footbridge with a simply fashioned railing. The ground was blue with the bell-shaped blossoms of a shrubby plant that grew rampant everywhere. Solemn firs, gigantic and uniform in growth, stood singly and in groups on the floor of the ravine and up the heights; and one of them, rooted obliquely in the slope beside the torrent, thrust itself crookedly and bizarrely into the scene. A murmurous seclusion reigned over the beautiful, lonely place. On the far side of the stream Hans Castorp noticed a bench.

He crossed the footbridge and sat down, to let himself be entertained by the sight of the plunging water, the drifting foam, and to listen to its idyllic, conversational sound, monotonous and yet inwardly full of variation; for Hans Castorp loved rushing water as much as music, indeed perhaps even more. But scarcely had he made himself comfortable when a nosebleed came upon him so suddenly that he could not entirely save his suit from being stained. The bleeding was violent and persistent and troubled him for a good half-hour, forcing him to run continually back and forth between the stream and the bench, to rinse his handkerchief, draw water up into his nostrils, and stretch himself out flat once more upon the wooden seat with the damp cloth over his nose. Thus he remained lying when at last the blood ceased—lay still, his hands clasped behind his head, his knees drawn up, his eyes closed, his ears filled with the rushing sound, not unwell, but rather soothed by the copious bloodletting and in a state of strangely diminished vital activity; for after breathing out he felt for a long while no need to take in fresh air, but calmly let his heart, within his motionless body, perform a series of beats before, late and languidly, he drew another shallow breath.

Then all at once he found himself transported into that early situation of his life which had formed the prototype of a dream, modelled upon his most recent impressions, that he had dreamed a few nights before ... But so completely, so utterly, to such a degree that space and time were abolished, had he been carried away to that place and that hour, that one might have said a lifeless body lay up here on the bench beside the tumbling brook, while the actual Hans Castorp stood far away in an earlier time and setting, and in a situation which, for all its simplicity, was daring and intoxicating to the heart.

He was thirteen years old, a boy in the lower third form, wearing short trousers, and stood in the school courtyard talking with another boy, of about the same age, from another class—a conversation which Hans Castorp had initiated on a fairly arbitrary pretext and which, though its practical and narrowly circumscribed subject could make it only very brief, nevertheless delighted him to the highest degree. It was the interval between the next-to-last and the final lesson, a history lesson and a drawing lesson for Hans Castorp's class. In the courtyard, which was paved with red clinker bricks and separated from the street by a shingled wall with two entrance gates, the pupils walked up and down in rows, stood in groups, or leaned half-seated against the glazed projections of the building's walls. There was a confusion of voices. A master in a slouch hat supervised the activity while biting into a ham roll.

The boy with whom Hans Castorp was speaking was named Hippe, Pribislav by first name. An additional peculiarity was that the r in this first name had to be pronounced like sh: it was called “Pshibislav”; and this singular name accorded not ill with his appearance, which was not altogether commonplace and decidedly somewhat foreign. Hippe, the son of a historian and grammar-school professor, consequently a notorious model pupil and already one class ahead of Hans Castorp although scarcely older than he, came from Mecklenburg and was evidently, in his own person, the product of an ancient mingling of races, an admixture of Germanic blood with Wendish-Slavic—or perhaps the other way round. He was fair-haired, to be sure—his hair was clipped very short over his round skull. But his eyes, blue-grey or grey-blue in colour—it was a somewhat indeterminate and ambiguous colour, like that of distant mountains—had a peculiar, narrow, and, strictly speaking, even slightly oblique shape; and directly beneath them sat the cheekbones, prominent and strongly marked—a formation of the face which in his case was by no means disfiguring, but actually quite attractive, though it had sufficed to earn him from his schoolfellows the nickname “the Kirghiz.” Hippe, moreover, already wore long trousers, together with a high-buttoned blue jacket drawn in at the back, upon whose collar a few flakes from his scalp were generally to be seen.

Now the fact was that Hans Castorp had long since fixed his attention upon this Pribislav—had singled him out from the whole swarm, known and unknown to him, that filled the school courtyard; he was interested in him, followed him with his eyes, shall we say admired him? at any rate regarded him with exceptional concern, and on the way to school already looked forward to observing him among his classmates, to seeing him speak and laugh, and to distinguishing at a distance his voice, which was agreeably veiled, muffled, and slightly hoarse. Admittedly there was no very adequate reason for this interest, unless one chose to regard as such the heathen first name, his status as a model pupil—which could hardly have carried any weight—or, finally, the Kirghiz eyes, eyes which at times, during a certain sidelong glance that was not intended for seeing, could darken meltingly into veiled and nocturnal depths; yet Hans Castorp gave little thought to the intellectual justification of his feelings, still less to what they might have to be called should the need arise. For friendship was hardly to be spoken of, since he did not “know” Hippe at all. But in the first place there was not the slightest necessity to give the matter a name, since there was no possibility that it could ever be mentioned—it was not suited to being spoken of, nor did it demand to be. And in the second place a name signifies, if not criticism, at least definition, that is to say, classification among the known and customary, whereas Hans Castorp was imbued with the unconscious conviction that an inward treasure such as this should once and for all be protected from any such definition and classification.

But well or ill founded, these feelings, so remote from naming and communication, were in any case of such vitality that Hans Castorp had carried them silently within him for nearly a year—approximately a year, for their beginnings could not be precisely traced—which spoke at the very least for the fidelity and constancy of his character, if one considers what an enormous mass of time a year represents at that age. Unfortunately, designations of character traits invariably contain a moral judgement, whether laudatory or censorious, although they all have two sides. Hans Castorp's “fidelity,” upon which, incidentally, he did not particularly pride himself, consisted, speaking without valuation, in a certain heaviness, slowness, and persistence of feeling, a conserving disposition which made states and circumstances of life seem to him all the more worthy of attachment and continuance the longer they had endured. He was also inclined to believe in the infinite duration of whatever state or condition he happened to find himself in; he valued it for that very reason and had no eagerness for change. Thus, in his heart, he had grown accustomed to his silent and distant relationship with Pribislav Hippe and regarded it, fundamentally, as a permanent institution of his life. He loved the emotions it brought with it: the suspense as to whether the other would meet him that day, pass close beside him, perhaps look at him; the silent, delicate fulfilments with which his secret rewarded him; and even the disappointments inherent in the affair, the greatest of which occurred when Pribislav was “absent”: then the school courtyard was desolate, the day stripped of all savour, but sustaining hope remained.

This lasted a year, until it reached that adventurous climax; then it lasted another year, thanks to Hans Castorp's conserving fidelity, and then it ceased—without his noticing the loosening and dissolution of the bonds that tied him to Pribislav Hippe any more than he had noticed their formation. Pribislav, too, left the school and the city after his father was transferred; but by then Hans Castorp scarcely took notice of it, for he had already forgotten him. One may say that the figure of “the Kirghiz” had entered his life imperceptibly out of the mists, had slowly gained ever greater definition and tangibility until that moment of greatest proximity and corporeal presence in the courtyard, had stood for a while thus in the foreground, and then gradually receded once more and vanished into the mists without any pang of farewell.

That moment, however, the daring and adventurous situation into which Hans Castorp now found himself transported once more, the conversation, an actual conversation with Pribislav Hippe, came about as follows. The drawing lesson was next, and Hans Castorp noticed that he did not have his pencil with him. Every one of his classmates needed his own; but among the members of other classes he had one or two acquaintances whom he might have approached for a pencil. Yet the person he knew best, he decided, was Pribislav; this was the one who stood closest to him, with whom he had already had so much silent involvement; and with a joyful soaring of his whole being he resolved to make use of the opportunity—an opportunity was what he called it—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. That this would be a rather extraordinary prank, since in reality he did not know Hippe at all, escaped him, or at least he paid it no heed, blinded by a remarkable lack of consideration. And so now, amid the bustle of the clinker-paved courtyard, he actually stood before Pribislav Hippe and said to him:

“Excuse me, can you lend me a pencil?”

And Pribislav looked at him with his Kirghiz eyes above the prominent cheekbones and spoke to him in his agreeably hoarse voice, without surprise, or at least without displaying any.

“Gladly,” he said. “But you must be sure to give it back to me after the lesson.” And he drew his crayon from his pocket, a silver-plated crayon with a ring that had to be pushed upward so that the red-coloured lead would emerge from the metal casing. He explained the simple mechanism while their two heads bent over it.

“But don't break it!” he added.

What could he be thinking? As if Hans Castorp had any intention of _not_ returning the pencil, or even of treating it carelessly.

Then they looked at one another with a smile, and since there was nothing more to say, they turned first their shoulders and then their backs upon each other and walked away.

That was all. But Hans Castorp had never in his life been happier than during that drawing lesson, when he drew with Pribislav Hippe's pencil—with, moreover, the prospect of handing it back to its owner afterward, which followed casually and as a matter of course from what had gone before, as a pure additional gift. He took the liberty of sharpening the pencil a little, and of the red-lacquered shavings that fell from it he kept three or four for nearly a whole year in an inner drawer of his desk—no one who saw them would have guessed what a momentous significance attached to them. The return, incidentally, took place in the simplest possible form, which was entirely to Hans Castorp's liking, indeed was something upon which he rather prided himself—blasé and spoiled as he was by his intimate intercourse with Hippe.

“Here,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

And Pribislav said nothing at all, but merely gave the mechanism a cursory inspection and slipped the crayon into his pocket ...

Then they had never spoken to each other again, but on that one occasion, thanks to Hans Castorp's spirit of enterprise, it had nevertheless happened ...

He tore his eyes open, bewildered by the depth of his transport. “I believe I have been dreaming!” he thought. “Yes, that was Pribislav. I haven't thought of him for a long time. What became of the shavings? The desk is in the attic, at home with Uncle Tienappel. They must still be in the little inner drawer, at the back on the left. I never took them out. I did not even pay them enough attention to throw them away ... It was Pribislav exactly, in the flesh. I would never have thought I should see him so distinctly again. How remarkably like her he looked—the one up here! Is that why I am so interested in her, then? Or perhaps it might also be: was that why I was so interested in _him_? Nonsense! Fine nonsense. I must be going, by the way, and at once.” Yet he continued to lie there, pondering and remembering. Then he sat up. “Well then, farewell, and thank you!” he said, and tears came into his eyes as he smiled. With that he meant to set off; but, hat and stick in hand, he quickly sat down again, for he had been forced to notice that his knees would not properly support him. “Whoops,” he thought, “I don't believe this is going to work! And I am supposed to be in the dining-room punctually at eleven for the lecture. Walking up here has its charms, but also its difficulties, it would seem. Yes, yes, but I cannot stay here. It is only that lying down has made me a little stiff; once I am moving it will soon get better.” And he tried once more to get to his feet, and since he pulled himself properly together, he succeeded.

Even so, it was a wretched homecoming after so high-spirited a departure. Repeatedly he had to rest beside the path, for he felt his face suddenly turn white, cold sweat break out upon his forehead, and the irregular behaviour of his heart rob him of breath. Thus he struggled miserably down the serpentine path; but when he reached the valley near the spa building, he saw plainly and distinctly that he could not possibly cover the long stretch to the “Berghof” under his own power, and since there was no tram and no hired carriage appeared, he asked a driver who was steering a wagon loaded with empty crates toward “Dorf” to let him ride. Back to back with the coachman, his legs dangling from the wagon, regarded by passers-by with astonished concern, swaying and nodding half asleep beneath the jolts of the vehicle, he travelled on, climbed down at the railway crossing, handed over money without seeing how much or how little, and hurried headlong up the loop of the road.

“_Dépêchez-vous, monsieur!_” said the French doorkeeper. “_La conférence de M. Krokowski vient de commencer._” And Hans Castorp flung hat and stick into the cloakroom and squeezed hastily yet cautiously, his tongue between his teeth, through the scarcely opened glass door into the dining-room, where the sanatorium company sat in rows upon chairs, while at the right-hand narrow end Dr. Krokowski stood speaking in his frock coat behind a table covered with a cloth and adorned with a water carafe ...

Analysis

Fortunately, an empty corner seat beckoned near the door. He slipped sideways into it and assumed an expression as though he had been sitting there all along. The audience, hanging with their first full attention upon Dr. Krokowski’s lips, scarcely noticed him; and that was well, for he looked dreadful. His face was white as linen and his suit stained with blood, so that he resembled a murderer fresh from the deed. The lady in front of him, however, turned her head as he sat down and scrutinized him through narrowed eyes. It was Madame Chauchat; he recognized her with a kind of exasperation. But this was the very devil! Was he never to be left in peace? He had thought he might sit quietly here, his destination reached, and recover a little; and now he must have her directly under his nose—a coincidence at which, under other circumstances, he might perhaps have been pleased, but tired and harried as he was, what good was it to him? It merely made fresh demands upon his heart and would keep him breathless throughout the lecture. She had looked at him with Pribislav’s very eyes, had gazed into his face and at the bloodstains on his suit—rather inconsiderately and intrusively, moreover, as befitted the manners of a woman who slammed doors. How badly she held herself! Not like the women of Hans Castorp’s native sphere, who, backs erect, turned their heads toward their partners at table while speaking with the tips of their lips. Frau Chauchat sat slumped and limp; her back was rounded, she let her shoulders droop forward, and, what was more, she thrust out her head, so that the vertebra at the nape protruded above the neckline of her white blouse. Pribislav, too, had held his head in much the same way; he, however, had been a model pupil who had lived honourably (although that had not been the reason why Hans Castorp had borrowed the pencil from him)—whereas it was perfectly clear that Frau Chauchat’s negligent posture, her slamming of doors, the inconsiderateness of her gaze, were connected with her illness; indeed, they expressed the licence, those dishonourable but positively boundless advantages of which young Herr Albin had boasted...

Hans Castorp’s thoughts became confused as he gazed at Frau Chauchat’s limp back; they ceased to be thoughts and turned into reverie, into which Dr. Krokowski’s dragging baritone, his softly sounded r, rang as though from a great distance. But the silence in the hall, the profound attention that held everything around him spellbound, affected him; it fairly roused him from his torpor. He looked about him... Beside him sat the thin-haired pianist, head thrown back, listening open-mouthed and with folded arms. The schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, farther away, had avid eyes and patches of reddish down on both cheeks—a heat repeated upon the faces of other ladies on whom Hans Castorp fixed his gaze: Frau Salomon over there beside Herr Albin, and Frau Magnus, the brewer’s wife, the one who was losing albumen. On Frau Stöhr’s face, a little farther back, there appeared such an uncultivated rapture that it was pitiful, while the ivory-coloured Levi, her eyes half closed, her flat hands resting in her lap against the back of the chair, would have looked entirely like a dead woman had not her breast risen and fallen so strongly and rhythmically, which instead reminded Hans Castorp of a female wax figure he had once seen in a panopticon, with a mechanical apparatus inside its bosom. Several guests held a cupped hand to the shell of the ear, or at least suggested the gesture by keeping the hand raised halfway to it, as though attention had frozen them in the midst of the movement. Public Prosecutor Paravant, a brown, apparently robust man, even shook one ear with his forefinger to make it more keenly receptive, then once again held it out to the stream of Dr. Krokowski’s discourse.

But what was Dr. Krokowski saying? Along what course of thought was he proceeding? Hans Castorp gathered his wits in order to catch up, which he did not immediately succeed in doing, since he had missed the beginning and, while reflecting upon Frau Chauchat’s limp back, had let still more escape him. It concerned a power... that power... in short, it was the power of love with which it dealt. Naturally! The subject was contained in the general title of the lecture series, and what else, indeed, was Dr. Krokowski likely to speak about, since that was his particular field. It was somewhat strange, to be sure, suddenly to hear a lecture on love, when previously there had been talk only of such things as transmission mechanisms in shipbuilding. How did one set about discussing, in the bright light of morning and before ladies and gentlemen, a subject of so refractory and reticent a nature? Dr. Krokowski discussed it in a mixed mode of expression, at once poetical and learned, ruthlessly scientific, yet in a tone that swung with a singing cadence, which struck young Hans Castorp as rather disorderly, though this might be precisely why the ladies’ cheeks were so heated and the gentlemen shook their ears. In particular, the speaker constantly employed the word “love” in a subtly shifting sense, so that one never quite knew where one stood with it, or whether it signified something devout or something passionately carnal—which produced a faint sensation of seasickness. Never in his life had Hans Castorp heard this word pronounced so often in succession as here and today; indeed, when he considered it, it seemed to him that he himself had never yet uttered it or heard it from another’s mouth. That might be an error—in any case, he did not find that such frequent repetition improved the word. On the contrary, in time those slippery syllables-and-a-half, with the tongue-sound, the lip-sound, and the thin vowel in the middle, became quite repugnant to him; he associated them with a notion of watered milk—something whitish-blue and flabby, particularly in comparison with all the vigorous matter that Dr. Krokowski, strictly speaking, was serving up on the subject. For this much became clear: one could say the strongest things without driving people from the hall, provided one went about it as he did. By no means did he content himself with bringing up things universally known yet commonly shrouded in silence, and doing so with a kind of intoxicating tact; he destroyed illusions, inexorably rendered knowledge its due, left no room for sentimental faith in the dignity of silver hair or the angelic purity of the tender child. Moreover, with his frock coat he wore his soft turned-down collar and sandals over grey socks, which made a principled and idealistic impression, although Hans Castorp was somewhat startled by it. Supporting his propositions with all manner of examples and anecdotes drawn from books and loose sheets lying before him on the table, and several times even reciting verse, Dr. Krokowski treated of terrifying forms of love, strange, painful, and sinister variations of its manifestations and omnipotence. Of all the natural drives, he said, it was the most unstable and endangered, fundamentally prone to aberration and disastrous perversity, nor should that occasion surprise. For this mighty impulse was not simple; by its nature it was manifoldly compounded, and, however legitimate it might be as a whole, it was compounded of nothing but perversities. Since, however, and rightly so, Dr. Krokowski continued, since one properly refused to infer the perversity of the whole from the perversity of its constituent parts, one was inevitably compelled to claim a portion of the whole’s legitimacy, if not its entire legitimacy, for each individual perversity as well. That was a demand of logic, and he begged his listeners to hold fast to it. Psychic resistances and correctives, decent and ordering instincts of—he had almost said a bourgeois nature—were what, through their balancing and restrictive influence, fused the perverse constituents into a regular and useful whole—a process frequent enough and to be welcomed, though its result (as Dr. Krokowski added somewhat dismissively) was of no further concern to the physician and thinker. In another case, however, this process did not succeed, would not and ought not to succeed; and who, Dr. Krokowski asked, could say whether this might not perhaps constitute the nobler, psychically more precious case? For in this case both groups of forces, the urge of love no less than those opposing impulses, among which shame and disgust were particularly to be named, possessed an extraordinary tension and passion exceeding the customary bourgeois measure; and the struggle between them, conducted in the depths of the soul, prevented that fencing-in, safeguarding, and moral disciplining of the errant drives which led to customary harmony, to the prescribed life of love. This conflict between the powers of chastity and love—for such it was—how did it end? Apparently, it ended in the victory of chastity. Fear, propriety, modest abhorrence, a trembling need for purity: these suppressed love, held it fettered in darkness, permitted its confused demands to enter consciousness and find expression only in part, and by no means in their full diversity and force. Yet this victory of chastity was merely an apparent and Pyrrhic victory, for the imperative of love could neither be gagged nor violated; suppressed love was not dead, it lived, it continued to strive in darkness and deepest secrecy toward fulfilment, it broke through the ban of chastity and reappeared, though in altered and unrecognizable form... And what, then, was the form and mask in which love, denied and suppressed, reappeared? Dr. Krokowski asked this and looked along the rows as though he seriously expected the answer from his listeners. Yes, he would have to tell them that himself as well, after all the other things he had already told them. No one but he knew it, but he would certainly know this too; one could see it in his face. With his glowing eyes, his waxen pallor and black beard, together with the monkish sandals over grey woollen socks, he seemed in his own person to symbolize the struggle between chastity and passion of which he had spoken. At least this was Hans Castorp’s impression as, like everyone else, he awaited with the utmost suspense the answer as to the form in which forbidden love returned. The women scarcely breathed. Public Prosecutor Paravant quickly shook his ear once more, so that at the decisive moment it might be open and receptive. Then Dr. Krokowski said: In the form of illness! The symptom of illness was love’s activity in disguise, and all illness was transformed love.

Now they knew, though not all of them may have been fully capable of appreciating it. A sigh passed through the hall, and Public Prosecutor Paravant nodded significant approval, while Dr. Krokowski continued to develop his thesis. Hans Castorp, for his part, lowered his head in order to consider what he had heard and examine himself as to whether he understood it. But being unpractised in such trains of thought, and moreover possessing little mental vigour after his unwholesome walk, he was easily distracted, and was indeed distracted at once by the back before him and the arm belonging to it, which rose and bent backward so that the hand, directly before Hans Castorp’s eyes, might support the braided hair from beneath.

It was oppressive to have the hand so close before one’s eyes—one was forced to contemplate it, whether one wished to or not, to study all the blemishes and human imperfections adhering to it as though it lay beneath a magnifying glass. No, there was nothing aristocratic about it at all, this over-stubby schoolgirl’s hand with its indifferently trimmed nails—one could not even be certain that it was perfectly clean at the outer finger joints, and the skin beside the nails had been bitten; there could be no doubt of that. Hans Castorp’s mouth twisted, but his eyes remained fixed upon Madame Chauchat’s hand, and a vague half-memory passed through his mind of what Dr. Krokowski had said about the bourgeois resistances that opposed love... The arm was more beautiful, that arm bent softly behind the head and scarcely clothed, for the fabric of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse—the lightest gauze, so that the arm acquired from it only a certain airy transfiguration and would probably have been less charming entirely uncovered. It was at once delicate and full—and cool, by every supposition. With regard to it, there could be no question of any bourgeois resistances.

Hans Castorp dreamed, his gaze fixed upon Frau Chauchat’s arm. How women dressed! They displayed this and that of their necks and breasts; they transfigured their arms with transparent gauze... They did so throughout the world in order to arouse our yearning desire. My God, life was beautiful! It was beautiful precisely by virtue of such matters of course as women dressing alluringly—for of course it was a matter of course, so universally practised and acknowledged that one scarcely thought about it, but accepted it unconsciously and without ado. Yet one ought to think about it, Hans Castorp reflected inwardly, in order properly to rejoice in life, and bear in mind that it was a delightful and, at bottom, almost fabulous arrangement. Naturally, it was for the sake of a certain purpose that women were permitted to dress in a fabulous and delightful fashion without thereby offending propriety; it concerned the next generation, the propagation of the human race, yes indeed. But what if the woman were inwardly diseased, so that she was not fit for motherhood at all—what then? Did it then make sense for her to wear gauze sleeves in order to make men curious about her body—her inwardly diseased body? That manifestly made _no_ sense and ought properly to have been considered improper and prohibited. For a man to take an interest in a diseased woman surely possessed no more reason than... well, than Hans Castorp’s quiet interest in Pribislav Hippe had once possessed. A foolish comparison, a somewhat embarrassing memory. But it had presented itself unbidden and without his assistance. His dreamy contemplation broke off at this point, however, chiefly because his attention was once more directed toward Dr. Krokowski, whose voice had risen strikingly. Truly, he stood there behind his little table with arms outspread and head inclined to one side, and despite his frock coat looked almost like the Lord Jesus upon the cross!

It emerged that, at the conclusion of his lecture, Dr. Krokowski was conducting an ardent campaign on behalf of the analysis of the soul and, with open arms, inviting everyone to come to him. Come unto me, he said in other words, all ye that labour and are heavy laden! And he left no doubt of his conviction that everyone without exception laboured and was heavy laden. He spoke of hidden suffering, of shame and grief, of the redeeming effect of analysis; he extolled the illumination of the unconscious, taught the retransformation of illness into consciously recognized affect, exhorted them to trust, promised recovery. Then he let his arms fall, set his head upright once more, gathered together the printed papers that had served him during his lecture, and, resting the little bundle against his shoulder with his left hand, exactly like a schoolmaster, departed through the ambulatory with head held high.

Everyone rose, shifted the chairs, and began moving slowly toward the same exit through which the doctor had left the hall. It looked as though they were converging upon him from every side, hesitantly yet without will, in dazed unanimity, like the swarm behind the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp remained standing amid the stream, the back of his chair in his hand. I am only visiting here, he thought; I am healthy and, thank God, do not come into consideration at all, and I shall not even be here for the next lecture. He saw Frau Chauchat going out, creeping along with her head thrust forward. Does she submit to analysis too? he thought, and his heart began to pound... In doing so, he failed to notice Joachim approaching him among the chairs, and started nervously when his cousin addressed him.

“You came at the very last moment,” Joachim said. “Did you go far? How was it?”

“Oh, pleasant,” Hans Castorp replied. “Yes, I went quite a long way. But I must confess it did me less good than I expected. It was probably premature, or altogether ill-advised. For the present I shall not do it again.”

Joachim did not ask whether he had liked the lecture, and Hans Castorp offered no opinion upon it. As though by tacit agreement, neither afterward mentioned the lecture by so much as a word.

Doubts and Considerations

By Tuesday, then, our hero had been among those up here for a week, and accordingly, on returning from his morning walk, he found the bill awaiting him in his room, his first weekly bill, a neatly executed commercial document enclosed in a greenish envelope, with an illustrated letterhead—the Berghof building was most alluringly depicted at the top—and adorned down the left-hand side with an extract from the prospectus arranged in a narrow column, in which “psychic treatment according to the most modern principles” was also mentioned in letterspaced type. The calligraphic entries themselves came to almost exactly 180 francs: twelve francs a day for board together with medical treatment, eight for the room, twenty under the heading “admission fee,” and ten for disinfecting the room, while smaller charges for laundry, beer, and the wine consumed with his first evening meal rounded out the sum.

Hans Castorp found nothing to object to when he checked the addition with Joachim. “Yes, I make no use of the medical treatment,” he said, “but that is my affair; it is included in the pension rate, and I cannot expect them to deduct it—for how could that be managed? They make a tidy profit on the disinfection, for they cannot possibly have used ten francs’ worth of H₂CO fumigating the American woman. But on the whole, I must say, considering what is provided, I find it cheap rather than expensive.” And so, before second breakfast, they went to the “Administration” to settle the debt.

The “Administration” was on the ground floor: if, beyond the hall, one followed the corridor past the cloakroom and the kitchen and serving rooms, the door could not be missed, especially as it was distinguished by a porcelain sign. There Hans Castorp gained, with interest, a certain insight into the commercial centre of the establishment’s operations. It was a proper little office: a young lady typist was at work, and three male employees sat bent over desks, while in the adjoining room a gentleman possessing the superior air of a manager or director worked at a free-standing roll-top desk and merely cast a cold, objectively appraising glance at the clients over his eyeglass. While they were attended to at the counter, a banknote changed, payment taken and receipt issued, they maintained a gravely modest, silent, indeed submissive demeanour, like young Germans who transfer their respect for authority and the government office to every place of clerical work and official business; but outside, on their way to breakfast and later in the course of the day, they chatted a little about the constitution of the Berghof Institute, Joachim, as the established and knowledgeable resident, answering his cousin’s questions.

Hofrat Behrens was by no means the proprietor and owner of the establishment—although one might well receive that impression. Above and behind him stood invisible powers, manifesting themselves to a certain degree only in the shape of the office: a supervisory board, a joint-stock company to which it might not have been at all unpleasant to belong, since, according to Joachim’s credible assurance, despite high physicians’ salaries and the most liberal principles of management, it was able every year to distribute a handsome dividend among its members. The Hofrat, therefore, was not an independent man; he was nothing but an agent, a functionary, a representative of higher powers—the first and foremost, certainly, the soul of the whole concern, exercising a determining influence upon the entire organization, the administrative management not excepted, although, as physician-in-chief, he was naturally exalted above all occupation with the commercial side of the enterprise. A native of north-western Germany, he had, as was known, arrived in this position years ago, contrary to his intentions and the plan of his life: brought up here by his wife, whose remains had long since been embraced by the cemetery at “Dorf”—the picturesque cemetery of Davos Dorf up there on the right-hand slope, farther back toward the entrance to the valley. She had been a very lovely, though large-eyed and asthenic apparition, to judge by the photographs standing everywhere in the Hofrat’s official residence, and also by the oil portraits, the work of his own amateur hand, that hung upon its walls. After giving him two children, a son and a daughter, her light, fever-stricken body had been drawn up into these regions, and within a few months its wasting and consumption had run their course. It was said that Behrens, who had idolized her, had been so grievously struck by the blow that for a time he had fallen into melancholy and eccentricity, attracting notice in the street by giggling, gesticulating, and talking to himself. He had then never returned to his original sphere of life, but had remained on the spot: certainly in part because he could not bear to leave the grave; though the decisive consideration had probably been the less sentimental one that he himself had caught something and, according to his own scientific judgment, simply _belonged_ here. Thus he had become naturalized as one of those physicians who are fellow-sufferers of the persons whose sojourn they supervise; who do not, themselves independent of disease, combat it from the free estate of personal soundness, but bear its mark themselves—a peculiar case, yet by no means an isolated one, and one that undoubtedly has its advantages as well as its questionable aspects. Comradeship between physician and patient is assuredly to be welcomed, and there is something to be said for the notion that only one who suffers can be the sufferer’s guide and saviour. But is true intellectual mastery of a power possible in one who himself numbers among its slaves? Can he who is himself subject set others free? The sick physician remains a paradox to simple feeling, a problematic phenomenon. May not his intellectual knowledge of disease be not so much enriched and morally strengthened by experiential knowledge as clouded and confused? He does not look disease in the eye as a clear antagonist; he is compromised, his allegiance is ambiguous; and with all due caution one must ask whether a man belonging to the world of disease can truly be interested in the healing, or even the preservation, of others in the same sense as a man of health…”

Hans Castorp expressed, in his own fashion, some of these doubts and considerations as he chatted with Joachim about the “Berghof” and its medical director; but Joachim objected that no one knew whether Hofrat Behrens was still himself a patient today—he had probably recovered long ago. It was many years since he had begun practising here; for a time he had done so on his own account and had rapidly made a name for himself as a keen-eared auscultator and a sure-handed pneumotomist. Then the “Berghof” had secured his services, the institute with which he had now been so closely identified for nearly a decade… His residence lay back there, at the end of the north-west wing—Dr. Krokowski lived not far from it—and that lady of ancient nobility, the matron of whom Settembrini had spoken so scornfully and whom Hans Castorp had thus far seen only in passing, presided over the little widower’s household. Otherwise the Hofrat was alone, for his son was studying at universities in the German Reich, and his daughter was already married—to a lawyer in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Young Behrens sometimes came to visit during the holidays, which had happened once already during Joachim’s stay; and Joachim said that the ladies of the establishment then became greatly agitated, temperatures rose, jealousies led to quarrels and disputes on the rest-cure balconies, and there was increased pressure upon Dr. Krokowski’s special consultation hour…”

A room of his own had been assigned to the assistant physician for his private consultations; like the large examination room, the laboratory, the operating theatre, and the X-ray studio, it was situated in the well-lit basement storey of the sanatorium building. We speak of a basement storey because the stone staircase leading down to it from the ground floor did indeed create the impression that one was descending into a cellar—an impression, however, almost wholly deceptive. For in the first place the ground floor lay fairly high, and in the second the Berghof building as a whole was erected upon sloping ground, against the mountainside, so that those “basement” rooms looked out at the front toward the garden and the valley: circumstances that, as it were, crossed out and annulled the effect and meaning of the staircase. For one believed oneself to be descending its steps below ground level, yet at the bottom found oneself still and once again at ground level, or only a few feet beneath it—an amusing impression for Hans Castorp when, one afternoon, he accompanied his cousin “down” into this sphere to be weighed by the bath attendant. Clinical brightness and cleanliness prevailed there; everything was white upon white, and the doors gleamed with white lacquer, including the one to Dr. Krokowski’s consulting room, upon which the scholar’s visiting card was fastened with a drawing pin, and to which two additional steps descended from the level of the corridor, giving the room beyond the character of a secluded chamber. This door stood to the right of the staircase, at the end of the passage, and Hans Castorp kept a particular eye upon it while pacing up and down the corridor as he waited for Joachim. He also saw someone emerge: a lady who had recently arrived and whose name he did not yet know, a small, dainty creature with curls upon her forehead and gold earrings. She stooped low as she mounted the steps and gathered up her skirt, while with her other little, ringed hand she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and, above it, gazed out of her bowed posture into vacancy with large, pale, distraught eyes. Thus she hurried toward the stairs with short, close steps that made her petticoat rustle, suddenly stopped as though remembering something, set off again with mincing haste, and disappeared into the stairwell, still bent low and without removing the handkerchief from her lips.

Behind her, when the door had opened, it had been much darker than in the white corridor: the clinical brightness of these lower rooms evidently did not penetrate there; veiled half-light, deep twilight, prevailed, as Hans Castorp observed, in Dr. Krokowski’s analytical cabinet.

Table Talk

At meals in the many-coloured dining hall, young Hans Castorp suffered some embarrassment because the grandfatherly tremor of the head had remained with him after that walk undertaken on his own initiative—it was precisely at table that it returned with almost unfailing regularity, and then could neither be prevented nor easily concealed. Besides the dignified support of the chin, which could not be maintained indefinitely, he devised various means of masking the weakness—for example, he kept his head in motion as much as possible by conversing to right and left; or, when raising his soup spoon to his mouth, say, pressed his left forearm firmly upon the table to give himself steadiness; and during pauses he would sometimes plant his elbow on the table and support his head with his hand, although in his own eyes this was loutish behaviour and could at best be tolerated only among an uninhibited company of invalids. But all this was troublesome and very nearly spoiled his meals altogether, though ordinarily he knew so well how to appreciate them for the tensions and spectacles they afforded.

The fact was, however—and Hans Castorp knew it perfectly well—that the humiliating phenomenon against which he struggled was not merely of physical origin, not merely attributable to the air up here and the exertions of acclimatization, but expressed an inward agitation and was directly connected with those very tensions and spectacles.

Madame Chauchat almost always came late to table, and until she appeared Hans Castorp sat unable to keep his feet still, for he was waiting for the crash of the glass door that unfailingly accompanied her entrance, and knew that it would make him start and cause him to feel his face turn cold, as indeed regularly occurred. At first he had flung his head round in fury each time and followed the negligent latecomer with angry eyes to her place at the “Good” Russian table, sometimes even sending after her, half aloud and between his teeth, a word of rebuke, an exclamation of outraged disapproval. He no longer did so now, but bent his head lower over his plate, perhaps even biting his lip, or turned it deliberately and unnaturally toward the other side; for it seemed to him that anger was no longer his right, that he was not altogether free to censure her, but was himself an accomplice in the offence and jointly answerable for it before the others—in short, he was ashamed; and it would have been inaccurate to say that he was ashamed for Frau Chauchat: rather, he was personally ashamed before the company—a feeling he might, incidentally, have spared himself, since no one in the room concerned himself either with Frau Chauchat’s vice or with Hans Castorp’s shame over it, except perhaps the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, on his right.

The wretched creature had understood that, thanks to Hans Castorp’s sensitivity to the slamming of doors, a certain emotionally charged relation had arisen between her young neighbour at table and the Russian woman; furthermore, that the character of such a relation mattered little so long as it existed at all; and finally, that his feigned indifference—feigned very badly indeed, owing to his lack of theatrical experience and talent—represented not a weakening but an intensification, a higher phase of the relation. Without claim or hope on her own behalf, Fräulein Engelhart was forever launching into selflessly enraptured speeches about Frau Chauchat—the remarkable point being that Hans Castorp, if not immediately, then certainly in the long run, recognized and saw through her incendiary activity with perfect clarity, indeed was even repelled by it, without therefore allowing himself to be any less willingly influenced and beguiled.

“Crash!” said the old maid. “That is _she_. One need not look up to make certain who has come in. Of course, there she goes—and how charmingly she walks—just like a kitten creeping up to its saucer of milk! I wish we could exchange places, so that you might observe her as freely and comfortably as I can. I quite understand that you do not care to keep turning your head toward her—God knows what she might end by imagining if she noticed… Now she is saying good day to her people… You really ought to look over for once; it is so refreshing to watch her. When she smiles and speaks as she is doing now, she gets a dimple in one cheek—but not always, only when she chooses. Yes, she is a golden darling of a woman, a spoiled creature; that is why she is so careless. One has to love such people, whether one wishes to or not, for when their carelessness vexes one, the vexation itself is only a further inducement to be fond of them; it is so blissful to be vexed and yet compelled to love…”

Thus the schoolmistress whispered behind her hand, unheard by the others, while the downy flush upon her old-maid’s cheeks recalled her abnormally high body temperature; and her voluptuous chatter entered poor Hans Castorp’s very marrow and blood. A certain lack of independence created in him the need to have it confirmed by a third party that Madame Chauchat was a delightful woman; and besides, the young man wished to be encouraged from without to surrender himself to feelings against which his reason and conscience raised troublesome resistance.

For the rest, these conversations proved scarcely fruitful as regarded factual information, for with the best will in the world Fräulein Engelhart could tell him nothing more precise about Frau Chauchat, nothing beyond what everyone in the sanatorium knew; she did not know her, could not even boast of an acquaintance they had in common, and the only means by which she could acquire some standing in Hans Castorp’s eyes was the fact that her home was in Königsberg—and thus not so very far from the Russian frontier—and that she knew a few scraps of Russian: meagre qualifications, in which Hans Castorp was nevertheless prepared to discern something like extensive personal connections with Frau Chauchat.

“She wears no ring,” he said, “no wedding ring, as I see. How is that? You told me she was a married woman.”

The schoolmistress became embarrassed, as though she had been driven into a corner and must talk her way out of it, so deeply responsible did she feel toward Hans Castorp for Frau Chauchat.

“You mustn’t be too particular about that,” she said. “She is certainly married. There can be no possible doubt of it. She does not call herself Madame merely for the sake of greater consequence, as foreign young ladies do when they are a little more mature; we all know that she really has a husband somewhere in Russia, it is common knowledge throughout the place. Her own family name is different, Russian and not French, something ending in -anov or -ukov; I used to know it and have merely forgotten it again. If you like, I shall inquire; there are sure to be several people here who know the name. A ring? No, she wears none; I have noticed it myself. Good heavens, perhaps it does not become her, perhaps it makes her hand look broad. Or she may think it narrow-minded and bourgeois to wear a wedding ring, such a plain band... all that is lacking is the basket of household keys... no, she is surely too generous-minded for that... I know how it is: Russian women all have something free and generous in their nature. Besides, such a ring has something positively repellent and sobering about it; it is, after all, a symbol of subjection, I should say, it gives a woman something downright nunlike, turns her into a pure little touch-me-not. I should not be surprised at all if that were not to Frau Chauchat’s taste... Such a charming woman, in the bloom of her years... She probably has neither cause nor inclination to make every gentleman whose hand she takes feel at once that she is bound in matrimony...”

Great God, how the schoolmistress exerted herself! Hans Castorp stared into her face in utter alarm, but she defied his gaze with a kind of wild embarrassment. Then they both fell silent for a while, in order to recover. Hans Castorp ate and suppressed the trembling of his head. At last he said:

“And the husband? Does he not concern himself with her at all? Does he never visit her up here? What is he, actually?”

“An official. A Russian administrative official, in a quite remote province—Daghestan, you know, far away in the east beyond the Caucasus—he has been posted there. No, as I told you, no one has ever seen him up here. And she is already in the third month of her present stay.”

“So this is not her first time here?”

“Oh no, her third already. And in between she goes to other places of the same sort.—It is the other way round: _she_ visits _him_ occasionally, not often, once a year for a little while. They live apart, one may say, and she visits him now and then.”

“Well, yes, since she is ill...”

“Certainly, she is ill. But not _like that_. Not so seriously ill that she positively has to live perpetually in sanatoriums, separated from her husband. There must be further and different reasons. Everyone here assumes that there are others. Perhaps she dislikes Daghestan beyond the Caucasus, such a wild and remote region; that would hardly be surprising, after all. But it must also be the husband’s fault to some degree, if she dislikes being with him so thoroughly. He may have a French name, but for all that he is a Russian official, and they are a coarse breed of men, you may take my word for it. I once saw one of them; he had iron-grey whiskers and such a red face... They are corruptible in the highest degree, and then they are all devoted to Wutki, to spirits, you know... For propriety’s sake they have some trifling thing brought them to eat, a few pickled mushrooms or a morsel of sturgeon, and with it they drink—simply to excess. And that is what they call a light refreshment...”

“You lay everything at his door,” said Hans Castorp. “But we do not know whether it may not be her fault that they fail to live happily together. One must be fair. When I look at her, and consider that ill-mannered door-slamming... I do not take her for an angel; please don’t be offended, but I would not trust her an inch. You, however, are not impartial; you are up to your ears in prejudices in her favour...”

He behaved in this fashion from time to time. With a cunning actually foreign to his nature, he represented matters as though Fräulein Engelhart’s infatuation with Frau Chauchat did not signify what, as he knew perfectly well, it truly signified, but were instead an independent and comical fact, on account of which he, the detached Hans Castorp, might tease the old maid from a cool and humorous distance. And since he was certain that his accomplice would accept and submit to this brazen distortion, he risked nothing by it.

“Good morning!” he said. “Did you rest well? I hope you dreamed of your lovely Minka?... No, how you blush the very moment anyone merely mentions her! You are utterly besotted with her; you had better not try to deny it!”

And the schoolmistress, who really had blushed and was bending low over her cup, whispered from the left-hand corner of her mouth:

“But no—fie, Herr Castorp! It is not kind of you to embarrass me so with your insinuations. Everyone will notice that we have our eye upon her, and that you are saying things to me that make me blush...”

What the two neighbours at table were doing was peculiar. Both knew that they were lying doubly and trebly: that Hans Castorp teased the schoolmistress about Frau Chauchat only in order to be able to speak of her, yet at the same time found an unhealthy, vicarious pleasure in flirting with the old maid—who, for her part, entered into it: first for reasons of matchmaking, then also because, to please the young man, she really had become somewhat enamoured of Frau Chauchat, and finally because in her pitiable way she relished being teased and made to blush by him in any fashion whatever. They both knew this of themselves and of the other, and knew as well that each knew it of himself and of the other, and the whole affair was intricate and unclean. But although Hans Castorp was generally repelled by intricate and unclean things, and felt repelled by them in this instance too, he nevertheless continued to splash about in the turbid element, reassuring himself with the thought that he was only visiting up here and would soon be leaving again. With an assumed objectivity, he passed connoisseurial judgement upon the appearance of the “languid” woman, determining that, seen from the front, she looked decidedly younger and prettier than in profile, that her eyes were set too far apart and her carriage left much to be desired, although her arms, to be sure, were beautiful and “softly formed.” And as he said this he attempted to conceal the trembling of his head, but was compelled not only to recognize that the schoolmistress noticed his futile effort, but also to make, with the greatest disgust, the observation that her own head was trembling likewise. It had also been nothing but policy and unnatural cunning that had led him to call Frau Chauchat a “lovely Minka”; for this enabled him to go on and ask:

“I say ‘Minka,’ but what is her real name, actually? Her Christian name, I mean. As indisputably besotted with her as you are, you absolutely must know her Christian name.”

The schoolmistress reflected.

“Wait, I know it,” she said. “I used to know it. Is she not called Tatiana? No, that was not it, nor was it Natasha. Natasha Chauchat? No, that is not how I heard it. Stop, I have it! Her name is Avdotya. Or at least it was something of that character. For she is most certainly not called Katienka or Ninochka. Upon my word, it has escaped me. But I can find it out with the greatest ease, if it matters to you.”

And indeed, the next day she knew the name. She pronounced it at luncheon, as the glass door crashed into its latch. Frau Chauchat’s name was Clawdia.

Hans Castorp did not understand at once. He had the name repeated and spelled before he grasped it. Then he repeated it several times himself, glancing across at Frau Chauchat with red-veined eyes as he did so, and, as it were, trying the name upon her.

“Clawdia,” he said, “yes, that may very well be her name; it suits her perfectly.” He made no secret of his delight in this intimate knowledge and henceforth spoke only of “Clawdia” whenever he meant Frau Chauchat. “Your Clawdia is rolling bread into pellets, I have just seen her. That is hardly refined.” “It depends upon who does it,” the schoolmistress replied. “It becomes Clawdia.”

Yes, the meals in the hall with the seven tables held the very greatest charm for Hans Castorp. He regretted it whenever one of them came to an end, but his consolation was that very soon, in two or two and a half hours, he would be sitting here again; and when he was sitting here again, it was as though he had never risen. What lay between? Nothing. A short walk to the watercourse or into the English quarter, a little repose in his chair. That was no serious interruption, no obstacle difficult to surmount. It would have been another matter had work, cares and exertions of any sort intervened—things not easily surveyed and passed over in the mind. But such was not the case in the wisely and happily regulated life of the Berghof. When Hans Castorp rose from one communal meal, he could look forward quite directly to the next—provided, that is, that “look forward” was the proper expression for the kind of expectation with which he anticipated another gathering in the company of the ailing Frau Clawdia Chauchat, and not too light, cheerful, simple-minded and commonplace a term. The reader may possibly be inclined to consider only expressions of this latter kind—cheerful and commonplace ones—appropriate and admissible in relation to Hans Castorp’s person and inner life; but we would recall that, as a young man of reason and conscience, he could not simply “look forward” to the sight and proximity of Frau Chauchat, and, since we must know, we record that, had this phrase been offered to him, he would have rejected it with a shrug of the shoulders.

Yes, he grew disdainful toward certain means of expression—a detail that deserves to be recorded. He went about with his cheeks glowing in a dry heat and sang to himself, sang inwardly, for his state was musical and sensitive. He hummed a little song which, who knows where or when, he had once heard sung by a small soprano voice at some social gathering or charitable concert, and which he now discovered within himself—a piece of gentle nonsense that began:

“How wondrously I am stirred Oft by a word from thee,”

and he was about to add:

“A word that came from thy lips And made its way to my heart!”—

when suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, said “ridiculous,” and rejected and thrust away the tender little song as tasteless, foolishly sentimental—thrust it away with a certain melancholy and severity. Some young man might find satisfaction and pleasure in such an intimate little song if he had, as the phrase goes, “given his heart,” permissibly, peaceably, and with fair prospects, to some healthy little goose down there in the flatlands, and was now abandoning himself to his permissible, promising, reasonable, and fundamentally cheerful emotions. But for him and his “relationship” with Madame Chauchat—the word “relationship” is his responsibility; we decline all accountability for it—such a little poem was decidedly unsuitable; in his reclining chair he felt moved to pronounce the aesthetic verdict “silly!” upon it, and broke off in the middle, wrinkling his nose, although he knew of nothing more fitting to put in its place.

One thing, however, afforded him satisfaction as he lay there and attended to his heart, his physical heart, which beat rapidly and audibly in the silence—the regulation silence imposed by the house rules, which prevailed throughout the Berghof during the principal rest cure and the sleeping rest cure. It beat obstinately and importunately, his heart, as it had done almost constantly since he had been up here; yet of late Hans Castorp took less exception to it than he had during the first few days. It could no longer be said that it was beating on its own account, without cause and without connection to the soul. Such a connection existed, or could at least be established without difficulty; an emotion of the mind that justified the body’s exalted activity could readily be supplied. Hans Castorp had only to think of Frau Chauchat—and he did think of her—and he possessed the feeling that properly belonged to the palpitation of his heart.

Mounting Anxiety. Of the Two Grandfathers and the Boat Ride at Twilight

The weather was abominably bad—in this respect Hans Castorp had no luck with his fleeting stay in these parts. It did not exactly snow, but for days on end the rain fell heavily and hideously, dense mists filled the valley, and thunderstorms of ludicrous superfluity—for it was already so cold that they had even lit the heating in the dining hall—discharged themselves amid echoes that rolled out with laborious elaboration.

“A pity,” said Joachim. “I had thought we might go up to the Schatzalp for breakfast one day, or undertake something else. But it seems it is not to be. Let us hope your last week will be better.”

But Hans Castorp replied:

“Never mind. I am not at all eager for expeditions. My first one did not agree with me particularly well. I recuperate best when I simply live from day to day like this, without much variety. Variety is for the long-term patients. But with my three weeks, what need have I of variety?”

So it was: he felt fulfilled and occupied where he was. If he cherished hopes, fulfilment no less than disappointment blossomed for him here, and not on some Schatzalp. It was not boredom that plagued him; on the contrary, he was beginning to fear that the end of his stay might approach on all too light a wing. The second week was advancing; soon two thirds of his time would have been lived away, and once the third had begun, one was already thinking of the suitcase. The first refreshment of Hans Castorp’s sense of time had long since passed; already the days were beginning to fly, and fly they did, although each one of them stretched beneath ever-renewed expectation and swelled with quiet, secret experiences ... Yes, time is an enigmatic thing; its nature is exceedingly difficult to elucidate!

Will it be necessary to characterize more closely those secret experiences which at once weighed down and lent wings to Hans Castorp’s days? But everyone knows them; they were altogether the ordinary sort in their sensitive insignificance, and in a case more reasonably situated and richer in prospects, to which the foolish little song “How wondrously this touches me” might have been applied, they could have unfolded no differently.

It was impossible that Madame Chauchat should not have noticed something of the threads stretching from a certain table to her own; and it was, with a thorough lack of restraint, precisely Hans Castorp’s intention that she should notice something—indeed, as much as possible. We call this wanton because he was perfectly clear about the unreasonableness of his case. But anyone whose condition is, or is beginning to be, what his was, desires that the person over there should know of it, even when there is neither sense nor reason in the matter. Such is man.

Thus, after Frau Chauchat had happened two or three times, whether by chance or under magnetic influence, to turn toward that table during meals and had each time encountered Hans Castorp’s eyes, the fourth time she looked across deliberately and encountered them once again. On a fifth occasion she did not, to be sure, catch him directly; at that moment he was not at his post. Yet he felt at once that she was looking at him and returned her gaze so eagerly that she turned away smiling. Mistrust and rapture filled him at the sight of that smile. If she took him for childish, she was mistaken. His need for refinement was considerable. At a sixth opportunity, when he divined, felt, received the inward intimation that she was looking across, he pretended to be regarding with intense displeasure a pimply lady who had approached his table to chat with the great-aunt; he held out with iron resolve for a good two or three minutes and did not yield until he was certain that the Kirghiz eyes over there had left him—a curious piece of play-acting which Frau Chauchat was not merely at liberty to see through, but expressly _meant_ to see through, so that Hans Castorp’s great subtlety and self-command might give her pause ... The following occurred. During a pause in the meal Frau Chauchat turned negligently about and surveyed the dining-room. Hans Castorp had been at his post: their eyes met. As they gazed at one another—the invalid peering vaguely and mockingly, Hans Castorp with agitated firmness (he even clenched his teeth while holding her gaze)—her napkin threatened to fall and was on the point of slipping from her lap to the floor. Starting nervously, she reached for it; but a jolt shot through his limbs as well, half tearing him from his chair, and blindly he was about to rush to her aid across eight metres of space and around an intervening table, as though it would signify a catastrophe if the napkin reached the floor ... She managed to seize it just above the tiles. But from her stooping posture, bent sideways toward the floor, holding the napkin by one corner and wearing a darkened expression, plainly annoyed by the unreasonable little panic to which she had succumbed and for which, it seemed, she held him to blame—from that posture she looked back at him once more, observed his readiness to spring and his raised eyebrows, and turned away smiling.

Hans Castorp triumphed over this occurrence to the point of exuberance. Yet the reaction was not slow in coming, for during two full days—that is, throughout ten meals—Madame Chauchat no longer turned toward the dining-room at all; indeed, upon entering she even omitted to “present” herself to the company, as had otherwise been her custom. That was hard. But since these omissions quite unquestionably referred to him, a relation was nevertheless clearly present, if only in negative form; and that might suffice.

He saw very well that Joachim had been entirely right in observing that it was by no means easy to make acquaintances here, except among one’s table companions. For during the single scant hour after dinner in which a certain sociability regularly took place, though it often dwindled to twenty minutes, Madame Chauchat sat without exception among her circle—the hollow-chested gentleman, the humorous woolly-haired lady, the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the sloping-shouldered young men—in the rear of the small salon, which seemed reserved for the “Good Russian Table.” Joachim, too, was always soon pressing to leave, so as not to curtail the evening rest cure, as he said, and perhaps for other reasons of regimen which he did not mention but which Hans Castorp divined and respected. We have accused him of wantonness; but wherever his wishes might tend, social acquaintance with Frau Chauchat was not what he sought, and at bottom he was content with the circumstances that opposed it. The vaguely charged relations which his gazing and contriving had established between himself and the Russian woman were extra-social in nature; they entailed nothing and must be allowed to entail nothing. For a considerable degree of social rejection was perfectly compatible with them on his side, and the fact that he made the thought of “Clawdia” the accompaniment to the pounding of his heart was far from sufficient to shake Hans Lorenz Castorp’s grandson in his conviction that he could have nothing to do, in reality—that is, beyond those secret relations—with this stranger who spent her life at every conceivable health resort, separated from her husband and with no wedding ring on her finger, who carried herself carelessly, let doors slam behind her, rolled pellets of bread, and doubtless bit her fingernails; that deep chasms divided her existence from his, and that together with her he could not pass muster before any judgment he acknowledged. To do him justice, Hans Castorp was entirely without personal arrogance; but an arrogance of a general and more remotely derived kind was written upon his brow and around his somewhat sleepily gazing eyes, and from it sprang the sense of superiority which, at the sight of Frau Chauchat’s being and nature, he neither could nor wished to put aside. It was curious that he became particularly keenly, and perhaps for the first time at all, aware of this far-reaching sense of superiority when one day he heard Frau Chauchat speaking German. After the conclusion of a meal she stood in the dining-room, both hands in the pockets of her sweater, and, as Hans Castorp perceived while passing, was struggling—charmingly, for that matter—with the German language in conversation with another patient, probably a companion from the rest-cure gallery: Hans Castorp’s mother tongue, as he felt with a sudden pride he had never known before—though not without a simultaneous inclination to sacrifice that pride to the delight with which her graceful bungling and mangling filled him.

In a word: Hans Castorp regarded his silent relation with this careless member of Those Up Here as a holiday adventure which, before the tribunal of reason—his own reasonable conscience—could make no claim whatever to approval: chiefly because Frau Chauchat was, after all, ill, languid, feverish, and inwardly worm-eaten, a circumstance closely connected with the dubiousness of her entire existence and strongly involved, too, in Hans Castorp’s feelings of caution and distance ... No, the thought of seeking her actual acquaintance never entered his mind; and as for the other thing, in a week and a half, when he began work at Tunder & Wilms, it would come to an end without consequences, whether he liked it or not.

For the present, however, matters stood thus with him: he had begun to regard the emotions, tensions, fulfilments, and disappointments arising from his delicate relations with the patient as the true meaning and substance of his holiday stay, to live wholly for them and to make his spirits dependent upon their flourishing. Circumstances afforded their cultivation the most benevolent encouragement, for everyone lived together within confined space under a fixed daily order binding upon all; and although Frau Chauchat was at home on another floor—the first (she took her rest cure, as Hans Castorp heard from the schoolmistress, in a communal rest gallery, namely the one on the roof, the very same in which Captain Miklosich had lately turned off the light)—the five meals alone, quite apart from everything else, provided from morning till evening, at every step and turn, the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of an encounter. This, like the fact that no cares or exertions obstructed the prospect, Hans Castorp found splendid, although such enclosure together with propitious chance had something oppressive about it.

Yet he even gave matters a little help, calculating and placing his head at the service of the cause in order to improve his luck. Since Frau Chauchat habitually came late to table, he contrived to be late as well, so that he might encounter her on the way. He lingered over his toilet, was not ready when Joachim came to fetch him, sent his cousin ahead, and said that he would follow at once. Guided by the instinct of his condition, he waited for a certain moment which seemed to him the right one, then hurried down to the first floor, where he did not take the staircase that continued the one which had brought him down, but followed the corridor almost to its end, as far as the other staircase, which lay near a long-familiar room door—it was that of No. 7. Along this route, down the corridor from one staircase to the other, every step offered, so to speak, a chance, for at any moment the door in question might open—and repeatedly it did: crashing shut behind Frau Chauchat, who herself had emerged soundlessly and glided soundlessly toward the stairs ... Then she would walk ahead of him, steadying her hair with one hand, or Hans Castorp would walk ahead of her and feel her gaze upon his back, experiencing a wrenching in his limbs and a crawling of ants down his spine, yet, from the desire to show himself off before her, pretending that he knew nothing of her and was conducting his solitary life in vigorous independence—burying his hands in his jacket pockets and quite needlessly rolling his shoulders, or clearing his throat violently and striking himself on the chest with his fist—all to proclaim his unconcern.

Twice he carried his cunning still further. After he had already taken his seat at the dining-table, he said in dismay and vexation, patting himself with both hands: “There, I have forgotten my handkerchief! Now I shall have to trouble myself upstairs again.” And he went back so that he and “Clawdia” might _meet_, which was, after all, something quite different—more dangerous and more sharply exciting—than having her walk before or behind him. The first time he performed this manoeuvre, she did indeed look him up and down from some distance, quite ruthlessly and without embarrassment, but as she approached she turned her face away indifferently and passed him thus, so that the outcome of this encounter could not be valued very highly. The second time, however, she looked at him, and not merely from afar—she looked at him the entire time, throughout the whole proceeding, gazing firmly and even somewhat darkly into his face, and as she passed she actually turned her head after him—it went to poor Hans Castorp’s very marrow and bone. For that matter, one should not pity him, since he had wished it no otherwise and had arranged the whole affair himself. But the encounter seized him powerfully, both while it was taking place and, above all, afterward; for only when everything was over did he see quite clearly how it had been. Never before had he had Frau Chauchat’s face so near him, so clearly distinguishable in every detail: he had been able to make out the short hairs escaping from the woven mass of her blond plait, which played a little into metallic red and was wound simply around her head; and only a few handbreadths of space had lain between his face and hers, in its wondrous formation, familiar to him from long ago and appealing to him as nothing else in the world—a formation foreign and full of character (for only the foreign seems to us to possess character), mysterious in its northern exoticism, inviting investigation inasmuch as its features and proportions were not easily determined. The decisive element was probably the pronounced region of the high-set cheekbones: it crowded the unusually shallow-set, unusually far-apart eyes and drove them slightly aslant, while at the same time causing the soft concavity of the cheeks, which in turn and indirectly produced the faintly protruding luxuriance of the lips. But then there had been, above all, the eyes themselves, those narrow and (as Hans Castorp found) quite magically shaped Kirghiz eyes, whose colour was the grey-blue or blue-grey of distant mountains, and which at times, during a certain sidelong glance not intended for seeing, could darken meltingly and utterly into veiled night—Clawdia’s eyes, which had regarded him ruthlessly and somewhat darkly at closest quarters and which, in position, colour, and expression, were so strikingly and alarmingly like Pribislav Hippe’s! “Like” was not even the right word—they were the same eyes; and the breadth of the upper half of the face, the flattened nose, everything, down to the flushed whiteness of the skin, the healthy colour of the cheeks—which in Frau Chauchat merely simulated health and, as with everyone up here, was nothing but a superficial product of the outdoor rest cure—everything was just as it had been with Pribislav, and no differently had he looked at Hans Castorp when they passed one another in the schoolyard.

It was shattering in every sense; Hans Castorp was enraptured by the encounter, and at the same time he felt something like a rising fear, an oppression of the same kind as that caused by being shut in with propitious chance within a confined space: this, too—the fact that the long-forgotten Pribislav had met him again up here as Frau Chauchat and looked at him with Kirghiz eyes—was like being shut in with something inevitable or inescapable, inescapable in both a blissful and a fearful sense. It was promising and at the same time uncanny, indeed menacing, and a feeling of helpless need came over young Hans Castorp; vague and instinctive movements took place within him which one might have described as a looking about him, a groping and searching for help, for counsel and support; one after another, he thought of various persons whom it might prove salutary to think of.

There was Joachim, good, honourable Joachim at his side, whose eyes had assumed so sorrowful an expression during these months, and who would sometimes shrug his shoulders with a violent disdain such as he had never displayed before—Joachim with the “Blue Heinrich” in his pocket, as Frau Stöhr was accustomed to call that apparatus: with a face so obstinately devoid of shame that Hans Castorp shuddered in his soul whenever he saw it ... There, then, was the upright Joachim, who harried and plagued Hofrat Behrens to let him leave, so that in the “plain,” or the “flatlands,” as the world of the healthy was called up here, with a faint but unmistakable accent of contempt, he might perform the service for which he yearned. In order to reach it sooner and save time, which was spent so lavishly here, he for the present observed the service of the cure with the utmost conscientiousness—did so for the sake of his speedy recovery, no doubt, yet also, as Hans Castorp sometimes thought he could sense, a little for the sake of the service itself, which after all was one service among others, and the fulfilment of duty was the fulfilment of duty. Thus, after barely a quarter of an hour, Joachim would urge them away from the evening company and back to the rest cure; and that was well, for his military precision came, as it were, to the assistance of Hans Castorp's civilian disposition, which otherwise would gladly, though purposelessly and without prospect, have lingered longer in society, with the little Russian drawing-room in view. Yet Joachim's insistence upon cutting the evening gathering short had another, unspoken reason, one that Hans Castorp understood perfectly, since he had learned so well to understand Joachim's mottled pallor and that peculiarly plaintive way in which his mouth became distorted at certain moments. For Marusja too—the perpetually laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her beautiful finger, the scent of oranges, and her high, worm-eaten breast—was generally present at these gatherings; and Hans Castorp understood that this circumstance drove Joachim away because it attracted him far too powerfully, in a terrible fashion. Was Joachim also “shut in”—even more narrowly and oppressively than he himself, since Marusja, with her orange-scented little handkerchief, sat with them at the same dining-table five times a day into the bargain? In any event Joachim had far too much to contend with within himself for his presence to afford Hans Castorp any true inward help. His daily flight from society appeared honourable, certainly, but was anything but reassuring; and at moments it also occurred to Hans Castorp that Joachim's good example of faithfulness to the duties of the cure, and the expert guidance he provided in them, might have something questionable about them.

Hans Castorp had not yet been on the spot for two weeks, but it seemed longer to him; and the daily order of those up here, which Joachim at his side observed with such devout fidelity to duty, had begun in his eyes to assume the stamp of a sacred, self-evident inviolability, so that life in the flatlands below, viewed from here, appeared almost strange and perverse. He had already acquired a fine dexterity in handling the two blankets with which, during the rest cure in cold weather, one made of oneself a neat parcel, a veritable mummy; very little was wanting before he equalled Joachim in the assured skill and art of wrapping them about himself in accordance with regulations, and he could scarcely help marvelling at the thought that no one in the plain below knew anything of this art or its rules. Yes, that was curious—but at the same time Hans Castorp marvelled that he found it curious, and the uneasiness which made him look about inwardly for counsel and support arose in him anew.

He was obliged to think of Hofrat Behrens and the advice he had given him _sine pecunia_, to live exactly as the patients did and even take his temperature as well—and of Settembrini, who had laughed so loudly into the air at this advice and then quoted something from the _Magic Flute_. Yes, he thought experimentally of these two also, to see whether it would do him good. Hofrat Behrens, after all, was a white-haired man; he might have been Hans Castorp's father. Moreover, he was the head of the institution, the supreme authority—and it was for paternal authority that young Hans Castorp felt a restless need at heart. And yet, whenever he tried, he could not succeed in thinking of the Hofrat with a child's trust. The man had buried his wife here, a grief that had made him rather strange for a time; and then he had remained on the spot because the grave bound him to it, and besides because he himself had caught a touch of the trouble. Was that over now? Was he healthy, and unequivocally intent upon making people healthy, so that they might return to the flatlands as soon as possible and perform their service? His cheeks were perpetually blue, and in fact he looked as though he had a raised temperature. But that might be an illusion, and the air alone responsible for the colour of his face: Hans Castorp himself, after all, felt a dry heat here day after day without having a fever, so far as he could judge without a thermometer. To be sure, when one heard the Hofrat speak, one might sometimes again believe in a raised temperature; there was something not quite right about his manner of speech: it sounded so brisk and hearty and genial, yet there was something peculiar in it, something exalted, especially if one took into account the blue cheeks and the watering eyes, which looked as though he were still weeping for his wife. Hans Castorp remembered what Settembrini had said about the Hofrat's “melancholy” and “dissoluteness,” and that he had called him a “confused soul.” That might have been malice and windbaggery; nevertheless, Hans Castorp found there was nothing particularly strengthening in the thought of Hofrat Behrens.

But then there was, of course, Settembrini himself, the man of opposition, the windbag and “_homo humanus_,” as he called himself, who with many resounding words had reproved Hans Castorp for calling illness and stupidity together a contradiction and a dilemma for human feeling. What of him? And would it be beneficial to think of him? Hans Castorp well remembered how, in several of the excessively vivid dreams that filled his nights up here, he had taken offence at the Italian's fine, dry smile, curling beneath the handsome curve of his moustache; how he had abused him as an organ-grinder and tried to thrust him away because he was an intrusion here. But that had been in a dream, and the waking Hans Castorp was another man, less uninhibited than the Hans Castorp of dreams. Awake, matters might be different—perhaps he would do well to make an inward trial of Settembrini's novel nature, of his rebelliousness and criticism, although they were lachrymose and loquacious. He himself had called himself a pedagogue; plainly he wished to exert an influence; and young Hans Castorp ardently desired to be influenced—which need not, of course, go so far as allowing Settembrini to persuade him to pack his trunk and depart before his time, as the latter had proposed in all seriousness the other day.

_Placet experiri_, he thought to himself with a smile, for he still understood that much Latin without being entitled to call himself a _homo humanus_. And so he kept an eye on Settembrini, and listened willingly, and not without an appraising attention, to all that he held forth upon at encounters such as occurred incidentally during the measured cure-walks to the bench by the mountainside or down to the “Platz,” or on other occasions—for example, when Settembrini, rising first after a meal, would stroll through the dining-hall with its seven tables in his checked trousers, a toothpick between his lips, in order, contrary to all rule and custom, to visit for a little while at the cousins' table. He did so by taking up his position in a graceful attitude, feet crossed, and chatting as he gesticulated with the toothpick. Or else he would draw up a chair, seat himself at one corner, between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress on the one side, or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson on the other, and watch the nine table-companions consume the dessert which he himself appeared to have forgone.

“I beg admission to this noble circle,” he said, shaking hands with the cousins and encompassing the other persons in a bow. “That brewer over there ... to say nothing of the despairing spectacle afforded by the brewer's wife. But this Herr Magnus—he has just delivered a lecture on national psychology. Would you care to hear it? ‘Our dear Germany is one great barracks, certainly. But there is much solid worth behind it, and I would not exchange our soundness for the courtesy of other nations. What use is all their courtesy if I am cheated front and back?’ In that vein. I am at the limit of my strength. Then opposite me sits a poor creature with graveyard roses on her cheeks, an old maid from Transylvania, who talks without cease of her ‘brother-in-law,’ a person of whom no one knows anything, or wishes to know anything. In short, I could bear no more; I made myself scarce.”

“You seized the standard in flight,” said Frau Stöhr; “I can well imagine it.”

“Precisely!” cried Settembrini. “The standard! I see that a different wind blows here—there can be no doubt, I have come to the proper forge. Thus I seized it in flight ... If only one knew how to set one's words in place like that!—May I inquire after the progress of your health, Frau Stöhr?”

It was appalling to see Frau Stöhr simper. “Good heavens,” she said, “it is always the same, as you yourself know. One takes two steps forward and three back—when one has served five months, the old man comes and adds another half-year to one's sentence. Ah, they are the torments of Tantalus. One pushes and pushes, and just when one thinks one has reached the top ...”

“Oh, how kind of you! At last you allow poor Tantalus a little variety! By way of exchange, you let him roll the celebrated block of marble for once! That is what I call true goodness of heart. But how is this, Madame? Mysterious things are taking place with you. There are tales of doubles, astral bodies ... Until now I have not believed in them, but what is happening in your case makes me doubt myself ...”

“It seems the gentleman means to make sport of me.”

“Not in the least! I should not dream of it! First reassure me concerning certain obscure aspects of your existence, and then we may speak of sport! Yesterday evening, between half-past nine and ten, I was taking a little exercise in the garden—I happened to glance along the balconies—the electric lamp on yours was glowing through the darkness. You were consequently engaged in the rest cure, in obedience to duty, reason, and regulation. ‘There lies our fair invalid,’ I said to myself, ‘faithfully observing the prescription so that she may return with all speed into the arms of Herr Stöhr.’ And what did I hear only a few minutes ago? That at that very hour you were seen at the _cinematógrafo_—Herr Settembrini pronounced the word in Italian, with the stress upon the fourth syllable—at the _cinematógrafo_ in the Kurhaus arcades, and afterwards in the confectioner's besides, over sweet wine and sundry meringues, and moreover ...”

Frau Stöhr writhed her shoulders, giggled into her napkin, dug her elbows into Joachim Ziemßen and the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, winked with sly intimacy, and displayed in every possible fashion a complacency of monumental stupidity. In the evening, to deceive the supervision, she was accustomed to place her burning table-lamp out on the balcony, steal secretly away, and pursue her diversions down below in the English Quarter. Her husband was waiting for her in Cannstatt. She was not, incidentally, the only patient who practised this device.

“... and moreover,” Settembrini continued, “in whose company had you tasted those meringues? In the company of Captain Miklosich of Bucharest! I am assured that he wears a corset, but good God, how little that signifies here! I implore you, Madame, where were you? You are double! No doubt you had fallen asleep, and while the earthly portion of your being performed its lonely rest cure, the spiritual portion disported itself in the company of Captain Miklosich and over his meringues ...”

Frau Stöhr writhed and struggled like someone being tickled.

“One hardly knows whether to wish that it had been the other way round,” said Settembrini. “That you had enjoyed the meringues alone and performed the rest cure with Captain Miklosich ...”

“Hee, hee, hee ...”

“Do the ladies and gentlemen know the story of the day before yesterday?” the Italian asked abruptly. “Someone was carried off—carried off by the devil, or rather by his lady mother, a woman of action; I liked her. It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat there at the front, at Mademoiselle Kleefeld's table—you see, his place is empty. It will be occupied again soon enough, I have no concern on that score; but Anton is gone upon the wings of the storm, in a flash and before he knew what had happened. He had been here a year and a half—and only sixteen years old; another six months had just been added to his term. And what occurred? I do not know who had let a word reach Madame Schneermann; at all events, she had got wind of her little son's conduct _in Baccho et ceteris_. She appeared upon the scene unannounced, a matron three heads taller than I, white-haired and wrathful; without a word she administered a pair of slaps to Herr Anton, took him by the collar, and put him on the train. ‘If he is to go to ruin,’ she said, ‘he can do so down below as well.’ And off they went home.”

Everyone within hearing laughed, for Herr Settembrini told the story comically. He showed himself abreast of all the latest news, although he adopted so critically mocking an attitude towards the communal life of those up here. He knew everything. He knew the names, and roughly the circumstances, of the new arrivals; he reported that yesterday a rib resection had been performed upon this person or that, and had it from the best authority that from autumn onward patients with temperatures above 38.5 degrees would no longer be admitted. During the previous night, according to his account, the little dog belonging to Madame Capatsoulias of Mytilene had seated itself upon the button of the electric bedside signal on its mistress's night-table, which had led to much running to and fro and considerable tumult, particularly as Madame Capatsoulias had been found not alone, but in the company of Assessor Düstmund of Friedrichshagen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl was obliged to smile at this story; pretty Marusja nearly choked in her orange-scented handkerchief, and Frau Stöhr shrieked piercingly as she pressed her left breast with both hands.

But Lodovico Settembrini also spoke to the cousins about himself and his origins, whether on their walks, during the evening gatherings, or after luncheon was over, when the great majority of the patients had already left the dining-hall and the three gentlemen remained seated for a while at their end of the table as the dining-room girls cleared away and Hans Castorp smoked his Maria Mancini, whose savour he was beginning to taste a little again in the third week. Attentively appraising, perplexed yet willing to submit to influence, he listened to the Italian's narratives, which opened before him a strange and wholly novel world.

Settembrini spoke of his grandfather, who had been an advocate in Milan, but chiefly a great patriot, and had figured as something of a political agitator, orator, and contributor to periodicals—he too a man of opposition, like his grandson, though he had conducted the business on a grander, bolder scale. For whereas Lodovico, as he himself bitterly observed, found himself reduced to combing through the life and doings of the International Sanatorium Berghof, subjecting them to scornful criticism and entering his protest against them in the name of a noble and active humanity, the elder man had given governments trouble, had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which at that time held his dismembered fatherland under the spell of benighted servitude, and had been a zealous member of certain secret societies spread throughout Italy—a Carbonaro, as Settembrini explained, suddenly lowering his voice, as though it were still dangerous even now to speak of such things. In short, according to the grandson’s accounts, this Giuseppe Settembrini presented himself to the two listeners as a dark, passionate, subversive figure, a ringleader and conspirator; and despite all the respect they politely strove to display, they did not entirely succeed in banishing from their features an expression of suspicious aversion, indeed of repugnance. The circumstances were peculiar, to be sure: what they heard had happened long ago, almost a hundred years before; it was history, and from history, particularly ancient history, the phenomenon of which they were hearing here—the manifestation of desperate courage in the cause of freedom and an unbending hatred of tyrants—was theoretically familiar to them, although they had never imagined that they would come into such direct human contact with it. Moreover, as they heard, this grandfather’s insurgency and conspiratorial activity had been bound up with a great love of his fatherland, which he wished to see united and free—indeed, his revolutionary endeavours had been the fruit and outflow of that honourable attachment; and however strange the mingling of rebellion and patriotism might seem to both cousins alike—for they were accustomed to equating patriotic sentiment with a conservative sense of order—they were nevertheless obliged to admit to themselves that, given the state of affairs in that place and at that time, rebellion might well have been synonymous with civic virtue, and loyal respectability with sluggish indifference to the commonwealth.

But Grandfather Settembrini had been not only an Italian patriot, but a fellow citizen and fellow combatant of all peoples thirsting for freedom. For after the failure of a certain attempted coup and stroke of state undertaken in Turin, in which he had participated in word and deed, and having only narrowly escaped the agents of Prince Metternich, he had used the period of his exile to fight and bleed in Spain for the constitution and in Greece for the independence of the Hellenic people. It was there that Settembrini’s father had come into the world—which was no doubt why he had later become so great a humanist and lover of classical antiquity—though born, incidentally, of a mother of German blood, for Giuseppe had married the girl in Switzerland and taken her with him upon his further adventures. Later, after ten years of exile, he had been able to return to his homeland and practise as an advocate in Milan, without by any means renouncing his efforts to summon the nation, by the spoken and written word, in verse and prose, to freedom and the establishment of a united republic, to draft revolutionary programmes with a passionately dictatorial sweep, and, in a lucid style, to proclaim the union of the liberated peoples for the establishment of universal happiness. One detail mentioned by Settembrini the grandson made a particular impression upon young Hans Castorp: namely, that throughout his life Grandfather Giuseppe had appeared among his fellow citizens exclusively in black mourning clothes, for he was in mourning, he had said, for Italy, his fatherland, which languished in misery and bondage. At this intelligence Hans Castorp was obliged—as indeed he had already done comparatively several times before—to think of his own grandfather, who likewise, for as long as his grandson had known him, had always dressed in black, though in a thoroughly different sense from the grandfather in question here: he thought of the old-fashioned attire by means of which the true being of Hans Lorenz Castorp, belonging as it did to a bygone age, had provisionally accommodated itself to the present while intimating that it did not belong there, until in death it had solemnly entered into its true and fitting form, complete with its pleated ruff. Two remarkably different kinds of grandfather they had been, indeed! Hans Castorp reflected upon this while his eyes grew fixed and he cautiously shook his head, in such a way that the gesture might equally well be interpreted as a sign of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini or as one of estrangement and denial. He also honestly guarded against passing judgement upon what was alien to him, but compelled himself to let comparison and observation suffice. He saw the narrow head of old Hans Lorenz bending contemplatively in the hall over the pale-golden round of the baptismal basin, that stationary yet itinerant family heirloom—his mouth rounded, for his lips were forming the prefix “primal,” that solemn, devout sound which called to mind places where one fell into a reverently swaying, forward-moving gait. And he saw Giuseppe Settembrini, the tricolour upon his arm, his sabre brandished and his dark gaze raised in dedication to heaven, charging at the head of a band of freedom fighters against the phalanx of despotism. Both had their beauty and honour, he thought, striving all the more for fairness because he felt himself personally, or half personally, a little partisan. For Grandfather Settembrini had fought for political rights; but all rights had originally belonged to his own grandfather, or at least to his forefathers, and over the course of four centuries the rabble had wrested them away with violence and fine phrases.... And so they had both always gone about in black, the grandfather in the north and the one in the south, both for the purpose of placing a stern distance between themselves and the wretched present. But the one had done so out of piety, in honour of the past and of death, to which his being belonged; the other, by contrast, out of rebellion and in honour of a progress hostile to piety. Yes, those were two worlds, or quarters of the heavens, Hans Castorp thought; and as he stood, as it were, between them while Herr Settembrini told his tale, looking searchingly now into the one and now into the other, it seemed to him that he had experienced this once before. He remembered a solitary excursion by boat in the evening twilight upon a Holstein lake, in late summer, several years before. It had been seven o’clock; the sun had already gone down, and the nearly full moon had already risen in the east above the bushy shores. For ten minutes, while Hans Castorp rowed over the quiet waters, a bewildering and dreamlike constellation had prevailed. In the west there had been broad daylight, a glassily sober, decided light of day; but when he turned his head, he had looked into an equally decided and most enchanted moonlit night, interwoven with damp mists. The strange conjunction had lasted perhaps a scant quarter of an hour before resolving itself in favour of night and the moon; and with cheerful astonishment Hans Castorp’s dazzled and bewildered eyes had passed from one illumination and landscape to the other, from day into night and from night back into day. It was this, then, that he was obliged to remember.

A great jurist, he further reflected, Advocate Settembrini could hardly have become, given the life he led and the wide range of his activities. But the universal principle of law, as the grandson convincingly maintained, had animated him from childhood to the end of his life; and Hans Castorp, although at present not particularly keen of mind and organically much preoccupied by a six-course Berghof meal, endeavoured to understand what Settembrini meant when he called that principle “the source of freedom and progress.” By the latter Hans Castorp had hitherto understood something like the development of lifting machinery in the nineteenth century; and he found, indeed, that Herr Settembrini did not esteem such things lightly, as his grandfather evidently had not done either. The Italian paid high honour to the fatherland of his two listeners on account of the invention there of gunpowder, which had reduced the armour of feudalism to scrap metal, and likewise of the printing press: for the latter had made possible the democratic dissemination of ideas—that was to say, the dissemination of democratic ideas. Thus he praised Germany in this respect and, so far as the past was concerned, even though he believed in fairness that he must award the palm to his own country, since it had been the first to unfurl the banner of enlightenment, cultivation, and freedom while the other nations still slumbered in superstition and bondage. Yet when he showed such reverence for technology and communications, Hans Castorp’s own field of work, as he had already done at his first encounter with the cousins beside the bench on the slope, he seemed to do so not for the sake of these powers themselves, but in consideration of their significance for the moral perfection of mankind—for he joyfully declared that he attributed such a significance to them. As technology, he said, increasingly subjected nature to its rule, and through the connections it created, the extension of road networks and telegraphs, overcame differences of climate, it proved itself the most reliable means of bringing the peoples closer together, promoting their mutual acquaintance, preparing the way for human reconciliation among them, destroying their prejudices, and finally bringing about their universal union. The human race was emerging from darkness, fear, and hatred, but along a radiant path it was advancing and ascending towards a final state of sympathy, inner illumination, goodness, and happiness; and upon this path technology was the most serviceable vehicle, he said. But in speaking thus, he brought together in a single outpouring of breath categories which Hans Castorp had hitherto been accustomed to conceive only as widely separated. Technology and morality! he said. And then he actually spoke of the Saviour of Christianity, who had first revealed the principle of equality and union, whereupon the printing press had mightily furthered the dissemination of that principle, and the great French Revolution had finally raised it into law. This struck young Hans Castorp, although for reasons not clearly defined, as most decidedly confused, despite Herr Settembrini’s expressing it in such clear and robust words. Once, the latter related, once in his life, namely at the beginning of his best manhood, his grandfather had felt himself truly and wholeheartedly happy, and that had been at the time of the Paris July Revolution. Loudly and publicly he had then declared that all men would one day set those three days of Paris beside the six days of the creation of the world. At this Hans Castorp could not refrain from striking the table with his hand and marvelling to the very depths of his soul. That three summer days of the year 1830, during which the Parisians had given themselves a new constitution, should be placed beside the six in which the Lord God had divided the firmament from the waters and created the eternal lights of heaven, as well as flowers, trees, birds, fishes, and all living things, seemed to him rather strong; and even afterwards, when alone with his cousin Joachim and expressly discussing the matter, he found it exceedingly strong, indeed positively offensive.

But he was well disposed towards allowing himself to be influenced, in accordance with the saying that it was agreeable to make experiments; and so he placed a bridle upon the protest raised by his piety and his taste against the Settembrinian arrangement of things, considering that what appeared blasphemous to him might be called boldness, and what struck him as preposterous might, there and at that time at least, have been magnanimity and noble excess: as, for example, when Grandfather Settembrini had called the barricades the “throne of the people” and declared that the task was “to consecrate the citizen’s pike upon the altar of humanity.”

Hans Castorp knew why he listened to Herr Settembrini—not explicitly, but he knew. There was something like a sense of duty in it, besides that holiday irresponsibility of the traveller and temporary guest, who hardens himself against no impression and allows things to approach him, conscious that tomorrow or the day after he will spread his wings once more and return to the accustomed order: something, then, like a dictate of conscience, and, to be precise, the dictate and admonition of a somehow guilty conscience, determined him to listen to the Italian, sitting with one leg crossed over the other and drawing upon his Maria Mancini, or when the three of them climbed from the English Quarter towards the Berghof.

According to Settembrini’s arrangement and exposition, two principles were engaged in a struggle for the world: power and law, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the principle of persistence and that of fermenting movement, of progress. The one might be called the Asiatic principle, the other the European; for Europe was the land of rebellion, criticism, and transformative activity, whereas the eastern continent embodied immobility, inactive repose. There could be no doubt whatever to which of the two powers victory would ultimately fall—it was the power of enlightenment, of rational perfection. For humanity, on its radiant path, swept ever new peoples along with it, conquered ever more ground within Europe itself, and began to advance into Asia. Yet much was still lacking before its victory could be complete, and great and magnanimous exertions must still be made by men of goodwill, by those who had received the light, before the day would come when, even in those countries of our continent which had in truth experienced neither an eighteenth century nor a 1789, monarchies and religions would collapse together. But that day would come, Settembrini said, smiling subtly beneath his moustache—it would come, if not upon doves’ feet, then upon eagles’ wings, and would dawn as the morning light of universal fraternity among the peoples, beneath the sign of reason, science, and law; it would bring the holy alliance of civic democracy, the radiant counterpart of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and cabinets whose personal mortal enemy Grandfather Giuseppe had been—in a word, the world republic. But to attain this final goal, it was above all necessary to strike the Asiatic, servile principle of persistence at the centre and vital nerve of its resistance, namely in Vienna. Austria must be struck upon the head and destroyed, first to take vengeance for the past and then to prepare the way for the dominion of law and happiness upon earth.

This final turn and conclusion of Settembrini’s mellifluous effusions no longer interested Hans Castorp in the least; it displeased him, indeed affected him painfully, like a personal or national rancour, whenever it recurred—not to mention Joachim Ziemßen, who, when the Italian entered these waters, turned his head away with darkened brows and ceased to listen, and would even remind them of the duties of the cure or attempt to divert the conversation. Hans Castorp too felt under no obligation to pay attention to such aberrations—they plainly lay beyond the limits of those things concerning which the dictates of his conscience admonished him to submit experimentally to influence, and admonished him so audibly that whenever Herr Settembrini sat down with them or joined them out of doors, he himself invited him to expound his ideas.

These ideas, ideals, and strivings of the will, Settembrini observed, were a family tradition in his house. For all three of them had devoted their lives and intellectual powers to these things, grandfather, father, and grandson, each after his own fashion: the father no less than Grandfather Giuseppe, although he had not, like the latter, been a political agitator and champion of liberty, but a quiet and delicate scholar, a humanist at his desk. But what, after all, was humanism? It was love of man, nothing more, and thereby it was also politics, also rebellion against everything that sullied and degraded the idea of man. It had been reproached with an excessive esteem for form; but beautiful form, too, it cultivated solely for the sake of human dignity, in shining contrast to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into shameful formlessness; and from the very beginning it had championed the cause of man, earthly interests, freedom of thought, and joy in life, holding that heaven might properly be left to the sparrows. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist, and was identical with that Satanas upon whom Carducci had composed his hymn ... Ah, good God, the cousins should have heard the old enemy of the Church in Bologna rail and thunder against the Christian sentimentality of the Romantics! Against Manzoni's sacred hymns! Against the poetry of shadows and moonlight of the Romanticismo, which he had compared to the “pale celestial nun Luna”! _Per Bacco_, it had been an exquisite delight! And they should also have heard how he, Carducci, had interpreted Dante—celebrating him as a citizen of a great city, who against asceticism and denial of the world had defended active power, the power that transforms and improves the world. For it was not the sickly, mystagogic shade of Beatrice whom the poet had honoured with the name “_Donna gentile e pietosa_”; that name belonged rather to his wife, who in the poem embodied the principle of knowledge in this world, of practical labour in life ...

So now Hans Castorp had heard one thing and another about Dante as well, and from the very best authority. He did not rely upon it altogether firmly, considering the intermediary's windbaggery; yet it was worth hearing, at all events, that Dante had been an alert city-dweller. And then he listened further as Settembrini spoke of himself and explained that in his own person, that of the grandson Lodovico, the tendencies of his immediate forebears—the civic tendency of his grandfather and the humanistic one of his father—had now been united, inasmuch as he had become a man of letters, a free-lance writer. For literature was nothing other than precisely this: it was the union of humanism and politics, a union accomplished all the more naturally since humanism itself was already politics, and politics humanism ... Here Hans Castorp pricked up his ears and made an effort to understand it properly; for he might now hope to perceive the full incorrigibility of Brewer Magnussen and to learn in what respect literature was, after all, something other than “beautiful characters.” Had his listeners, Settembrini asked, ever heard of Messer Brunetto, Brunetto Latini, town clerk of Florence around 1250, who had written a book on the virtues and the vices? This master had been the first to give the Florentines polish, to teach them how to speak, and also the art of governing their republic according to the rules of politics. “There you have it, gentlemen!” cried Settembrini. “There you have it!” And he spoke of the “word,” of the cult of the word, of eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. For the word was man's honour, and it alone made life worthy of man. Not humanism only—humanity in general, all human dignity, respect for man and man's self-respect, were inseparably bound up with the word, with literature—(“You see,” Hans Castorp later said to his cousin, “you see that in literature it is the beautiful words that matter? I noticed that at once.”)—and thus politics, too, was bound up with it, or rather: politics sprang from the alliance, the unity, of humanity and literature, for the beautiful word engendered the beautiful deed. “Two hundred years ago,” Settembrini said, “you had in your country a poet, a splendid old chatterer, who attached great importance to beautiful handwriting, because he believed that it led to beautiful style. He should have gone a little further and said that a beautiful style leads to beautiful actions.” To write beautifully was almost already to think beautifully, and thence it was no great distance to beautiful action. All civilization and moral perfection sprang from the spirit of literature, that spirit of human honour which was at the same time the spirit of humanity and of politics. Yes, all this was one, one and the same power and idea, and it could be summed up in _one_ name. What was that name? Why, that name was composed of familiar syllables whose meaning and majesty the cousins had surely never yet properly understood—it was: Civilization! And as Settembrini let the word fall from his lips, he flung his small yellow right hand aloft like one proposing a toast.

Young Hans Castorp found all this worth hearing—noncommittally, to be sure, and more by way of experiment, but worth hearing at all events—and expressed himself to this effect to Joachim Ziemßen, who, however, had the thermometer in his mouth just then and could therefore answer only indistinctly, and afterward was much too occupied in reading the figure and entering it in the chart to comment upon Settembrini's views. Hans Castorp, as we have said, took good-natured notice of them and opened his inner being to their examination: from which it becomes particularly clear how advantageously the waking man differs from the one who dreams in dull stupefaction—for in that latter state Hans Castorp had several times called Herr Settembrini a hurdy-gurdy man to his face and tried with all his might to thrust him from the spot because he was “disturbing things here”; whereas awake, he listened to him politely and attentively, and in a fair-minded spirit sought to balance and suppress the resistances that threatened to arise within him against the mentor's pronouncements and representations. For it cannot be denied that certain resistances stirred in his soul: some had been there from earlier times, originally and from the beginning, while others arose especially from the present state of affairs, from his experiences among those up here, experiences partly indirect and partly kept secret.

What is man, and how readily his conscience deceives itself! How skilfully he contrives to hear, even in the voice of duty, permission for passion! From a sense of duty, for the sake of fairness and equilibrium, Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini and benevolently examined his views on reason, the republic, and beautiful style, prepared to let himself be influenced by them. But afterward he considered himself all the more justified in once again giving his thoughts and dreams free rein in another, in the _opposite_ direction—indeed, to voice the whole of our suspicion, or the whole of our insight, he may actually have listened to Herr Settembrini solely for the _purpose_ of obtaining from his conscience a licence it had originally been unwilling to issue him. But what, or who, occupied that other side, opposed to patriotism, human dignity, and beautiful literature, toward which Hans Castorp now believed himself permitted to turn his musings and endeavours once more? There was ... Clawdia Chauchat—limp, worm-eaten, and Kirghiz-eyed; and as Hans Castorp thought of her (“thought” is, incidentally, far too restrained a word for the manner in which he inwardly turned toward her), he felt once more as though he were sitting in the boat upon that Holstein lake and gazing, with bewildered and dazzled eyes, from the glassy daylight of the western shore across into the mist-threaded moonlit night of the eastern heavens.

The Thermometer

Hans Castorp's week up here ran from Tuesday to Tuesday, since it was on a Tuesday, of course, that he had arrived. It was already several days since he had settled his second weekly bill at the office—the modest weekly bill of some 160 francs, modest and inexpensive in his judgment, even if one left entirely out of account, precisely because they were beyond price, the priceless features of his stay here, as well as certain offerings that might readily have been charged for, had anyone wished, such as the fortnightly sanatorium music and Dr. Krokowski's lectures, and considered solely and exclusively the actual board and hotel service, the comfortable lodging, the five prodigious meals.

“It isn't much; it is inexpensive, if anything—you cannot complain that they overcharge you up here,” the visitor said to the established resident. “So you need about 650 francs a month for room and board, and the medical treatment is already included in that. Good. Suppose you spend another thirty francs a month on tips, if you are decent and set some value on friendly faces. That makes 680 francs. Good. You will tell me there are incidental expenses and fees as well. There are outlays for drinks, cosmetics, cigars; now and then one takes an excursion, a carriage drive if you like, and from time to time there is a shoemaker's or tailor's bill. Good, but even with all that, and with the best will in the world, you still cannot get through a thousand francs a month! Not even eight hundred marks! That is not even 10,000 marks a year. It cannot possibly be more. And on that you live.”

“Commendable mental arithmetic,” Joachim said. “I had no idea you were so nimble at it. And that you should proceed at once to an annual calculation—I find that generous of you; you have decidedly learned something already up here. Besides, you reckon too high. I do not smoke cigars, after all, and I hope I shall not have to have any suits made for me here either, thank you very much!”

“So even that is too high,” Hans Castorp said, somewhat confused. But however it might have come about that he had entered cigars and new suits in his cousin's account—as for his nimble mental arithmetic, it was nothing but a deceptive show, misleading as to his natural gifts. For in this, as in all things, he was rather slow and devoid of fire, and his rapid survey in the present case was no extempore achievement, but rested upon preparation—upon _written_ preparation, in fact: one evening during the rest cure (for he now did lie outside in the evenings after all, since everyone else did), Hans Castorp had expressly risen from his excellent reclining chair in order, following a sudden notion, to fetch paper and pencil from his room for his calculations. In this way he had established that his cousin—or rather that anyone at all up here—required, all told, 12,000 francs a year, and had amused himself by inwardly making clear that he personally was more than equal to life up here in economic terms, since he was entitled to regard himself as a man with an annual income of eighteen to nineteen thousand francs.

His second weekly bill, then, had been settled three days ago, with thanks and a receipt, which is as much as to say that he now found himself in the midst of the third and, according to plan, final week of his stay up here. On the coming Sunday he would still be here for one of the sanatorium concerts that recurred every fortnight, and on Monday he would attend one of Dr. Krokowski's lectures, which likewise took place every fortnight—so he told himself and his cousin; but on Tuesday or Wednesday he would depart and leave Joachim alone up here again, poor Joachim, upon whom Rhadamanthus had imposed no one knew how many months more, and whose gentle black eyes grew mournfully veiled whenever Hans Castorp's rapidly approaching departure was mentioned. Yes, great God, where had this holiday gone! Run away, flown, sped past—one truly did not quite know how to say it. After all, there had been twenty-one days for them to spend together, a long succession, not easily surveyed at the outset. And now, all at once, only three or four trifling days remained, an inconsiderable remnant, admittedly lent a little weight by the two periodic variations of the normal day, but already filled with thoughts of packing and farewell. Three weeks were as good as nothing up here—they had all told him so from the start. The smallest unit of time here was the month, Settembrini had said, and since Hans Castorp's stay fell short of that magnitude, it was simply a nonentity of a stay, a flying visit, as Hofrat Behrens had put it. Could it perhaps be due to the heightened general combustion that time passed so swiftly here, in the twinkling of an eye? Such rapidity of life was certainly a consolation for Joachim in view of the five months that still lay before him, supposing five should prove the end of it. But during these three weeks they ought to have kept a somewhat closer watch upon time, as happened while taking their temperatures, when the prescribed seven minutes became so considerable a span ... Hans Castorp felt heartfelt pity for his cousin, in whose eyes one could read his grief at the imminent loss of his human companion—felt, indeed, the keenest pity for him when he reflected that the poor fellow must now remain up here indefinitely without him, while he himself lived once more in the flatlands and laboured in the service of transport engineering that united the nations: a positively burning pity, painful to his chest at certain moments and, in short, so intense that at times he seriously doubted whether he could bring himself to leave Joachim alone up here. So fiercely, then, did pity sometimes burn within him, and this was doubtless also the reason why he himself, of his own accord, spoke less and less of his departure: it was Joachim who now and again introduced the subject; Hans Castorp, as we have said, appeared from natural tact and delicacy to wish not to think of it until the very last moment.

“Well, at least let us hope,” Joachim said, “that you have recovered your strength among us and will feel refreshed when you go down.”

“Yes, so I shall give everyone your greetings,” Hans Castorp replied, “and say that you will follow in five months at the latest. Recovered? You mean whether _I_ have recovered my strength in these few days? I should certainly hope so. A certain degree of recuperation must surely, in the end, have taken place even in so short a time. Admittedly, the impressions up here were so novel, novel in every respect, highly stimulating, but also taxing to mind and body; I do not feel that I have yet come to terms with them or become acclimatized, which surely would be the prerequisite for any recuperation. Thank God, Maria is her old self; for several days now I have regained my taste for her. But from time to time my handkerchief still turns red when I use it, and apparently I shall not be rid, before the end, of that accursed heat in my face together with the senseless pounding of my heart. No, no, one can hardly speak of acclimatization in my case—how could one, after so short a time? It would take longer to become acclimatized here and come to terms with the impressions, and then the recuperation and the building up of protein could begin. A pity. I say ‘a pity’ because it was decidedly a mistake not to reserve more time for this stay—after all, the time would have been available. I feel as if, once home in the flatlands, I shall first of all have to recover from my recuperation and sleep for three weeks, so utterly worn out do I sometimes feel. And now, vexatiously enough, this catarrh has been added to everything else ...”

For it had begun to appear that Hans Castorp would return to the flatlands with a first-class cold. He had caught a chill, probably during the rest cure—and, to venture one further conjecture, during the evening rest cure, in which he had been taking part for about a week despite the cold, wet weather, which seemed unwilling to improve before his departure. But he had learned that it was not acknowledged as bad; indeed, the concept of bad weather had no standing whatsoever up here, no weather was feared, scarcely any account was taken of it, and with the gentle docility of youth, with all its readiness to adapt itself to the ideas and customs of whatever surroundings it happens to find itself placed in, Hans Castorp had begun to make this indifference his own. If it poured as though from buckets, one must not suppose that the air was any the less dry on that account. And presumably it truly was not, for it still gave one as hot a head as the air of an overheated room, or as though one had drunk a great deal of wine. As for the cold, which was considerable, there would have been little sense in fleeing indoors from it; for since it was not snowing, there was no heating, and sitting in one’s room was by no means more comfortable than lying in one’s balcony box, wearing a winter overcoat and expertly wrapped in two good camel-hair blankets. On the contrary, quite the reverse: the latter was incomparably the more comfortable; judged without qualification, it was the most agreeable posture of life Hans Castorp could remember ever having tried—a judgment in which he refused to be unsettled by the fact that a certain writer and Carbonaro, with malicious undertone and innuendo, called it the “horizontal” posture of life. He found it especially agreeable in the evening, when the little lamp glowed on the table beside him and, warm beneath the blankets, with Maria, whose savour had returned, between his lips, and enjoying all the elusive advantages of the local type of reclining chair, though with an icy tip to his nose and a book—it was still “_Ocean Steamships_”—in hands admittedly cramped with cold and reddened, he looked through the arches of the loggia across the darkening valley, adorned here with scattered lights and there with lights clustering densely together, from which music rose almost every evening for at least an hour, pleasantly muted, familiarly melodious sounds: fragments of opera, pieces from “Carmen,” from “Il Trovatore,” or “Der Freischütz”; then well-constructed, spirited waltzes, marches to which one turned one’s head proudly from side to side, and lively mazurkas. Mazurka? Her name was really Marusja, the one with the little ruby; and in the neighbouring box, behind the thick wall of frosted glass, Joachim lay—now and then Hans Castorp exchanged a cautious word with him, in full consideration of the other horizontals. Joachim was every bit as snug in his box as Hans Castorp, although he was unmusical and did not know how to delight in the evening concerts. A pity for him; instead, he was probably reading his Russian grammar. Hans Castorp, however, let “_Ocean Steamships_” lie upon the blanket and listened to the music with heartfelt sympathy, gazed with pleasure into the transparent depths of its workmanship, and felt such intimate delight in a melodic inspiration full of character and mood that, in the intervals, he could think only with hostility of Settembrini’s pronouncements upon music—pronouncements as vexatious as the one that music was politically suspect, which was in fact not much better than Grandfather Giuseppe’s phrase about the July Revolution and the six days of the Creation ...

Joachim, then, did not partake of the musical enjoyment to the same degree, and the piquant diversion of smoking was likewise unknown to him; otherwise, however, he lay just as securely sheltered in his box, protected and at peace. The day was over; for this occasion everything was over; one was certain that nothing more would happen today, that no further shocks would occur, that no further demands would be made upon the musculature of the heart. Yet at the same time one was certain that _tomorrow_ all this, with all the probability arising from the narrowness, favour, and regularity of the circumstances, would happen again and begin anew; and this twofold certainty and security was exceedingly comfortable and, together with the music and Maria’s recovered savour, made the evening rest cure for Hans Castorp a truly happy posture of life.

Yet none of this had prevented the visiting guest and pliant novice from catching a substantial chill during the rest cure—or however and wherever it may have happened. A severe cold appeared to be on its way; it had lodged in his frontal sinus and pressed there, the uvula in his throat was sore and raw, and the air no longer passed as usual through the channel provided for that purpose by nature, but swept through it coldly and with difficulty, ceaselessly provoking spasms of coughing; overnight his voice had assumed the timbre of a muffled bass scorched, as it were, by strong drink, and according to his own account he had not closed his eyes that entire night, since a suffocating dryness of the throat had repeatedly made him start up from his pillow.

“Extremely annoying,” Joachim said, “and almost embarrassing. Colds, you must understand, are not _reçus_ here; their existence is denied, officially they do not occur in such exceedingly dry air, and as a patient one would receive a rough welcome from Behrens if one attempted to report oneself with a cold. With you, of course, it is different; after all, you may have a right to one. It would be a good thing if we could still cut the catarrh short; in the flatlands they know various practices, but here—I doubt whether anyone will take enough interest. One had better not fall ill here; no one troubles about it. That is an old lesson, and now you are learning it too, at the very last. When I arrived, there was a lady here who spent the whole week holding her ear and complaining of pain, and at last Behrens examined it. ‘You may set your mind entirely at rest,’ he said; ‘it isn’t tubercular.’ And there the matter ended. Yes, we must see what can be done. I shall tell the bath attendant tomorrow morning when he comes to me. That is the official channel, and he will pass it on, so that perhaps something may be done for you after all.”

Thus Joachim; and the official channel proved its worth. No sooner had Hans Castorp returned to his room on Friday from his morning exercise than there came a knock, and he was granted a personal acquaintance with Fräulein von Mylendonk, or “Frau Oberin,” as she was called—until then he had seen this evidently much-occupied person only from a distance, crossing the corridor as she emerged from one sickroom in order to enter another opposite, or had watched her appear fleetingly in the dining hall and heard her bleating voice. Now, then, her visit was intended for him; drawn thither by his catarrh, she knocked briefly and with bony hardness upon his door and entered almost before he had said Come in, bending back once more upon the threshold to make certain of the room number.

“Forty-three,” she bleated without lowering her voice. “That is correct. Human’s child, _on me dit, que vous avez pris froid_, _I hear, you have caught a cold_, _Wy, kaschetsja, prostudilisj_, I hear you have caught a cold? How am I to speak to you? German, I see. Ah, young Ziemßen’s visitor, I see. I must get to the operating theatre. There is someone there who is to be chloroformed and has eaten bean salad. If one does not keep one’s eyes everywhere ... And you, human’s child, claim to have caught a cold up here?”

Hans Castorp was taken aback by such a manner of speech in a lady of ancient nobility. As she spoke, she hurried past her own words, restlessly turning her head from side to side in a rolling, looping motion, her nose raised searchingly, as beasts of prey do in a cage, while before her she swung her freckled right hand loosely from the wrist, the fingers slightly closed and the thumb uppermost, as though she meant to say: “Quickly, quickly, quickly! Do not listen to what I am saying; speak yourself, so that I may get away!” She was a woman in her forties, of stunted growth and without curves, dressed in a white, belted clinical apron-dress, upon whose breast lay a garnet cross. Sparse reddish hair emerged from beneath her nurse’s cap; her watery-blue, inflamed eyes, one of which, to crown all, bore a stye already very far advanced in its development, had an unsteady gaze; her nose was turned up, her mouth frog-like, with a lower lip that projected crookedly besides and which she moved in a shovelling fashion when she spoke. Hans Castorp, however, regarded her with all the modestly forbearing and trustful benevolence toward mankind that was innate in him.

“And what sort of cold is this, eh?” the Oberin asked again, trying to make her eyes penetrating, though without success, since they wandered away. “We do not care for such colds. Do you often catch cold? Was not your cousin always catching cold too? How old are you? Twenty-four? That is a tricky age. And now you come up here and catch cold? We ought not to speak of ‘catching cold’ here, my esteemed human’s child; that is so much fiddle-faddle from down below.” (The word “fiddle-faddle” appeared altogether hideous and fantastic in her mouth, as she brought it forth with that shovelling lower lip.) “You have a most magnificent catarrh of the respiratory passages, I grant you; one can see it in your eyes—” (And once again she made the peculiar attempt to look penetratingly into his eyes, without quite managing it.) “But catarrhs do not come from cold; they come from an infection to which one has proved receptive, and the sole question is whether the infection is innocent or rather less innocent; everything else is fiddle-faddle.” (Again that dreadful “fiddle-faddle”!) “It is possible, of course, that your receptiveness inclines more toward the harmless variety,” she said, looking at him with her advanced stye in a manner he could not define. “Here is a mild antiseptic. It may possibly do you good.” And from the black leather bag hanging at her belt she brought out a packet, which she placed upon the table. It was Formamint. “For that matter, you look rather stimulated—as though you were feverish.” And she did not cease looking into his face, though always with eyes that strayed somewhat aside. “Have you taken your temperature?”

He said he had not.

“Why not?” she asked, leaving her crookedly projecting lower lip suspended in the air ...

He fell silent. The good fellow was still so young that he had retained the schoolboy’s way of falling silent when he stands at his desk, knows nothing, and says nothing.

“Do you mean to say you never take your temperature at all?”

“Yes, Frau Oberin. When I have a fever.”

“Human’s child, one takes one’s temperature first and foremost in order to find out _whether_ one has a fever. And in your opinion you have none now?”

“I am not quite sure, Frau Oberin; I cannot properly tell the difference. I have been a little hot and shivery ever since I arrived up here.”

“Aha. And where is your thermometer?”

“I have not brought one with me, Frau Oberin. What would I need one for? I am only visiting here; I am healthy.”

“Fiddle-faddle! Did you send for me because you are healthy?”

“No,” he laughed politely, “but because I have somewhat—”

“—Caught cold. We have encountered such colds before. Here!” she said, rummaging in her bag once more and bringing forth two oblong leather cases, one black and one red, which she likewise placed upon the table. “This one costs three francs fifty, and this one five francs. Naturally you will do better with the five-franc one. It is something for a lifetime, if you treat it properly.”

Smiling, he took the red case from the table and opened it. Ornamental as a piece of jewellery, the glass instrument lay bedded in the hollow precisely fitted to its shape in the red velvet lining. The whole degrees were marked with red strokes, the tenths with black ones. The numerals were red, and the lower, tapering portion was filled with mirror-bright mercury. The column stood low and cool, far below the normal degree of animal warmth.

Hans Castorp knew what he owed to himself and to his standing.

“I shall take this one,” he said, without so much as giving the other any attention. “This one for five. May I pay you at once ...”

“Settled!” the Oberin bleated. “No stinting over important purchases! There is no hurry; it will go on the bill. Give it here; first we must make it properly small, drive it right down—so.” And she took the thermometer from his hand, thrust it repeatedly through the air, and thus drove the mercury still lower, below 35. “It will rise soon enough, soon enough it will climb upward, Mercurius!” she said. “Here is your acquisition! You do know how we do it here, I trust? Under the esteemed tongue with it, for seven minutes, four times a day, and close the honoured lips firmly about it. Adieu, human’s child! I wish you good results!” And she was out of the room.

Hans Castorp, who had bowed, stood by the table and looked at the door through which she had vanished, and at the instrument she had left behind. “So that was the Oberin von Mylendonk,” he thought. “Settembrini does not like her, and it is true that she has her disagreeable aspects. The stye is not attractive, though presumably she does not always have it. But why does she keep calling me ‘human’s child,’ with an s in the middle at that? It is mannish and odd. And now she has sold me a thermometer; she always carries a few of them in her bag. They say you can buy them everywhere here, in all the shops, even where one would least expect it; Joachim told me so. But I have not had to put myself to any trouble; it has dropped into my lap of its own accord.” He took the delicate instrument from its case, examined it, and then paced the room several times with it in some agitation. His heart was beating rapidly and strongly. He glanced toward the open balcony door and made a movement toward the door of the room, prompted by an impulse to seek out Joachim, but then refrained and remained standing by the table once more, clearing his throat to test the dullness of his voice. Then he coughed. “Yes, now I must see whether I have fever with this cold,” he said, and quickly put the thermometer into his mouth, the mercury tip beneath his tongue, so that the instrument projected obliquely upward between his lips, which he closed firmly around it to admit no outside air. Then he looked at his wristwatch: it was six minutes past half-past nine. And he began to wait for the seven minutes to elapse.

“Not one unnecessary second,” he thought, “and not one too few. I can be relied upon, upward as well as downward. There will be no need to exchange it for a Silent Sister on my account, as with the person Settembrini told us about, Ottilie Kneifer.” And he walked about the room, pressing the instrument down with his tongue.

Time crept by; the allotted interval seemed endless. Only two and a half minutes had passed when he looked at the hands, already anxious lest he miss the moment. He did a thousand things, picked objects up and set them down, stepped out onto the balcony without drawing his cousin’s attention, surveyed the landscape, this high valley already intimately familiar to his senses in all its forms: with its peaks, ridgelines, and walls, with the projecting scenery of the “Brembühl” on the left, whose back sloped obliquely down toward the village and whose flank was covered by the rugged Mattenwald, with the mountain formations to the right, whose names had likewise become familiar to him, and the Alteinwand, which, seen from here, appeared to close the valley in the south—looked down upon the paths and flower-beds of the garden terrace, the rock grotto, the silver fir, listened to a whispering that issued from the rest-cure gallery, where the cure was being taken, and turned back into the room, trying as he did so to improve the position of the instrument in his mouth, only to thrust his arm forward once more, draw the sleeve from his wrist, and bend his forearm before his face. With toil and effort, as though by shoving, thrusting, and kicking, six minutes had been got rid of. But now, as he stood in the middle of the room, fell to dreaming, and let his thoughts wander, the one remaining minute stole away unnoticed on cats’ paws; a fresh movement of his arm revealed its secret escape, and it was a little too late—the eighth minute was already one-third gone—when, reflecting that this could do no harm, could make no difference to the result or have any significance, he tore the thermometer from his mouth and stared down at it with bewildered eyes.

He could not immediately make sense of its reading; the gleam of the mercury coincided with the reflection of light on the flattened, rounded glass casing, and the column seemed now to stand quite high, now not to exist at all. He brought the instrument close to his eyes, turned it this way and that, and could distinguish nothing. At last, with a fortunate turn, the image became clear to him; he held it fast and hastily brought his understanding to bear upon it. Indeed, Mercurius had expanded, had expanded considerably; the column had risen fairly high, standing several tenths above the limit of normal blood heat: Hans Castorp had 37.6.

In the broad light of morning, between ten and half past, 37.6—that was too much; it was “temperature,” fever as the consequence of an infection to which he had proved receptive, and the only question was what kind of infection it might be. 37.6—Joachim had no more than that, nor did anyone up here who was not confined to bed seriously ill or moribund: neither Kleefeld with her pneumothorax nor—nor Madame Chauchat either. In his own case, of course, it was probably not quite the genuine article—merely cold-fever, as they called it down below. But the two could not be precisely distinguished and kept apart; Hans Castorp doubted that he had acquired this temperature only since catching cold, and he was obliged to regret that he had not consulted Mercurius earlier, at the very outset, as the Hofrat had advised him to do. That advice had been perfectly sensible, as was now apparent, and Settembrini had been entirely wrong to laugh so scornfully at it into the air—Settembrini with his republic and his fine style. Hans Castorp despised the republic and fine style, while again and again he examined the thermometer’s declaration, which the glare repeatedly caused him to lose and which he then restored by zealously turning and twisting the instrument: it read 37.6, and at this earliest hour of the morning!

His agitation was powerful. He walked through the room several times, thermometer in hand, though he held it horizontally so as not to cause any disturbance by a vertical jolt; then, with the utmost care, he laid it on the marble top of the washstand and went out for the present, overcoat and blankets in hand, to take the rest cure. Sitting down, he wrapped the blankets about himself as he had learned to do, from the sides and from below, one after the other, with a hand already practised, and then lay still, awaiting the hour of second breakfast and Joachim’s arrival. From time to time he smiled, and it was as though he were smiling at someone. From time to time his chest rose in an oppressed tremor, and then he was obliged to cough from his catarrhal chest.

Joachim found him still lying there when, at eleven o’clock, after the sounding of the gong, he came over to fetch him for breakfast.

“Well?” he asked in surprise, stepping beside the chair...

Hans Castorp remained silent for a little while longer and gazed before him. Then he answered:

“Well, the latest news is that I have a little temperature.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Joachim asked. “Do you feel feverish?”

Hans Castorp again allowed the answer to wait a little, and then, with a certain sluggishness, delivered the following:

“Feverish, my dear fellow, I have felt for a long time, the whole time, in fact. But now it is not a matter of subjective sensations, but of an exact determination. I have taken my temperature.”

“You have taken your temperature?! With what?!” Joachim cried in alarm.

“With a thermometer, naturally,” Hans Castorp replied, not without mockery and severity. “The matron sold me one. Why she is always addressing one as ‘child of man,’ I do not know; it is not proper. But in great haste she sold me a very good thermometer, and if you wish to satisfy yourself as to what it shows, it is lying inside there on the washstand. It is a minimal elevation.”

Joachim turned sharply about and went into the room. When he returned, he said hesitantly:

“Yes, that is 37.5 and a half.”

“Then it has gone down a little!” Hans Castorp promptly replied. “It was six.”

“In no circumstances can that be called minimal in the morning,” said Joachim. “A fine mess,” he said, and stood beside his cousin’s couch as one stands before a “fine mess,” arms akimbo and head lowered. “You will have to go to bed.”

Hans Castorp had his answer ready.

“I do not see,” he said, “why I should go to bed with 37.6, when you and so many others who have no less than that—when all of you walk freely about up here.”

“But that is something quite different,” said Joachim. “With you it is acute and harmless. You have cold-fever.”

“In the first place,” Hans Castorp replied, now actually dividing his speech into a first and a second point, “I do not understand why one must keep to one’s bed with harmless fever—assuming for the moment that such a thing exists—but not with fever of another kind. And in the second place, I am telling you that the cold has not made me any hotter than I was before. I take the position,” he concluded, “that 37.6 is 37.6. If all of you can walk about with it, so can I.”

“But I had to lie in bed for four weeks when I arrived,” Joachim objected; “and it was only when the temperature proved not to disappear with bed rest that I was allowed to get up.”

Hans Castorp smiled.

“Well, and?” he asked. “I thought it was something different in your case? It seems to me you are entangling yourself in contradictions. First you distinguish, and then you equate. That is surely nonsense...”

Joachim turned on his heel, and when he faced his cousin again, it could be seen that his bronzed face had grown another shade darker.

“No,” he said, “I am not equating anything; you are a Councillor of Confusion. I merely mean that you have a wretched cold—one can hear it in your voice—and that you ought to go to bed in order to shorten the process, since you intend to go home next week. But if you do not wish to—I mean, if you do not wish to go to bed—then you may leave it alone. I am not giving you orders. In any event, we must go to breakfast now. Come along, it is past time!”

“Right. Let us go!” said Hans Castorp, throwing off the blankets. He went into the room to run a brush over his hair, and while he did so Joachim looked once more at the thermometer on the washstand, with Hans Castorp observing him from a distance. Then they went, in silence, and once again sat in their places in the dining hall, where, as always at this hour, everything shimmered white with sheer milk.

When the dwarf brought the Kulmbacher beer for Hans Castorp, he declined it with solemn renunciation. He would rather drink no beer today, would drink nothing at all—no, many thanks—at most a sip of water. This caused a stir. Why was that? What innovations were these! Why no beer?—He had a little temperature, Hans Castorp tossed out. 37.6. Minimal.

At that they wagged their forefingers at him—it was very peculiar. They grew roguish, tilted their heads to one side, screwed up one eye, and wagged their forefingers level with their ears, as though saucy, piquant things were coming to light about someone who had played the innocent. “Well, well, you,” said the schoolmistress, and the down upon her cheeks reddened as she smilingly threatened him. “Fine tales one hears—scandalous ones. Just you wait, wait, wait.”—“Dear, dear, dear,” Frau Stöhr chimed in, threatening him with her short red stump, which she held beside her nose. “Tempus he has, our visiting gentleman. You are a fine one, you are—the very article, a regular Brother Merryman!”—Even the great-aunt at the upper end of the table wagged a finger at him playfully and slyly when the news reached her; pretty Marusja, who until then had scarcely ever paid him any attention, bent forward toward him and looked at him with her perfectly round brown eyes, the little orange-scented handkerchief pressed to her lips, while she too made the threatening gesture; even Dr. Blumenkohl, to whom Frau Stöhr related the matter, could not refrain from joining in the general pantomime, though without looking at Hans Castorp as he did so; and only Miss Robinson remained indifferent and close-minded, as always. Joachim kept his eyes lowered with a decorous expression.

Hans Castorp, flattered by so much teasing, thought himself obliged modestly to disclaim it. “No, no,” he said, “you are mistaken; mine is the most harmless case imaginable. I have a cold—you can see for yourselves: my eyes are watering, my chest is congested, I cough half the night; it is unpleasant enough...” But they would not accept his excuses; they laughed and waved them aside, crying: “Yes, yes, yes—stuff and nonsense, excuses, cold-fever; we know it, we know it!” And then they all demanded at once that Hans Castorp report for examination without delay. The news had enlivened them; among the seven tables, the conversation at this one was the merriest during breakfast. Frau Stöhr in particular, her obstinate face glowing crimson above her neck-ruff and little cracks appearing in the skin of her cheeks, displayed an almost savage loquacity and expatiated upon the pleasure of coughing—yes, there was unquestionably something entertaining and richly enjoyable about it when the tickling in the depths of the chest multiplied and grew, and with spasms and straining one reached properly far down to satisfy the irritation: it was a diversion like sneezing, when the urge swelled mightily and became irresistible, and one inhaled and exhaled stormily several times with an intoxicated expression, yielded oneself voluptuously, and in the blessed eruption forgot the entire world. And sometimes it came twice or three times in succession. Those were the cost-free pleasures of life, as was, for example, scratching one’s chilblains in spring when they itched so sweetly—scratching them with true intimacy and cruelty, in rage and delight, until they bled; and if one happened to look in the mirror while doing it, one saw a devil’s grimace.

Thus the uneducated Stöhr spoke in gruesome detail until the brief, though substantial, intermediate meal was ended and the cousins set out upon their second morning walk, the walk down to Davos Platz. Joachim was withdrawn into himself along the way, while Hans Castorp groaned with his cold and cleared his rusty chest. On the way home Joachim said:

“I have a proposal to make. Today is Friday—tomorrow after luncheon I have my monthly examination. It is not a full examination, but Behrens taps me over a little and has Krokowski make a few notes. You might come along and ask him to listen to your chest quickly while he is about it. It is ridiculous—if you were at home, you would send for Heidekind. And here, with two specialists in the building, you walk about not knowing what is wrong with you, or how deep-seated it is, or whether you would not do better to go to bed.”

“Very well,” said Hans Castorp. “As you think best. Of course, I can do that. And it will be interesting for me as well to be present at an examination for once.”

Thus they came to an agreement; and when they arrived before the sanatorium up above, chance ordained that they should encounter Hofrat Behrens in person and find a favourable opportunity to present their request to him then and there.

Behrens emerged from the porch, tall and high-necked, a stiff hat on the back of his head and a cigar in his mouth, blue-cheeked and bulging-eyed, thoroughly in the full swing of activity, about to attend to his private practice and make visits in the village, having just been at work in the operating theatre, as he explained.

“Good day, gentlemen!” he said. “Always on the tramp? Had a splendid time in the great world, I suppose? I have just come from an unequal duel with knife and bone-saw—a major affair, you know, resection of the ribs. In the old days fifty percent remained on the establishment’s table. We have the knack of it better now, though even so one must often pack up prematurely _mortis causa_. Well, today’s fellow knew how to take a joke; for the present he held his ground quite gamely... Mad, a human thorax like that, when it is no longer one. Soft tissue, you know, unbecoming, a slight clouding of the idea, so to speak. Well, and you? How goes the esteemed state of healthiness? A merrier mode of life as a pair, eh, Ziemßen, you old slyboots? Why are you weeping, you pleasure traveller?” he suddenly addressed Hans Castorp. “Public weeping is not permitted here. Forbidden by house regulations. If we allowed that, everyone would be doing it.”

“It is my cold, Herr Hofrat,” Hans Castorp replied. “I do not know how it was possible, but I have acquired an enormous catarrh. I have a cough as well, and it lies heavily on my chest.”

“Indeed?” said Behrens. “Then you ought to consult a sensible physician.”

The two laughed, and Joachim replied, drawing his heels together:

“We are just in the act of doing so, Herr Hofrat. I am to be examined tomorrow, as you know, and we wished to ask whether you would be so kind as to take my cousin at the same time. The question is whether he will be able to travel on Tuesday…”

“We shall! We shall, my dear fellow!” said Behrens. “Delighted to! We ought to have done it long ago. Once one is here, one should always take advantage of the opportunity. But naturally one does not care to intrude. Tomorrow at two, then, the moment you come from the feeding trough!”

“For as a matter of fact I have a little fever too,” Hans Castorp added.

“You don’t say!” cried Behrens. “You propose to tell me something new, do you? Do you suppose I have no eyes in my head?” And with his enormous forefinger he indicated his two bloodshot, bluishly bulging, watering eyeballs. “How much is it, by the way?”

Hans Castorp modestly named the figure.

“In the morning? Hm, not bad. Quite promising for a beginner. Well then, form up in pairs tomorrow at two! It shall be an honour. A blessed intake of nourishment!” And, his knees bent and his hands paddling, he began to tramp down the sloping path, while a plume of smoke from his cigar streamed backward.

“So that has been arranged according to your wishes,” said Hans Castorp. “It could hardly have fallen out more fortunately, and now I am duly entered. He will probably not be able to do much about it beyond prescribing me some licorice syrup or pectoral tea, but it is pleasant all the same to have a little medical encouragement when one feels as I do. But why must he always talk in such an extravagantly jaunty way!” he said. “At first it amused me, but in the long run I find it disagreeable. ‘A blessed intake of nourishment!’ What gibberish. One may say: ‘A blessed meal!’ for ‘meal’ is a poetic word, so to speak, like ‘daily bread,’ and goes perfectly well with ‘blessed.’ But ‘intake of nourishment’ is pure physiology, and to wish a blessing upon it is surely a derisive manner of speaking. Nor do I like to see him smoke; there is something alarming in it for me, because I know it disagrees with him and makes him melancholy. Settembrini said that his gaiety was forced, and Settembrini is a critic, a man of judgment; one must grant him that. Perhaps I too ought to exercise more judgment instead of taking everything as it comes; he is perfectly right. But sometimes one begins with judgment and censure and righteous indignation, and then something quite different intervenes, something that has nothing whatever to do with judging, and that is the end of moral severity, while the republic and the fine style likewise come to seem merely insipid…”

He murmured something indistinct and seemed not altogether clear himself as to what he meant. His cousin merely looked at him sidelong and said, “Good-bye,” whereupon each went to his room and his balcony box.

“How much?” Joachim asked in a subdued voice after a while, although he had not seen Hans Castorp consult his thermometer again… And Hans Castorp answered in an indifferent tone:

“Nothing new.”

Indeed, immediately upon entering his room he had taken his dainty acquisition of that morning from the washstand, shaken down the 37.6, which had now played out its part, with vertical jerks, and, quite like an old hand, betaken himself to the rest cure with the glass cigar in his mouth. But contrary to his soaring expectations, and although he had kept the instrument beneath his tongue for a full eight minutes, Mercurius had expanded no farther than 37.6 once again—which, to be sure, was fever, though no higher than it had already been earlier that morning. After luncheon the gleaming column rose to 37.7; in the evening, when the patient was very tired after the excitements and novelties of the day, it remained at 37.5; and early the following morning it showed no more than 37, only to regain yesterday’s height toward noon. Amid these results came the principal meal of the following day, and with its conclusion the hour of the rendezvous.

Hans Castorp later remembered that during this meal Madame Chauchat had worn a golden-yellow sweater with large buttons and embroidered pockets, which was new, or at any rate new to Hans Castorp, and in which, upon entering late as always, she had for a moment presented herself frontally to the room in the manner he knew so well in her. Then, as she did five times each day, she had glided to her table, seated herself with soft movements, and begun to eat and chatter: Hans Castorp, as every day, though with particular attention, had watched her head move as she spoke and had noted afresh the curve of her neck and the slack carriage of her back whenever, looking past Settembrini, who sat at the end of the table placed obliquely between them, he glanced across toward the Good Russian table. Frau Chauchat, for her part, had not once looked around the room during luncheon. But when dessert had been eaten and the large clock with its chains and pendulum, on the narrow right-hand wall of the room where the Bad Russian table stood, had struck two, then, to Hans Castorp’s mysterious dismay, it had happened nonetheless: while the clock struck two—one, and two—the graceful invalid had slowly turned her head, and her upper body a little as well, and over her shoulder had looked clearly and openly toward Hans Castorp’s table—and not merely toward his table in general, no, unmistakably and strictly personally at _him_, with a smile about her closed lips and in her narrow-cut Pribislav eyes, as though she meant to say: “Well? It is time. Are you going?” (for when only the eyes speak, their speech is in the form of “thou,” even though the lips have not yet uttered so much as the formal “you”)—and this had been an incident that bewildered and appalled Hans Castorp in the depths of his soul; he had scarcely trusted his senses, but had stared aghast first into Frau Chauchat’s face and then, lifting his eyes, beyond her forehead and her hair into vacancy. Could she know, then, that he had been summoned for examination at two o’clock? That was precisely how it had looked. And yet it was almost as unlikely as that she should have known that only a moment before, in the minute just past, he had been asking himself whether he ought not to have Joachim tell the Hofrat that his cold had already improved and that he considered the examination superfluous: a thought whose attractions, beneath that questioning smile, had admittedly withered away and transformed themselves into sheer repellent tediousness. In the next second Joachim had already laid his rolled napkin upon the table, beckoned to him with raised eyebrows, bowed to those seated around them, and left the table—whereupon Hans Castorp, inwardly reeling though outwardly firm of step, and with the feeling that the look and smile still rested upon him, followed his cousin out of the dining room.

They had not spoken of today’s undertaking since the previous morning, and now too they proceeded in silent accord. Joachim hurried: it was already past the appointed hour, and Hofrat Behrens insisted upon punctuality. They went from the dining room along the ground-floor corridor, past the “Administration,” and “down” the spotless staircase laid with polished linoleum to the basement. Joachim knocked at the door directly opposite the stairs, which a porcelain sign identified as the entrance to the consulting room.

“_Come_ in!” Behrens called, heavily stressing the first word. He stood in the middle of the room in his medical coat, holding the black listening tube in his right hand and tapping it against his thigh.

“Tempo, tempo,” he said, fixing his bulging eyes upon the wall clock. “_Un poco più presto, Signori!_ We are not here quite exclusively for Your High-Well-Born selves.”

At the double writing desk before the window sat Dr. Krokowski, pale against his black alpaca smock, his elbows on the desktop, a pen in one hand and the other buried in his beard, papers before him—probably the patient’s file—and he looked toward the newcomers with the dull expression of a person present merely in an assisting capacity.

“Well, let us have the conduct report!” the Hofrat replied to Joachim’s apologies, taking the fever chart from his hand and examining it while the patient hurried to bare his upper body and hang the discarded garments upon the clothes stand beside the door. No one concerned himself with Hans Castorp. He stood watching for a while and later seated himself in an old-fashioned little fauteuil with tassels on the armrests, beside a small table bearing a water carafe. Bookcases containing broad-spined medical works and bundles of files stood against the walls. The only other piece of furniture was a chaise longue covered in white oilcloth, which could be cranked higher or lower and whose headrest was spread with a paper napkin.

“Point seven, point nine, point eight,” said Behrens, leafing through the weekly charts in which Joachim had faithfully entered the results of his five daily measurements. “Still a little illuminated, my dear Ziemßen; we cannot exactly claim that you have become any more sober since the other day.” (“The other day” had been four weeks ago.) “Not detoxified, not detoxified,” he said. “Well, naturally that cannot be managed from one day to the next; we cannot work magic either.”

Joachim nodded and shrugged his bare shoulders, although he might have objected that he had by no means been up here only since yesterday.

“And how are those stabbing pains at the right hilum, where the sound was always harsher? Better? Well, come over here! We shall knock politely at your door.” And the auscultation began.

Hofrat Behrens, his legs planted wide and his body leaning backward, the listening tube tucked beneath his arm, first tapped at the very top of Joachim’s right shoulder, tapping from the wrist and employing the enormous middle finger of his right hand as a hammer, with the left for support. Then he moved down beneath the shoulder blade and tapped along the side of the middle and lower back, whereupon Joachim, who was well trained, raised his arm so that the tapping might be performed beneath the armpit as well. The whole procedure was then repeated on the left, and when that was done the Hofrat commanded, “About face!” for the percussion of the chest. He tapped just below the neck at the collarbone, tapped above and below the breast, first on the right and then on the left. But when he had tapped to his satisfaction, he proceeded to listen, placing his listening tube, his ear against the cup, upon Joachim’s chest and back, everywhere he had previously tapped. Joachim was required in turn to breathe deeply and to cough artificially, which appeared to cost him considerable effort, for he became short of breath and tears came into his eyes. Hofrat Behrens, meanwhile, reported everything he heard within to the assistant at the desk in brief, standardized terms, in such a manner that Hans Castorp could not help thinking of the proceedings at a tailor’s, when the well-dressed gentleman takes one’s measurements for a suit, laying the measuring tape here and there about the customer’s trunk and limbs in the customary sequence and dictating the resulting figures to the pen of the assistant seated bent over his work. “Short,” Hofrat Behrens dictated. “Shortened.” “Vesicular,” he said, and then again: “Vesicular” (that was good, evidently). “Harsh,” he said, making a face. “_Very_ harsh.” “Sound.” And Dr. Krokowski entered it all, just as the clerk enters the cutter’s figures.

Hans Castorp followed the proceedings with his head inclined to one side, thoughtfully absorbed in contemplating Joachim’s upper body, whose ribs (thank God he was in possession of his ribs) rose beneath the taut skin as he panted, high above the receding stomach—this slender, yellowish-brown young man’s torso, with black hair upon the breastbone and upon the otherwise strong arms, one of which bore a gold chain bracelet around the wrist. Those are a gymnast’s arms, Hans Castorp thought; he was always fond of gymnastics, whereas I cared nothing for them, and that was connected with his desire for the military profession. He was always well disposed toward the physical, much more so than I, or at any rate in a different fashion; for I was always a civilian, and my concern was more with warm baths and good food and drink, whereas his was with manly demands and achievements. And now, in such an entirely different fashion, his body has come to the fore and made itself independent and important—through illness, that is. It is illuminated and refuses to detoxify and become sober, however dearly poor Joachim would like to be a soldier in the flatlands. Just look at him: he has grown exactly as the book prescribes, the very Apollo Belvedere, except for the hair. But inwardly he is ill, and outwardly too warm with illness; for illness makes a human being far more physical, it makes him body through and through… And as he thought this, he took fright and quickly looked up, searchingly, from Joachim’s bare torso to his eyes, his large, black, gentle eyes, which stood full of tears from the artificial breathing and coughing and, throughout the examination, gazed sadly beyond the onlooker into vacancy.

Meanwhile, however, Hofrat Behrens had finished.

“Well, all right, Ziemßen,” he said. “Everything in order, so far as that is possible. Next time”—that would be in four weeks—“things will certainly be a little better everywhere again.”

“How long does Herr Hofrat think that—”

“Are you beginning to press me again already? You cannot go bullying your men while you are in a tipsy state! I said a little half-year the other day—you may count from the other day if you like, but regard it as a minimum. After all, life is possible here; you must be fair. We are certainly no bagno and no… Siberian mine! Or do you mean to say that we bear some resemblance to such things? All right, Ziemßen! Dismissed! Next, whoever else feels inclined!” he cried, looking into the air. At the same time, his arm outstretched, he passed his listening tube across to Dr. Krokowski, who rose and took it in order to perform a brief assistant’s recheck upon Joachim.

Hans Castorp too had sprung up, and with his eyes riveted upon the Hofrat, who stood with legs planted wide and seemed lost in thought, his mouth open, he began hurriedly to make himself ready. He rushed matters, and did not at once manage to extricate himself from his dotted, cuffed shirt as he pulled it over his head. And then he stood before Hofrat Behrens, white, fair, and slight—seemingly of a more civilian mould than Joachim Ziemßen.

But the Hofrat left him standing there, still absorbed in thought. Dr. Krokowski had already resumed his seat and Joachim had begun to dress when Behrens at last resolved to take notice of the person who likewise felt inclined.

“Ah yes, so now it is _you_!” he said, grasped Hans Castorp by the upper arm with his gigantic hand, moved him away from himself, and scrutinized him sharply. He did not look into his face as one looks at a human being, but at his body; he turned him around as one turns a body around, and examined his back as well. “Hm,” he said. “Well, let us see what note you give.” And, as before, he began his tapping.

He percussed every place he had percussed on Joachim Ziemßen, returning several times to various points. For some while he tapped alternately, by way of comparison, high on the left near the collarbone and a little farther down.

“Do you hear that?” he asked Dr. Krokowski as he did so ... And Dr. Krokowski, seated at the desk five paces away, indicated with an inclination of the head that he did: gravely he lowered his chin to his chest, compressing his beard so that its tips curved upward.

“Breathe deeply! Cough!” commanded the Hofrat, who had now taken up the stethoscope again; and Hans Castorp laboured hard for eight or ten minutes, while the Hofrat listened to his chest. He said not a word, merely applied the instrument here and there, listening particularly and repeatedly at the points where he had already lingered while percussing. Then he tucked the instrument beneath his arm, clasped his hands behind his back, and looked down at the floor between Hans Castorp and himself.

“Yes, Castorp,” he said—and this was the first time he had addressed the young man simply by his surname—“the matter stands _praeter-propter_ as I had always supposed it did. I had your number, Castorp, I may as well tell you now—from the very outset, ever since I first had the undeserved distinction of making your acquaintance—and suspected with tolerable certainty that you were secretly one of us and would come to recognize the fact, like many another who came up here for amusement, looking about him with his nose in the air, and one day learned that he would do well—and not merely ‘do well,’ mind you, please understand me—to make a somewhat more extended stay here, without any airs of detached curiosity.”

Hans Castorp had changed colour, and Joachim, in the act of buttoning on his braces, paused just as he stood and listened ...

“You have such a pleasant, likeable cousin there,” the Hofrat continued, indicating Joachim’s side with his head while rocking back and forth from the balls of his feet to his heels, “who, let us hope, will soon be able to say that he once _was_ ill; but even when we have reached that point, your worthy first cousin will nevertheless still once have _been_ ill, and that, _a priori_, as the thinker says, casts a certain light upon you as well, my dear Castorp ...”

“But he is only my step-cousin, Herr Hofrat.”

“Come, come. Surely you do not mean to disown your cousin. Step or no step, he remains a blood relation. On which side?”

“My mother’s, Herr Hofrat. He is the son of a step—”

“And your mother is alive and well?”

“No, she is dead. She died when I was still small.”

“Oh, what of?”

“A blood clot, Herr Hofrat.”

“A blood clot? Well, it was a long time ago. And your father?”

“He died of pneumonia,” Hans Castorp said, “and my grandfather did too,” he added.

“Indeed, he too? Well, so much for your forebears. As for yourself, you have probably always been rather anaemic, have you not? But you did not tire easily at all from physical and mental exertion? You did? And you suffer a good deal from palpitations? Only lately? Good; and besides, there is plainly a marked predisposition to catarrh of the respiratory passages. Do you know that you have been ill before?”

“I?”

“Yes, you are the person I have in mind. Do you hear the difference?” And the Hofrat tapped alternately high on the left side of his chest and a little farther down.

“It sounds rather duller there than here,” Hans Castorp said.

“Very good. You ought to become a specialist. That, then, is dullness on percussion, and such dullness is due to old lesions where calcification has already occurred—scarring, if you prefer. You are an old patient, Castorp, though we will blame no one for your not having learned the fact. Early diagnosis is difficult—especially for our esteemed colleagues in the flatlands. I will not go so far as to say that we have subtler ears, although specialized practice naturally counts for something. But the air helps us to hear, you understand—the thin, dry air up here.”

“Certainly, of course,” Hans Castorp said.

“Good, Castorp. And now listen, my boy, for I am going to utter several golden words. If that were all that was wrong with you, you understand, if the matter ended with the dullness and scars in that Aeolian tube of yours in there, and the chalky foreign bodies lodged within it, I should send you home to your Lares and Penates and not trouble my head about you by so much as a jot, do you understand? But as matters stand, in view of the additional findings, and since you happen to be here among us already—the journey home is not worth your while, Hans Castorp; before long you would only have to make the journey back again.”

Hans Castorp felt his blood stream toward his heart anew, setting it pounding, and Joachim still stood with his hands at the buttons behind him, his eyes cast down.

“For besides the dullness,” said the Hofrat, “you have a roughness high on the left which is almost a murmur already and undoubtedly comes from a fresh lesion—I will not yet call it a focus of softening, but it is certainly a damp spot; and if you carry on down there as you have been doing, my dear fellow, then before you know where you are the whole lobe of your lung will go to the devil.”

Hans Castorp stood motionless; there was an odd twitching about his mouth, and one could plainly see his heart pulsing against his ribs. He looked across at Joachim, whose eyes he could not meet, and then back into the Hofrat’s face, with its blue cheeks, its equally blue bulging eyes, and the little moustache twisted upward on one side.

“As objective confirmation,” Behrens continued, “we also have your temperature: 37.6 at ten o’clock this morning, which corresponds fairly closely with the acoustic findings.”

“I merely thought,” Hans Castorp said, “that the fever came from my catarrh.”

“And the catarrh?” the Hofrat retorted ... “Where does that come from? Let me tell you something, Castorp, and pay attention; you possess a sufficiently generous number of cerebral convolutions, so far as I know. Now, the air here among us is good against the disease, you think, do you not? And so it is. But it is also good _for_ the disease, do you understand me: to begin with, it promotes it, revolutionizes the body, brings the latent disease to an outbreak—and such an outbreak, no offence intended, is your catarrh. I do not know whether you were already febrile down in the lowlands, but up here you became so on the very first day, at all events, and not merely because of your catarrh—that, at least, is my opinion.”

“Yes,” Hans Castorp said, “yes, I truly believe so too.”

“You were probably tipsy at once,” the Hofrat affirmed. “Those are the soluble toxins produced by the bacteria; they have an intoxicating effect upon the central nervous system, you understand, and then one acquires rosy little cheeks. For the present you are going straight to bed, Castorp; we must see whether a few weeks’ bed rest will sober you up. The rest can come afterward. We shall take a handsome interior view of you—it will amuse you to gain such an insight into your own person. But let me tell you this at once: a case like yours does not heal from one day to the next; no spectacular successes or miraculous cures are to be exhibited here. I thought from the first that you would make a better patient, with more talent for being ill, than that brigadier-general over there, who is always wanting to leave the moment his reading drops by a few marks. As though ‘Lie still!’ were not as good a command as ‘Stand still!’ Rest is the citizen’s foremost duty, and impatience does nothing but harm. See to it, then, Castorp, that you do not disappoint me and give the lie to my knowledge of human nature—that is what I require of you! And now, march—off to the depot with you!”

With that Hofrat Behrens concluded the interview and seated himself at the desk, in order, as a man of many affairs, to fill the interval before the next examination with written work. Dr. Krokowski, however, rose from his place, strode toward Hans Castorp, and, with his head tilted sideways and back, one hand resting on the young man’s shoulder, smiling heartily so that the yellowish teeth showed in his beard, gave his right hand a vigorous shake.