The Magic Mountain — Chapter 5

Chapter 6 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

Eternity Soup and Sudden Clarity

Here a phenomenon is impending, at which the narrator does well to marvel himself, lest the reader on his own account marvel overmuch at it. For whereas our account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp's stay among those up here (twenty-one high-summer days, to which, by all human foresight, that stay was supposed to have been limited altogether) has devoured expanses and quantities of time whose extent accords only too closely with our own half-confessed expectations, the mastering of the next three weeks of his visit to this place will scarcely require as many lines, indeed words and moments, as the other has cost in pages, sheets, hours, and working-days: in no time, as we can see coming, these three weeks will have been got behind us and laid to rest.

This, then, might well occasion wonder; and yet it is all in order and in keeping with the laws of narration and listening. For it is in the order of things, and it accords with those laws, that time should become for us exactly as long or short, should spread itself out or shrink together for our experience, exactly as it does for the young Hans Castorp, the hero of our story, so unexpectedly laid under levy by fate; and it may be useful to prepare the reader, with regard to the mystery of time, for quite other marvels and phenomena than the conspicuous one before us here, such as will befall us in his company. For the present it is enough that everyone recall how swiftly a series, indeed a "long" series, of days passes when one spends them ill in bed: it is always the same day repeating itself; but since it is always the same, it is in fact hardly correct to speak of "repetition"; one ought rather to speak of sameness, of a standing still now, or of eternity. They bring you the luncheon soup as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow. And in that very moment something breathes upon you, you do not know how or whence; you grow dizzy as you see the soup coming, the tenses blur for you, run together, and what reveals itself to you as the true form of being is a present without extension in which they are eternally bringing you the soup. But to speak of boredom in relation to eternity would be highly paradoxical; and paradoxes are what we would avoid, especially in living together with this hero.

Hans Castorp, then, had been bedridden since Saturday afternoon, because Hofrat Behrens, the highest authority in the world that encloses us, had so ordained. There he lay, with his monogram on the breast pocket of his nightshirt, his hands clasped behind his head, in his neat white bed, the deathbed of the American woman and probably of many another person as well, and gazed upward with simple blue eyes dimmed by his cold at the ceiling of the room, contemplating the oddity of his situation in life. Yet it is not to be supposed that without his cold his eyes would have looked clear, bright, and unequivocal, for things were not so within him, simple though his inward nature may have been, but in truth very dim, confused, indistinctly half-sincere, and dubious. At one moment, as he lay there, a mad peal of triumphal laughter rising from the depths shook his breast, and his heart stopped and ached with an extravagant joy and hope he had never known; at another he turned pale with fright and apprehension, and it was the very blows of conscience with which his heart beat in rapid, flying time against his ribs.

On the first day Joachim left him wholly in peace and avoided any discussion. Considerately he came a few times into the sickroom, nodded to the man lying there, and, for form's sake, asked whether anything ailed him. Indeed it was all the easier for him to recognize and respect Hans Castorp's shyness of an explanation because he shared it, and according to his own view stood in an even more awkward position than his cousin.

But on Sunday morning, after returning from the morning walk which, as before, he had taken alone, he nevertheless postponed no longer conferring with his cousin about what was now most immediately necessary. He placed himself by the bed and said with a sigh:

"Yes, there is no help for it, steps must now be taken. They are expecting you at home."

"Not yet," answered Hans Castorp.

"No, but in the next few days, Wednesday or Thursday."

"Oh," said Hans Castorp, "they are not expecting me with any such exactness of day. They have other things to do than wait for me and count the days until I come back. When I come, there I am, and Uncle Tienappel says, 'So here you are again!' and Uncle James says, 'Well, was it nice?' And if I do not come, it is a long time before they even notice, you may be sure of that. Naturally they would have to be informed in due course..."

"You can imagine," said Joachim, sighing again, "how unpleasant the whole thing is to me! What is to become of it now? Naturally I feel, so to speak, responsible. You come up here to visit me, and I introduce you up here, and now you are stuck fast, and nobody knows when you will get away again and be able to take up your post. You must see that this is exceedingly painful to me."

"Allow me!" said Hans Castorp, his hands still beneath his head. "What are you troubling your head about? That is nonsense. Did I come up here to visit you? That too; but in the first place, after all, I came to recuperate, on Heidekind's orders. Well, and now it turns out that I was more in need of recuperation than he and all of us ever dreamed. I am surely not the first who thought he was paying a flying visit here and for whom things afterwards turned out differently. Just think, for example, of _Tous les deux_'s second son, and how much more completely it came over him here; I do not know whether he is still alive, perhaps they fetched him away in the middle of a meal. That I am a little ill is certainly a surprise to me; I must first accustom myself to regarding myself here as a patient and really as one of you, instead of, as hitherto, merely as a guest. And then again it almost does not surprise me at all, for I have never really felt myself in magnificent condition, and when I think how early both my parents died, where after all was that splendid state to come from? We are all under no illusion about the fact that you have a little flaw, are we, even if it is as good as cured now, and so it may very well be something that runs in our family; at least Behrens made some such remark. In any case I have been lying here since yesterday considering how I have actually always felt and how I stood toward the whole business, toward life, you know, and its demands. A certain gravity and a certain aversion to robust and noisy ways have always lain in my nature; we were only talking of it the other day, and how I have sometimes almost felt like taking orders, out of an interest in sad and edifying things, a black cloth, you know, with a silver cross upon it, or _R. I. P._... _Requiescat in pace_... that is really the finest phrase, and much more sympathetic to me than 'Long may he live,' which after all is more of a racket. All that, I tell myself, probably comes from my having a flaw myself and understanding illness from the outset; it is coming out on this occasion. But if that is how matters stand, then I may count myself lucky to have come up here and let myself be examined; you need not make yourself the slightest reproaches on that account. For you heard what he said: if I had gone on like that a little longer in the flatlands, my whole lung-lobe might, before I knew where I was, have gone to the devil."

"One cannot know that!" said Joachim. "That is just the point, that one cannot know it at all! They say you had spots even earlier that nobody troubled about and that healed entirely of themselves, so that now all that remain are a few negligible areas of dullness. Perhaps it would have gone the same way with the damp spot you are now supposed to have, if you had not happened to come up to me here; one cannot know it!"

"No, one can know nothing at all," answered Hans Castorp. "And for that very reason one has no right to take the most disagreeable possibility as one's premise, for example with regard to the length of my stay for the cure. You say nobody knows when I shall get away and take up my work at the shipyard, but you say it in the pessimistic sense, and I think that premature, since after all one cannot know it. Behrens named no date; he is a prudent man and does not play the soothsayer. Besides, the screening and photographic plate have not yet taken place, which alone will objectively make the state of affairs clear, and who knows whether anything worth mentioning will come to light and whether I may not already be free of fever before then and be able to bid you farewell. I am for our not making a fuss before the time and not at once telling the people at home the wildest stories. It will be enough if one of these days we write, I can write myself with this fountain pen here if I sit up a little, that I have a bad cold and a fever and am confined to bed and for the present cannot travel. The rest will come of itself."

"Good," said Joachim, "that is how we can manage it for the time being. And then we can wait a little over the other matter too."

"What other matter?"

"Do not be so thoughtless! You came equipped only for three weeks with your cabin trunk. You need linen, underclothes and outer clothes and winter things, and you need more shoes. In the end, you must have money sent to you as well."

"_If_," said Hans Castorp, "_if_ I need all that."

"Very well, let us wait and see. But we ought... no," said Joachim, beginning to pace about the room, "we ought not to indulge in illusions! I have been here too long not to know what is what. If Behrens says there is a rough place there, almost a sound... But naturally, we can wait and see!"

That was where the matter rested for this time, and for the present the weekly and fortnightly variations of the normal day came into their own; even in his present condition Hans Castorp had his share in them, if not by direct participation, then through the reports Joachim gave him when he visited and sat for a quarter of an hour on the edge of his bed.

The tea-tray on which his breakfast was brought to him on Sunday morning had been adorned with a little flower vase, and they had not failed to send him some of the fancy pastry that was served in the dining hall today. Later things grew lively below in the garden and on the terrace, and with blare and clarinet nasalities the fortnightly Sunday concert began, at which Joachim joined his cousin: with the balcony door open he received the performance outside in the loggia, while Hans Castorp from his bed, half sitting up, his head inclined to one side, listened with lovingly devout, swimming eyes to the harmonies pressing upward, not without inwardly shrugging his shoulders at Settembrini's talk of music's "political dubiousness."

For the rest, as we said, he had Joachim report to him on the occurrences and entertainments of those days, questioned him as to whether Sunday had brought festive toilettes, lace matinées, or the like, though for lace matinées it had been too cold; also whether there had been carriage-drives in the afternoon, and indeed there had been, the Society "Half a Lung" having flown out _in corpore_ to Clavadell; and on Monday he insisted on hearing about Dr. Krokowski's conférence when Joachim returned from it and, before going in for the midday rest cure, called on him. Joachim showed himself close-mouthed and disinclined to report on the lecture, just as the former one, too, had not really been discussed between the two. But Hans Castorp insisted on hearing particulars. "I lie here and pay the full price," he said. "I want some share too in what is being offered." He remembered the Monday a fortnight ago, his solitary walk, which had done him so little good, and gave definite expression to the conjecture that it had really been that very walk which had wrought a revolution in his body and brought the silently existing illness to its outbreak. "But the way people talk here," he cried, "the common folk, so dignified and solemn: at times it sounds like poetry. 'Well then, farewell, and my thanks to you!'" he repeated, imitating the woodman's manner of speech. "That is how I heard it in the wood, and I shall never forget it as long as I live. Things of that sort then link themselves with other impressions or memories, you know, and one keeps them ringing in one's ears to the end of one's life. And so Krokowski talked again about 'love'?' he asked, making a face at the word.

"Self-evidently," said Joachim. "What else would he talk about? It is his theme, after all."

"And what did he say about it today?"

"Oh, nothing special. You know yourself from last time how he puts things."

"But what new thing did he have to offer?"

"Nothing further that was new... Yes, it was pure chemistry he was dishing up today," Joachim reluctantly allowed himself to report. It was a matter, Dr. Krokowski had said, of a kind of poisoning, of self-poisoning of the organism, produced by an as yet unknown substance diffused through the body undergoing decomposition; and the products of this decomposition acted intoxicatingly upon certain centres of the spinal cord, no differently from what occurs with the habitual introduction of foreign poisons, morphine or cocaine.

"And then one gets rosy little cheeks!" said Hans Castorp. "Well now, that is worth hearing. There is no end to what the man knows. He has eaten it with a spoon. Just wait, one day he will discover for you the unknown substance that is diffused through the whole body and manufacture the soluble poisons that act intoxicatingly on the centre, and then he will be able to make people tipsy in a special way. Perhaps mankind once got as far as that already. When one hears him, one might think there is something true in those stories of love-potions and that sort of stuff one reads of in books of legends... Are you going already?"

"Yes," said Joachim, "I absolutely must lie down a while longer. My temperature curve has been rising since yesterday. This business with you has upset me rather."

That was Sunday, Monday. Out of evening and morning there became the third day of Hans Castorp’s stay in the “coach-house,” a weekday without distinction, Tuesday. But it was the day of his arrival up here; he had now been a full three weeks in this place, and so he felt compelled, after all, to write the letter home and inform his uncles, at least in broad outline and for the moment, of the state of affairs. With his plumeau at his back, he wrote on a sheet of the sanatorium stationery that his departure from here was being delayed contrary to plan. He was laid up with a feverish cold, which Hofrat Behrens, over-conscientious as he doubtless was, was evidently not taking altogether lightly, since he connected it with the writer’s constitution in general. For at their very first acquaintance the physician in charge had found him markedly anaemic, and all in all it appeared that in authoritative quarters the period which he, Hans Castorp, had allotted to his own recuperation was not considered quite sufficient. Further particulars as soon as possible. So that is well, thought Hans Castorp. There is not a word too much, and yet it will do for a while in any case. The letter was handed to the house-servant, who, avoiding the détour by way of the letter-box, conveyed it directly to the next scheduled train.

After this, much seemed settled for our adventurer, and with a pacified mind, though plagued by coughing and the heavy dulness of a cold in the head, he lived on into the day in a mood of expectancy, into that normal day divided in many ways into little pieces and, in its fixed uniformity, neither short nor tedious, the day that was always the same. In the morning, after a mighty knocking, the bath attendant came in, a sinewy individual named Turnherr, with rolled-up shirt-sleeves, strongly veined forearms, and a gurgling speech laboriously impeded, who addressed Hans Castorp, like all the patients, by his room number and rubbed him down with alcohol. Not long after his departure Joachim appeared, fully dressed, to say good morning, ask after his cousin’s seven-o’clock temperature, and communicate his own. While he breakfasted downstairs, Hans Castorp, with his plumeau at his back, did the same, with the appetite produced by a new mode of life, scarcely disturbed by the briskly businesslike incursion of the doctors, who at that hour had passed through the dining-hall and were making their round of the bedridden and the moribund at a rapid pace through the rooms. With his mouth full of preserves, he declared that he had slept “well,” watched over the rim of his cup as the Hofrat, bracing his fists on the top of the middle table, rapidly examined the fever chart lying there, and answered in an equably drawling tone the morning greeting of those who were moving off. Then he lit himself a cigarette and already saw Joachim returning from his morning round when he had scarcely had time to think he had gone. Again they chatted of this and that, and the interval of time until second breakfast - Joachim meanwhile taking his rest cure - was so short that even an out-and-out dullard and pauper of mind could not have succeeded in making it tedious; whereas Hans Castorp, with the impressions of his first three weeks up here to feed upon in abundance, and with his present situation and what might come of it to work over inwardly, would scarcely have had need of the two thick volumes of an illustrated periodical, borrowed from the sanatorium library, that lay on his bedside table.

The same holds good of the stretch of time during which Joachim made his second excursion to Platz Davos, a scant little hour. He would then look in again on Hans Castorp and tell him this and that which had struck him on his walk, stand or sit a moment by the sick-bed before going to the midday rest cure - and how long did that last? Again only an hour! One had scarcely lain there with one’s hands clasped behind one’s head, gazed a little at the ceiling, and followed out a thought, when the gong boomed, summoning those who were not bedridden or moribund to make ready for the principal meal.

Joachim went, and the “midday soup” arrived: a simple-mindedly symbolic name for what arrived! For Hans Castorp had not been put on invalid diet - and why should he have been? Invalid diet, meagre fare, was in no way indicated by his condition. He lay there and paid the full price, and what was brought him in the standing eternity of that hour was no “midday soup”; it was the six-course Berghof dinner, without deduction and in all its fullness - lavish on weekdays, on Sundays a gala, pleasure, and parade meal, prepared by a European-trained chef in the sanatorium’s luxury-hotel kitchen. The dining-room maid whose office it was to attend the bedridden brought it to him under nickel-plated domed covers and in appetizing little dishes; she wheeled the invalid’s table that had presented itself, that one-legged marvel of balanced construction, crosswise over his bed before him, and Hans Castorp feasted at it like the tailor’s son at the little table that set itself.

Hardly had he finished dining when Joachim too returned, and by the time the latter went out to his loggia and the stillness of the great rest cure descended over House Berghof, it had become as much as half-past two. Not quite, perhaps; to be exact, it was probably no more than a quarter past two. But such supernumerary quarter-hours outside round units are not counted; they are swallowed incidentally where a generous economy of time prevails, as on a journey, during many hours of railway travel, or in any other empty, waiting state, when all striving and living is reduced to the business of getting time over and behind one. A quarter past two - that counts as half-past two; in God’s name it may count at once as three o’clock too, since the three is already in play. The thirty minutes are understood as a prelude to the round hour from three to four and are inwardly disposed of: that is how one proceeds under such circumstances. And so, in the end and properly speaking, the duration of the great rest cure was once more restricted to an hour - though at its close that hour was diminished, clipped away, and, as it were, apostrophized. The apostrophe was Dr. Krokowski.

Yes, on his independent afternoon round Dr. Krokowski no longer described an arc round Hans Castorp. The latter now counted; he was no longer an interval and a hiatus, he was a patient; he was questioned and not passed over, as had so long happened to his secret and slight, yet daily renewed annoyance. It was on Monday that Dr. Krokowski had appeared in the room for the first time - we say “appeared,” for that is the right word for the strange and even somewhat terrifying impression against which Hans Castorp had not then been able to defend himself. He had been lying in a half- or quarter-doze when he started up and became aware that the assistant was in the room without having come in by the door, and was advancing upon him from the outer side. For his way had not been by the corridor, but through the outer loggias, and he had entered by the open balcony door, so that the notion forced itself upon one that he had come through the air. There he had stood, then, by Hans Castorp’s couch, black-pale, broad-shouldered and sturdy, the apostrophe of the hour, and in his parted beard his teeth had been visible, yellowish and smiling in a manly fashion.

“You seem surprised to see me, Herr Castorp,” he had said with baritonal mildness, drawling, unmistakably somewhat affected, and with an exotic palate-r, which, however, he did not roll, but produced by a single tap of the tongue just behind the upper front teeth; “I am merely performing an agreeable duty in now seeing to your welfare as well. Your relation to us has entered upon a new phase; overnight the guest has become a comrade ...” The word “comrade” had somewhat frightened Hans Castorp. “Who would have thought it!” Dr. Krokowski had joked companionably. “Who would have thought it on the evening when I first had the honour of greeting you and you met my mistaken view - at that time it was mistaken - with the declaration that you were perfectly healthy. I believe I expressed something like a doubt at the time; but I assure you, I did not mean it in that sense. I do not wish to set myself up as more sharp-sighted than I am; I was not then thinking of any damp spot; I meant it otherwise, more generally, more philosophically; I gave voice to my doubt whether ‘man’ and ‘perfect health’ were rhyming words at all. And even to-day, even after the result of your examination, being the man I am, and unlike my honoured chief, I cannot regard that damp spot there” - and he had lightly touched Hans Castorp’s shoulder with the tip of his finger - “as occupying the foreground of interest. For me it is a secondary phenomenon ... The organic is always secondary ...”

Hans Castorp had recoiled.

“... And so your catarrh is in my eyes a phenomenon of the third order,” Dr. Krokowski had added very lightly. “How does it stand with that? Bed-rest will no doubt soon do its part in that respect. What did you measure to-day?” And from then on the assistant’s visit had borne the character of a harmless control call, which in fact it steadily retained throughout the following days and weeks: Dr. Krokowski came in by way of the balcony at three-quarters to four, or even a little earlier, greeted the man lying there with manfully cheerful cordiality, put the simplest medical questions, perhaps introduced a brief chat of a more personal character, joked companionably - and if all this was not without a touch of the questionable, one grows accustomed in the end even to what is questionable, provided it keeps within bounds, and Hans Castorp soon found nothing more to object to in Dr. Krokowski’s regular appearance, which, after all, belonged to the fixed normal day and apostrophized the hour of the great rest cure.

So it was four o’clock when the assistant stepped back out upon the balcony again - that is to say, deep afternoon! Suddenly, before one had thought of it, it was deep afternoon - which, moreover, at once deepened into something almost evening-like; for by the time tea had been drunk, downstairs in the hall and in Number 34, the hour was pressing strongly toward five, and by the time Joachim returned from his third round of duty and looked in again on his cousin, it was pressing strongly enough toward six that the rest cure until dinner, if one rounded only a little, was once more reduced to an hour - an opposition on the part of time that could be beaten out of the field playfully enough when one has thoughts in one’s head, and besides a whole _orbis pictus_ on one’s bedside table.

Joachim took his leave for the meal. The food was brought. The valley had long since filled with shadows, and while Hans Castorp ate, the white room visibly darkened. When he had finished, he sat leaning into his plumeau before the cleared little self-spreading table and gazed into the rapidly increasing dusk, the dusk of to-day, scarcely distinguishable from that of yesterday, the day before, or eight days ago. It was evening - though just now it had still been morning. The day, minced up and artificially made diverting, had literally crumbled away and come to nothing in his hands, as he remarked with cheerful amazement or at most reflectively; for horror at this was still foreign to his years. He only felt as though he were “still” looking.

One day, ten or twelve perhaps having passed since Hans Castorp had taken to his bed, there came a knock at the room door at this hour, that is to say before Joachim had returned from supper and from society; and upon Hans Castorp’s questioning invitation to enter, Lodovico Settembrini appeared on the threshold - whereupon the room in one stroke became dazzlingly bright. For the visitor’s first movement, while the door was still open, had been to switch on the ceiling light, which, reflected by the whiteness of the ceiling and the furniture, instantly flooded the room with a quivering clarity.

The Italian was the only personality among the guests taking the cure about whom Hans Castorp had expressly and by name inquired of Joachim during these days. Joachim, to be sure, told him in any case, as often as for ten minutes he sat on the edge of his cousin’s bed or stood beside him - and that happened ten times a day - of the little incidents and fluctuations in the everyday life of the establishment; and so far as Hans Castorp had asked questions, they had been of a general and impersonal sort. The curiosity of the isolated man was directed to knowing whether any new guests had arrived, or whether anyone among the familiar physiognomies had departed; and it seemed to satisfy him that only the former had occurred. A “new one” had arrived, a young man with a greenish, hollow face, and had received his place at the table of the ivory-hued Levi and Frau Iltis, immediately to the right of the cousins’. Well then, Hans Castorp could wait to have a look at him. So nobody had departed? Joachim denied it briefly, lowering his eyes. But he had to answer the question repeatedly, in fact every other day, although at last, with a certain impatience in his voice, he had tried to settle the matter once and for all and had said that, so far as he knew, nobody was on the point of departure; in any case people did not simply depart from here so lightly.

As for Settembrini, Hans Castorp had personally asked after him and demanded to hear what he had “said to it.” To what? “Why, that I am lying here and am supposed to be ill.” Settembrini had in fact expressed himself, though very briefly. On the very day of Hans Castorp’s disappearance he had approached Joachim with the question of what had become of the guest, being visibly prepared to learn that Hans Castorp had departed. To Joachim’s explanations he had replied only with two Italian words: first he had said _Ecco_ and then _Poveretto_, in German: “there we have it” and “poor little fellow” - one needed to understand no more Italian than the two young men did in order to grasp the sense of these two utterances. “Why _poveretto_?” Hans Castorp had said. “He too sits up here with his literature, which consists of humanism and politics, and is little able to advance the earthly interests of life. He had better not pity me so condescendingly; I shall get back to the flatlands before he does yet.”

Now then Herr Settembrini stood in the suddenly illuminated room - Hans Castorp, who had propped himself on one elbow and turned toward the door, recognized him with blinking eyes and blushed as he did so. As always, Settembrini wore his thick coat with the large lapels, together with a somewhat worn turn-down collar and the checked trousers. Since he was coming from dinner, he held, by habit, a wooden toothpick between his lips. The corner of his mouth beneath the fine curve of his moustache was drawn into the familiar delicate, sober, critical smile.

“Good evening, Engineer! Am I permitted to look in on you? If so, light is needed for the purpose - forgive my high-handedness!” he said, flinging his little hand upward with a flourish toward the ceiling lamp. “You were contemplating - I should by no means wish to disturb you. An inclination to reflection would be entirely intelligible to me in your case, and for chatting you have, after all, your cousin. You see, my superfluity is perfectly clear to me. Nevertheless, one lives in such close quarters together, one conceives a human concern from man to man, a concern of the mind, a concern of the heart ... It is a good week since one has seen you. I truly began to imagine that you had departed when I saw your place down below in the refectory empty. The lieutenant set me right to something better, hm, to something less good, if that does not sound discourteous ... In short, how are you? What are you doing? How do you feel? Not too downcast, I hope?”

"It is you, Herr Settembrini! That is kind indeed. Ha, ha, 'refectory'? There you've made a joke again at once. Take the chair, please. You are not disturbing me in the least. I was lying here musing, though 'musing' is far too much to say. I was simply too lazy to turn on the light. Many thanks, subjectively I feel as good as normal. My cold is almost cleared up by the bed rest, but after all it is supposed to be a secondary phenomenon, as I hear on all hands. Only the temperature is still not what it ought to be, now 37.5, now 37.7; that has not changed these last few days."

"Do you take your temperature regularly?"

"Yes, six times a day, just like all the others up here. Ha ha, excuse me, I still have to laugh at your calling our dining-room the 'refectory.' That is what they say in a monastery, isn't it? There really is something of that here; I have never been in a monastery, of course, but it is something like this that I imagine. And I have the 'rules' by heart already, and observe them quite exactly."

"Like a pious brother. One may say your novitiate is over, you have made your profession. My solemn congratulations. You say 'our dining-room,' too. By the way, without wishing to affront your manly dignity, you almost remind me more of a young little nun than of a monk, of one of those newly shorn, innocent brides of Christ with great eyes of self-sacrifice. I have seen such lambs here and there in former days, never without... never without a certain sentimentality. Ah yes, yes, your cousin has told me everything. So at the last moment you did let yourself be examined."

"Since I was feverish -. I beg you, Herr Settembrini, with such a catarrh I should have gone to our doctor in the flatlands. And here, where one is sitting, so to speak, at the source, where there are two specialists in the house, it would really have been absurd..."

"Naturally, naturally. And so you had already taken your temperature before you were told to. It was recommended to you at once, by the way. Mylendonk slipped you the thermometer?"

"Slipped? Since the need existed, I bought one from her."

"I understand. A perfectly proper business transaction. And how many months did the chief clap on you? ... Good God, I asked you that once before! Do you remember? You had just arrived. You answered so pertly then..."

"Of course I remember that, Herr Settembrini. I have gone through a great deal that was new since then, but I still remember that as if it were today. Even then you were so amusing, and made Hofrat Behrens into the judge of hell... Rhadames... no, wait, that is something else..."

"Rhadamanthys? It may be that I incidentally called him that. I do not retain everything that occasionally bubbles forth from my head."

"Rhadamanthys, of course! Minos and Rhadamanthys! And even then you told us at once about Carducci..."

"Allow me, my dear friend, let us leave that one aside. That name sounds far too foreign in your mouth at this moment!"

"Very well," laughed Hans Castorp. "Still, I learned a great deal about him from you. Yes, at that time I had no idea and answered you that I had come for three weeks; I knew no differently. At that very moment Kleefeld had greeted me, whistling through her pneumothorax, and it upset me a little. But I felt feverish even then at once, for the air up here is not only good against illness, it is also good for illness; sometimes it is what first brings it to the outbreak, and in the end that is probably necessary if a cure is to come about."

"A seductive hypothesis. Did Hofrat Behrens also tell you of the German-Russian woman we had here last year, no: the year before last, for five months? No? He ought to have done so. A charming lady, German-Russian by descent, married, a young mother. She came here from the East, lymphatic, anaemic; there was probably something more serious the matter as well. Well then, she had been living here a month and complained that she felt ill. Only patience! A second month passes, and she keeps asserting that she is not better but worse. She is given to understand that how she is going can be judged solely and exclusively by the doctor; she can only state how she feels, and that is of little consequence. With her lungs they are satisfied. Very well, she is silent, she takes the cure, and loses weight week after week. In the fourth month she faints during examinations. That does no harm, Behrens explains; with her lungs he is quite well satisfied. But when in the fifth month she can no longer walk, she writes as much to her husband in the East, and Behrens receives a letter from him; it had 'Personal' and 'Urgent' written on it in a bold hand, I saw it myself. Yes, says Behrens now, shrugging his shoulders, it did seem to be coming out that evidently she could not endure the climate here. The woman was beside herself. He ought to have told her so sooner, she cried; she had always felt it, she had ruined herself completely! ... Let us hope she recovered her strength again with her husband in the East."

"Excellent! You tell a story so prettily, Herr Settembrini; every word of yours is positively plastic. I have often had to laugh to myself too over the story of the young lady who bathed in the lake and to whom they gave the Silent Sister. Yes, what things do happen. One certainly never stops learning. As for the rest, my own case still lies wholly in uncertainty. The Hofrat does claim to have found a trifle in me; I myself heard the old spots when he was percussing, where I was ill before without knowing it, and now there is also supposed to be a fresh one to be heard somewhere here, though 'fresh' is an odd thing to say in this connection. But so far it is only a matter of acoustic perceptions, and we shall have real diagnostic certainty only when I am up again and the fluoroscopic examination and photographic plate have taken place. Then we shall know positively where we are."

"Do you think so? Did you know that the photographic plate often shows spots one takes for cavities, while they are nothing but shadows, and that there are sometimes no spots where something actually is? Madonna, the photographic plate! We had a young numismatist here who was feverish; and because he was feverish, one saw cavities plainly on the photographic plate. They even claimed to have heard them! He was treated for phthisis, and under that treatment he died. The autopsy showed that there was nothing wrong with his lungs and that he had died of some sort of cocci."

"Really, Herr Settembrini, you are already talking of autopsy! Things have surely not got that far with me yet."

"Engineer, you are a rogue."

"And you are a critic and a doubter through and through, that must be said! You do not even believe in exact science. Does the plate show spots in your case too?"

"Yes, it does show some."

"And are you really ill, then?"

"Yes, I am unfortunately rather ill," replied Herr Settembrini, and let his head sink. There followed a pause during which he coughed. Hans Castorp looked from where he lay at rest at the guest who had been silenced. It seemed to him as though with his two very simple questions he had refuted all sorts of things and struck them dumb, even the republic and fine style. On his side he did nothing to set the conversation in motion again.

After a while Herr Settembrini straightened himself again with a smile.

"Now tell me, Engineer," he said, "how did your people receive the news?"

"That is to say, what news? About the postponement of my departure? Ah, my people, you see, my people at home consist of three uncles, a great-uncle, and two sons of his, with whom my relation is more cousinly. I have no others; I was bereft of both parents very early. Receive it? Why, they do not yet know much, no more than I know myself. At first, when I had to take to bed, I wrote them that I had caught a severe cold and could not travel. And yesterday, since it was after all lasting a little long, I wrote again and said that Hofrat Behrens had had his attention drawn by the catarrh to the condition of my chest and was insisting that I prolong my stay until the matter was made clear. They will have taken note of that with complete equanimity."

"And your position? You spoke of a practical sphere of activity upon which you were just on the point of entering."

"Yes, as a volunteer. I have asked them to excuse me for the present at the shipyard. You must not suppose there is despair over it there. They can manage for any length of time without a volunteer."

"Very good! From that side, then, everything is in order. Phlegm all along the line. In general people are phlegmatic in your country, are they not? But energetic too!"

"Oh yes, energetic too, certainly, very energetic," said Hans Castorp. He tested the temper of life at home from a distance and found that his interlocutor characterized it correctly. "Phlegmatic and energetic, that is what they are, I suppose."

"Well then," Herr Settembrini went on, "if you should stay longer, we shall certainly have the pleasure up here of making the acquaintance of your uncle, I mean the great-uncle. No doubt he will come up to look in on you."

"Impossible!" cried Hans Castorp. "Under no circumstances! Not ten horses would bring him up here! My uncle is strongly apoplectic, you know, he has hardly any neck. No, he needs a sensible air pressure; it would go even worse with him here than with your lady from the East, he would be seized with every conceivable attack."

"That disappoints me. Apoplectic, then? What use are phlegm and energy to me there. Your uncle is rich, I suppose? You too are rich? People are rich where you come from."

Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini's literary generalization, and then from where he lay at rest he looked out again into the distance, into the sphere of home from which he had been removed. He remembered, he tried to judge impersonally; distance encouraged and enabled him to do so. He answered:

"One is rich, yes, or one is not. And if one is not, so much the worse. I? I am no millionaire, but what is mine is assured to me, I am independent, I have enough to live on. Let us leave me out of it. If you had said: one must be rich back there, then I should have agreed with you. For suppose one is not rich, or ceases to be so, then woe betide one. 'Him? Has he still got money then?' that is what they ask... literally in those words and with precisely that face; I have often heard it, and I notice that it has imprinted itself on me. So it must after all have struck me as odd, though I was used to hearing it, otherwise it would not have stayed with me. Or what do you think? No, I do not believe that, for example, you, as homo humanus, would find our way of life to your taste; even to me, who am at home there, it has often seemed harsh, as I perceive afterwards, though personally I have had no sufferings from it. If a man does not have the best, most expensive wines served at his dinners, nobody goes to him at all, and his daughters remain unmarried. That is what people are like. Lying here as I do and seeing it from afar, it strikes me as harsh. What were the words you used, phlegmatic and what? Energetic! Very well, but what does that mean? It means hard, cold. And what do hard and cold mean? They mean cruel. There is a cruel air down below, inexorable. When one lies here and sees it from afar, it can fill one with dread."

Settembrini listened to him and nodded. He was still doing so when Hans Castorp had for the time being come to the end of his criticism and spoke no more. Then he drew breath and said:

"I will not gloss over the special forms in which the natural cruelty of life manifests itself within your society. Be that as it may, the reproach of cruelty remains a rather sentimental reproach. On the spot you would hardly have made it, for fear of seeming ridiculous to yourself. You have rightly left it to life's shirkers. That you make it now bears witness to a certain estrangement, which I should be reluctant to see increase, for he who grows accustomed to making it may very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know, Engineer, what that means: to be lost to life? I, I know it, I see it here every day. After half a year at the latest, the young person who comes up here, and it is almost nothing but young people who come up here, has no other thought in his head but flirtation and temperature. And after a year at the latest he will never be able to entertain any other again, but will regard every other as 'cruel,' or rather as mistaken and ignorant. You like stories; I could oblige you. I could tell you about the son and husband who was here for eleven months, and whom I knew. He was a little older than you, I believe, indeed already somewhat older. They dismissed him on trial as improved, he returned home to the arms of his loved ones; they were no uncles, they were mother and wife. All day long he lay with the thermometer in his mouth and knew of nothing else. 'You do not understand that,' he said. 'One must have lived up above to know how things ought to be. Down here the fundamental notions are lacking.' It ended with his mother's deciding: 'Just go back up again. There is nothing to be done with you any longer.' And back up he went. He returned to the 'homeland' - you know, that is what people call it when once they have lived here. He had become utterly estranged from his young wife; she lacked the 'fundamental notions,' and she renounced him. She saw that in the homeland he would find a companion with matching 'fundamental notions' and stay there."

Hans Castorp seemed to have listened with only half an ear. Still he kept gazing into the incandescent brightness of the white room as into a far expanse. He laughed belatedly and said:

“He called it home? That really is a little sentimental, as you say. Yes, you know no end of stories. I was just now thinking further about what we were saying of hardness and cruelty; in these last days I have had it pass through my mind more than once. You see, one must surely have a pretty thick skin to be so entirely at one, by nature, with the way of thinking of the people down there in the flatlands, and with such questions as, ‘Has he still got money, then?’ and the look they put on when they ask it. It was never altogether natural to me, though I am not even a _homo humanus_; only afterward do I perceive that it always struck me as remarkable. Perhaps it was connected with my unconscious inclination toward illness that it was not natural to me; I heard the old spots myself, after all, and now Behrens has supposedly found some fresh trifle in me. It did come to me as a surprise, and yet at bottom I was not very much astonished. To tell the truth, I have never felt altogether rock-solid; and then both my parents died so early, and I have been a double orphan from childhood, you know ...”

Herr Settembrini described, with head, shoulders, and hands, a single gesture that made the question “Well, and? What next?” visible in a cheerful and courteous way.

“You are a writer, after all,” said Hans Castorp, “a man of letters; you must understand such things and see that in such circumstances one cannot very well be so downright in one's sentiments and find the cruelty of people altogether natural, the ordinary people, you know, who go about and laugh and make money and stuff themselves ... I do not know whether I am expressing myself rightly ...”

Settembrini bowed. “What you mean to say,” he explained, “is that early and repeated contact with death produces a fundamental disposition of mind which is rendered irritable and sensitive toward the hardnesses and crudities of the unreflecting life of the world, let us say: toward its cynicism.”

“Exactly so!” cried Hans Castorp in sincere enthusiasm. “Faultlessly expressed, down to the very last dot over the i, Herr Settembrini! With death! I knew it, of course, that as a man of letters you ...”

Settembrini stretched out his hand toward him, laying his head a little to one side and closing his eyes, a very beautiful and gentle gesture of restraint and of asking for further hearing. He remained several seconds in this attitude, even after Hans Castorp had long since fallen silent and waited, in some embarrassment, for what was to come. At last he opened his black eyes again, the eyes of barrel-organ men, and said:

“Permit me. Permit me, engineer, to tell you and impress upon your heart that the only healthy and noble, and indeed, I expressly add, the only _religious_ way of regarding death is to apprehend and feel it as a constituent and accessory, as a sacred condition of life, _not_, however, which would be the opposite of healthy, noble, rational, and religious, to separate it from life in the mind in any way, to set it in opposition to life, and perhaps even, repulsively, to play it off against life. The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with symbols of life and generation, even with obscene symbols; with antique religiosity, the sacred was very often one and the same with the obscene. Those people knew how to honour death. Death is venerable as the cradle of life, as the mother-womb of renewal. Seen apart from life, it becomes a ghost, a grimace, and something worse still. For death as an independent spiritual power is a highly dissolute power, whose vicious force of attraction is doubtless very strong, but with which to sympathize means, just as doubtless, the most ghastly aberration of the human mind.”

Here Herr Settembrini was silent. He remained at this level of generality and ended with the utmost definiteness. He was in earnest; he had not spoken for entertainment, had disdained to offer his partner any occasion for taking hold and replying, but at the end of his propositions had let his voice sink and put down a full stop. He sat with closed mouth, his folded hands in his lap, one leg in the checkered trousers crossed over the other, and only lightly wagged the foot that hovered in the air, which he regarded sternly.

Hans Castorp therefore likewise kept silence. Sitting in his eiderdown, he turned his head toward the wall and lightly drummed with his fingertips on the quilt. He felt himself instructed, corrected, indeed scolded, and there was much childish obstinacy in his silence. The pause in the conversation lasted quite a while.

At last Herr Settembrini raised his head again and said, smiling:

“Do you remember, engineer, that we have already once had a similar dispute, one might say the very same? We were chatting then, I think it was on a walk, about illness and stupidity, whose union you declared to be a paradox, and indeed out of esteem for illness. I called this esteem a gloomy whim by which one dishonoured the thought of man, and to my pleasure you did seem not altogether disinclined to take my objection under consideration. We spoke too of the neutrality and intellectual indecision of youth, of its freedom of choice, its inclination to try experiments with possible points of view, and of the fact that such experiments ought not yet to be regarded as final and life-serious options, or rather need not be so regarded. Will you,” and Herr Settembrini, smiling, bent forward in his chair, his feet side by side on the floor, his clasped hands between his knees, his head likewise thrust a little slantwise forward, “will you, in future also,” he said, and there was a slight movement in his voice, “allow me to lend you a little assistance in your exercises and experiments, and to act upon you in a corrective way when the danger of pernicious fixations threatens?”

“Why, certainly, Herr Settembrini!” Hans Castorp hastened to give up his constrained and half-defiant turning away, to stop drumming on the bedcover, and to turn back toward his guest with dismayed friendliness. “It is extraordinarily kind of you, indeed ... I really ask myself whether I ... that is, whether in my case ...”

“Quite _sine pecunia_,” quoted Herr Settembrini, as he rose. “Who would let himself be outdone in generosity?” They laughed. They heard the outer double door open, and the next moment the inner door too was unlatched. It was Joachim returning from the evening sociability. At sight of the Italian he too blushed, as Hans Castorp for his part had done a little while before: the sunburnt darkness of his face deepened by a shade.

“Oh, you have a visitor,” he said. “How pleasant for you. I have been detained. They forced me into a game of bridge; bridge is what they call it outwardly,” he said, shaking his head, “and in the end it was something quite different. I won five marks ...”

“Only let it not acquire a vicious force of attraction for you,” said Hans Castorp. “Hm, hm. Herr Settembrini has meanwhile passed the time for me so beautifully ... which, by the way, is no expression at all. It may do, at most, for your false bridge, but Herr Settembrini has filled out the time for me so significantly ... As a decent man one ought, to be sure, to strive with hands and feet to get away from here, now that false bridge has begun in your midst. But in order to hear Herr Settembrini very often still, and let him lend me a hand conversationally, I could almost wish to remain feverish for an unforeseeably long time and stay stuck here among you ... In the end they will have to give me a mute sister, so that I may not cheat.”

“I repeat, engineer, that you are a rogue,” said the Italian. He took his leave in the most agreeable forms. Left alone with his cousin, Hans Castorp gave a sigh.

“What an educator that is!” he said ... “A humanistic educator, that one must admit. He is forever acting upon you in a corrective way, now in the form of stories, now in abstract form. And what things one comes to speak of with him, things one would never have imagined one could talk about, or even understand. And if I had met him down below in the flatlands, I should _not_ have understood them either,” he added.

At this hour Joachim stayed with him for a while; he sacrificed two or three quarter-hours of his evening rest cure. Sometimes they played chess on Hans Castorp’s dining-table top; Joachim had brought a set up from downstairs. Later he betook himself, bag and baggage, the thermometer in his mouth, to his balcony, and Hans Castorp too took his temperature one last time, while light music floated up from near at hand or from farther away out of the nighted valley. At ten o’clock the rest cure was ended; one heard Joachim; one heard the married couple from the bad Russian table ... And Hans Castorp lay down on his side, in expectation of sleep.

Night was the more difficult half of the day, for Hans Castorp often woke and not seldom lay awake for hours, whether because his not quite correct warmth of blood kept him alert, or because desire and power for sleep had suffered diminution through his present wholly horizontal mode of life. On the other hand, the hours of slumber were animated by varied and very vivid dreams, on which he could dwell while he lay awake. And if the manifold articulation and division of the day made it pass pleasantly, then by night it was the blurred uniformity of the advancing hours that worked in the same direction. But once morning began to draw near, it was entertaining to observe the room’s gradual greying and emergence, the stepping forth and unveiling of things, to see the day outside kindle itself in smouldering gloom or cheerful glow; and before one knew it, the moment had come again when the solid knocking of the bath attendant announced that the order of the day had entered into force.

Hans Castorp had not taken a calendar along on his excursion, and so, as regarded the date, he was not always quite exactly abreast of things. Now and then he asked his cousin for information, though Joachim too in this matter was by no means always wholly sure of his ground. Still, the Sundays, especially the second Sunday, the fortnightly one with the concert, which Hans Castorp spent in this fashion, offered some point of reference, and this much was certain, that September had by now advanced pretty far, toward the middle of the month. Down in the valley, since Hans Castorp had taken to his bed, the murky and cold weather that had prevailed at that time had given way to magnificent high-summer days, to countless such days, a whole series of them, so that Joachim had entered his cousin’s room every morning in white trousers, and Hans Castorp had not been able to suppress an honest regret, a regret of the soul and of his young muscles, over the loss of so splendid a season. Once he had even called it, in a low voice, “a shame” that he should be missing it in this way; but then, to reassure himself, had added that even at liberty he would not have known what much more to do with it than now, since, as experience showed, extensive exercise was forbidden him here. And after all, the broad balcony door, standing wide open, did grant him some share in the warm radiance outside.

But toward the end of the seclusion imposed upon him, the weather turned again. Overnight it had grown foggy and cold, the valley wrapped itself in wet whirling snow, and the dry breath of the steam heat filled the room. So it was likewise on the day when, at the doctors’ morning round, Hans Castorp reminded the Hofrat that he had now been lying there three weeks and asked leave to get up.

“What the deuce, are you finished already?” said Behrens. “Let me see; by God, it’s true. Good Lord, how one grows old. There has not exactly been much change in you meanwhile. What, yesterday it was normal? Yes, except for the six o’clock afternoon reading. Well then, Castorp, I don’t want to be difficult, and I will restore you to human society. Get up and walk, man! Within the prescribed limits and measures, of course. We’ll be making your interior portrait next time. Make a note of it!” he said on his way out to Dr. Krokowski, pointing with his gigantic thumb over his shoulder at Hans Castorp and looking at the pale assistant with his bloodshot, tearful blue eyes ... Hans Castorp left the “shed.”

With his coat collar turned up and in rubber overshoes, he accompanied his cousin once more for the first time to the bench by the watercourse and back, not without raising on the way the question how long the Hofrat would probably have kept him lying there if he had not reported that the term had expired. And Joachim, his gaze broken, his mouth opened as though for a hopeless “Ah,” made into the air the gesture of the unforeseeable.

“My God, I see!”

It was a week before Hans Castorp was summoned by the matron, von Mylendonk, to the X-ray laboratory. He did not care to press matters. There was much to do in the house "Berghof"; doctors and staff plainly had their hands full. New guests had arrived in the last few days: two Russian students with thick hair and close-buttoned black blouses that showed not the faintest glimpse of linen; a Dutch couple, to whom places were assigned at Settembrini's table; a hunchbacked Mexican who threw his table companions into terror by dreadful fits of shortness of breath, during which he clutched at his neighbours, man or woman, with the brazen grip of his long hands, held them fast like a vice, and drew the horrified, struggling creatures, calling for help, into the midst of his own anxieties. In short, the dining-room was almost full, although the winter season did not begin until October. And the gravity of Hans Castorp's case, the degree of his illness, scarcely gave him any right to lay claim to special attention. Frau Stoehr, for instance, in all her stupidity and lack of cultivation, was without doubt far sicker than he, not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One would have had to be utterly without all sense of rank and distance not to practise modest reserve in Hans Castorp's case, especially as such an attitude belonged to the spirit of the house. Slight cases counted for little; he had often gathered as much from the conversations. People spoke slightingly of them, by the standard prevailing here; they were looked over the shoulder, and that not only by the higher and highest grades, but by those too who were themselves only "slight"; whereby these indeed displayed contempt for themselves as well, yet saved a higher self-respect by submitting to the standard. So it is with human nature. "Oh, him!" they might well say of one another. "There's really nothing the matter with him, hardly enough to give him the right to be here. He hasn't even a cavity..." Such was the spirit; it was aristocratic in its own particular sense, and Hans Castorp saluted it out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. Country ways, country morals, as the saying goes. Travellers show little cultivation when they make merry over the customs and values of the peoples who host them, and there are these qualities and those that confer honour. Hans Castorp observed a certain reverence and consideration even toward Joachim himself, not so much because Joachim had been here longer and was his guide and cicerone in this world, as especially because he was beyond question the graver case. But things being as they were, it was understandable that one should incline to make as much as possible of one's own case, and even perhaps exaggerate where oneself was concerned, in order to belong to the aristocracy or come nearer to it. Hans Castorp too, when questioned at table, would name a few lines more than he had actually measured, and he could not but feel flattered when people threatened him with a finger, as if he were no innocent. But even when he overdid it a little, he still remained, properly speaking, a person of slight degree; and so patience and reserve were certainly the behaviour becoming to him.

He had resumed the mode of life of his first three weeks, that already familiar, even, and precisely regulated life at Joachim's side, and from the first day onward it ran as smoothly as clockwork, as though it had never been interrupted. In truth, that interruption had been a negligible thing; he felt as much at once on the occasion of his first reappearance at table. Joachim, it is true, who attached a very definite and studious importance to such observances, had seen to it that a few flowers adorned the place of the man restored. But the greeting from his table companions was scarcely festive and differed but little from earlier greetings preceded not by a separation of three weeks, but of three hours: less from indifference to his simple and sympathetic person, and because these people were far too much occupied with themselves, that is to say with their interesting bodies, than because the interval had never become conscious to them. And Hans Castorp could follow them in this without difficulty, for he himself sat in his place at the end of the table, between the schoolmistress and Miss Robinson, exactly as though he had last sat there no later than yesterday.

But if at table itself no great fuss had been made over the end of his seclusion, how should any fuss have been made over it in the larger hall? There literally nobody had taken the slightest notice of it, with the sole exception of Settembrini, who after the meal had come up and greeted him in jesting friendliness. Hans Castorp would indeed have made one further reservation, the validity of which we may leave undecided. He maintained to himself that Clawdia Chauchat had noticed his reappearance; that, at her entrance, as always belated, after the glass door had fallen to behind her, she had let her narrow glance rest on him, which he had met with his own, and that, scarcely had she seated herself, she had once more looked back at him over her shoulder with a smile: smiling, as three weeks before, before he had gone in to be examined. And it had been so unconcealed and reckless a movement, reckless both with regard to herself and to the rest of the company, that he had not known whether to be enchanted by it or to take it as a sign of disdain and be vexed by it. At all events his heart had contracted under those glances, which had denied and given the lie to the social unfamiliarity existing between the invalid and himself in a way that seemed to him monstrous and intoxicating; it had contracted almost painfully already when the glass door clattered, for he had been waiting for that moment with short, hurried breath.

It should be added that Hans Castorp's inward relations with the patient from the Good Russian Table, the participation of his senses and his modest spirit in her medium-sized, softly gliding, Kirghiz-eyed person, in short his being in love (let the word stand, although it is a word from "down below," a word of the plain, and might call up the notion that the little song "How strangely I am touched" could here have had any application) had made very great progress during his seclusion. Her image had hovered before him when, awake early, he looked into the room slowly unveiling itself, or, in the evening, into the deepening dusk; at that hour too, when Settembrini had entered his room with the sudden flare of the light, it had hovered before him with extreme vividness, and that had been the reason why he had blushed at the sight of the humanist. He had thought of her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyes, whose colour, shape, and setting cut into his soul, her slack back, the carriage of her head, the vertebra visible in the nape-opening of her blouse, her arms transfigured by the thinnest gauze, during the several hours of the day chopped into fragments; and if we have been silent about the fact that this was the means by which the hours passed for him so effortlessly, that was because we share sympathetically in the uneasiness of conscience that mingled with the alarming happiness of these images and apparitions. Yes, there was dread in it, there was agitation, a hope, a joy, and an anxiety straying off into the indefinite, the limitless, and the utterly adventurous, nameless indeed, yet one that at times squeezed the young man's heart, his heart in the literal and bodily sense, so suddenly that he laid one hand upon the region of that organ, the other upon his brow, holding it like a shade above his eyes, and whispered:

"My God!"

For behind his brow there were thoughts, or half-thoughts, which were what first lent the images and apparitions their sweetness carried too far, and which had to do with Madame Chauchat's carelessness and recklessness, with her being ill, the intensification and emphasis that illness gave her body, the embodiment of her nature through illness, in which he, Hans Castorp, according to the doctors' verdict, was now to have a share. Behind his brow he understood the adventurous freedom with which Frau Chauchat, by looking back and smiling, disregarded the social unfamiliarity existing between them, as though they were no social beings at all, and as though it were not even necessary that they should _speak_ to one another... and it was precisely this that frightened him: he was frightened in the same sense as then in the examination room, when he had glanced quickly and searchingly up from Joachim's torso to his eyes, with this difference only, that then pity and concern had been the grounds of his alarm, whereas here quite other things were at play.

And so the life at the Berghof, that favoured and well-regulated life on a narrow stage, resumed its even course; Hans Castorp, awaiting the X-ray picture, went on sharing it with good Joachim, conducting himself hour by hour exactly as Joachim did; and this proximity was doubtless good for the young man. For although it was only the proximity of one invalid to another, there was much military honourableness in it: an honourableness which, to be sure, without knowing it, was already on the point of finding satisfaction in the service of the cure, so that this became, as it were, a substitute for the fulfilment of duty in the flatlands and a surreptitious profession. Hans Castorp was not so stupid as not to notice this quite exactly. Yet he felt very well its restraining, withholding effect upon his civilian temper; indeed, this proximity itself, its example and the supervision exercised by it, may have been what held him back from outward steps and blind enterprises. For he saw perfectly well what the good Joachim had to endure from a certain orange atmosphere pressing daily upon him, an atmosphere containing round brown eyes, a little ruby, much but scantily justified propensity to laughter, and an outwardly shapely bosom; and the reason and sense of honour with which Joachim shunned and fled the influence of this atmosphere affected Hans Castorp, kept him too in some degree of discipline and order, and prevented him from so to speak "borrowing a pencil" from the narrow-eyed one, to which, without this disciplining proximity, all experience shows that he would have been very ready.

Joachim never spoke of the laughter-loving Marusya, and thus it was forbidden Hans Castorp as well to speak with him of Clawdia Chauchat. He made himself amends by furtive exchanges with the schoolmistress at his right at table, teasing the old maid about her weakness for the supple invalid until he made her blush, and meanwhile imitating old Castorp's support of chin and dignity. He also pressed her to find out something new and worth knowing about Madame Chauchat's personal circumstances, her origin, her husband, her age, the nature of her illness. Did she have children, for example? But no, she had none. What in the world would a woman like her do with children? Very likely she was strictly forbidden to have any; and besides, what sort of children would they be? Hans Castorp had to agree to that. By now, he conjectured with forced matter-of-factness, it was probably too late for such things in any case. At times, in profile, Madame Chauchat's face seemed to him almost a little sharp already. Could she be over thirty? Fraeulein Engelhart contradicted him violently. Clawdia thirty? At the very worst she was twenty-eight. And as for the profile, she forbade her neighbour at table to say anything of the kind. Clawdia's profile was of the softest youthfulness and sweetness, even if naturally it was an interesting profile and not that of some healthy goose. And by way of punishment Fraeulein Engelhart added without pause that she knew Frau Chauchat often received visits from gentlemen, the visits of a fellow-countryman living in "Platz"; she received him in her room in the afternoons.

That was well aimed. Hans Castorp's face twisted despite all his efforts, and even the set phrases with which he tried to treat the disclosure, phrases in the key of "You don't say" and "Just look at that," came out twisted. Unable to take the existence of this fellow-countryman lightly, as he had at first tried to seem to do, he kept returning to him with twitching lips. A younger man? Young and good-looking, from all she heard, replied the schoolmistress; for she could not judge by her own observation. Ill? At most a slight case. He hoped, said Hans Castorp mockingly, that there was more linen to be seen on him than on the fellow-countrymen at the Bad Russian Table, for which Engelhart, still by way of punishment, declared herself ready to answer. Whereupon he admitted that this was a matter one must concern oneself with, and seriously charged her to ascertain what was the truth about this fellow-countryman who came and went. But instead of bringing him news on that point, a few days later she knew something entirely new.

She knew that Clawdia Chauchat was being painted, was having her portrait done, and asked Hans Castorp whether he knew it too. If not, he might nonetheless be certain that she had it from the surest source. For some time now, here in the house, she had been sitting to someone as a model for her portrait and to whom, indeed? To the Hofrat. Herr Hofrat Behrens, who for that purpose saw her with him in his private rooms almost every day.

This piece of news seized Hans Castorp even more than the previous one. From then on he made many strained jokes about it. Well then, certainly, it was well known that the Hofrat painted in oils; what did the schoolmistress mean, it was not forbidden, and thus anyone was free to do it. In the Hofrat's widower establishment, then? One could only hope that at least Miss von Mylendonk was present during the sittings. She probably had no time. "Behrens ought to have no more time than the matron," said Hans Castorp sternly. But although that seemed to say something definitive about the matter, he was far from dropping it; instead he exhausted himself in questions for nearer and further particulars: about the picture, its size, and whether it was a head-piece or a knee-piece; also about the hour of the sittings, while Fraeulein Engelhart could provide no details here either and had to put him off with the results of further inquiries.

Hans Castorp measured 37.7 after receiving this news. Far more even than the visits Frau Chauchat received, those she paid pained and disquieted him. Frau Chauchat's private and personal life, as such, in and for itself, and quite apart from its content, had begun to cause him pain and disquiet; and how much more sharply must both be intensified when ambiguities concerning that content reached his ears! To be sure, it seemed generally possible that the relations of the Russian visitor to his countrywoman were of a sober and harmless nature; but for some time Hans Castorp had been inclined to regard sobriety and harmlessness as twaddle, just as he could neither bring himself nor persuade himself to see oil-painting, as a relation between an outspoken widower and a narrow-eyed, soft-treading young woman, as anything else. The taste the Hofrat displayed in the choice of his model corresponded too closely to his own for him to be able to believe in sobriety here, in which conviction the thought of the Hofrat's blue cheeks and his red-veined, bulging eyes gave him but little support.

An observation which in those days he made on his own account and by chance affected him in another way, although here again it was a matter of a confirmation of his taste. There was at the crosswise table of Frau Salomon and the gluttonous schoolboy with spectacles, to the left of that of the cousins, next the side glass door, a patient, a native of Mannheim, as Hans Castorp had heard, about thirty years old, with thinning hair, carious teeth, and a timid manner of speech, the same man who from time to time played the piano during the evening gathering, and for the most part the wedding march from the "Midsummer Night's Dream." He was said to be very pious, as, understandably enough, was not infrequently the case among those up here, so Hans Castorp had heard. Every Sunday he was supposed to attend divine service down in Platz and during the rest cure to read devotional books, books with a chalice or palm branches on the front cover. This man now, Hans Castorp observed one day, had his eyes fixed precisely where he himself had fixed his, hung upon Madame Chauchat's supple person, and that in a fashion at once shy and importunate to the point of the doglike. Once Hans Castorp had observed it, he could not help establishing it again and again. He saw him of an evening standing in the recreation room among the guests, darkly lost in the contemplation of the lovely, if damaged, woman, who sat over there on the sofa in the little salon and chatted with the woolly-haired Tamara, as the humorous girl was called, with Dr. Blumenkohl, and the concave and droop-shouldered gentlemen of her table; saw him turn away, edge about, and then once more slowly, with his eyeballs turned sideways and his upper lip pitifully pursed, turn his head over his shoulder in that direction. He saw him change colour and _not_ look up, yet then nevertheless look up and stare greedily when the glass door banged and Frau Chauchat glided to her place. And more than once he saw how the poor fellow stationed himself after table between the exit and the Good Russian Table, in order to let Frau Chauchat pass by him and devour her, who took no notice of him, from the nearest proximity with eyes filled to the bottom with sadness.

This discovery too, then, cost young Hans Castorp not a little, although the pitiable avidity for spectacle of the Mannheim man could not disquiet him in the sense in which the private intercourse of Clawdia Chauchat with Hofrat Behrens, a man so superior to him in age, person, and station in life, disquieted him. Clawdia troubled herself not at all about the Mannheim man; it would not have escaped Hans Castorp's inward sharpened sense if such had been the case, and so it was not the repellent sting of jealousy that he felt in his soul on this occasion. But he experienced all the sensations that intoxication and passion experience when they behold themselves in the outer world, and which compose the strangest mixture of feelings of disgust and of fellowship. It is impossible to fathom and disentangle everything if we are to get on. At all events, for his circumstances it was a great deal at once, what the observation of the Mannheim man also gave poor Hans Castorp to taste through.

Thus the eight days passed until Hans Castorp's X-ray examination. He had not known that they would pass until then, but when one morning at first breakfast he received from the matron, who already had another sty, it could no longer be the same one, evidently this harmless but disfiguring affliction lay in her constitution, the order to present himself that afternoon in the laboratory, then they had in fact passed. Hans Castorp was to appear together with his cousin, half an hour before tea; for on this occasion an interior view was to be taken of Joachim once more as well, the last one having long since to count as out of date.

So to-day they had shortened the great afternoon rest cure by thirty minutes, had gone "down" the stone staircase into the false cellar storey at the stroke of half past three, and were sitting together in the little waiting-room that separated the consulting-room from the X-ray laboratory, Joachim, to whom nothing new was in store, in good composure, Hans Castorp a little feverishly expectant, since as yet no one had ever taken a look into his organic inner life. They were not alone: several guests had already been sitting in the room when they entered, with torn illustrated magazines on their knees, and waited with them: a stalwart young Swede, who in the dining-room sat at Settembrini's table, and of whom people said that when he arrived in April he had been so ill that they had scarcely wished to admit him; now, however, he had gained eighty pounds and was on the point of being discharged as completely cured; and further, a woman from the Bad Russian Table, a mother, herself puny, together with her still punier, long-nosed and ugly little boy named Sascha. These persons, then, had been waiting longer than the cousins; evidently in the order of appointments they had precedence over them; delay seemed to have set in next door in the X-ray room, and so cold tea was in prospect.

In the laboratory they were occupied. The Hofrat's voice could be heard giving instructions. It was half past three or somewhat later when the door opened, a technical assistant who was at work down here opened it, and only the Swedish giant and favourite of fortune was let in: evidently his predecessor had been dismissed by another exit. Affairs now proceeded more quickly. After ten minutes one already heard the completely recovered Scandinavian, this walking recommendation of the place and the sanatorium, removing himself down the corridor with a vigorous step, and the Russian mother together with Sascha were received. Once again, as already when the Swede entered, Hans Castorp noticed that in the X-ray room a half-darkness prevailed, that is to say an artificial half-light, just as, on the other hand, in Dr. Krokowski's analytical cabinet. The windows were curtained, the daylight shut out, and a few electric lamps were burning. But while Sascha and his mother were being admitted and Hans Castorp looked after them, simultaneously with this the corridor door opened, and the next patient appointed entered the waiting-room, prematurely, since delay prevailed: it was Madame Chauchat.

It was Clawdia Chauchat who suddenly found herself in the little room; Hans Castorp recognized her with staring eyes, while distinctly feeling the blood leave his face and his lower jaw slacken, so that his mouth was on the point of opening. Clawdia's entrance had taken place so casually, so unexpectedly, all at once she shared the narrow room with the cousins, after having just before by no means been there. Joachim cast a rapid glance at Hans Castorp and then not only lowered his eyes, but took up again from the table the illustrated paper that he had already laid aside and hid his face behind it. Hans Castorp did not find the resolution to do the same. After turning pale he had become very red, and his heart hammered.

Frau Chauchat sat down by the door to the laboratory in a small rounded armchair with stumpy, as it were rudimentary armrests, crossed one leg lightly over the other as she leaned back, and gazed into vacancy, while her Pribislav eyes, nervously deflected from the direction of their gaze by the consciousness that she was being observed, squinted a little. She wore a white sweater and a blue skirt and held a book on her lap, a circulating-library volume, it seemed, while with the sole of the foot that rested on the floor she tapped softly.

After only a minute and a half she changed her posture, looked about her, stood up with an expression as though she did not know where she was or to what she should turn, and began to speak. She asked something, addressed a question to Joachim, although he seemed absorbed in his illustrated newspaper, while Hans Castorp sat there unoccupied, formed words with her mouth and gave them voice from her white throat: it was the voice Hans Castorp knew, not deep, but containing a slight sharpness, pleasantly veiled, a voice he had known from far back and once had even heard at the closest range: then, when with that voice there had been said for his own benefit, "Gladly. But you must be sure to give it back to me after the lesson." That, however, had been spoken more fluently and decisively; now the words came somewhat dragging and broken, the speaker had no natural right to them, she merely borrowed them, as Hans Castorp had already heard her do a few times, with a sort of feeling of superiority that nevertheless was awash with humble delight. One hand in the pocket of her woollen jacket and the other at the back of her head, Frau Chauchat asked:

"If you please, for what hour are you appointed?"

And Joachim, who had cast a quick glance at his cousin, replied, drawing his heels together as he sat:

"For half past three."

She spoke again:

"I for a quarter to. What is the matter, then? It is nearly four. Some persons have only just gone in, have they not?"

"Yes, two persons," answered Joachim. "They were before us in turn. The routine is delayed. It seems the whole business has shifted by half an hour."

"That is unpleasant!" she said, and touched her hair nervously.

"Rather," Joachim returned. "We too have been waiting almost half an hour already."

Thus they spoke together, and as in a dream Hans Castorp listened. That Joachim spoke with Frau Chauchat was almost the same as if he himself had spoken with her, though to be sure again something altogether different. The "Rather" had offended Hans Castorp; it struck him as impudent and at the least strangely indifferent in view of the circumstances. But after all Joachim could speak so, he could _in general_ speak with her, and perhaps even plumed himself a little before him on his dashing "Rather," much as he himself had shown off before Joachim and Settembrini when they had asked him how long he intended to stay and he had answered, "three weeks." It was to Joachim, although he had held the newspaper before his face, that she had addressed herself with her question, certainly because he was the older resident, longer known to her by sight; but still also for that other reason, that in his case an intercourse on a civilized footing, an articulated exchange, was in place, and nothing wild, deep, terrible, and mysterious held sway between them. Had someone brown-eyed with a ruby ring and orange perfume been waiting here with them, then it would have been for him, Hans Castorp, to take the word and say "Rather," independent and pure as he stood toward her. "Certainly, rather unpleasant, honoured Fräulein!" he would have said, and perhaps with a flourish drawn his handkerchief from his breast pocket in order to blow his nose. "Pray exercise patience. We are in no better case." And Joachim would have marvelled at his light-heartedness, though probably without seriously wishing himself in his place. No, Hans Castorp was not jealous of Joachim either, matters being as they were, although it was he who was permitted to speak with Frau Chauchat. He was in agreement with the fact that she had addressed herself to him; she had taken the circumstances into account in doing so, and had thereby shown that she was conscious of those circumstances ... His heart hammered.

After the composed treatment that Frau Chauchat had experienced at Joachim's hands, and in which Hans Castorp had even felt something like a faint hostility on the part of good Joachim toward the fellow-patient, a hostility over which for all his agitation he was obliged to smile, "Clawdia" attempted to take a turn through the room; but there was no space for it, and so she too took an illustrated magazine from the table and returned with it to the chair with the rudimentary armrests. Hans Castorp sat and looked at her, imitating his grandfather's way of supporting his chin and thereby truly looking ludicrously like the old gentleman. Since Frau Chauchat had again crossed one leg over the other, her knee, indeed the whole slender line of her leg, stood out beneath the blue cloth skirt. She was only of medium height, a height in Hans Castorp's eyes most agreeable and proper, but comparatively long of leg and not broad in the hips. She sat not leaning back, but bent forward, the crossed forearms resting on the thigh of the leg laid across the other, with rounded back and fallen shoulders, so that the vertebrae of the nape stood out, indeed beneath the close-fitting sweater one could almost discern the spine, and her breast, which was not developed so high and luxuriantly as Marusja's, but was small and girlish, was compressed from both sides. Suddenly Hans Castorp remembered that she too sat here in expectation of being X-rayed. The Hofrat painted her; he rendered her outward appearance with oil and pigments upon the canvas. But now, in the half-darkness, he would direct rays upon her that laid bare for him the interior of her body. And as Hans Castorp thought this, he turned his head aside with an honourable darkening of his expression, an expression of discretion and decency which in face of that idea seemed to him fitting to assume before himself.

The three of them did not remain together long in the little waiting-room. Inside they had evidently made short work of Sascha and his mother; they were making haste to catch up the delay again. Once more the technician in the white coat opened the door, Joachim, rising, threw his newspaper back upon the table, and Hans Castorp followed him, though not without inward hesitation, to the door. Chivalrous scruples stirred within him together with the temptation nevertheless to speak in civilized fashion to Frau Chauchat and offer her precedence; perhaps even in French, if it could be managed; and hastily he searched within himself for the vocabulary, for the construction of the sentence. But he did not know whether such courtesies were customary here, whether the established order was not exalted high above chivalries. Joachim must know, and since he made no move to stand back before the lady present, although Hans Castorp looked at him with emotion and urgency, the latter accordingly followed him past Frau Chauchat, who only glanced up fleetingly from her bent posture, and through the door into the laboratory.

He was too benumbed by what he was leaving behind him, by the adventures of the last ten minutes, for his inward presence to have readjusted itself at once upon crossing into the screening-room. He saw nothing, or only the most general things, in the artificial half-light. He heard Frau Chauchat's pleasantly veiled voice, with which she had said: "What is the matter, then ... some people have just come in just now ... that is disagreeable ...," and the sound of that voice ran down his spine like a sweet shiver. He saw the image of her knee beneath the cloth skirt, saw the vertebrae stand out at her bent nape, under the short reddish-blond hair that hung loose there without having been taken up into the braided coiffure, and again the shudder passed over him. He saw Hofrat Behrens, turned away from those who entered, standing before a cabinet or shelving structure and examining a blackish plate which he held, arm outstretched, against the dim ceiling-light. They passed him and went farther into the room, overtaken by the assistant, who was making preparations for their treatment and dispatch. There was a peculiar smell here. A sort of stale ozone filled the atmosphere. Projecting between the black-curtained windows, the structure divided the laboratory into two unequal halves. One could distinguish physical apparatus, hollow glass vessels, switchboards, measuring instruments rearing upright, but also a camera-like box on a rolling stand, glass diapositives let into the wall in rows; one did not know whether one was in a photographer's studio, a darkroom, or an inventor's workshop and technical witches' kitchen.

Joachim had at once begun to bare his upper body. The assistant, a younger, thickset, red-cheeked native in a white coat, instructed Hans Castorp to do the same. It would be over quickly; he would be taken at once ... While Hans Castorp was taking off his waistcoat, Behrens came over from the little compartment where he had been standing into the more spacious one.

"Hallo!" he said. "Why, here are our Dioscuri! Castorp and Pollux ... Kindly suppress cries of woe! Just wait, in a moment we shall have seen through both of you. I believe you are afraid, Castorp, to open your interior to us? Be easy, everything proceeds quite aesthetically. Here, have you seen my private gallery yet?" And he drew Hans Castorp by the arm before the rows of dark glass, behind which he switched on the light with little clicks. Then they brightened and showed their images. Hans Castorp saw limbs: hands, feet, kneecaps, upper and lower legs, arms and pelvic parts. But the rounded living form of these fragments of the human body was shadowy and vaporous in outline; like mist and pale radiance it surrounded, uncertainly, their clear, minute, decisively prominent core, the skeleton.

"Very interesting," said Hans Castorp.

"It is certainly interesting!" replied the Hofrat. "Useful instruction by direct observation for young people. Anatomy by light, you understand, triumph of the modern age. That is a woman's arm; you can tell it by its daintiness. With that they put their arms round one at a tryst, you understand." And he laughed, his upper lip with the trimmed little moustache drawing itself higher on one side. The pictures went dark. Hans Castorp turned aside, to where Joachim's interior picture was being prepared.

It was done before that structure on whose other side the Hofrat had at first been standing. Joachim had taken his place on a kind of cobbler's chair before a board, against which he pressed his chest while at the same time clasping it with his arms; and with kneading movements the assistant improved his position, pressing Joachim's shoulders farther forward and massaging his back. After that he went behind the camera in order, bent and broad-legged like some photographer, to inspect the view, expressed his satisfaction, and, stepping aside, admonished Joachim to breathe in deeply and hold his breath until it was all over. Joachim's rounded back expanded and remained still. At that moment the assistant, at the switchboard, had made the necessary movement of the hand. For two seconds terrible forces were at play, currents of thousands of volts, of a hundred thousand, Hans Castorp thought he remembered, whose expenditure was required in order to penetrate matter. Hardly tamed to their purpose, the powers sought to vent themselves by side-paths. Discharges cracked like shots. Blue crackling played about the measuring-instrument. Long flashes ran with a fizzing noise along the wall. Somewhere a red light, like an eye, looked into the room, quiet and threatening, and a phial behind Joachim's back turned green. Then everything subsided; the luminous phenomena vanished, and Joachim let out his breath with a sigh. It was done.

"Next delinquent!" said Behrens, nudging Hans Castorp with his elbow. "No pleading fatigue! You get a complimentary copy, Castorp. Then you can project upon the wall for children and grandchildren the secrets of your chest!"

Joachim had stepped aside; the technician changed the plate. Hofrat Behrens personally instructed the newcomer how he was to sit and hold himself. "Embrace!" he said. "Embrace the board! Imagine something else in its place, if you like! And press your chest well against it, as though blissful sensations were connected with the act! There, that's right. Breathe in! Keep still!" he commanded. "Do look pleasant!" Hans Castorp waited, blinking, his lungs full of air. Behind him the storm broke loose, crackled, rattled, snapped, and subsided. The objective had looked into his interior.

He stepped down, confused and benumbed by what had happened to him, although he had not felt the penetration in the slightest. "Good," said the Hofrat. "Now we shall see for ourselves." And Joachim, experienced as he was, had already moved farther on and taken up his position near the exit door at a stand, with the spacious apparatus rising behind him, on a level with his back a glass bulb half filled with water and fitted with an evaporation tube visible, before him, at the height of his chest, a framed screen suspended on pulleys. To his left, amid a switchboard and instruments, there rose a red lamp-bell. The Hofrat, astride a stool before the hanging screen, lighted it. The ceiling-light went out, and only the ruby light still illumined the scene. Then the master, too, removed this with a brief movement of the hand, and densest darkness enveloped the occupants of the laboratory.

"First the eyes must get accustomed," one heard the Hofrat say in the dark. "First we must get very large pupils, like cats', in order to see what we want to see. You surely understand that with our ordinary daylight eyes we could not properly see it just like that. First we must knock the bright day with its cheerful pictures out of our minds for the purpose."

"Self-evidently," said Hans Castorp, who stood behind the Hofrat's shoulder, and closed his eyes, since it was wholly immaterial whether one kept them open or not, so black was the night. "First we must wash our eyes with darkness, in order to see such a thing; that is perfectly clear. I even find it good and proper that we should collect ourselves a little beforehand, so to speak in silent prayer. Here I stand with my eyes shut; I feel agreeably drowsy in spirit. But what is it that it smells of here?"

"Oxygen," said the Hofrat. "That is Oxygen, what you feel in the air. Atmospheric product of the indoor thunderstorm, do you understand me ... Open your eyes!" he said. "Now the conjuration begins." Hans Castorp obeyed hurriedly.

One heard the shifting of a lever. A motor started up and sang furiously upward, but by a new movement of the hand it was curbed into steadiness. The floor trembled evenly. The little red light, oblong and upright, looked over with quiet menace. Somewhere a flash crackled. And slowly, with a milky gleam, like a window growing bright, there emerged from the darkness the pale square of the fluorescent screen, before which Hofrat Behrens rode upon his cobbler's stool, his thighs spread, his fists braced upon them, his snub nose close to the pane that afforded a view into a human being's organic interior.

"Do you see, young man?" he asked ... Hans Castorp bent over his shoulder, but once more raised his head, toward the place where Joachim's eyes were to be presumed in the darkness, eyes that might be looking gently and sadly, as they had then during the examination, and asked:

"You permit it, do you not?"

"Please, please," Joachim answered generously out of his darkness. And while the earth shook, amid the crackling and rumbling of the forces at play, Hans Castorp peered, bending down, through the pale window, peered through Joachim Ziemßen's empty bones. The breastbone coincided with the spine in a dark cartilaginous pillar. The front cage of ribs was intersected by that of the back, which appeared the paler. Curving, the collar-bones branched off above to both sides, and within the soft luminous envelope of the fleshly form there showed lean and sharp the skeleton of the shoulders, the beginning of Joachim's upper arm-bone. It was bright in the cavity of the chest, but one distinguished a veining, dark spots, a blackish curl-work.

"Clear picture," said the Hofrat. "That is decent leanness, military youth. I have had paunches here, impenetrable ones, with scarcely anything to be made out. One would first have to discover the rays that can get through such a layer of fat ... This here is clean work. Do you see the diaphragm?" he said, pointing with his finger to the dark arch that rose and sank at the bottom of the window ... "Do you see the humps here on the left side, the elevations? That is the pleurisy he had when he was fifteen. Breathe deeply! Deeper! I said _deep_!" And Joachim's diaphragm rose trembling as high as it could; a brightening was noticeable in the upper parts of the lungs, but the Hofrat was not satisfied. "Insufficient!" he said. "Do you see the hilar glands? Do you see the adhesions? Do you see the cavities here? That is where the poisons come from that keep him a little tipsy." But Hans Castorp's attention had been claimed by something bag-like, shapelessly animal, darkly visible behind the central trunk, and indeed for the greater part on the right, as seen by the observer, which expanded and contracted evenly, somewhat after the fashion of a rowing jellyfish.

"Do you see his heart?" asked the Hofrat, once more lifting the enormous hand from his thigh and pointing with his forefinger to the pulsating hanging thing ... Great God, it was the heart, Joachim's heart that loved honour, that Hans Castorp saw!

"I see your heart!" he said in a constricted voice.

"Please, please," Joachim answered again, and probably smiled there above in the dark with resignation. But the Hofrat bade them be silent and exchange no sentimentalities. He studied the spots and lines, the black curl-work in the interior of the chest, while his fellow-gazer, too, did not tire of contemplating Joachim's grave-shape and dead bones, this bald framework and spindle-thin memento. Devotion and terror filled him. "Yes, yes, I see," he said several times. "My God, I see!" He had heard of a woman, a long-dead relation on the Tienappel side, who was said to have been endowed, or afflicted, with a grave gift which she had borne in humility, and which had consisted in this, that people who were soon to die had appeared to her eyes as skeletons. Thus Hans Castorp now saw good Joachim, even if with the help, and by the arrangement, of physical-optical science, so that it signified nothing and everything was in proper order, especially since he had expressly obtained Joachim's consent. Yet an understanding came over him of the melancholy in the fate of that visionary aunt. Deeply moved by what he saw, or rather by the fact that he saw it, he felt his soul goaded by secret doubts whether right things were at work here, doubts as to the permissibility of his seeing in the shaking, crackling darkness; and the rending delight of indiscretion mingled in his breast with feelings of emotion and piety.

But a few minutes later he himself stood at the pillory in the storm, while Joachim, his body closed again, dressed himself. Once more the Hofrat peered through the milky pane, this time into Hans Castorp's interior, and from his half-audible remarks, broken expletives, and turns of phrase it seemed to emerge that the finding answered to his expectations. He was then kind enough to permit the patient to view his own hand through the fluorescent screen, since he had urgently begged to do so. And Hans Castorp saw what he had had to expect to see, yet what it is not truly appointed for man to see, and of which he too had never thought that it might be appointed him to see it: he saw into his own grave. He saw the later business of decay anticipated by the power of the light, the flesh wherein he moved decomposed, annihilated, dissolved into insubstantial mist, and within it the finely turned skeleton of his right hand, about whose upper ring-finger joint his signet ring, bequeathed to him by his grandfather, floated black and loose: a hard thing of this earth with which man adorns his body, and beneath which that body is destined to melt away, so that it comes free and passes on to a flesh that can wear it again for a while. With the eyes of that Tienappel foremother he beheld a familiar part of his body, with eyes that saw through and foresaw, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. At this he made the face he was wont to make when he heard music, rather stupid, sleepy, and devout, his head inclined toward his shoulder, his mouth half open. The Hofrat said:

"Ghostly, eh? Yes, a touch of the ghostly is not to be denied."

And then he checked the powers. The floor came to rest, the luminous manifestations vanished, the magic window wrapped itself once more in darkness. The ceiling-light went on. And while Hans Castorp too flung on his clothes, Behrens gave the young men some information about his observations, with due regard to their lay capacity for comprehension. As concerned Hans Castorp in particular, the optical finding had confirmed the acoustic one exactly as the honour of science could possibly desire. Both the old spots and the fresh one had been visible, and "cords" ran from the bronchi pretty far into the organ, "cords with nodules." Hans Castorp would be able to verify it himself on the little diapositive picture, which, as stated, would shortly be handed to him. So then: rest, patience, self-discipline, take one's temperature, eat, lie down, wait, and drink tea. He turned his back on them. They went. Hans Castorp, behind Joachim, looked over his shoulder as he went out. Admitted by the technician, Frau Chauchat entered the laboratory.

Freedom

How did it actually seem to young Hans Castorp? Something like this, perhaps: as though the seven weeks which he had now demonstrably and beyond all doubt spent among Those up here had been no more than seven days? Or did it seem to him, on the contrary, that he had already been living in this place far, far longer than was really the case? He put the question to himself, both inwardly and in the form of putting it to Joachim, but could arrive at no decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time spent here appeared to him at once unnaturally short and unnaturally long — only just as it really stood with it, so it refused to seem to him — supposing, that is, that time is nature at all, and that it is permissible to bring the concept of reality into connection with it.

In any case October stood at the door; it might come in any day. It was an easy matter for Hans Castorp to reckon it out, and besides he was reminded of it by the conversations of his fellow patients, to which he listened. "Do you know that in five days it will be the first of the month again?" he heard Hermine Kleefeld say to two young gentlemen of her circle, the student Rasmussen and that thick-lipped fellow whose name was Gänser. After the principal meal people were standing about among the tables in the steam of the food, lingering in talk, reluctant to go to the rest cure. "The first of October — I saw it on the calendar in the office. That is the second of its kind that I shall have lived through in this pleasure resort. Very well, the summer is gone, in so far as there was any; one has been cheated of it, as one is cheated of life, on the whole and in general." And she sighed out of her half a lung, shaking her head and turning her eyes, veiled with stupidity, toward the ceiling. "Be merry, Rasmussen!" she said thereupon, and struck her comrade on his sloping shoulder. "Make jokes!" "I know only a few," replied Rasmussen, letting his hands hang like fins at the height of his chest; "and even those will not come off with me, I am always so tired." "No dog," said Gänser between his teeth, "would care to go on living like this, or anything like it, much longer." And they laughed and shrugged their shoulders.

But Settembrini too, his toothpick between his lips, had been standing close by, and as they went out he said to Hans Castorp:

"Do not believe them, Engineer, never believe them when they rail! They all do it, without exception, although they feel only too much at home. They lead a dissolute life and lay claim to pity into the bargain, fancy themselves entitled to bitterness, to irony, to cynicism! 'In this pleasure resort!' Is it not a pleasure resort, then? I should say that it is one, and indeed in the most questionable sense of the word! 'Cheated,' says this female; 'cheated of life in this pleasure resort.' But release her into the plains, and her manner of living down there will leave no doubt that she is bent on getting up here again as soon as ever she can. Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, Engineer! Beware of that intellectual attitude altogether! Where it is not a straightforward and classical device of rhetoric, not for a moment open to misunderstanding by a healthy mind, there it becomes dissoluteness, an impediment to civilization, an unclean flirtation with stagnation, with the unspirit, with vice. Since the atmosphere in which we live is evidently very favourable to the thriving of this marsh growth, I may hope, or must fear, that you understand me."

In truth the Italian's words were of the kind that, seven weeks earlier and down in the lowlands, would have been mere sound to Hans Castorp, but for whose meaning his sojourn up here had made his mind receptive: receptive in the sense of intellectual comprehension, not without further ado in that of sympathy as well, which perhaps says even more. For although in the depths of his soul he was glad that Settembrini even now, in spite of all that had happened, went on speaking to him as he did, went on instructing him, warning him and seeking to exert influence upon him, his powers of apprehension went so far that he passed judgment upon those words and withheld his assent from them, at least up to a certain point. "Just look at that," he thought, "he speaks of irony very much as he speaks of music; it only wants his calling it 'politically suspect' as well — from the moment, that is, when it ceases to be a 'straightforward and classical means of instruction.' But an irony that is 'not for a moment open to misunderstanding' — what sort of irony would that be, I ask in God's name, if I am to have my say at all? A piece of dryness and schoolmastering it would be!" — So ungrateful is youth in the process of forming itself. It accepts the gift only to carp at it afterwards.

To put his resistance into words would all the same have seemed to him too hazardous a venture. He confined his objections to Herr Settembrini's judgment upon Hermine Kleefeld, which struck him as unjust, or which for certain reasons he wished to let strike him so.

"But the young lady is ill!" he said. "She is truly and veritably gravely ill and has every reason to despair! What is it you actually want of her?"

"Illness and despair," said Settembrini, "are also often no more than forms of dissoluteness."

"And Leopardi," thought Hans Castorp, "who expressly despaired even of science and progress? And he himself, our schoolmaster? He too is ill, after all, and keeps coming up here again, and Carducci would have little joy of him." Aloud he said:

"That is a good one. The young lady may bite the dust any day, and that you call dissoluteness! You will really have to explain yourself more closely. If you were to tell me: illness is sometimes a consequence of dissoluteness, that would be plausible ..."

"Very plausible," Settembrini put in. "Upon my word, it would suit you if I stopped there?"

"Or if you said: illness must sometimes serve dissoluteness as a pretext — that too I should let pass."

"_Grazie tanto!_"

"But illness a _form_ of dissoluteness? That is to say: not arisen out of dissoluteness, but itself dissoluteness? That is surely paradoxical!"

"Oh, I beg of you, Engineer, no imputations! I despise the paradox, I hate it! Take everything I remarked to you about irony as said of the paradox too, and something more besides! The paradox is the poison flower of quietism, the iridescence of a mind gone putrid, the greatest dissoluteness of them all! For the rest, I observe that you are once again taking illness under your protection ..."

"No, what you say interests me. It positively puts me in mind of a good deal that Dr. Krokowski brings forward on his Mondays. He too declares organic illness to be a secondary phenomenon."

"Not an altogether clean idealist."

"What have you against him?"

"Precisely that."

"Are you ill-disposed toward analysis?"

"Not every day. — Very ill and very well disposed, by turns, Engineer."

"How am I to understand that?"

"Analysis is good as an instrument of enlightenment and of civilization, good in so far as it shakes stupid convictions, dissolves natural prejudices and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it liberates, refines, humanizes and makes bondsmen ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, in so far as it hinders the deed, damages life at its roots, being incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be a very unsavoury business, unsavoury as death, to which indeed it may well properly belong — akin to the grave and to its disreputable anatomy ..."

"Well roared, Lion," Hans Castorp could not help thinking, as he usually did when Herr Settembrini had uttered something pedagogic. But all he said was:

"We were practising anatomy by light the other day, down in our ground-floor basement. That is what Behrens called it while he was screening us."

"Ah, so you have already ascended to that station as well. Well, and?"

"I saw the skeleton of my hand," said Hans Castorp, trying to call back to himself the sensations that had risen in him at that sight. "Have you ever had yours shown to you as well?"

"No, I take not the slightest interest in my skeleton. And the medical finding?"

"He saw strands, strands with nodules."

"The Devil's henchman."

"You have called Hofrat Behrens that once before. What do you mean by it?"

"Rest assured that it is a carefully chosen designation!"

"No, you are unjust, Herr Settembrini! I grant that the man has his weaknesses. His way of talking is not agreeable even to me in the long run; there is something forced about it at times, especially when one remembers that he has had the great sorrow of losing his wife up here. But what a deserving and estimable man he is, all in all, a benefactor of suffering humanity! The other day I met him just as he was coming from an operation, a rib resection, an affair that had been a matter of bend or break. It made a great impression on me, to see him coming like that from his difficult, useful work, which he understands so well. He was still quite flushed and had lighted a cigar by way of reward. I was envious of him."

"That was handsome of you. But your sentence?"

"He set me no definite term."

"Not bad either. Let us lie down then, Engineer. Let us take up our positions."

They took leave of each other outside number 34.

"Now you go up to your roof, Herr Settembrini. It must be merrier to lie in company like that than alone. Do you converse? Are they interesting people with whom you take the cure?"

"Ah, they are Parthians and Scythians, the whole lot of them!"

"You mean Russians?"

"And Russian women," said Herr Settembrini, and the corner of his mouth grew taut. "Adieu, Engineer!"

That was said with meaning, unquestionably. Hans Castorp entered his room in confusion. Did Settembrini know how matters stood with him? Probably he had been tracking him in his pedagogic way and had followed the paths his eyes took. Hans Castorp was angry with the Italian and with himself as well, because in his want of self-control he had invited the thrust. While he gathered together his writing things to take them with him into the rest cure — for now there was no more hesitating, the letter home, the third one, would have to be written — he went on fuming, muttering this and that to himself against this windbag and ranter, who meddled in things that were none of his business while he himself went warbling after the girls in the street — and he no longer felt in the least disposed for the written task — this barrel-organ man had positively spoiled his mood for it with his allusions. But one way or another he had to have winter clothes, money, linen, footwear, in short everything he would have brought with him had he known that he was coming not for three weeks of high summer, but ... but for a term still undetermined, which in any case would reach some way into the winter, indeed, such being the notions and time-relations among Us up here, would probably take the winter in altogether. This was precisely what had to be communicated home, at least as a possibility. This time it was a matter of doing a thorough job, of telling Those down below the plain truth and of no longer keeping up any pretence either to himself or to them ...

In this spirit, then, he wrote, observing the technique he had several times watched Joachim practise: in the deck chair, with his fountain pen, the travelling portfolio on his drawn-up knees. He wrote on a sheet of the establishment's notepaper, a supply of which lay ready in the table drawer, to James Tienappel, the nearest to him of the three uncles, and asked him to inform the Consul. He spoke of a vexatious turn of events, of apprehensions that had proved well founded, of the necessity, declared on the medical side, of spending a part of the winter, perhaps the whole of it, up here, for cases such as his were often more obstinate than those which announced themselves more pompously, and it was after all a matter of intervening emphatically and of taking precautions in good time, once and for all. From this point of view, he observed, it was indeed a piece of luck and a favourable dispensation that he had happened to come up now and had been prompted to have himself examined; for otherwise he would doubtless have remained long in the dark about his condition and would perhaps have been enlightened about it later in a far more painful manner. As for the probable duration of the cure, they were not to be surprised that he would in all likelihood have to idle the winter away and would scarcely be able to return to the flatlands sooner than Joachim. The notions of time here were other than those otherwise valid for watering-places and cures; the month was, so to speak, the smallest unit of time, and taken singly it played no part at all ...

It was cool; he wrote in his paletot, wrapped in a blanket, with reddened hands. Now and then he looked up from his paper, which was covering itself with sensible and convincing sentences, and looked out into the familiar landscape, which he scarcely saw any longer: this elongated valley with the glassy-pale jumble of peaks at its outlet, the brightly settled floor that sometimes gleamed up in the sun, and the slopes, part rough with forest, part meadow, from which came the sound of cowbells. He wrote with growing ease and no longer understood how he could have been afraid of the letter. As he wrote he himself grasped that nothing could be more evident than his exposition, and that at home it would of course meet with the most perfect agreement. A young man of his class and in his circumstances did something for himself when it proved advisable; he made use of the comforts provided expressly for people of his sort. That was as it should be. Had he travelled home — they would have sent him up again on the strength of his report. He asked that what he needed be forwarded to him. In closing he asked also for the regular remittance of the necessary funds; with eight hundred marks a month everything could be covered.

He signed his name. That was done. This third letter home was ample, it would hold out for a good while — not according to the time-concepts of down below, but according to those prevailing up here; it secured Hans Castorp's _freedom_. This was the word he applied, not expressly, not so much as forming its syllables inwardly, but he felt its most far-reaching sense, as he had learned to do during his stay here — a sense that had little enough to do with the one Settembrini attached to that word — and a wave of terror and excitement, already familiar to him, passed over him and made his breast tremble as he sighed.

His head was full of blood from writing, his cheeks burned. He took Mercury from the little lamp table and measured himself, as though it were a matter of making use of an opportunity. Mercury rose to 37.8.

"There, you see?" thought Hans Castorp. And he added the postscript: "The letter has tired me after all. I register 37.8. I see that for the present I must keep very quiet. You must excuse me if I write but seldom." Then he lay and lifted his hand against the sky, the inside turned outward, just as he had held it behind the fluoroscope screen. But the light of heaven left its living form untouched; its substance grew even darker and more opaque before that brightness, and only its outermost contours showed reddish and shone through. It was the living hand that he was accustomed to see, to clean, to use — not that alien scaffolding he had glimpsed in the screen — the analytical pit that he had then seen standing open had closed again.

Whims of Mercury

October broke in as new months are wont to break in — in and of itself it is a wholly modest and noiseless breaking-in, without signs or fiery portents, a quiet slinking-in, in fact, which easily escapes the attention if the attention does not keep strict order. Time in reality has no divisions; there is no thunderstorm or blare of trumpets at the beginning of a new month or year, and even at that of a new century it is only we human beings who fire salutes and ring bells.

In Hans Castorp's case the first day of October resembled the last day of September to a hair; it was just as cold and unfriendly as that one, and the days immediately following were so as well. One needed the winter overcoat and both camel's-hair blankets for the rest cure, not only in the evening but by day too; the fingers with which one held one's book were damp and stiff, even though the cheeks stood in a dry heat, and Joachim was greatly tempted to put his fur sack into use; he refrained only in order not to pamper himself prematurely.

But a few days later — one already stood between the beginning and the middle of the month — everything changed, and a belated summer set in of such splendour that it was a wonder. Not for nothing had Hans Castorp heard the October of these regions praised; for a good two and a half weeks a glory of heaven reigned over mountain and valley, one day outbidding the next in blue purity, and the sun burned down into it with such unmediated force that everybody found himself moved to hunt out again the lightest summer things, muslin dresses and linen trousers, which had already been cast aside, and even the great canvas parasol without a stick, which one fastened to the arm of the deck chair by means of an ingenious contrivance, a peg pierced with several holes, offered in the middle hours of the day but insufficient protection against the glow of that luminary.

"A fine thing that I am still here for this," said Hans Castorp to his cousin. "We have had it so miserable at times — it is quite as though we had the winter behind us already and now the good season were coming." He was right. Few marks pointed to the true state of affairs, and even these were inconspicuous. Leaving aside a few planted maples down in "Platz", which barely eked out their lives there and had long since let their leaves fall in discouragement, there were no deciduous trees here whose condition might have stamped the landscape with the character of the season, and only the hybrid alpine alder, which bears soft needles and sheds them as it does leaves, showed itself autumnally bare. The region's remaining arboreal adornment, whether towering or crouching, was evergreen coniferous wood, firm against the winter, which, vaguely bounded, may distribute its snowstorms here over the whole year; and only a manifoldly graduated, rust-red tone above the forest allowed one, despite the summer burning of the sky, to recognize the declining year. To be sure, looked at more closely, there were still the meadow flowers, which likewise spoke softly to the point. The orchid-like orchis was there no longer, nor the shrubby columbine that at the visitor's arrival had still decked the slope, and the wild pink too was gone. Only the gentian and the short-stemmed autumn crocus were still to be seen, and gave notice of a certain inward freshness in the superficially heated atmosphere, a coolness that could suddenly strike to the bone of the man lying there, outwardly all but scorched, as a shiver of frost strikes one glowing with fever.

Hans Castorp, then, did not inwardly keep that order with which the man who husbands time supervises its course, divides off, counts and names its units. He had not paid heed to the quiet breaking-in of the tenth month; only the sensuous touched him, the glow of the sun with the secret frosty freshness in it and beneath it — a sensation which in this strength was new to him and prompted him to a culinary comparison: it reminded him, according to a remark he made to Joachim, of an "_omelette en surprise_" with ice beneath the hot froth of egg. He often said such things, said them rapidly, fluently and with an agitated voice, as a man speaks who feels chilly with a hot skin. In between, to be sure, he was also silent, not to say turned in upon himself; for his attention was indeed directed outward, but upon a single point; the rest, people as well as things, blurred in a mist, a mist generated in Hans Castorp's brain, which Hofrat Behrens and Dr. Krokowski would doubtless have addressed as the product of soluble toxins, as the befogged man told himself, without this insight breeding in him the power, or even remotely the wish, to be rid of the intoxication.

For it is an intoxication that is concerned with itself, and to which nothing seems less desirable and more abominable than the sobering up. It maintains itself even against damping impressions, it does not admit them, in order to preserve itself. Hans Castorp knew, and had himself earlier given voice to it, that Frau Chauchat did not look to advantage in profile, somewhat sharp, no longer quite young. The consequence? He avoided regarding her in profile, literally closed his eyes when by chance she offered him this aspect from near or far; it hurt him. Why? His reason ought joyfully to have seized the opportunity to assert itself! But what is one to demand ... He grew pale with delight when, during these brilliant days, Clawdia appeared once again at second breakfast in the white lace matinee that she wore in warm weather, and which made her so extraordinarily charming — appeared in it late and with a slam of the door, and, smiling, her arms lifted lightly to unequal heights, faced the room in order to present herself. But he was delighted not so much by the fact that she looked so well, as _at the fact_ that it was so, since this strengthened the sweet mist in his head, the intoxication that willed itself, and whose concern it was to be justified and nourished.

An appraiser of Lodovico Settembrini's cast of thought might, in view of such a lack of good will, have spoken outright of dissoluteness, of "a form of dissoluteness". Hans Castorp sometimes recalled the literary things the other had uttered about "illness and despair", which he had found incomprehensible, or had given himself the appearance of so finding. He looked at Clawdia Chauchat, at the slackness of her back, the forward-thrust carriage of her head; he saw her come to table constantly with great lateness, without reason or apology, solely from a want of order and civilized energy; saw her, from this same fundamental want, let every door fall to behind her through which she passed in or out, roll pellets of bread and occasionally chew at the side tips of her fingers — and a wordless intimation rose in him that, if she was ill, and ill she surely was, almost hopelessly ill, since she had had to live up here already so long and so often — her illness was, if not entirely, yet in good part of a moral nature, and indeed, just as Settembrini had said, was neither cause nor consequence of her "laxity", but one and the same thing with it. He remembered too the dismissive gesture with which the humanist had spoken of the "Parthians and Scythians" with whom he must take the rest cure, a gesture of natural and immediate disdain and rejection needing no grounds, which Hans Castorp well understood from earlier days — from the days when he, who held himself very straight at table, hated the slamming of doors from the bottom of his heart and was not even tempted to chew his fingers (if only because he had Maria Mancini instead), had taken grave offence at Frau Chauchat's ill manners and had been unable to rid himself of a feeling of superiority when he had heard the narrow-eyed foreign woman trying her hand at his mother tongue.

Such sensations Hans Castorp had now, on the ground of the inward state of affairs, almost wholly given up, and it was much rather the Italian at whom he was vexed, because in his conceit he had spoken of "Parthians and Scythians" — whereas he had not even had in view persons from the "bad" Russian table, the one at which sat the students with the all too thick hair and the invisible linen, who disputed unceasingly in their utterly outlandish tongue, besides which they evidently knew how to express themselves in no other, and whose boneless character called to mind a thorax without ribs, as Hofrat Behrens had lately described it. It was true that the manners of these people might well arouse lively feelings of distance in a humanist. They ate with their knives and befouled the lavatory in a manner not to be reproduced. Settembrini maintained that one of their company, a medical man in his higher semesters, had shown himself completely ignorant of Latin, had not known, for instance, what a _vacuum_ was, and according to Hans Castorp's own daily experiences Frau Stöhr was probably not lying when she related at table that the married couple in No. 32 received the bath attendant of a morning, when he came for the rub-down, lying together in bed.

All this might well be correct, and yet the palpable division into "good" and "bad" did not exist for nothing, and Hans Castorp assured himself that he had no more than a shrug of the shoulders for any propagandist of the republic and the beautiful style who, supercilious and sober — sober above all, although he too was febrile and a little tipsy — lumped the two table companies together under the name of Parthians and Scythians. How it was meant, young Hans Castorp understood very far indeed; he had, after all, himself begun to understand the connections between Frau Chauchat's illness and her "laxity". But it was as he himself had one day said to Joachim: one begins with vexation and feelings of distance, but all at once "something quite different comes in between", something that "has nothing at all to do with judging", and severity of morals has played out its part — one is hardly still accessible to pedagogical influences of a republican and eloquent kind. But what is it, we ask, probably in Lodovico Settembrini's sense as well, what sort of questionable intervention is this, which lames and switches off a man's judgment, robs him of the right to it, or rather determines him to give up that right with senseless delight? We do not ask after its name, for that everyone knows. We inquire after its moral constitution — and expect, frankly, no very high-minded answer thereto. In Hans Castorp's case this constitution proved itself in such a degree that he not only ceased to judge, but also began, for his own part, to make experiments with the form of life that had taken hold of him. He tried what it was like to sit at table slumped together, with a slack back, and found that it meant a great relief for the muscles of the pelvis. Further he tried not to close laboriously behind him a door through which he had stepped, but to let it fall to; and this too proved both comfortable and appropriate: it corresponded in its expression to that shrug of the shoulders with which Joachim had greeted him at the station on his arrival, and which he had so often found since among Those up here.

Plainly stated, then, our traveller was now over head and ears in love with Clawdia Chauchat — we use the word once again, since we believe we have sufficiently forestalled the misunderstanding it might arouse. Kindly, warm-hearted wistfulness in the spirit of that little song was therefore not what made up the essence of his being in love. Rather it was a fairly hazardous and homeless variety of that infatuation, mixed of frost and heat like the condition of a febrile patient or like an October day in the upper spheres; and what was lacking was precisely a temperate mean that might have joined its extreme components. On the one hand it referred, with an immediacy that made the young man turn pale and distorted his features, to Frau Chauchat's knees and the line of her leg, to her back, the vertebrae of her neck and her upper arms, by which the small breasts were pressed together — in a word, to her body, her lax and heightened body, monstrously accentuated by illness and made body once again. And on the other hand it was something extremely fleeting and far-extended, a thought, no, a dream, the terrifying and boundlessly alluring dream of a young man to whom certain questions, though unconsciously put, had been answered only by a hollow silence. Like everybody else, we claim the right to have our private thoughts about the story here running its course, and we venture the surmise that Hans Castorp would not have exceeded the term originally set for his stay with Those up here even so far as the point now reached, had there been vouchsafed to his simple soul, out of the depths of time, any in some measure satisfying information concerning the meaning and purpose of the service of life.

For the rest, his infatuation inflicted upon him all the pains and granted him all the joys that this condition brings with it everywhere and under all circumstances. The pain is piercing; it contains a degrading element, as every pain does, and signifies such a shock to the nervous system that it takes the breath away and can wring bitter tears from a grown man. To do justice to the joys as well: they were numerous and, though arising from inconspicuous occasions, no less insistent than the sufferings. Almost every moment of the Berghof day was capable of bringing them forth. For example: on the point of entering the dining hall, Hans Castorp notices the object of his dreams behind him. The outcome is clear in advance and of the greatest simplicity, but inwardly enchanting to the point of likewise drawing tears. Their eyes meet close at hand, his and her grey-green ones, whose slightly Asiatic set and cut bewitch him to the marrow. He is bereft of his senses, but even bereft of them he steps aside to leave her the way through the door first. With a half-smile and a half-audible “_Merci_” she makes use of his no more than well-bred offer, passes by and through. He stands in the breath of her person as it brushes past him, foolish with happiness over the encounter and over the fact that a word from her mouth, namely the _Merci_, had been meant for him directly and personally. He follows her, he sways rightward toward his table, and as he sinks onto his chair he may perceive that “Clawdia” over yonder, taking her seat as well, is looking round after him — with an expression of reflection upon the meeting at the door, as it seems to him. O incredible adventure! O jubilation, triumph, and boundless exultation! No, this intoxication of fantastic satisfaction Hans Castorp would never have known from the glance of some healthy little goose to whom, down below in the flatlands, permissibly, peaceably, and with every prospect, in the sense of that little song, he might have “given his heart.” With feverish high spirits he greets the schoolmistress, who has seen everything and has flushed downily — whereupon he assails Miss Robinson with English conversation of such senselessness that the lady, not versed in the ecstatic, actually recoils and measures him with looks full of misgiving.

Another time, at supper, the rays of the clearly setting sun fall upon the Good Russian table. The curtains have been drawn across the veranda doors and windows, but somewhere a gap gapes, and through it the red glow finds its way, cool but blinding, and strikes Frau Chauchat's head exactly, so that she, in conversation with her concave compatriot on her right, must shield herself against it with her hand. It is a nuisance, but no grave one; nobody troubles about it, the person affected is probably not even conscious of the discomfort. But Hans Castorp sees it across the hall — he too looks on at it for a while. He examines the state of affairs, traces the path of the ray, determines the place of its entry. It is the bay window back there on the right, in the corner between one of the veranda doors and the Bad Russian table, far from Frau Chauchat's place and almost exactly as far from Hans Castorp's. And he takes his resolve. Without a word he rises, walks, his napkin in his hand, diagonally between the tables across the hall, draws the cream-coloured curtains well over one another back there, satisfies himself by a glance over his shoulder that the evening light is shut out and Frau Chauchat freed — and betakes himself back, summoning up a great deal of composure. An attentive young man, who does what is necessary since no one else thinks to do it. Very few had noticed his intervention, but Frau Chauchat had felt the relief at once and had looked round — she remained in this attitude until Hans Castorp had regained his place and, sitting down, looked across at her, whereupon she thanked him with a friendly, astonished smile, that is to say: she thrust her head forward rather than inclined it. He acknowledged it with a bow. His heart was motionless, it seemed not to be beating at all. Only afterwards, when it was all over, did it begin to hammer, and only then did he notice that Joachim was keeping his eyes quietly fixed upon his plate — just as it also became clear to him after the fact that Frau Stöhr had nudged Dr. Blumenkohl in the side and was seeking knowing glances everywhere, at her own table and at the others, with a suppressed laugh ...

We are describing everyday things; but the everyday becomes strange when it thrives upon a strange foundation. There were tensions and beneficent releases between them — or if not between them (for how far Madame Chauchat was touched by it we shall leave undetermined), then at least for Hans Castorp's imagination and feeling. After the midday meal, in these fine days, a good part of the cure society was accustomed to betake itself out onto the veranda that lay before the dining hall, to linger there a quarter of an hour in the sun in groups. Things went on there, and a picture developed, similar to that of the fortnightly Sunday band music. The young people, absolutely idle, oversated with meat dishes and sweets, and all of them slightly feverish, chatted, dallied, ogled. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam might well be sitting at the balustrade — her knees hard pressed by the thick-lipped Gänser on the one side and on the other by the Swedish giant, who, though wholly recovered, was prolonging his stay somewhat for a little after-cure. Frau Iltis seemed to be a widow, for she had of late been enjoying the company of a “fiancé,” of a moreover simultaneously melancholy and subordinate appearance, whose existence did not prevent her from at the same time receiving the homage of Captain Miklosich, a man with a hooked nose, waxed moustache, lofty chest, and menacing eyes. There were rest-hall ladies of various nationalities, new figures among them, first become visible since the first of October, whom Hans Castorp would scarcely have been able to call by name, mingled with cavaliers of Herr Albin's stamp; monocle-wearing seventeen-year-olds; a bespectacled young Dutchman with a rosy face and a monomaniacal passion for the exchange of postage stamps; various Greeks, pomaded and almond-eyed, inclined at table to encroachments; two closely inseparable little dandies who were called “Max and Moritz” and passed for great escapers ... The hunchbacked Mexican, upon whom ignorance of the languages represented here bestowed the facial expression of a deaf man, was incessantly taking photographs, dragging his tripod with droll nimbleness from one point of the terrace to another. The Hofrat too might well appear, to perform the trick with the bootlaces. Somewhere, however, the religious man from Mannheim pressed solitary into the crowd, and his eyes, sad to their very depths, went secretly certain ways, to Hans Castorp's disgust.

To come back, then, with one example or another, to those “tensions and releases”: on such an occasion Hans Castorp might be sitting against the wall of the house upon a lacquered garden chair and in talkative conversation with Joachim, whom, despite his reluctance, he had compelled to come out with him, while before him Frau Chauchat stood at the parapet with her table companions, smoking a cigarette. He spoke for her, that she might hear him. She turned her back to him ... One sees, we now have a definite case in mind. His cousin's conversation had not sufficed for his affected loquacity; he had deliberately made an acquaintance — which one? The acquaintance of Hermine Kleefeld — had addressed the young lady as if by chance, presented himself and Joachim to her by name, and had also drawn up a lacquered chair for her, in order to be able to show off the better as a party of three. Did she still remember, he asked, how devilishly she had frightened him back then, at their first meeting on the morning promenade? Yes, it was _he_ whom she had whistled at so heart-refreshingly by way of welcome! And she had attained her purpose, that he would freely confess, he had been as though struck upon the head with a club, she had only to ask his cousin. Ha, ha, to whistle with a pneumothorax and frighten harmless wanderers with it! A wicked game he called it, a sinful abuse he termed it outright and in righteous wrath ... And while Joachim, conscious of his instrumental role, sat with downcast eyes, and Kleefeld too gradually gained for her own person, from Hans Castorp's blind and wandering glances, the mortifying feeling that she served merely as a means to an end, Hans Castorp pouted and put on airs and turned out phrases and gave himself a melodious voice, until he really brought it about that Frau Chauchat turned round toward the conspicuous talker and looked him in the face — but only for an instant. For it so came about that her Pribislav eyes slid rapidly down his figure as he sat with one leg crossed over the other and remained fastened a while upon his yellow boot, with an expression of such studied indifference that it looked like contempt, exactly like contempt — whereupon they withdrew again phlegmatically and perhaps with a smile in their depths.

A heavy, heavy misfortune! Hans Castorp went on talking feverishly for a while; then, when he had inwardly become fully aware of that glance at his boot, he fell silent almost in the middle of a word and sank into grief. Kleefeld, bored and offended, went her way. Not without irritation in his voice, Joachim observed that they might well take their rest cure now. And a broken man answered him with pale lips that they might.

Hans Castorp suffered cruelly from this occurrence for two days; for nothing happened in the meantime that might have been balm for his burning wound. Why that glance? Why her contempt for him, in the name of the triune God? Did she look at him as at a healthy simpleton from down below, whose eagerness for impressions inclined only toward the harmless? As at an innocent from the flatlands, so to speak, an ordinary fellow who went about and laughed and stuffed his belly and earned money — a model pupil of life who understood nothing but the tedious advantages of honour? Was he a flighty visitor for three weeks, no partaker in her sphere, or had he not taken vows on the strength of a damp spot — was he not enrolled and belonging, one of Us up here, with a good two months on his back, and had not Mercurius risen again only yesterday evening to 37.8? ... But that was just it, that made his suffering complete! Mercurius rose no longer! The frightful dejection of these days brought about a cooling, a sobering, and a slackening of Hans Castorp's nature, which expressed itself, to his bitter shame, in very low readings, scarcely above the normal; and it was cruel for him to perceive how his sorrow and grief availed nothing further than to remove him ever further still from Clawdia's being and essence.

The third day brought the tender deliverance, brought it right in the early morning. It was a splendid autumn morning, sunny and fresh, with meadows spun over in grey silver. Sun and waning moon stood at the same time at about the same height in the pure sky. The cousins had risen earlier than usual in order, in honour of the fine day, to extend their morning walk a little beyond the prescription, to press on somewhat further along the forest path where the bench stood beside the water channel. Joachim, whose curve likewise showed just then a gratifying descent, had advocated the refreshing irregularity, and Hans Castorp had not said no. “We are convalescent men,” he had said, “our fever gone and our poison with it, as good as ripe for the flatlands. Why should we not kick up our heels like foals?” So they wandered bare-headed — for since he had taken vows Hans Castorp had in God's name accommodated himself to the prevailing custom of going without a hat, however secure he had felt at first, in the face of this practice, in his own form of life and breeding — and set their sticks. But they had not yet put behind them the ascending part of the reddish path, had got only about as far as the point where the pneumatic troop had once met the newcomer, when they became aware, at some distance ahead of them, climbing slowly, of Frau Chauchat, Frau Chauchat in white, in a white sweater, white flannel skirt, and even in white shoes, her reddish hair lit by the morning sun. More precisely: Hans Castorp had recognized her; Joachim was first alerted to the circumstances by an unpleasant sensation of pulling and tugging at his side — a sensation produced by the urgent, more winged gait his companion had suddenly struck up, after having first abruptly checked his steps and almost come to a standstill. Being hurried along in such a manner Joachim found extremely unwholesome and vexatious; his breath shortened rapidly, and he gave a little cough. But the purposeful Hans Castorp, whose organs seemed to be working splendidly, cared little about that; and when his cousin had grasped the state of affairs, he only silently drew his brows together and kept pace, for he could not possibly let the other run on ahead alone.

The fine morning enlivened young Hans Castorp. Moreover, in his depression his spiritual forces had secretly rested, and there shone clearly before his mind the certainty that the moment had come when the spell that had lain upon him should be broken. So he strode out, drawing the panting and otherwise reluctant Joachim along with him, and before the bend in the path, where it became level and led to the right along the wooded hill, they had as good as overtaken Frau Chauchat. There Hans Castorp slackened his pace again, so as not to carry out his design in a state made wild with exertion. And beyond the elbow of the path, between slope and mountain wall, among the rust-coloured firs through whose branches the sunlight fell, it came to pass and wondrously befell that Hans Castorp, to Joachim's left, overtook the lovely invalid, that he passed her by with manly strides, and at the moment when he found himself to her right, greeted her _respectfully_ (why, exactly, respectfully?) with a hatless bow and a “Good morning” spoken in a half voice, and received an answer from her: with a friendly inclination of the head, not otherwise astonished, she thanked him, said good morning in her turn in his language, her eyes smiling the while — and all this was something other, something thoroughly and blissfully other than the glance at his boot, it was a stroke of fortune and a turn of things toward the good and the very best, of an altogether unexampled kind and almost passing his powers of comprehension; it was the deliverance.

On winged soles, blinded by unreasoning joy, in possession of the greeting, the word, the smile, Hans Castorp hurried forward at the side of the misused Joachim, who looked silently away from him down the slope. A trick it had been, a rather wanton one, and probably even something like treachery and malice in Joachim's eyes, that Hans Castorp knew very well. It was not quite as though he had asked some total stranger for a pencil — rather it would have been almost boorish to pass by, stiff and without any mark of respect, a lady with whom one had lived for months under the same roof; and had not Clawdia recently in the waiting room even entered into conversation with them? Therefore Joachim had to hold his peace. But Hans Castorp understood well why the honour-loving Joachim was otherwise silent as well and walked with averted head, while he himself was so extravagantly and unbridledly happy over his successful trick. No one could be happier who down in the flatlands, permissibly, with every prospect, and at bottom pleasurably, had “given his heart” to a healthy little goose and had met with great success in it — no, _so happy_ as he now was over the little that he had snatched and made sure of in a good hour, such a one could not be ... Therefore, after a while, he struck his cousin mightily upon the shoulder and said:

“Hallo there, what is the matter with you? It is such fine weather! Afterwards we shall go down to the Kurhaus, they will probably be making music there, just think! Perhaps they will play ‘Here on my heart, kept faithfully, the flower, see, from that morning' out of ‘Carmen.' What has run across your liver?”

“Nothing,” said Joachim. “But you look so hot, I am afraid it is all over with your drop.”

It _was_ at an end. The humiliating depression of Hans Castorp's system had been overcome by the greeting he had exchanged with Clawdia Chauchat, and, to be quite precise, it was this consciousness that was the true object of his satisfaction. Yes, Joachim had been right: Mercury was rising again! When Hans Castorp consulted him after the walk, he rose to a good 38 degrees.

Encyclopaedia

If certain allusions of Herr Settembrini's had annoyed Hans Castorp, he had no cause to be surprised and no right to accuse the humanist of pedagogical inquisitiveness. A blind man must have noticed how matters stood with him: he himself did nothing to keep it secret; a certain magnanimity and noble simplicity simply prevented him from making a murderer's den of his heart, whereby he differed, at all events—and advantageously, if one chooses—from the thin-haired lover from Mannheim and his furtive ways. We recall, and repeat, that the condition in which he found himself is generally endowed with an urge and compulsion to reveal itself, an impulse toward confession and avowal, a blind infatuation with itself and a craving to fill the world with its own being—all the more disconcerting to us sober souls, the less sense, reason, and hope there manifestly is in the affair. Just how such people contrive to betray themselves is hard to say; it seems that they can do nothing, or leave nothing undone, that does not betray them—especially in a society of which a discerning mind had observed that it had, on the whole, only two things in its thoughts: first, temperature, and then—temperature once again; which is to say, for example, the question with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt of Vienna was consoling herself for Captain Miklosich's fickleness: whether with the fully recovered Swedish champion, or with Public Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund, or, thirdly, with both at once. For it was certain and well known that the ties which had united the public prosecutor and Frau Salomon of Amsterdam for several months had been dissolved by amicable agreement, and that Frau Salomon, following the inclination of her years, had turned toward younger generations and taken the thick-lipped Gänser from Kleefeld's table under her wing—or, as Frau Stöhr expressed it in a sort of bureaucratic idiom, though not without vividness, had “bent him her way”—so that the public prosecutor consequently had a free hand to fight or come to terms with the Swede over the Consul-General's lady.

These proceedings, then, which were pending in Berghof society, and particularly among its febrile youth, and in which the balcony passages—past the glass partitions and along the railing—evidently played an important part: these goings-on occupied people's minds; they formed a principal constituent of the atmosphere of life here—and even that does not truly express what we have in mind. For Hans Castorp had the peculiar impression that upon a fundamental matter to which everywhere in the world sufficient importance is conceded, in earnest and in jest alike, there rested here a mark of tone, value, and significance so weighty, and in its very weight so novel, that it caused the matter itself to appear in an entirely new light—a light which, if not terrible, was nevertheless alarming in its novelty. In saying this we alter our expression and observe that, if hitherto we may have spoken of the relations in question in a light and jocular tone, it would have been for the same secret reasons for which this is so often done, without thereby proving anything whatever about the lightness or jocularity of the matter itself; and in the sphere where we now find ourselves this would in fact be even less the case than elsewhere. Hans Castorp had believed himself acquainted, to the customary degree, with that fundamental matter so readily made the object of jokes, and may rightly have believed so. Now he recognized that in the flatlands his understanding of it had been very inadequate, that he had actually dwelt in simple ignorance of it—whereas up here personal experiences, whose nature we have repeatedly attempted to indicate, and which at certain moments wrung from him the exclamation “My God!”, did indeed enable him from within to perceive and comprehend the intensifying accent of the unheard-of, the adventurously nameless, which the matter bore universally and for everyone among those up here. Not that it was not joked about here as well. But far more than down below, this manner bore here the stamp of incongruity; there was something teeth-chattering and short-breathed about it that marked it all too plainly as a transparent cloak for the distress hidden beneath—or rather, impossible to hide. Hans Castorp remembered the blotched pallor Joachim had displayed when, for the first and only time, the conversation had turned, in the innocently teasing fashion of the lowlands, to Marusja's physical charms. He also remembered the cold pallor that had overspread his own face when he relieved Frau Chauchat of the encroaching evening light—and remembered that before and afterward, on various occasions, he had perceived it upon many another face: upon two at once, as a rule—for example, upon the faces of Frau Salomon and young Gänser in those days when what Frau Stöhr designated so idiomatically had begun to develop between them. He remembered this, we say, and understood that under such circumstances it would not only have been very difficult to avoid “betraying” oneself, but that the effort would scarcely have been worth making. In other words: it may well have been not magnanimity and honest-heartedness alone, but also a certain encouragement afforded by the atmosphere, that made Hans Castorp feel little called upon to constrain his emotions or conceal his condition.

Had it not been for the difficulty of making acquaintances here, which Joachim had immediately emphasized—a difficulty chiefly attributable to the fact that the cousins formed, so to speak, a party and miniature group of their own within sanatorium society, and that the soldierly Joachim, intent on nothing but rapid recovery, was on principle averse to closer contact and fellowship with his fellow sufferers—Hans Castorp would have had, and seized, far more opportunities to parade his feelings among people with magnanimous abandon. Even so, Joachim came upon him one evening during the social hour in the lounge, standing with Hermine Kleefeld, her two table companions Gänser and Rasmussen, and, as a fourth, the youth with the monocle and the fingernail; and with eyes that did not belie their abnormal brilliance, and in an agitated voice, he was delivering an impromptu address on Frau Chauchat's peculiar and exotic facial formation, while his listeners exchanged glances, nudged one another, and giggled.

This was tormenting to Joachim; but the author of such merriment was insensible to the exposure of his condition—he may have thought that, if it went unnoticed and concealed, it would not receive its due. He could be certain of general understanding. The malicious pleasure mingled with it he accepted into the bargain. Not only from his own table, but gradually from other neighbouring ones as well, people looked toward him in order to feast upon his blanching and flushing when, after the beginning of a meal, the glass door crashed into its latch; and with this too he was perhaps even pleased, since it seemed to him that, by attracting attention, his intoxication received a certain recognition and confirmation from without, suited to advancing his cause and encouraging his vague and irrational hopes—and that actually made him happy. It came to the point that people literally assembled to watch the infatuated man. This might happen after meals on the terrace, or on Sunday afternoons before the concierge's lodge, when the guests received their post there, since on that day it was not distributed to the rooms. It was widely known that there was a man there prodigiously tipsy and sublimely illuminated, who allowed everything to show; and so Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Engelhart, Kleefeld together with her tapir-faced friend, the incurable Herr Albin, the young man with the fingernail, and this or that further member of the patient body would stand there—with mouths drawn downward, snorting through their noses—and watch him as, lost in a passionate smile, with that heat upon his cheeks which had seized him on the very first evening of his stay, and that brilliance in his eyes which even the gentleman-rider's cough had kindled there, he gazed in a particular direction ...

It was really kind of Herr Settembrini, under such circumstances, to approach Hans Castorp, draw him into conversation, and inquire after his welfare; but it is doubtful whether Hans Castorp knew how gratefully to appreciate the humane freedom from prejudice implied in the act. It may have been in the vestibule, on a Sunday afternoon. The guests were crowding about the concierge and stretching out their hands for their post. Joachim too was there at the front. His cousin had remained behind and, in the condition described, was endeavouring to win a glance from Clawdia Chauchat, who stood nearby with her table companions, waiting for the press around the lodge to thin. It was an hour that mingled the sanatorium guests together, an hour of opportunities, loved and longed for on that account by young Hans Castorp. Eight days earlier he had come into very close contact with Madame Chauchat at the counter, so that she had even jostled him slightly and, turning her head in passing, said “_Pardon_” to him—whereupon, by virtue of a febrile presence of mind for which he blessed himself, he had managed to reply:

“_Pas de quoi, madame!_”

What a favour of life, he thought, that every Sunday afternoon the post was unfailingly distributed in the entrance hall! One may say that he had consumed the week by waiting for the return of that same hour seven days later; and waiting means: hurrying ahead, means feeling time and the present not as a gift but merely as an obstacle, denying and destroying their intrinsic worth, and leaping over them in spirit. Waiting, they say, is tedious. Yet it is just as much, or indeed in its true nature, diverting, since it devours quantities of time without living or making use of them for their own sake. One might say that the man who does nothing but wait resembles a glutton whose digestive apparatus drives masses of food through itself without assimilating their nourishment or utility. One might go further and say: just as undigested food does not make a man stronger, so time spent in waiting does not make him older. Pure and unmixed waiting, of course, does not occur in practice.

Thus the week had been devoured, and the Sunday-afternoon hour of post had come into force again, just as though it were still the one from seven days before. In the most exciting fashion it continued to create opportunities, concealing and offering in every minute the possibility of entering into social relations with Frau Chauchat: possibilities by which Hans Castorp allowed his heart to be squeezed and driven, without permitting them to pass into reality. Against this stood inhibitions partly military and partly civilian in nature: partly, that is, connected with the presence of the honourable Joachim and with Hans Castorp's own honour and duty; but partly also rooted in the feeling that social relations with Clawdia Chauchat, _proper_ relations in which they addressed one another formally, made bows, and perhaps even spoke French, were unnecessary, undesirable, not the right thing at all ... He stood watching her speak with laughter, exactly as Pribislav Hippe had once laughed while speaking in the schoolyard: her mouth opened rather wide as she did so, and her slanting grey-green eyes above the cheekbones narrowed to slender slits. It was by no means “beautiful”; but it was as it was, and in infatuation the aesthetic verdict of reason receives no more of its due than does the moral one. —

“You too are expecting dispatches, Engineer?”

Only one man spoke thus: an intruder. Hans Castorp started and turned toward Herr Settembrini, who stood smiling before him. It was the refined and humanistic smile with which, long ago beside the bench by the watercourse, he had first greeted the new arrival; and as he had then, Hans Castorp felt ashamed when he saw it. But however often in his dreams he had tried to thrust the “organ-grinder” aside because he was “intruding here”—the waking man is better than the dreaming one, and Hans Castorp beheld this smile again not only with shame and disillusionment, but also with feelings of grateful need. He said:

“Good heavens, dispatches, Herr Settembrini. I am no ambassador! Perhaps there is a postcard for one of us. My cousin is just looking.”

“The lame devil up there has already handed me my little correspondence,” Settembrini said, putting his hand to the side pocket of his inevitable shaggy coat. “Interesting matters, matters of literary and social consequence, I do not deny it. It concerns an encyclopaedic work upon which a humanitarian institute deems me worthy to collaborate ... In short, fine work.” Herr Settembrini broke off. “But your affairs?” he asked. “How do they stand? How far, for example, has the process of acclimatization advanced? All in all, you have not yet been among us so long that the question has ceased to be on the order of the day.”

“Thank you, Herr Settembrini; it continues to present its difficulties. I consider it possible that it will do so until my final day. Some people never become accustomed, my cousin told me as soon as I arrived. But one grows accustomed to not growing accustomed.”

“A complicated process,” laughed the Italian. “A singular form of naturalization. Of course, youth is capable of anything. It does not grow accustomed, but it puts down roots.”

“And after all, this is no Siberian mine.”

“No. Oh, you favour eastern comparisons. Very understandable. Asia is swallowing us. Wherever one looks: Tatar faces.” And Herr Settembrini discreetly turned his head over his shoulder. “Genghis Khan,” he said, “steppe-wolf eyes, snow and schnapps, the knout, Schlüsselburg, and Christianity. An altar ought to be erected to Pallas Athena here in the entrance hall—as a means of defence. Look, up there an Ivan Ivanovich without linen has become embroiled in a quarrel with Public Prosecutor Paravant. Each wishes to receive his post before the other. I do not know who is in the right, but to my mind the public prosecutor enjoys the protection of the goddess. He may be an ass, but at least he understands Latin.”

Hans Castorp laughed—something Herr Settembrini never did. One could not imagine him laughing heartily at all; he never got beyond the refined, dry tension at the corner of his mouth. He watched the young man laugh, and then asked:

“Your transparency—have you received it?”

“I have received it!” Hans Castorp confirmed importantly. “Several days ago. Here it is.” And he reached into the inner breast pocket of his coat.

“Ah, you carry it in your wallet. Like a credential, so to speak, a passport or membership card. Very good. Let me see!” And Herr Settembrini raised the little glass plate, bordered with strips of black paper, against the light, holding it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand—a gesture often seen and very customary up here. His face, with its black almond eyes, grimaced slightly as he examined the funereal image—without making it entirely clear whether this was merely for the sake of seeing more precisely or for other reasons.

“Yes, yes,” he then said. “Here is your certificate of legitimacy; many thanks.” And he handed the glass back to its owner, handing it sideways, as it were, across his own arm, with his face averted.

“Did you see the strands?” Hans Castorp asked. “And the little nodules?”

“You know,” Herr Settembrini replied slowly, “what I think of the value of these products. You also know that the spots and shadows there within are, for the very greatest part, physiological. I have seen a hundred pictures that looked approximately like yours and left the decision whether they truly constituted a ‘certificate’ or not more or less to the discretion of the examiner. I speak as a layman, but at least as a layman of many years’ standing.”

“Does your own certificate look worse?”

“Yes, somewhat worse. — Besides, I am aware that even our lords and masters do not base a diagnosis upon this toy alone. — And so you now intend to spend the winter with us?”

“Yes, good Lord ... I am beginning to grow accustomed to the thought that I shall not go down again until I go with my cousin.”

“That is to say, you are growing accustomed to the fact that you are not ... You put that very wittily. I hope you have received your things—warm clothes, stout footwear?”

“Everything. Everything in the best of order, Herr Settembrini. I informed my relatives, and our housekeeper sent me everything by express freight. I can hold out now.”

“That reassures me. But wait—you need a bag, a fur-lined rest-cure bag—where were our wits! This late-summer weather is deceptive; within an hour it may be deepest winter. You will be spending the coldest months here ...”

“Yes, the rest-cure bag,” said Hans Castorp, “I suppose that is part of the equipment. It had already briefly occurred to me that one of these next few days my cousin and I would have to go into the village and buy one. One never needs the thing again afterward, but for four to six months, after all, it is worth it.”

“It is worth it, it is. — Engineer!” Herr Settembrini said softly, stepping closer to the young man. “Do you not know how appalling it is, the way you fling months about? Appalling because it is unnatural and foreign to your nature, founded solely upon the docility of your years. Ah, this excessive docility of youth!—it is the despair of educators, for above all it stands ready to prove itself in what is worst. Do not speak as the atmosphere prompts you, young man, but as befits your European form of life! There is, above all, a great deal of Asia in the air here—not for nothing does the place swarm with types from Muscovite Mongolia! These people”—and Herr Settembrini gestured with his chin over his shoulder—“do not inwardly take your bearings from them; do not allow yourself to be infected by their conceptions, but rather set your own nature, your _higher_ nature, against theirs, and hold sacred what is sacred to you, the son of the West, of the divine West—the son of civilization—by nature and descent: time, for example! This prodigality, this barbaric magnificence in the expenditure of time, is Asiatic style—and that may be one reason why the children of the East find this place congenial. Have you never noticed that when a Russian says ‘four hours,’ it amounts to no more than when one of us says ‘one’? It is easy to suppose that these people’s nonchalance in relation to time is connected with the wild vastness of their country. Where there is much space, there is much time—it is said, indeed, that they are the people who have time and know how to wait. We Europeans cannot do so. We have as little time as our noble and delicately articulated continent has space; we depend upon the exact husbanding of both, upon utilization, utilization, Engineer! Take our great cities as an emblem, those centres and focal points of civilization, those melting-pots of thought! In the same measure as land there grows more costly and the waste of space becomes impossible, in that same measure—mark this—time too grows ever more precious. _Carpe diem!_ That was sung by a city-dweller. Time is a gift of the gods, bestowed upon man that he may use it—use it, Engineer, in the service of humanity’s progress.”

Even this last word, however many obstacles it may have presented to his Mediterranean tongue, Herr Settembrini had made audible in a most pleasing fashion—clearly, melodiously, and, one might well say, sculpturally. Hans Castorp answered only with the brief, stiff, embarrassed bow of a pupil receiving an admonitory lesson. What could he have replied? This private lecture, which Herr Settembrini had delivered to him in confidence, with his back turned upon all the rest of the company and almost in a whisper, had been too factual, too unsocial, too little in the nature of conversation for tact to permit even an expression of approval. One does not answer a teacher: “You put that beautifully.” Hans Castorp had indeed sometimes done so in the past, as it were to preserve the social relation of equality between them; but never before had the humanist spoken with such urgent pedagogic purpose; there was nothing for it but to swallow the admonition—dazed like a schoolboy by so much morality.

Moreover, one could see from Herr Settembrini that his mental activity continued its course even in silence. He still stood close before Hans Castorp, so that the latter even leaned back a little, and his black eyes, fixed upon the young man’s face, had a steadfast, brooding blindness in their gaze.

“You are suffering, Engineer!” he continued. “You suffer like one who has lost his way—who could fail to see it in your face? But your attitude toward suffering, too, should be a European attitude—not that of the East, which, being soft and prone to illness, sends its people to this place in such abundance... Compassion and immeasurable patience: that is its way of confronting suffering. It cannot, it must not be ours, or yours!... We were speaking of my post... Look, here... Or better still—come! It is impossible here... We shall withdraw; we shall go in over there. I have disclosures to make to you which... Come!” And turning, he drew Hans Castorp away from the vestibule and into the first of the common rooms, the one nearest the main entrance, which was fitted out as a writing and reading room and was now empty of guests. Beneath its pale vaulting it displayed oak panelling, bookcases, a table in the centre surrounded by chairs and covered with newspapers in frames, and writing facilities beneath the arches of the window recesses. Herr Settembrini advanced to one of the windows; Hans Castorp followed him. The door remained open.

“These papers,” said the Italian, drawing with a swift hand from the pouchlike side pocket of his loose jacket a sheaf—a large, already opened envelope—and letting its contents, various printed materials together with a letter, slip through his fingers before Hans Castorp’s eyes, “these papers bear, in French, the imprint: ‘International League for the Organization of Progress.’ They are sent to me from Lugano, where the League maintains a branch office. You ask me about its principles, its aims? I shall give them to you in two words. From Darwin’s theory of evolution, the League for the Organization of Progress derives the philosophical conviction that mankind’s innermost natural vocation is its own self-perfection. From this it further concludes that everyone who wishes to fulfil his natural vocation has a duty to collaborate actively in the progress of mankind. Many have answered its call; the number of its members in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and even Germany is considerable. I, too, have the honour of being entered in the registers of the League. A scientifically elaborated programme of reform on the grand scale has been drawn up, embracing all the possibilities presently available for the improvement of the human organism. The problem of the health of our race is being studied; every method of combating degeneration, which is without doubt a lamentable concomitant of increasing industrialization, is under examination. The League also promotes the establishment of popular universities, the overcoming of class conflict through all such social improvements as recommend themselves for that purpose, and finally the abolition of conflict between nations, of war, through the development of international law. You see, the endeavours of the League are magnanimous and comprehensive. Several international journals bear witness to its activity—monthly reviews which, in three or four world languages, provide highly stimulating reports on the progressive development of civilized mankind. Numerous local groups have been founded in the various countries, whose discussion evenings and Sunday observances are intended to enlighten and edify in the spirit of the ideal of human progress. Above all, the League zealously strives to place its material at the disposal of the progressive political parties of every country... You are following my words, Engineer?”

“Absolutely!” Hans Castorp replied vehemently and with undue haste. As he uttered the word, he had the sensation of a man who slips and only just succeeds in keeping his feet.

Herr Settembrini appeared satisfied.

“I take it that these are new and surprising vistas opening before you?”

“Yes, I must confess, this is the first I have heard of these . . . these endeavours.”

“If only,” Settembrini exclaimed softly, “if only you had heard of them sooner! But perhaps it is not yet too late. Now, these printed papers . . . You wish to know what they concern . . . Listen further! In the spring a solemn general assembly of the League was convened in Barcelona—you know that this city can boast of special ties with the political idea of progress. The congress sat for a week amid banquets and festivities. Good God, how I wished to travel there; I longed ardently to take part in the deliberations. But that scoundrel of a Hofrat forbade me to go, under threat of death—and what would you have? I feared death and did not go. I was in despair, as you may imagine, over the trick my inadequate health had played upon me. Nothing is more painful than when our organic, our animal part prevents us from serving reason. All the more lively, then, is my satisfaction at this communication from the bureau in Lugano . . . You are curious as to its contents? I can well believe it! A few cursory particulars . . . The ‘League for the Organization of Progress,’ mindful of the truth that its task consists in bringing about the happiness of mankind—in other words, in combating human suffering through purposeful social labour and ultimately eradicating it altogether—mindful, furthermore, of the truth that this supreme task can be accomplished only with the aid of sociological science, whose ultimate goal is the perfect state—the League, then, resolved at Barcelona upon the production of a work in many volumes, to bear the title ‘Sociology of Suffering,’ in which human sufferings, in all their classes and species, are to be treated according to an exact and exhaustive system. You will object: what use are classes, species, systems! I answer you: order and classification are the beginning of mastery, and the truly terrible enemy is the unknown. The human race must be led out of the primitive stages of fear and torpid endurance and guided into the phase of purposeful activity. It must be enlightened to the fact that effects cease to exist when their causes are first recognized and then abolished, and that almost all the sufferings of the individual are diseases of the social organism. Good! Such is the intention of the ‘Sociological Pathology.’ In some twenty encyclopedia-sized volumes, therefore, it will enumerate and treat every conceivable instance of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the great conflicts between groups, the sufferings arising from class antagonisms and international collisions; it will, in short, identify the chemical elements whose manifold mixtures and combinations compose all human suffering, and, taking the dignity and happiness of mankind as its guiding principle, will in every case place at mankind’s disposal the means and measures that appear suited to removing the causes of suffering. Qualified specialists from the learned world of Europe—physicians, economists, and psychologists—will divide among themselves the preparation of this encyclopedia of suffering, and the central editorial bureau in Lugano will be the reservoir into which the articles flow. You are asking me with your eyes what role is to fall to me in all this? Allow me to finish! Nor does this great work intend to neglect belles-lettres, insofar as they take human suffering for their subject. A separate volume is therefore planned which, for the consolation and instruction of sufferers, is to contain a compilation and concise analysis of all those masterpieces of world literature pertinent to each individual conflict; and—this is the task with which, in the letter you see here, your most obedient servant has been entrusted.”

“You amaze me, Herr Settembrini! Then you must permit me to congratulate you most warmly! That is a magnificent commission, and one made precisely for you, it seems to me. I am not in the least surprised that the League thought of you. And how it must delight you to be able now to assist in eradicating human suffering!”

“It is an extensive undertaking,” Herr Settembrini said pensively, “requiring a great deal of circumspection and reading. Especially,” he added, while his gaze seemed to lose itself in the multiplicity of his task, “especially since belles-lettres have, in fact, almost invariably taken suffering for their subject, and even masterpieces of the second and third rank concern themselves with it in one fashion or another. No matter—or so much the better! However comprehensive the task may be, it is at all events of such a nature that, at a pinch, I can discharge it even in this accursed place, though I do not wish to suppose that I shall be compelled to complete it here. The same cannot be said,” he continued, stepping closer to Hans Castorp again and lowering his voice almost to a whisper, “the same cannot be said of the duties Nature has imposed upon _you_, Engineer! That is the point I wished to make, the thing of which I wished to remind you. You know how greatly I admire your profession; but because it is a practical and not an intellectual calling, you, unlike me, can pursue it only in the world below. Only in the flatlands can you be a European, actively combat suffering in your own fashion, advance progress, make use of time. I told you of the task that has fallen to me solely to remind you, to bring you back to yourself, to set straight your ideas, which are evidently beginning to grow confused under atmospheric influences. I urge you: keep a hold upon yourself! Be proud, and do not surrender yourself to the alien! Shun this swamp, this island of Circe’s, upon which you are not enough of an Odysseus to dwell with impunity. You will go on all fours; already you are inclining towards your forelimbs; soon you will begin to grunt—beware!”

The humanist had shaken his head emphatically as he delivered these quiet admonitions. He fell silent, eyes lowered and brows drawn together. It was impossible to answer him jokingly and evasively, as Hans Castorp was accustomed to do and as, for one moment, he now considered doing. He too stood with lowered lids. Then he shrugged his shoulders and said, equally softly:

“What am I to do?”

“What I told you.”

“That is to say: leave?”

Herr Settembrini was silent.

“Do you mean that I ought to go home?”

“I advised you to do so on the very first evening, Engineer.”

“Yes, and at that time I was free to do it, although I thought it unreasonable to throw up the sponge merely because the air here was affecting me a little. But since then the situation has changed. Since then there has been that examination, after which Hofrat Behrens told me plainly and unequivocally that it was not worth my while to go home, since I should only have to return in a short while, and that if I went on down there as I had been doing, then, before I knew where I was, the whole lobe of my lung would go to the devil.”

“I know; now you have your certificate in your pocket.”

“Yes, you say that so ironically . . . with the proper irony, of course, which cannot be misunderstood for a moment, but is a direct and classical instrument of rhetoric—you see, I remember your words. But can you really take responsibility for advising me to go home, in view of this photograph and the result of the fluoroscopy and the Hofrat’s diagnosis?”

Herr Settembrini hesitated for a moment. Then he drew himself up and raised his eyes as well, fixing them, black and steadfast, upon Hans Castorp, and replied with an emphasis not entirely devoid of theatricality and calculated effect:

“Yes, Engineer. I am prepared to take that responsibility.”

But Hans Castorp’s bearing too had now grown taut. He stood with his heels together and likewise looked Herr Settembrini directly in the eye. This time it was a skirmish. Hans Castorp stood his ground. Influences close at hand “strengthened” him. Here was a pedagogue, and out there was a narrow-eyed woman. He did not even apologize for what he said; he did not add: “Do not take it amiss.” He answered:

“Then you are more cautious on your own behalf than on other people’s! _You_ did not travel to Barcelona for the congress of progress against the doctor’s orders. You feared death and stayed here.”

To a certain degree, Herr Settembrini’s pose was undoubtedly demolished by this. He smiled, not altogether without effort, and said:

“I know how to appreciate a ready answer, even when its logic comes perilously close to sophistry. It disgusts me to compete in an odious contest of the sort customary here; otherwise I should reply that I am considerably more ill than you—indeed, unfortunately, so ill that I keep alive my hope of ever leaving this place and returning to the lower world only by artificial means and with a degree of self-deception. The moment it becomes wholly improper to sustain it, I shall turn my back upon this establishment and take private lodgings somewhere in the valley for the remainder of my days. That will be sad; but since my sphere of work is the freest and most spiritual of all, it will not prevent me, to my last breath, from serving the cause of humanity and confronting the spirit of disease. I have already drawn your attention to the difference that exists between us in this respect. Engineer, you are not the man to preserve your better nature here; I saw that at our first meeting. You reproach me with not having gone to Barcelona. I submitted to the prohibition in order not to destroy myself prematurely. But I did so under the strongest reservation, amid the proudest and most painful protest of my spirit against the dictates of my wretched body. Whether that protest is also alive in you as you comply with the prescriptions of the powers that rule here—or whether it is not rather _the body_, and its evil propensity, that you obey only too willingly . . .”

“What have you against the body?” Hans Castorp interrupted him quickly, staring wide-eyed at him with his blue eyes, whose whites were threaded with red veins. His own temerity made him dizzy, and it showed. “What am I talking about?” he thought. “This is becoming outrageous. But now that I have placed myself on a war footing with him, I shall not let him have the last word for as long as I can help it. Of course he will have it in the end, but that does not matter; I shall profit by it all the same. I shall provoke him.” He completed his objection:

“But you are a humanist, are you not? How can you speak ill of the body?”

Settembrini smiled, this time freely and with self-assurance.

“‘What have you against analysis?’” he quoted, his head inclined upon his shoulder. “‘Do you speak ill of analysis?’—You will always find me ready to answer you, Engineer,” he said with a bow and a saluting gesture of one hand toward the floor, “especially when your objections possess wit. You parry not without elegance. A humanist—certainly, that is what I am. You will never convict me of ascetic tendencies. I affirm, honour, and love the body, just as I affirm, honour, and love form, beauty, freedom, gaiety, and enjoyment—just as I champion the ‘world,’ the interests of life, against sentimental flight from the world—Classicismo against Romanticism. I think my position is unequivocal. But there is one power, one principle, to which my highest affirmation, my supreme and ultimate reverence and love belong, and that power, that principle, is the spirit. Much as I abhor seeing some dubious web and spectre of moonshine called ‘the soul’ played off against the body—within the antithesis of body _and spirit_, the body represents the evil, the diabolical principle, for the body is nature, and nature—within its opposition to spirit, to reason, I repeat!—is evil, mystical and evil. ‘You are a humanist!’ Indeed I am, for I am a friend of man, as Prometheus was, a lover of humanity and its nobility. But that nobility resides in the spirit, in reason, and therefore you will raise the charge of Christian obscurantism quite in vain . . .”

Hans Castorp made a gesture of protest.

“. . . You will,” Settembrini persisted, “raise that charge quite in vain when humanistic pride in man’s nobility comes one day to regard the spirit’s bondage to the corporeal, to nature, as a degradation and an affront. Do you know that the great Plotinus is reported to have said that he was ashamed to possess a body?” Settembrini asked, demanding an answer so earnestly that Hans Castorp was obliged to confess that this was the first he had heard of it.

“Porphyry records it. An absurd utterance, if you will. But the absurd is what does honour to the spirit, and nothing can fundamentally be more paltry than the objection of absurdity when the spirit seeks to uphold its dignity against nature and refuses to abdicate before her . . . Have you heard of the earthquake at Lisbon?”

“No—an earthquake? I see no newspapers here . . .”

“You misunderstand me. Incidentally, it is regrettable—and characteristic of this place—that you neglect to read the press while here. But you misunderstand me: the natural event of which I speak is not a recent one; it occurred approximately a hundred and fifty years ago . . .”

“Oh, I see! Wait—yes, of course! I have read that Goethe said to his servant in his bedroom at Weimar that night . . .”

“Ah—that was not what I meant to discuss,” Settembrini interrupted, closing his eyes and shaking his small brown hand in the air. “Besides, you are confusing the catastrophes. You have the Messina earthquake in mind. I mean the convulsion that visited Lisbon in the year 1755.”

“Forgive me.”

“Well, Voltaire rebelled against it.”

“That is to say . . . how? He rebelled?”

“He revolted, yes. He did not accept the brutal fatum and factum; he refused to abdicate before it. In the name of spirit and reason, he protested against this scandalous outrage of nature, to which three-quarters of a flourishing city and thousands of human lives fell victim . . . You are astonished? You smile? By all means be astonished; as for the smile, I take the liberty of rebuking you for it! Voltaire’s attitude was that of a true descendant of those ancient Gauls who shot their arrows against the heavens . . . You see, Engineer, there you have the spirit’s hostility toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its high-minded insistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, irrational power. For she is power, and it is servile to accept power, to come to terms with it . . . mark me, to come to terms with it _inwardly_. But there too you have that humanism which involves itself in no contradiction whatsoever and incurs no relapse into Christian submissiveness when it resolves to behold in the body the evil, the adversarial principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is fundamentally always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing . . . when it serves enlightenment, liberation, and progress. Everything . . . when the hideous _haut-goût_ of the grave clings to it. It is no different with the body. One must honour and defend it when its emancipation and beauty are at stake, the freedom of the senses, happiness, pleasure. One must despise it insofar as, being the principle of heaviness and inertia, it opposes the movement toward light; abhor it insofar as it even represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its peculiar spirit is the spirit of perversity, the spirit of corruption, lust, and shame . . .”

Settembrini had spoken these last words, standing close before Hans Castorp, very rapidly and almost without sound, in order to finish. Relief was approaching for Hans Castorp: Joachim entered the reading room with two postcards in his hand, the man of letters broke off his discourse, and the adroitness with which his expression passed into the lightness of social intercourse did not fail to impress his pupil—if Hans Castorp might be so called.

“There you are, Lieutenant! You will have been looking for your cousin—forgive me! We had fallen into conversation here—indeed, if I am not mistaken, we had even had a little dispute. Your cousin is no mean debater, by no means an innocuous opponent in a war of words when he sets his mind to it.”

Humaniora

Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemßen sat in the garden after dinner, wearing white trousers and blue jackets. It was yet another of those vaunted October days, a day hot and light, festive and austere at once, with the southern darkness of a blue sky above the valley, whose pastures, traversed by paths and dotted with dwellings, still showed a cheerful green along the floor, and from whose rugged wooded slopes came the ringing of cowbells—that tinny-peaceful, simple-musical sound which floated clear and undisturbed through the still, thin, empty air, deepening the solemn mood that reigns over lofty regions.

The cousins sat on a bench at the end of the garden, before a circular plantation of young firs.—The spot lay at the north-western edge of the fenced platform, raised some fifty metres above the valley, which formed the pedestal of the Berghof grounds. They were silent. Hans Castorp smoked. Inwardly he quarrelled with Joachim because the latter had refused after the meal to take part in the sociability on the veranda, but had forced him, against his wish and will, into the quiet of the garden before they took up their rest-cure duties. That was tyrannical of Joachim. Strictly speaking, they were not Siamese twins. They could part company when their inclinations diverged. Hans Castorp was not here to keep Joachim company; he was himself a patient. He sulked in this spirit, and could endure sulking because he had Maria Mancini. His hands in the side pockets of his jacket, his brown-shod feet stretched out before him, he held between the middle of his lips the long, dull-grey cigar, which was still in the first stage of consumption—that is, he had not yet knocked the ash from its blunt tip—so that it drooped slightly downward, and after the substantial meal he enjoyed its aroma, of which he had now entirely regained possession. Though his acclimatization up here might otherwise consist only in his becoming accustomed to the fact that he did not become accustomed, nevertheless, so far as the chemistry of his stomach and the nerves of his dry mucous membranes, with their tendency to bleed, were concerned, the adjustment had evidently at last taken place: imperceptibly, and without his having been able to follow its progress, amid the passing days, these sixty-five or seventy days, his whole organic delight in the well-manufactured vegetable stimulant or narcotic had been restored. He rejoiced in the recovered faculty. Moral satisfaction intensified the physical pleasure. During his confinement to bed he had been sparing with the stock of two hundred he had brought with him; remnants of it still remained. But together with his linen and winter clothes, he had also had Schalleen send him a further five hundred of the Bremen goods, so that he might be well supplied. They came in handsome lacquered boxes adorned in gold with a globe, numerous medals, and an exhibition building flutteringly encircled by flags.

As they sat there, behold, Hofrat Behrens came through the garden. He had taken part in the midday meal in the dining hall that day; at Frau Salomon’s table he had been seen folding his gigantic hands before his plate. Afterward he had presumably lingered on the terrace, struck personal notes, and probably performed the bootlace trick for someone who had not yet seen it. Now he came sauntering toward them along the gravel path, without his doctor’s coat, in a small-checked tailcoat, his stiff hat pushed back on his head, and a cigar likewise in his mouth, a very black one from which he drew great whitish clouds of smoke. His head, his face with its bluishly inflamed cheeks, snub nose, moist blue eyes, and pursed little beard, were small in proportion to the long, slightly stooping, loosely jointed figure and to the dimensions of his hands and feet. He was nervous; he visibly started when he noticed the cousins, and even appeared somewhat embarrassed, since his path was taking him directly toward them. He greeted them in his customary manner, cheerfully and with stock phrases, crying, “Well, well, Timothy!” and invoking blessings upon their metabolism, while obliging them to remain seated when they sought to rise in his honor.

“Spare me, spare me. No ceremony with a plain man like myself. It isn’t my due at all, seeing that you are patients, one as much as the other. You’ve no need for such things. Nothing to be said against the situation as it stands.”

And he remained standing before them, the cigar between the index and middle fingers of his enormous right hand.

“How does the cabbage-roll taste, Castorp? Let me have a look; I’m a connoisseur and an enthusiast. The ash is good: what is this brown beauty?”

“Maria Mancini, _Postre de Banquett_, from Bremen, Herr Hofrat. Costs next to nothing, nineteen pfennigs in plain colors, but has a bouquet you do not otherwise find in this price range. Sumatra-Havana, sand-leaf wrapper, as you see. I have grown very accustomed to her. She is a medium-full blend and highly aromatic, yet mild upon the tongue. She likes one to leave her ash on for a long while; I tap it off twice at most. Naturally she has her little caprices, but the supervision during manufacture must be particularly exact, for Maria is very dependable in her qualities and draws with perfect evenness. May I offer you one?”

“Thank you, we might make an exchange.” And they drew out their cases.

“That one has breeding,” said the Hofrat, handing over his own brand. “Temperament, you know, sap and strength. St. Felix-Brazil—I have always favored that sort of character. A true dispeller of cares; it burns into you like spirits, and especially toward the end there is something explosive about it. A certain reserve in one’s dealings with it is advisable; you cannot light one from another—that exceeds a man’s strength. But better a proper mouthful now and then than water vapor all day long…”

They turned the exchanged gifts between their fingers, examining with expert objectivity those slender bodies which, with the obliquely parallel ribs formed by the raised and here and there slightly loosened edges of their wrappers, with the veins lying upon them and seeming to pulse, the small irregularities of their skin, and the play of light over their surfaces and edges, possessed something organically alive. Hans Castorp put it into words:

“A cigar like this has life. It actually breathes. At home I once took it into my head to keep Maria in an airtight tin box, to protect her from damp. Would you believe she died? She perished and was dead within a week—a collection of leathery corpses.”

And they exchanged their experiences concerning the best way of keeping cigars, particularly imported ones. The Hofrat loved imports; he would have preferred to smoke nothing but heavy Havanas. Unfortunately, however, he could not tolerate them, and two little Henry Clays that he had once taken to his heart at a social gathering had, as he related, very nearly put him under the turf. “I smoke them with my coffee,” he said, “one after the other, and think little of it. But when I have finished, the question occurs to me: precisely what sort of state am I getting into? Quite a different one, at any rate, utterly strange, unlike anything I have ever known in my life. Getting home was no small matter, and once there I thought more than ever: well, I’ll be damned. Legs of ice, you know; cold sweat wherever you please; face white as linen; the heart in every conceivable state; a pulse—now threadlike and scarcely perceptible, now helter-skelter, over hill and dale, you understand; and the brain in a ferment… I was convinced that I was going to dance off. I say ‘dance off’ because that was the expression that occurred to me at the time, and the one I needed to characterize my condition. For in truth it was exceedingly merry and a regular festivity, although I was colossally afraid—or, more correctly, consisted wholly and entirely of fear. But fear and festivity do not exclude one another, as everyone knows. The young rascal who is to have a girl for the first time is afraid too, and so is she, and all the while they are fairly melting with delight. Well, I too was on the point of melting; with heaving bosom I was preparing to dance off. But Mylendonk put me out of the mood with her treatments. Ice compresses, a brush rubdown, a camphor injection—and thus I was preserved for humanity.”

Hans Castorp, seated in his capacity as a patient, looked up with an expression indicative of mental activity at Behrens, whose blue, bulging eyes had filled with tears as he told his tale.

“You paint sometimes, don’t you, Herr Hofrat?” he said suddenly.

The Hofrat made as though recoiling.

“What’s this? Young man, what do you take me for?”

“Forgive me. I happened to hear it mentioned once. It just occurred to me.”

“Well, then, I shall not resort to denial. We are frail mortals, one and all. Yes, such a thing has been known to occur. _Anch’ io sono pittore_, as that Spaniard used to say.”

“Landscapes?” Hans Castorp asked curtly and condescendingly. The circumstances tempted him into this tone.

“As many as you please!” replied the Hofrat with embarrassed boastfulness. “Landscapes, still lifes, animals—a fellow worthy of the name shrinks from nothing whatever.”

“But no portraits?”

“A portrait has been known to slip in among them as well. Would you care to commission me to do yours?”

“Ha, ha, no. But it would be very kind if Herr Hofrat would show us your pictures sometime.”

Joachim too, after gazing at his cousin in astonishment, hastened to affirm that it would be very kind indeed.

Behrens was delighted, flattered to the point of enthusiasm. He even flushed with pleasure, and this time his eyes seemed about to shed their tears.

“With pleasure!” he cried. “With the very greatest pleasure! This instant, if it amuses you! Come along, come with me; I’ll brew us some Turkish coffee at my place!” And he took the young men by the arm, pulled them from the bench, and, linked between them, led them along the gravel path toward his residence, which, as they knew, lay in the nearby northwestern wing of the Berghof building.

“I myself,” Hans Castorp explained, “used to make an attempt in that direction now and then.”

“You don’t say. The genuine article, in oils?”

“No, no, I never got beyond the occasional watercolor. A ship now and then, a seascape—childish things. But I am very fond of looking at pictures, and that was why I took the liberty…”

Joachim in particular found himself somewhat reassured and enlightened concerning his cousin’s disconcerting curiosity by this explanation—and it was more for his sake than for the Hofrat’s that Hans Castorp had referred to his own artistic endeavors. They arrived. There was no magnificent portal flanked by lanterns on this side, such as there was over by the drive. A few rounded steps led up to the oaken front door, which the Hofrat opened with one of the keys from his ample bunch. His hand trembled as he did so; he was decidedly nervous. An anteroom fitted out as a cloakroom received them, and there Behrens hung his stiff hat upon a peg. Inside, in the short corridor separated by a glass door from the common portion of the building, with the rooms of the small private apartment lying on either side, he called for the maid and gave his order. Then, with jovial and encouraging turns of phrase, he ushered his guests in—through one of the doors on the right.

Several rooms furnished in a banally bourgeois fashion, facing forward over the valley, opened into one another without connecting doors and were separated only by portières: an “Old German” dining room; a living room and study with a writing desk, above which hung a student’s cap and crossed dueling sabers, woolly carpets, a library, and a suite of sofa furniture; and finally a smoking cabinet fitted out in the “Turkish” style. Pictures hung everywhere, the Hofrat’s pictures—and the eyes of the newcomers, courteous and prepared to admire, passed over them at once. The Hofrat’s departed wife was to be seen several times: in oils, and also in a photograph upon the writing desk. She was a somewhat enigmatic blonde, thinly and flowingly clad, who, with her hands folded at her left shoulder—not firmly folded, but merely so that the upper joints of the fingers lay faintly across one another—held her eyes either raised toward heaven or deeply lowered and concealed beneath the long lashes that slanted outward from the lids: never did the blessed lady look straight ahead and toward the beholder. Otherwise there were chiefly mountainous landscape motifs: mountains in snow and fir-tree green; mountains wreathed in high-altitude haze; and mountains whose dry, sharp outlines, under Segantini’s influence, cut into a deep-blue sky. There were, furthermore, Alpine herdsmen’s huts; dewlapped cows standing and reclining in sunlit pasture; a plucked chicken letting its twisted neck hang from a tabletop among vegetables; flower pieces; types of mountain folk; and much else—all of it painted with a certain brisk amateurism, in boldly daubed colors that often looked as though they had been squeezed directly from the tube onto the canvas, and must have taken a long time to dry; for all its gross errors, it was sometimes effective.

Viewing them as though at an exhibition, they passed along the walls, accompanied by their host, who now and then named a motif but for the most part remained silent, enjoying, in the proud anxiety of the artist, the sight of his own eyes resting upon his works together with those of strangers. The portrait of Clawdia Chauchat hung in the living room, on the wall beside the windows—Hans Castorp had spied it with a swift glance upon entering, although it bore only a remote resemblance. He deliberately avoided the spot, detained his companions in the dining room, where he pretended to admire a green vista into the Sertig valley with bluish glaciers in the background, then steered, upon his own authority, first into the Turkish cabinet, which he likewise examined thoroughly with praise upon his lips, and afterward inspected the entrance wall of the living room, sometimes calling upon Joachim as well for an expression of approval. At last he turned around and asked, with a measured show of surprise:

“Why, isn’t that a familiar face?”

“You recognize her?” Behrens was eager to hear.

“Yes, there can hardly be any mistake. That is the lady from the Good Russian table, with the French name…”

“Correct, Chauchat. I’m pleased you find it a likeness.”

“Speaking!” Hans Castorp lied, less from falseness than from the consciousness that, had everything been entirely aboveboard, he ought never to have been able to recognize the model at all—as little as Joachim could ever have recognized her by his own powers, good, outwitted Joachim, upon whom a light was now indeed dawning, the true light following the false one Hans Castorp had previously kindled for him. “Ah, so that’s it,” he said softly, and resigned himself to helping inspect the picture. His cousin had contrived to compensate himself for their absence from the sociability of the veranda.

It was a bust portrait in half-profile, somewhat under life size, low-necked, with a drapery of gauze about shoulders and bosom, set in a broad black frame that sloped inward and was adorned at the edge of the canvas with a strip of gold. Frau Chauchat appeared in it ten years older than she was, as is apt to happen in amateur portraits that aspire to be characteristic. There was too much red throughout the face; the nose was badly misdrawn; the color of the hair had not been caught and was too strawlike; the mouth was distorted; the peculiar charm of the physiognomy had either not been perceived or not brought out, but missed through a coarsening of its causes; the whole was a rather botched production and, as a likeness, only distantly related to its subject. But Hans Castorp was not disposed to be exacting about the resemblance; the connections between this canvas and Frau Chauchat’s person were close enough for him. The picture _was meant_ to represent Frau Chauchat; she herself had sat as a model for it in these rooms—that sufficed him, and with emotion he repeated:

“Her very image, as she lives and breathes!”

“Don’t say that,” the Hofrat protested. “It was a thumping piece of work, and I don’t flatter myself that I ever properly mastered it, although we must have had twenty sittings—how are you to master so confounded a visage? One thinks she must be easy to catch, with those Hyperborean cheekbones of hers and eyes like burst slashes in a yeast cake. Not a bit of it. Get the details right, and you make a hash of the whole. A perfect picture puzzle. Do you know her? Perhaps one ought not to paint her from life at all, but work from memory. Do you know her, then?”

“Yes—no, superficially, the way one knows people up here…”

“Well, I know her better from the inside, subcutaneously, you understand—through arterial blood pressure, tissue tension, and lymphatic movement; in those respects I am fairly well informed about her—for certain reasons. The superficial presents greater difficulties. Have you ever watched her walk? Her face is as she walks. A prowler. Take the eyes, for example—I am not speaking of their colour, which has its own treacheries; I mean their setting, their cut. The palpebral fissure, you say, is slit and slanting. But that is merely how it appears to you. What deceives you is the epicanthus—that is, a variation occurring in certain races, and consisting in an excess of skin, arising from these people’s flat nasal bridge, which descends from the covering fold of the eyelid across the inner corner of the eye. Draw the skin taut above the root of the nose, and you have an eye exactly like one of ours. A piquant mystification, then, though not a particularly honourable one; for, examined in the light, the epicanthus amounts to an atavistic arrest of development.”

“So that is how it is,” said Hans Castorp. “I did not know, but I have long been interested in what lies behind eyes of that sort.”

“Vexation, deception,” the Hofrat affirmed. “Simply draw them slanting and slit, and you are lost. You must produce the slant and the slit as nature produces them, practise illusion within illusion, so to speak; and for that, of course, you must know about the epicanthus. Knowledge can never do any harm. Look at the skin, the bodily skin here. Is it vivid, or is it not particularly vivid in your opinion?”

“Enormously,” said Hans Castorp, “the skin is painted with enormous vividness. I believe I have never encountered any so well painted. One thinks one can see the pores.” And he lightly passed the edge of his hand over the décolletage in the picture, which stood out very white against the exaggerated redness of the face, like a part of the body ordinarily unexposed to the light, and thus, intentionally or otherwise, obtrusively evoked the notion of nakedness—an effect that was, in any case, rather crude.

Nevertheless, Hans Castorp’s praise was justified. The matt-shimmering whiteness of this delicate, though by no means meagre, bust, which lost itself in bluish draperies of gauze, possessed much of nature; it had visibly been painted with feeling, yet without prejudice to a certain sweetness emanating from it, the artist had contrived to impart to it a kind of scientific reality and living exactitude. He had made use of the granular character of the canvas, allowing it, particularly in the region of the gently prominent collarbones, to show through the oil paint as the natural unevenness of the skin’s surface. A small mole on the left, where the bosom began to divide, had not been overlooked, and between its elevations one fancied one could see a faint bluish tracery of veins gleaming through. It was as though, beneath the beholder’s gaze, a scarcely perceptible shiver of sensitivity passed over this nakedness—one might venture to say: one could imagine oneself perceiving the perspiration, the invisible vital exhalation of this flesh, as though, if one were to press one’s lips upon it, one would smell not paint and varnish, but the human body. In all this we are reproducing Hans Castorp’s impressions; yet, though he was particularly disposed to receive such impressions, it must nevertheless be objectively stated that Frau Chauchat’s décolletage was by far the most remarkable piece of painting in these rooms.

Hofrat Behrens rocked himself from heel to ball, his hands in his trouser pockets, while contemplating his work together with his visitors.

“Glad to hear it, my dear colleague,” he said, “glad that you appreciate it. It is simply a good thing, and can do no harm at all, to know one’s way about a little beneath the epidermis as well, and to be able to paint along with what cannot be seen—in other words, to stand in some relation to nature other than the merely lyrical, let us say; if, for instance, one happens in one’s secondary occupation to be a physician, physiologist, anatomist, and to possess one’s own quiet knowledge of the Dessous besides—that can be an advantage, say what you will, it decidedly gives one the preference. That bodily hide there has science in it; you can examine it under the microscope for organic correctness. You see there not only the mucous and horny layers of the epidermis, but beneath them the tissue of the dermis has been conceived as well, with its sebaceous glands and sweat glands and blood vessels and papillae—and beneath that again the fatty layer, the padding, you know, the foundation which, with its multitude of fat cells, produces those charming feminine forms. But what is known and conceived along with a thing speaks along with it too. It flows into your hand and takes effect; it is not there, and yet somehow it is there—and that is what gives vividness.”

Hans Castorp was all fire and flame for this conversation; his brow was flushed, his eyes ardent, and he did not know what to answer first, for he had much to say. First, he intended to move the picture away from the shadowed window-wall to a more favourable place; secondly, he was determined to take up the Hofrat’s remarks on the nature of the skin, which interested him urgently; but thirdly, he wished to attempt the expression of a general and philosophical thought of his own, which likewise lay exceedingly close to his heart. Even as he laid his hands upon the portrait to take it down, he began hastily:

“Yes, yes! Very good, that is important. I should like to say… That is, Herr Hofrat said: ‘In some other relation as well.’ It would be a good thing if, besides the lyrical—as I believe you called it—the artistic relation, there were another one too; if one regarded things, in short, from another angle as well, the medical one, for example. That is colossally apt—forgive me, Herr Hofrat—I mean, it is so extraordinarily right because these are not really fundamentally different relations and angles of vision at all, but, strictly speaking, always one and the same—merely varieties of it, I mean: shades, I mean, then: variations of one and the same general interest, of which artistic occupation too is merely one part and one expression, if I may say so. Yes, forgive me, I am taking the picture down; it has absolutely no light here, and you will see, I shall just carry it over to the sofa and see whether it does not look altogether different there… What I meant to say was: What does medical science occupy itself with? Naturally I know nothing about it, but it does occupy itself with man. And jurisprudence, legislation and the administration of justice? With man as well. And philology, with which the practice of the pedagogical profession is for the most part associated? And theology, the cure of souls, the pastoral ministry? All of them with man; they are all merely different shades of one and the same important and… principal interest, namely the interest in man; they are the humanistic professions, in a word, and if one wishes to study them, one first of all learns the ancient languages as a foundation, does one not, for the sake of formal cultivation, as they say. You may perhaps be surprised to hear me speak of it in this way; after all, I am only a realist, a technician. But only recently, while lying down, I was thinking about it: it is excellent, an excellent institution in the world, that at the basis of every sort of humanistic profession one should place the formal element, the idea of form, of beautiful form, you know—it brings something noble and superfluous into the matter, and besides that something of feeling and… courtesy—the interest thereby becomes almost something like a gallant concern… That is, I am in all probability expressing myself inappropriately, but one sees from this how the intellectual and the beautiful intermingle and really have always been one and the same—in other words, science and art—and therefore artistic occupation unquestionably belongs among them too, as a fifth faculty, so to speak; that it too is nothing other than a humanistic profession, a shade of the humanistic interest, inasmuch as its most important theme or concern is once again man—you will concede that. I have only painted ships and water myself, when in my youth I made attempts in that direction, but the most attractive thing in painting, to my mind, is and remains the portrait, because it has man directly for its object; that was why I asked at once whether Herr Hofrat had also been active in this field… Would it not hang considerably more favourably here after all?”

Both of them, Behrens as well as Joachim, looked at him to see whether he was not ashamed of all he had improvised on the spur of the moment. But Hans Castorp was far too absorbed in the matter to become embarrassed. He held the picture against the wall above the sofa and demanded an answer as to whether it was not considerably better lit there. At the same time the maid brought hot water, a spirit stove, and coffee cups on a tray. The Hofrat directed her into the adjoining cabinet and said:

“But then you ought really not to be so greatly interested in painting as, first and foremost, in sculpture… Yes, it naturally has more light there. If you think it can bear so much… In sculpture, I mean, because that deals most purely and exclusively with man in general. But we must not let the water boil away.”

“Very true, sculpture,” said Hans Castorp as they went across, and forgot either to hang the picture up again or set it down: he took it with him, carrying it at his side into the adjoining room. “Certainly, in a Greek Venus or an athlete the humanistic element undoubtedly appears most clearly; at bottom it is probably the true thing, the properly humanistic kind of art, when one considers it.”

“Well, as for little Chauchat,” the Hofrat remarked, “she is probably more a subject for painting, at any rate; I fancy Phidias, or the other fellow with the Mosaic ending to his name, would have turned up their noses at her sort of physiognomy… What are you doing there, why are you lugging that great daub about?”

“Thank you, I shall set it here against the leg of my chair for the moment; it will stand quite well there just now. But the Greek sculptors did not trouble much about the head; it was the body that mattered to them—perhaps that was precisely the humanistic element… And feminine sculpture, then—that is fat?”

“That is fat!” said the Hofrat conclusively; he had unlocked a wall cupboard and taken from it the accessories for preparing coffee: a tubular Turkish mill, the long-handled boiling cup, and the double vessel for sugar and ground coffee, all of brass. “Palmitin, stearin, olein,” he said, pouring coffee beans from a tin into the mill, whose handle he began to turn. “You gentlemen see, I do everything myself, from the very beginning; it tastes twice as good. What did you think it was? Ambrosia?”

“No, I knew it myself already. It is only curious to hear it said,” Hans Castorp replied.

They sat in the angle between door and window, at a bamboo tabouret with an ornamented Oriental brass top, upon which the coffee equipage had found room among the smoking utensils: Joachim beside Behrens on the ottoman, which was lavishly furnished with silken cushions, and Hans Castorp in a club chair on castors, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat’s portrait. A brightly coloured carpet lay beneath them. The Hofrat spooned coffee and sugar into the handled cup, added water, and allowed the beverage to boil over the spirit flame. It foamed brown in the onion-shaped little cups and, when sipped, proved as strong as it was sweet.

“Yours too, by the way,” said Behrens. “Your sculptural form, so far as one can speak of it, is naturally fat as well, though not to the same degree as with women. In our sort, fat usually makes up only a twentieth of the body’s weight; in women, a sixteenth. Without the subcutaneous cellular tissue, we should all be nothing but morels. It dwindles with the years, of course, and then you get the familiar unaesthetic folds and wrinkles. It is thickest and fattest on the female breast and belly, on the thighs—in short, wherever there is something doing for heart and hand. The soles of the feet are fatty and ticklish too.”

Hans Castorp turned the tubular coffee mill between his hands. Like the whole set, it was probably of Indian or Persian rather than Turkish origin: the style of the engravings worked into the brass, their surfaces gleaming brightly out of the matt ground, indicated as much. Hans Castorp studied the ornamentation without at once being able to make sense of it. When he had made sense of it, he suddenly blushed.

“Yes, that is the sort of apparatus intended for unmarried gentlemen,” said Behrens. “That is why I keep it under lock and key, you know. My kitchen fairy might ruin her eyes on it. You, I suppose, will suffer no further harm from it. It was given to me once by a patient, an Egyptian princess who honoured us with her presence for a little year. You see, the pattern is repeated on every piece. Droll, is it not?”

“Yes, it is curious,” Hans Castorp replied. “Oh no, naturally it does not affect me. One may even take it seriously and solemnly, if one chooses—although in that case it is perhaps not altogether in place on a coffee service. The ancients, I am told, occasionally put such things on their coffins. The obscene and the sacred were, in a manner of speaking, one and the same to them.”

“Well, as for the princess,” said Behrens, “I believe she was rather more inclined towards the former. Incidentally, I still have some very fine cigarettes from her too; something exceptionally choice, brought out only on first-class occasions.” And he fetched the gaudily coloured box from the wall cupboard to offer them. Joachim abstained, drawing his heels together. Hans Castorp accepted, and lit the unusually large and broad cigarette, adorned with a sphinx stamped in gold, which was in fact magnificent.

“Do tell us something more about the skin,” he begged, “if you would be so kind, Herr Hofrat!” He had taken Frau Chauchat’s portrait to himself again, had set it upon his knee, and was contemplating it as he leaned back in the chair, the cigarette between his lips. “Not the fatty layer in particular; we know now what that amounts to. But the human skin in general, which you understand how to paint so well.”

“The skin? Are you interested in physiology?”

“Very much! Yes, I have always been interested in it to the highest degree. The human body—I have always had an exceptionally strong feeling for it. Sometimes I have already asked myself whether I ought not to have become a doctor—in a certain sense, I believe, it would not have suited me badly. For anyone interested in the body is also interested in illness—indeed, especially in illness—is he not? Besides, it does not signify much; I might have become various things. I might, for example, have become a clergyman as well.”

“What’s that?”

“Yes, at moments it has sometimes seemed to me that I should really have been altogether in my element there.”

“Then why did you become an engineer?”

“By chance. It was more or less external circumstances, I suppose, that tipped the balance.”

“Well now, the skin? What am I to tell you about your sensory integument? It is your external brain, you understand—ontogenetically of precisely the same origin as the apparatus for the so-called higher sense organs up there in your skull: the central nervous system, you must know, is merely a slight modification of the outer layer of skin; and among the lower animals there is no distinction whatever between central and peripheral—they smell and taste with their skin, you must imagine, they possess nothing but cutaneous sensuality—which must be quite agreeable, if one puts oneself in their place. With highly differentiated creatures like you and me, on the other hand, the skin’s ambitions are confined to susceptibility to tickling; it is now merely an organ of protection and alarm, though infernally vigilant against anything that tries to come too close to the body—it even extends tactile apparatus beyond itself: the hair, that is, the little hairs of the body, which consist solely of keratinized skin cells and enable us to feel an approach before the skin itself has even been touched. Between ourselves, it is even possible that the skin’s protective and defensive vocation is not confined to the physical alone... Do you know how you blush and turn pale?”

“Not precisely.”

“Yes, to be candid, we do not know it with absolute precision either, at least as regards blushing from shame. The matter has not been entirely elucidated, for no dilator muscles that might be set in motion by the vasomotor nerves have so far been demonstrated in the blood vessels. Just why a cock’s comb swells—or whatever other vainglorious examples one might adduce—is mysterious, so to speak, particularly since a psychical influence is involved. We assume that connections exist between the cerebral cortex and the vascular centre in the medulla. And so, under certain stimuli—for example, you feel mightily ashamed—this connection comes into play, and the vascular nerves leading to the face come into play, and then the blood vessels there expand and fill until your head looks like a turkey-cock’s; you are positively swollen with blood and can scarcely see out of your eyes. In other cases, however—God knows what awaits you, something perhaps both beautiful and exceedingly dangerous—the blood vessels of the skin contract, and the skin grows pale and cold and sinks in, and then sheer emotion makes you look like a corpse, with leaden eye-sockets and a white, pointed nose. But the sympathetic nervous system sets the heart properly drumming.”

“So that is how it happens,” said Hans Castorp.

“Approximately. Those are reactions, you know. But since all reactions and reflexes originally serve a purpose, we physiologists are almost inclined to suppose that these concomitants of psychical affects are themselves really expedient means of protection, defensive reflexes of the body, like gooseflesh. Do you know how you get gooseflesh?”

“Not altogether.”

“That, you see, is an arrangement of the sebaceous glands, which secrete the skin’s lubricant—a greasy, albuminous secretion, you know, not exactly appetizing, but it keeps the skin supple, so that it does not crack and split from dryness and is pleasant to the touch—it does not bear thinking what human skin would feel like without its coating of cholesterol. These ointment-glands of the skin have small involuntary muscles capable of making the glands stand erect; and when they do so, your skin becomes like a grater, just as it did for the boy over whom the princess poured the bucket of gudgeons; and if the stimulus is powerful, the hair follicles stand erect as well—the hair on your head and the little hairs of your body bristle like the quills of a porcupine defending itself, and you may say that you have learnt what it is to shudder.”

“Oh, I,” said Hans Castorp, “I have learnt that often enough. In fact, I shudder rather easily, on all sorts of occasions. The only thing that surprises me is that the glands stand erect on such very different occasions. When someone scrapes a slate-pencil over glass, one gets gooseflesh; and particularly beautiful music may suddenly give one gooseflesh too; and when I took Communion at my confirmation, I had one shiver after another—the crawling and prickling simply would not stop. It is strange, all the things that can set those little muscles in motion.”

“Yes,” said Behrens, “a stimulus is a stimulus. The body does not give a damn about the content of the stimulus. Gudgeons or Communion, the sebaceous glands simply stand erect.”

“Herr Hofrat,” said Hans Castorp, contemplating the picture on his knees, “there is something I wanted to return to. You spoke a little while ago of internal processes, the movement of the lymph and so forth... What is the nature of all that? I should like to hear more about it—the movement of the lymph, for example—if you would be so kind; it interests me greatly.”

“I can well believe it,” Behrens replied. “The lymph is the subtlest, most intimate and delicate thing in the whole economy of the body—you have some inkling of that, I suppose, or you would not ask. People are always talking of the blood and its mysteries, and calling it a very special juice. But lymph is the very juice of the juice, the essence, you understand, the milk of the blood, an altogether delectable fluid—and after fatty food, incidentally, it really does look like milk.” And cheerfully, in his stock phrases, he began to describe how the blood—that theatrical-cloak-red broth of fat, albumen, iron, sugar, and salts, prepared by respiration and digestion, saturated with gases and laden with the slag of tissue-renewal—was forced by the heart-pump through the vessels at a temperature of thirty-eight degrees, everywhere maintaining the body’s metabolism, its animal heat, in a word, dear life itself; how, then, the blood did not come into direct contact with the cells, but the pressure under which it stood caused an extract, a milky fluid, to perspire through the walls of the vessels and forced it into the tissues, so that it penetrated everywhere, filled every tiny crevice as tissue-fluid, and stretched and tensed the elastic cellular tissue. That was tissue tension, turgor; and turgor in its turn caused the lymph, after it had sweetly bathed the cells and exchanged substances with them, to be driven into the lymphatic vessels, the _vasa lymphatica_, and to flow back into the blood—to the amount of a litre and a half each day. He described the system of tubes and absorbent vessels that formed the lymphatic system; spoke of the thoracic duct, which collected the lymph from the legs, the abdomen and chest, one arm and one side of the head; and then of delicate filtering organs formed at many points along the lymphatic vessels, called lymph glands and situated in the neck, the armpits, the crooks of the elbows, the hollows of the knees, and other similarly intimate and tender regions of the body. “Now swellings can occur there,” Behrens explained, “and that, I believe, was where we began—thickenings of the lymph glands, let us say, in the hollows of the knees and the joints of the arms, dropsical tumours here and there; and there is always a reason for it, though not necessarily a pleasant one. Under certain circumstances, the suspicion of a tubercular obstruction of the lymphatic vessels is more than strongly suggested.”

Hans Castorp was silent. “Yes,” he said softly after a pause, “it is true, I could quite well have become a doctor. The thoracic duct... The lymph from the legs... It interests me greatly.—What is the body!” he suddenly cried, breaking out impetuously. “What is flesh! What is the human frame! Of what does it consist? Tell us this afternoon, Herr Hofrat! Tell us once and for all, and precisely, so that we may know!”

“Of water,” Behrens answered. “So organic chemistry interests you too? Water is by far the greater part of what the humanistic human body consists of—nothing better and nothing worse; there is no cause to become excited. The dry substance amounts to only twenty-five per cent, and twenty per cent of that is ordinary hen’s albumen—proteins, if you care to put it a little more grandly—to which, in fact, only a little fat and salt have been added; and that is practically all.”

“But the hen’s albumen. What is that?”

“All manner of elementary things. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur. Sometimes phosphorus as well. You are developing an extravagant thirst for knowledge. Some proteins are also combined with carbohydrates, that is, with grape sugar and starch. In old age the flesh grows tough; that is because the collagen increases in the connective tissue—the glue, you understand, the chief constituent of bones and cartilage. What else am I to tell you? In the muscular plasma we have a protein called myosinogen, which after death coagulates into muscle fibrin and produces rigor mortis.”

“Ah yes, rigor mortis,” said Hans Castorp brightly. “Very good, very good. And then comes the general analysis, the anatomy of the grave.”

“Why, naturally. That was prettily put, by the way. Then the matter becomes diffuse. One flows apart, so to speak. Just consider all that water! And without life the other ingredients are not very durable either; putrefaction decomposes them into simpler compounds—inorganic ones.”

“Putrefaction, decomposition,” said Hans Castorp, “is combustion, surely—combination with oxygen, so far as I know.”

“Remarkably correct. Oxidation.”

“And life?”

“That too. That too, young man. Oxidation too. Life, for the most part, is merely the combustion by oxygen of cellular albumen; that is where the fine animal heat comes from, of which one sometimes has too much. Yes indeed, life is dying; there is not much to be done about prettifying it—_une destruction organique_, as some Frenchman once called it in his native levity. Life smells of it too. If it seems otherwise to us, our judgment has been bribed.”

“And if one is interested in life,” said Hans Castorp, “one is interested particularly in death. Is that not so?”

“Well, some sort of distinction does remain, after all. Life means that amid the exchange of matter, form is preserved.”

“What is the point of preserving form?” said Hans Castorp.

“What is the point? Now listen, there is not the least bit of humanism in what you are saying.”

“Form is hoity-toity.”

“There is something decidedly venturesome about you today. Positively unruly. But now I am sinking,” said the Hofrat. “I am growing melancholy,” he said, and laid his enormous hand across his eyes. “You see, it comes over me like this. Here I have been drinking coffee with you, and I enjoyed it, and all at once it comes over me that I am growing melancholy. You gentlemen must excuse me now. It has been something quite special for me, and has given me all manner of pleasure...”

The cousins had sprung to their feet. They reproached themselves, they said, for having detained Herr Hofrat so long... He responded with reassuring protestations. Hans Castorp hastened to carry Frau Chauchat’s portrait into the adjoining room and hang it back in its place. They did not go into the garden again in order to reach their quarters. Behrens showed them the way through the building, accompanying them as far as the connecting glass door. His nape seemed to protrude more strongly than usual in the state of mind that had so suddenly come over him; he blinked his protuberant eyes, and his little moustache, crooked from the one-sided pursing of his lips, had acquired a woeful expression.

As they passed along corridors and down staircases, Hans Castorp said:

“Admit that it was a good idea of mine.”

“At any rate, it was a change,” Joachim replied. “And the two of you certainly expressed yourselves on a good many subjects in the course of it, that must be admitted. It was even a little too pell-mell for me. It is high time now that we managed at least twenty minutes of rest cure before tea. Perhaps you think it hoity-toity of me to insist upon it so strictly—unruly as you have become of late. But then, after all, you do not need it as badly as I do.”

Researches

Thus came what had to come, and what only a short while before Hans Castorp would never have dreamt of experiencing here: winter descended—the winter of these parts, which Joachim already knew, since the previous one had still been in full dominion when he arrived here, but of which Hans Castorp felt somewhat afraid, although he knew himself to be excellently equipped for it. His cousin sought to reassure him.

“You must not imagine it as too ferocious,” he said, “not positively arctic. One feels the cold very little because of the dryness of the air and the absence of wind. If one wraps oneself up well, one can remain on the balcony until deep into the night without feeling cold. It is the business of the temperature inversion above the fog line—it grows warmer at higher elevations; people did not understand that so well in the old days. It is more likely to feel cold when it rains. But now you have your rest-cure sack, and they put on a little heat as well when the need becomes pressing.”

For the rest, there could be no question of surprise attack or violence: winter came gently, and at first looked not very different from many a day that high summer itself had already brought. For several days a south wind had blown, the sun pressed heavily down, the valley seemed shortened and narrowed, and the Alpine scenery at its outlet lay near and sober to the eye. Then clouds gathered, advancing northeastward from Piz Michel and the Tinzenhorn, and the valley darkened. Then the rain came down heavily. Then the rain grew impure, whitish-grey; snow had mingled with it; at last there was nothing but snow, the valley was filled with driving flakes, and since this continued for a good long while, while the temperature meanwhile had fallen considerably, the snow could no longer melt away altogether: it was wet, but it remained lying; the valley lay in a thin, damp, defective white garment, against which the needle-rough slopes stood out black; in the dining-room the pipes grew lukewarm. This was early November, about All Souls' Day, and it was nothing new. It had already been so in August, and one had long since lost the habit of regarding snow as a privilege of winter. Always and in every kind of weather, if only from afar, one had had some of it before one's eyes, for remnants and traces of it perpetually gleamed in the clefts and ravines of the rocky Rätikon range that seemed to bar the valley's entrance, and the most distant mountain majesties of the south had always sent their snowy greetings across. But both continued, the snowfall and the decline in warmth. The sky hung pale grey and low over the valley, dissolving into flakes that fell silently and without cease, with an extravagant and slightly disquieting abundance, and it grew colder by the hour. The morning came when Hans Castorp had seven degrees in his room, and the next day there were only five. That was frost, and it kept within bounds, but it persisted. It had frozen at night; now it froze by day as well, from morning till evening, while the snow continued to fall, with brief interruptions, through the fourth and fifth, the seventh day. The snow now accumulated mightily; little by little it became an embarrassment. Paths had been shovelled along the service way to the bench by the watercourse, and down the carriage road into the valley; but they were narrow, there was no passing on them, and when people met, one had to step aside into the snowbank and sank to the knee. A stone snow-roller, drawn by a horse that a man led by the halter, rolled all day through the streets of the health resort below, and a yellow sleigh-tram of antiquated, stagecoach-like appearance, with a snowplough in front that shovelled the white masses aside, ran between the Kurhaus quarter and the northern part of the settlement known as the “Dorf.” The world, the narrow, lofty, secluded world of those up here, now appeared thickly furred and padded; there was not a pillar or post that did not wear a white cap; the steps leading to the portal of the Berghof vanished, transformed into an inclined plane; heavy, comically shaped cushions burdened every branch of the pines; here and there the mass slipped off, scattered into powder, and drifted between the trunks as cloud and white mist. All around, the mountains lay snowbound, rough in their lower regions, while the variously shaped summits rising above the tree line were softly covered. It was dark; the sun stood only as a pallid glow behind the veiling. But the snow gave an indirect and gentle light, a milky brightness that became both world and people well, although the noses beneath the white or coloured woollen caps were red.

In the dining-room, at the seven tables, the onset of winter, the great season of these regions, dominated the conversation. Many tourists and sportsmen, it was said, had arrived and were filling the hotels of “Dorf” and “Platz.” The depth of the fallen snow was estimated at sixty centimetres, and its condition was said to be ideal from the skier's point of view. Work was proceeding briskly on the bobsleigh run, which descended into the valley over on the northwestern slope from the Schatzalp; it could be opened within the next few days, provided the föhn did not upset the calculation. People looked forward to the bustle of the healthy, the visitors from below, which would now develop up here once again, to the sporting festivals and races that they intended to attend even against orders, by shirking the rest cure and slipping away. There was something new, Hans Castorp heard, an invention from the North: skikjöring, a race in which the participants, standing on skis, would be drawn by horses. They meant to slip away for that.—Christmas, too, was discussed.

Christmas! No, Hans Castorp had not yet thought of that. It had been easy enough for him to say and write that, by virtue of the medical findings, he would have to spend the winter up here with Joachim. But that included, as now became apparent, his spending Christmas here as well, and there was undoubtedly something alarming to the heart in that, if only, though not solely, because he had never yet spent that season anywhere but at home, in the bosom of his family. Well then, in God's name, that too must now be accepted into the bargain. He was no longer a child; Joachim likewise seemed to take no particular offence at it, but to reconcile himself to it without whimpering—and where in the world, and under what circumstances, had Christmas not been celebrated before now!

For all that, it seemed to him rather precipitate to speak of Christmas before the first Sunday in Advent; there were still a good six weeks to go. But these were skipped over and swallowed up in the dining-room—an inward procedure in which Hans Castorp had already learned, on his own account, to be proficient, though he was not yet accustomed to practising it on so bold a scale as his longer-established companions in life. Such stages in the course of the year as Christmas seemed to them ideally suited as points of support and gymnastic apparatus, upon which one might nimbly vault across the empty intervals of time. They all had fever, their metabolism was heightened, their bodily life intensified and accelerated—it might, after all, have some connection with this that they drove through time so rapidly and in such masses. He would not have been surprised if they had already regarded Christmas as disposed of and begun speaking at once of New Year and Carnival. But by no means were they so frivolous and unsettled in the Berghof dining-room. At Christmas they came to a halt; it afforded occasion for care and perplexity. They deliberated over the collective present which, in accordance with established sanatorium custom, was to be presented to the chief, Hofrat Behrens, on Christmas Eve, and for which a general collection had been opened. The previous year they had given him a travelling trunk, as those who had been here for more than a year related. For this year there was talk of a new operating table, a painter's easel, a fur coat for walking, a rocking-chair, an ivory ear-trumpet somehow “inlaid”; and Settembrini, when asked, recommended the gift of an allegedly forthcoming lexicographical work entitled “The Sociology of Suffering”; but only a bookseller who had recently begun sitting at Kleefeld's table supported him. No agreement had yet been reached. Communication with the Russian guests presented difficulties. The collection divided. The Muscovites declared that they wished to give Behrens a present on their own account. For days Frau Stöhr displayed the utmost agitation over a sum of money, ten francs, which in a moment of rashness she had advanced for Frau Iltis during the collection, and which the latter “forgot” to repay. She “forgot” it—the inflections with which Frau Stöhr endowed this word were manifold and delicately graduated, all of them calculated to express the profoundest disbelief in a forgetfulness that appeared determined to defy every allusion and subtle prodding of the memory, of which Frau Stöhr, as she assured them, had by no means been sparing. Several times Frau Stöhr renounced the money and declared that she would make Iltis a gift of the sum she owed. “So I pay for myself and for her,” she said; “very well, the shame is not mine!” At last, however, she had hit upon a way out, which she communicated to the company at table amid general merriment: she had had the ten francs paid out to her by the “administration” and charged to Iltis's account—whereby the sluggish debtor had been outwitted and this matter, at least, set right.

It had ceased snowing. The sky opened here and there; grey-blue clouds, parting from one another, admitted glimpses of sunlight that tinged the landscape blue. Then it cleared completely. A lucid frost prevailed, the pure, assured splendour of winter in mid-November, and the panorama beyond the arches of the balcony loggia—the powdered forests, the softly filled ravines, the white and sunlit valley beneath the blue-radiant sky—was magnificent. In the evening especially, when the nearly rounded moon appeared, the world became enchanted and marvellous. Crystalline shimmer and diamond glitter reigned far and wide. The forests stood out in the sharpest white and black. The regions of the heavens remote from the moon lay dark, embroidered with stars. Sharp, precise, intense shadows, which seemed more real and significant than the things themselves, fell from the houses, the trees, the telegraph poles across the flashing surface. The frost stood at seven or eight degrees a few hours after sunset. The world seemed spellbound into icy purity, its natural uncleanness covered over and frozen fast in the dream of a fantastic death-enchantment.

Hans Castorp remained until late at night in his balcony loggia above the enchanted winter valley, far longer than Joachim, who withdrew at ten, or at any rate not much later. His excellent reclining chair, with its three-part cushion and neck-roll, had been drawn close to the wooden railing, along which ran a cushion of snow; on the little white table beside it the electric lamp burned, and next to a stack of books stood a glass of rich milk, the evening milk that was brought to the rooms of all the residents of the “Berghof” at nine o'clock, and into which Hans Castorp poured a dash of cognac to make it more palatable. He had already brought into service every available means of protection against the cold, the whole apparatus. He was encased to the chest in the buttoned fur sack that he had purchased betimes from a suitable shop in the health resort, and around this he had wrapped the two camel-hair blankets according to the ritual. In addition, over his winter suit he wore his short fur jacket, a woollen cap on his head, felt boots on his feet, and thickly lined gloves on his hands, though these, to be sure, could not prevent his fingers from growing numb.

What kept him out so long, until near and even past midnight—when the disreputable Russian couple had long since left the neighbouring loggia—was no doubt in part the enchantment of the winter night, especially since until eleven o'clock music wove itself into it, rising from the valley, now from near, now from farther away; but chiefly it was indolence and stimulation, both at once and acting in concert: namely, the indolence and movement-averse weariness of his body, and the busy stimulation of his mind, which would not come to rest over certain new and absorbing studies upon which the young man had embarked. The weather taxed him; the frost exerted a strenuous and consuming effect upon his organism. He ate a great deal, availing himself of the prodigious Berghof meals, at which roast geese followed garnished roast beef, with that more than ordinary appetite which up here was altogether the order of the day and, in winter as it appeared, even more so than in summer. At the same time he was ruled by a craving for sleep, so that by day, as on the moonlit evenings, he often fell asleep over the books through which he was working, and which we shall presently describe, only to resume his researches after a few minutes of unconsciousness. Animated speech—and up here he was more inclined than formerly in the flatlands to speak quickly, unreservedly, and even daringly—animated speech, then, with Joachim during their prescribed walks through the snow exhausted him greatly; dizziness and trembling, a sensation of stupefaction and intoxication, came over him, and his head burned hot. His curve had risen since the onset of winter, and Hofrat Behrens had let fall a word about injections, which he was accustomed to employ in cases of persistent elevated temperature, and to which two-thirds of the guests, Joachim among them, had regularly to submit. But the increased production of heat in his body, Hans Castorp thought, was surely connected with the mental excitement and activity which, for their part, held him fast in his reclining chair far into the glittering, frosty night. The reading that enthralled him suggested such explanations.

No little reading was done in the rest-cure galleries and on the private balconies of the international sanatorium “Berghof”—especially by beginners and short-termers; for those who had been there many months, or even several years, had long since learned to annihilate time and put it behind them, by virtue of an inward virtuosity, even without diversion or occupation of the mind; indeed, they declared that only bungling novices needed to cling to a book while doing so. At most, one might have one lying on one's lap or on the little table beside one; that was amply sufficient to give one the feeling of being provided for. The sanatorium library, polyglot and rich in illustrated works—the enlarged recreational stock of a dentist's waiting-room—was available for unrestricted use. Volumes of novels from the lending library in “Platz” were exchanged. Now and then a book or pamphlet appeared that was eagerly fought over, and for which even those who no longer read reached out their hands with only feigned phlegm. At the point in time where we now pause, a badly printed booklet introduced by Herr Albin was passing from hand to hand, entitled “The Art of Seduction.” It had been translated very literally from the French; indeed, even the syntax of that language had been preserved in the translation, whereby the exposition acquired great bearing and piquant elegance, and it developed the philosophy of carnal love and voluptuousness in the spirit of a worldly, life-affirming paganism. Frau Stöhr soon read it and found it “intoxicating.” Frau Magnus, the same lady who was losing protein, agreed with her unreservedly. Her husband, the brewer, maintained that he personally had profited in several respects from reading it, but regretted that Frau Magnus had absorbed the work, for such things “spoilt” women and gave them immodest notions. This remark increased the craving for the book by no small degree. Between two ladies of the lower rest-cure gallery who had arrived in October, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrialist, and a certain Widow Hessenfeld from Berlin, each of whom claimed to have put down her name to read it before the other, there occurred after dinner a more than disagreeable, indeed actually violent scene, to which Hans Castorp was obliged to listen from his balcony loggia, and which ended in a hysterical fit of screaming on the part of one of the two ladies—it may have been Redisch, but might equally have been Hessenfeld—and in the removal of the rage-stricken woman to her room. The younger set had gained possession of the treatise before their maturer fellows. Some of them studied it together after supper in various rooms. Hans Castorp saw the youth with the fingernail hand it over in the dining-room to a young, newly arrived patient with a mild case, Fränzchen Oberdank, a sheltered little daughter of the house with fair hair parted neatly down the middle, who had only recently been brought up here by her mother.

Perhaps there were exceptions, perhaps some who filled the hours of the rest cure with serious intellectual occupation of one kind or another, with some study conducive to advancement, if only in order thereby to preserve a connection with life in the flatlands, or to lend time a little weight and depth, so that it should not be pure time and otherwise nothing at all. Perhaps, besides Herr Settembrini, with his endeavours to eradicate suffering, and the honour-loving Joachim with his Russian exercise books, there was one here and another there who took this course—if not among the inmates of the dining hall, which was truly improbable, then possibly precisely among the bedridden and the moribund—Hans Castorp was inclined to believe it. As for himself, at the time when _Ocean steamships_ no longer had anything to say to him, he had arranged for several books connected with his future profession, works of engineering science and naval construction, to be sent up from home together with his winter requirements. These volumes, however, lay neglected in favour of other textbooks, belonging to an entirely different branch and faculty, whose subject matter had taken young Hans Castorp's fancy. They dealt with anatomy, physiology, and the science of life, were written in various languages—German, French, and English—and one day they were sent up to him by the local bookseller, evidently because he had ordered them, on his own initiative and without saying a word, during a walk he had taken down to Platz without Joachim, who had just then been summoned for an injection or a weighing. Joachim regarded the books in his cousin's hands with surprise. They had been expensive, as scientific works are; the prices were still marked on the insides of the covers and on the wrappers. He asked why Hans Castorp, if he wished to read such things, had not borrowed them from the Hofrat, who was surely well supplied with literature of that sort. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own them himself; reading was quite a different matter when the book belonged to one; besides, he liked to go at it with a pencil and underline passages. For hours Joachim heard from his cousin's balcony the sound of the paper knife cutting open the leaves of the stitched gatherings.

The volumes were heavy and unwieldy; as he lay, Hans Castorp propped their lower edges against his chest, his stomach. They pressed upon him, but he accepted the discomfort; with his mouth half open he let his eyes descend the learned pages, which were illuminated almost unnecessarily by the reddish glow of the shaded little lamp, since at need they would have been legible in the strong moonlight—following them with his head until his chin rested upon his breast, an attitude in which the reader, before lifting his face to the next page, would linger for a while, perhaps in thought, perhaps slumbering, or thinking in half-slumber. He pursued his researches deeply; while the moon made its measured way above the crystalline, glittering high-mountain valley, he read of organized matter, of the properties of protoplasm, of that sensitive substance which maintained itself in a strange suspension of being between construction and dissolution, and of its formation from primordial yet ever-present fundamental forms; he read, with urgent concern, of life and its sacred-unclean mystery.

What was life? No one knew. It was conscious of itself, beyond doubt, as soon as it was life, but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as susceptibility to stimuli, undoubtedly awakened to a certain degree even at the lowest, most unformed levels of its occurrence; it was impossible to assign the first appearance of conscious processes to any particular point in its general or individual history, to make consciousness dependent, for instance, upon the existence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous system, much less a cerebrum, yet no one ventured to deny them the capacity to perceive stimuli. Life, moreover, could be anaesthetized—life itself, not merely particular organs of susceptibility that it might have developed, not merely the nerves. The irritability of every substance endowed with life, in the vegetable kingdom as in the animal, could be temporarily abolished; eggs and spermatozoa could be narcotized with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness of itself was therefore quite simply a function of matter ordered into life, and at a higher degree of intensification this function turned against its own bearer, becoming an endeavour to fathom and explain the phenomenon that had produced it—a hopeful-hopeless striving of life after self-knowledge, a burrowing of nature into itself, futile in the end, since nature cannot be resolved into knowledge, nor life, in the last resort, eavesdrop upon itself.

What was life? No one knew. No one knew the natural point at which it sprang forth and kindled. From that point onward, nothing within the realm of life was unmediated, or only poorly mediated; but life itself appeared unmediated. If anything could be said of it, it was this: its structure must be so highly developed that nothing even remotely resembling it occurred in the inanimate world. The distance between the pseudopodial amoeba and the vertebrate animal was slight, inessential, compared with that between the simplest manifestation of life and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was inorganic. For death was merely the logical negation of life; between life and inanimate nature, however, yawned an abyss which research strove in vain to bridge. Men laboured to close it with theories, which it swallowed without forfeiting in the least either depth or breadth. In order to find a connecting link, they had allowed themselves to embrace the absurd assumption of structureless living matter, of unorganized organisms arising spontaneously in a protein solution as the crystal arises in its mother liquor—although organic differentiation remained at once the precondition and the expression of all life, and although no living creature could be produced that did not owe its existence to parental generation. The rejoicing with which primordial slime had been fished from the uttermost depths of the sea had ended in humiliation. It proved that deposits of gypsum had been mistaken for protoplasm. Yet, in order not to be forced to halt before a miracle—for life, building itself out of the same substances as inorganic nature and dissolving into those same substances, would, if unmediated, have been a miracle—men were nevertheless compelled to believe in spontaneous generation, that is, in the emergence of the organic from the inorganic, which was itself likewise a miracle. And so they continued to devise intermediate stages and transitions, to assume the existence of organisms lower than any known, which in their turn had been preceded by still more primordial attempts at life on nature's part—probia that no one would ever see, since they remained beneath every microscopic dimension, and before whose conjectured emergence the synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place ...

What, then, was life? It was warmth, the product of warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter accompanying the process of perpetual decomposition and restoration in protein molecules built up with untenable complexity, untenable ingenuity. It was the being of that which properly could not be—the being of something which, only in this interwoven and feverish process of decay and renewal, balanced upon the point of existence with sweetly painful, exacting necessity. It was not material, and it was not spirit. It was something between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above the waterfall and like the flame. Yet although it was not material, it was sensuous to the point of delight and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensitive and susceptible to itself, the obscene form of being. It was a secret, sentient stirring amid the chaste cold of the universe, a voluptuously furtive impurity of sucking nourishment and excretion, an excretory breath of carbonic acid and noxious substances of hidden origin and constitution. It was the proliferating, unfolding, and formation of something swollen, composed of water, protein, salts, and fats, made possible by the overcompensation of its instability and confined within innate laws of formation—something called flesh, which became form, exalted image, beauty, while yet remaining the very essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not borne by spirit, as in the works of poetry and music, nor borne by a neutral material consumed by spirit and giving it sensuous embodiment in an innocent fashion, as were the form and beauty of sculptured works. Rather, they were borne and fashioned by substance awakened in some unknown fashion to voluptuousness, by organic matter itself, existing as it decayed, by fragrant flesh ...

To young Hans Castorp, resting above the glittering valley in the bodily warmth preserved for him by fur and wool, the image of life revealed itself in the frost-bound night illuminated by the radiance of the dead celestial body. There hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote and yet sensuously near, the body, the fleshly form, dull whitish, exhaling scent, steaming, sticky; the skin, in all the impurity and blemished imperfection of its nature, marked with spots, papillae, yellow discolorations, fissures, and granular, scaly regions, overspread by the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary lanugo down. Secluded from the cold of the inanimate, it leaned at ease within its sphere of vapour, its head crowned with something cool, horny, and pigmented, a product of its skin, its hands clasped behind its neck; and from beneath lowered lids it gazed towards the beholder out of eyes rendered oblique by a variation in the formation of the eyelid skin, its lips half open and slightly pouting, its weight resting upon one leg, so that the supporting hipbone stood sharply forth in its flesh, while the knee of the relaxed leg, bent slightly and with the foot poised upon its toes, nestled against the inner side of the burdened limb. Thus it stood, turned smilingly, leaning in its grace, its gleaming elbows spread forward, in the paired symmetry of its limbs and bodily markings. The acridly steaming darkness of the armpits corresponded, in a mystic triangle, to the night of the lap, just as the red epithelial opening of the mouth corresponded to the eyes, and the navel, drawn vertically into length, to the red blossoms of the breast. Driven by a central organ and by motor nerves arising in the spinal cord, the abdomen and thorax stirred, the pleuroperitoneal cavity expanded and contracted; the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract and saturated with waste products, streamed out between the lips after having, in the air cells of the lungs, bound its oxygen to the haemoglobin of the blood for internal respiration. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious regularity of its structure—nourished by blood, traversed by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillary filters, permeated by lymph—with its inner framework of tubular bones filled with fatty marrow, of flat, vertebral, and root bones that had been consolidated out of the original supporting substance, the gelatinous tissue, with the aid of lime salts and collagen, in order to bear it; with the capsules and slipperily lubricated cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints; with its more than two hundred muscles; its central organic formations serving nutrition, respiration, the reception and transmission of stimuli; its protective membranes, serous cavities, richly secreting glands; the system of tubes and clefts composing its intricate inner surface, which opened into external nature through the body's orifices—that this I was a living unity of a high order, no longer by any means of the nature of those simplest beings which breathed, nourished themselves, and even thought with their entire bodily surface, but built up of myriads of such minute organisms which, having originated from a single one, had multiplied by ever-recurring division, arranged themselves in various services and associations, differentiated and specially developed themselves, and brought forth forms that were both the condition and the effect of their growth.

The body that hovered before him, this individual creature and living I, was therefore an immense multiplicity of breathing and feeding individuals which, through organic subordination and specialization of purpose, had forfeited to so high a degree their egoistic being, their freedom and direct immediacy of life, had so thoroughly become anatomical elements, that the activity of some was confined solely to susceptibility to light, sound, touch, and warmth; others could do no more than alter their shape by contraction or produce digestive secretions; while still others were developed and equipped one-sidedly for protection, support, the conveyance of fluids, or reproduction. There were loosenings in this organic plurality united into a higher I, cases in which the multitude of subordinate individuals was combined into a higher unity of life only lightly and dubiously. The student brooded over the phenomenon of cell colonies; he learned of semi-organisms, algae whose individual cells, merely enclosed within a mantle of jelly, often lay far apart—multicellular formations, certainly, yet ones which, if called upon to declare themselves, would not have known whether they wished to be regarded as settlements of unicellular individuals or as unified beings, and which in their self-declaration would have wavered strangely between I and We. Here nature displayed an intermediate state between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals into the tissues and organs of a superordinate self—and the free, separate existence of these simple creatures: the multicellular organism was merely one manifestation of the cyclic process in which life enacted itself, a circuit from generation to generation. The act of fertilization, the sexual fusion of two cellular bodies, stood at the beginning of the construction of every plural individual, just as it stood at the beginning of every generational series of separately living elementary creatures and led back to itself. For the effect of this act endured through many generations which had no need of it in order to multiply by continually repeated division, until a moment came when the asexually produced descendants found themselves compelled to renew the business of copulation, and the circle closed. Thus the manifold commonwealth of life, sprung from the fusion of the nuclei of two parental cells, was the communal existence of many asexually generated generations of cellular individuals; its growth was their multiplication, and the reproductive circle closed when germ cells, elements specially developed for the purpose of reproduction, had formed within it and found their way to a fusion that set life anew in motion.

With a volume on embryology propped against the pit of his stomach, the young adventurer followed the organism's development from the moment when the spermatozoon, one among many and the first to arrive, propelling itself by the lashing movements of its tail, struck the gelatinous envelope of the ovum with the tip of its head and bored into the cone of reception which the protoplasm of the egg's cortex thrust out to meet its approach. No grotesquerie or farce could be devised in which nature had not taken grave delight while varying this established procedure. There were animals in which the male lived as a parasite in the female's intestine. There were others in which the progenitor's arm reached through the progenitress's gullet into her interior to deposit its seed there, after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the bewilderment of science, which had long believed itself obliged to address it, in Greek and Latin, as an independent living creature. Hans Castorp heard the learned schools of ovists and animalculists wrangling: the former had maintained that the egg was a complete little frog, dog, or human being in itself, with the semen serving merely to stimulate its growth, while the latter saw in the spermatozoon, which possessed head, arms, and legs, a preformed living creature for which the egg served only as nutritive soil—until agreement had been reached that equal merit should be accorded to ovum and sperm cell, both of which had arisen from originally indistinguishable reproductive cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fertilized ovum on its way to becoming a multicellular one, as it furrowed and divided; saw the cell-bodies nestle together into a mucous lamella, the germinal vesicle invaginate to form a cup and cavity that began the business of ingesting and digesting nourishment. This was the intestinal larva, the primordial animal, the gastrula, fundamental form of all animal life, fundamental form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelial layers, outer and inner, the skin-sensory layer and the intestinal-glandular layer, proved to be primitive organs from which, through invaginations and evaginations, the glands, tissues, sensory apparatus, and bodily appendages were formed. A strip of the outer germinal layer thickened, folded into a groove, closed into the neural tube, and became the spinal cord and brain. And as the fetal mucus consolidated into fibrous connective tissue and cartilage, the gelatinous cells beginning to produce collagenous substance instead of mucin, he saw, at certain points, the connective-tissue cells draw calcium salts and fats from the fluids washing about them and ossify. The human embryo crouched doubled in upon itself, tailed, indistinguishable in any respect from that of the pig, with an enormous abdominal stalk and stunted, shapeless extremities, its facial mask bent over its swollen paunch; and to a science whose conception of truth was unflattering and sombre, its development appeared as the fleeting recapitulation of a zoological ancestral history. Temporarily it possessed gill pouches like a ray. It seemed permissible, or necessary, to infer from the developmental stages through which it passed the far from humanistic appearance presented by perfected man in primeval times. His skin had been furnished with twitching muscles to ward off insects and had been thickly covered with hair; the extent of his olfactory membrane had been enormous, and his projecting, mobile ears, which took a lively part in his play of features, had been better adapted to catch sound than they were at present. In those days his eyes, protected by a third, nictitating lid, had stood at the sides of his head—with the exception of the third eye, whose rudiment was the pineal gland and which had been capable of keeping watch upon the upper air. This man had also possessed a very long intestinal tract, numerous molars, vocal sacs upon the larynx for roaring, and had borne the male reproductive glands within the abdominal cavity.

Anatomy flayed and dissected the limbs of the human body for our investigator, showing him their superficial and their deep posterior muscles, tendons, and ligaments: those of the thighs, the foot, and particularly the arms, the upper and lower arm; it taught him the Latin names by which medicine, that adumbration of the humanistic spirit, had nobly and gallantly designated and distinguished them, and allowed him to penetrate as far as the skeleton, whose construction provided him with new points of view from which the unity of all things human, and the enclosure within them of every discipline, might be contemplated. For here, most remarkably, he found himself reminded of his actual—or should one say his former?—profession, the scientific calling as one of whose adherents he had introduced himself to those he met upon his arrival up here—to Herr Dr. Krokowski and Herr Settembrini. In order to learn something—it had been fairly immaterial what—he had learned at institutions of higher education this and that concerning statics, flexible supports, loading, and construction as an advantageous economy in the use of mechanical material. It would doubtless have been childish to suppose that engineering science and the laws of mechanics had found application in organic nature; yet one could no more say that they had been derived from it. They were simply repeated and confirmed therein. The principle of the hollow cylinder governed the structure of the long tubular bones in such a fashion that the demands of statics were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid substance. A body, Hans Castorp had learned, which is composed, in accordance with the tensile and compressive demands to be made upon it, solely of rods and bands of mechanically serviceable material, can bear the same load as a solid body of the same substance. Thus, in the formation of the tubular bones, one could likewise follow how, keeping pace with the formation of compact substance upon their surface, the inner portions, as they became mechanically superfluous, were transformed into fatty tissue, the yellow marrow. The femur was a crane in whose construction organic nature, by the direction it had given the bony trabeculae, had traced to a hair's breadth the same curves of tension and compression which Hans Castorp would properly have had to enter in the graphic representation of an apparatus subjected to such stresses. He regarded this with pleasure, for he now found himself standing in a threefold relation to the femur, or indeed to organic nature as a whole: the lyrical, the medical, and the technical—so great was his state of stimulation; and these three relations, he found, were one in their humanity, variations of one and the same urgent concern, humanistic faculties...

For all that, the achievements of protoplasm remained wholly inexplicable; life appeared forbidden to comprehend itself. The majority of biochemical processes were not merely unknown: it lay in their nature to elude understanding. Almost nothing was known of the structure and composition of the living unit called the “cell.” What use was it to demonstrate the constituents of dead muscle? Living muscle could not be investigated chemically; the changes that produced rigor mortis were in themselves sufficient to render every experiment meaningless. No one understood metabolism, no one the nature of nervous function. To what properties did sapid bodies owe their taste? In what consisted the differing excitation of certain sensory nerves by odorous substances? In what did odoriferousness itself consist? The specific odour of animals and human beings depended upon the evaporation of substances that no one would have been able to name. The composition of the secretion called sweat had been little elucidated. The glands that secreted it produced aromas which unquestionably played an important part among mammals, and of whose significance in man one professed to have no knowledge. The physiological significance of manifestly important parts of the body was wrapped in darkness. One might leave aside the caecum, which was a mystery and which in the rabbit was regularly found filled with a pulpy content of which no one could say how it might ever emerge again or be renewed. But what was the truth concerning the white and grey matter of the brain; what of the optic thalamus, which communicated with the optic nerve, and of the grey deposits in the “pons”? The substance of the brain and spinal cord was so prone to decomposition that no hope existed of ever fathoming its structure. What relieved the cerebral cortex of its activity when sleep began? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself, as in fact sometimes occurred in corpses? The answer was: life; a special power of resistance in living protoplasm—and one pretended not to notice that this was a mystical explanation. The theory of so commonplace a phenomenon as fever was contradictory. Increased metabolism resulted in increased production of heat. But why was the emission of heat not correspondingly increased, as it was under other circumstances? Was the paralysis of sweat secretion due to states of contraction in the skin? But such states could be demonstrated only during the chills of fever, whereas at other times the skin was, on the contrary, hot. The “heat-puncture” indicated the central nervous system as the seat both of the causes of heightened metabolism and of a condition of the skin which one contented oneself with calling abnormal, since one was unable to define it.

But what did all this ignorance signify beside the helplessness with which one confronted phenomena such as memory, or that further and more astonishing memory known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics? It was utterly impossible to conceive even the faintest prospect of a mechanical explanation for such achievements of cellular substance. The spermatozoon which transmitted innumerable and intricate characteristics of species and individual from the father to the ovum was visible only under the microscope, and even the strongest magnification was insufficient to make it appear as anything but a homogeneous body or to permit its origin to be determined; for in one animal it looked exactly as it did in another. These were conditions of organization that compelled the assumption that the cell stood in precisely the same relation as the higher body which it built up; that it, too, was already a superordinate organism, composed in its turn, and yet again, of living corpuscles capable of division, individual units of life. Thus one proceeded from the supposedly smallest to something smaller yet; necessity forced one to dissolve the elementary into sub-elements. There could be no doubt: just as the animal kingdom consisted of different species of animals, and the animal-human organism of an entire animal kingdom of cellular species, so the organism of the cell consisted of a new and manifold animal kingdom of elementary living units, whose dimensions lay far beneath the limit of microscopic visibility, which grew autonomously, autonomously multiplied according to the law that each could produce only its own kind, and, on the principle of the division of labour, served jointly the next higher order of life.

These were the genes, the bioblasts, the biophores—Hans Castorp was pleased to make their acquaintance by name in the frosty night. Yet in his state of stimulation he wondered what might become of their elementary nature under a further improvement in illumination. Since they bore life, they must be organized, for life rested upon organization; but if they were organized, they could not be elementary, for an organism is not elementary, it is manifold. They were units of life beneath the living unit of the cell which they organically built up. But if this were so, then they themselves, although inconceivably small, must be “built up,” and built up organically, as an order of life; for the concept of the living unit was identical with that of a structure composed of smaller, subordinate living units—that is, of living units ordered into a higher life. So long as division yielded organic units possessing the attributes of life, namely the capacities of assimilation, growth, and reproduction, no limits could be set to it. So long as living units were in question, elementary units could be spoken of only falsely; for the concept of the unit contained _ad infinitum_ the correlative concept of the subordinate, constructive unit, and elementary life—something that was already life and yet still elementary—did not exist.

Yet although it had no logical existence, something of the kind must ultimately be real in some fashion, for the idea of spontaneous generation—that is, of life's arising from the nonliving—could not be dismissed; and that gulf which one sought in vain to close in external nature, namely the gulf between life and lifelessness, must in some way be filled or bridged within nature's organic interior. At some point division must lead to “units” which, though composite, were not yet organized, and which mediated between life and nonlife: groups of molecules forming the transition between the order of life and mere chemistry. But once one had arrived at the chemical molecule, one already found oneself near an abyss yawning far more mysteriously than the gulf between organic and inorganic nature: near the abyss between the material and the immaterial. For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was by far no longer large enough to be described even as extraordinarily small. It was so small, so minute, incipient, and transitional a condensation of the insubstantial, of that which was not yet substance but already resembled substance—of energy—that it had to be conceived as scarcely yet, or scarcely any longer, material, but rather as the intermediary and boundary point between the material and the immaterial. The problem of another spontaneous generation arose, one far more enigmatic and adventurous even than the organic: the spontaneous generation of substance from the insubstantial. Indeed, the gulf between matter and nonmatter demanded to be filled just as urgently—more urgently still—than that between organic and inorganic nature. There must necessarily be a chemistry of the immaterial, insubstantial compounds from which substance arose as organisms arose from inorganic compounds; and the atoms might represent the probia and monera of matter—material by their nature and yet, at the same time, not material. But upon arriving at that which was “not even small any longer,” the standard of measurement slipped away; “not even small any longer” already amounted to “enormously large”; and the step to the atom proved, without exaggeration, supremely momentous. For at the instant of matter's ultimate division and diminution, the astronomical cosmos suddenly opened forth!

The atom was an energy-charged cosmic system, in which celestial bodies sped in rotation about a sunlike centre, while through its ether-space comets travelled at the speed of light, forced into their eccentric orbits by the power of the central body. This was no more a mere comparison than it was merely a comparison to call the body of multicellular beings a “cell-state.” The city, the state, the social community ordered according to the principle of the division of labour, was not merely comparable to organic life: it repeated it. Thus, in the innermost depths of nature, in the widest mirroring, there was repeated the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groups, and figures, pale in the moonlight, hovered above the muffled adept’s head over the frost-glittering valley. Was it impermissible to suppose that certain planets of the atomic solar system—of these hosts and Milky Ways of solar systems that composed matter—that one or another, therefore, of these intramundane celestial bodies existed in a condition corresponding to that which made the earth an abode of _life_? For a young adept with an “abnormal” condition of the skin, somewhat tipsy at the centre, who was, after all, no longer wholly without experience in the realm of the impermissible, this was not merely a far from absurd speculation, but one that thrust itself upon him almost importunately, supremely plausible and bearing the stamp of logical truth. The “smallness” of the intramundane stellar bodies would have been a most irrelevant objection, for the standard of great and small had been lost at the latest when the cosmic character of the “smallest” particles of matter had revealed itself, and the concepts of outside and inside had likewise gradually suffered in their stability. The world of the atom was an outside, just as the earthly star we inhabited was, in all probability and organically regarded, a deep inside. Had not the dreamlike audacity of one investigator spoken of “Milky Way animals”—cosmic monsters whose flesh, bone, and brain were composed of solar systems? But if this were so, as Hans Castorp thought, then, at the very moment when one had believed oneself to have reached the end, the whole thing began again from the beginning! Then perhaps, in the innermost and ever more inward depths of his nature, he himself, young Hans Castorp, lay once more, lay a hundred times over, warmly wrapped in a balcony box overlooking the moonlit, high-mountain night of frost, and with stiffened fingers and a hot face studied the life of the body out of humanistic-medical sympathy?

Pathological anatomy, a volume of which he held sideways in the red glow of his table lamp, instructed him, by means of a text interspersed with illustrations, concerning the nature of parasitic cell-associations and infectious tumours. These were tissue formations—and particularly luxuriant tissue formations—brought about by the penetration of alien cells into an organism that had proved receptive to them and offered conditions favourable to their flourishing in some fashion—but one must surely say, in some rather dissolute fashion. It was not so much that the parasite withdrew nourishment from the surrounding tissue; rather, in carrying on its metabolism like every cell, it produced organic compounds that proved astonishingly poisonous to the cells of the host organism, unerringly ruinous. Scientists had succeeded in isolating the toxins of certain microorganisms and preparing them in a concentrated state, and had found it astonishing in what minute doses these substances, which belonged simply to the class of protein compounds, produced the most perilous symptoms of poisoning and rapid destruction when introduced into an animal’s circulation. The outward form of this corruption was a proliferation of tissue, the pathological tumour, arising as the cells’ reaction to the irritation exerted upon them by the bacilli settled among them. Nodules the size of millet grains formed, composed of cells resembling mucous-membrane tissue, between or within which the bacilli nested; and some of these cells, extraordinarily rich in protoplasm, were enormous and filled with many nuclei. But this revelry very soon led to ruin, for now the nuclei of the monster cells began to shrink and disintegrate, while their protoplasm perished through coagulation; further portions of the surrounding tissue were seized by the alien irritation; inflammatory processes spread and involved the neighbouring vessels; white blood corpuscles, attracted by the scene of disaster, migrated thither; death by coagulation advanced; and meanwhile the soluble bacterial poisons had long since intoxicated the nerve centres, the organism stood at a high temperature and, with heaving breast, as it were, reeled towards its dissolution.

Thus far pathology, the doctrine of disease, the body’s accentuation through pain, which, however, _as_ an accentuation of the bodily, was at the same time an accentuation through pleasure—disease was the lewd form of life. And life, for its part? Was it perhaps merely an infectious disease of matter—just as what might be called the spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps merely disease, an irritated proliferation of the immaterial? The very first step towards evil, pleasure, and death was undoubtedly to be located at the point where, provoked by the titillation of an unknown infiltration, there occurred that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant proliferation of its tissue which, half gratification and half resistance, constituted the earliest preliminary stage of substance, the transition from the immaterial to the material. That was the Fall. The second spontaneous generation, the birth of the organic from the inorganic, was merely a further and pernicious intensification of corporeality into consciousness, just as the illness of an organism was an intoxicated intensification and indecent overemphasis of its corporeality—life was merely the next step along the adventurous path of spirit grown dishonourable, a reflex of shame-warmth in matter awakened to sensibility, matter that had proved receptive to the awakener ...

The books lay heaped upon the little lamp table; one lay on the floor beside the reclining chair, upon the matting of the loggia, and the one in which Hans Castorp had last been conducting his researches lay upon his stomach and pressed there, burdening his breathing severely, though no order had gone forth from his cerebral cortex to the appropriate muscles to remove it. He had read down the page; his chin had sunk to his breast, and his lids had fallen over his simple blue eyes. He saw the image of life, its flowering architecture of limbs, its flesh-borne beauty. She had released her hands from behind her neck, and her arms, which she opened, and on whose inner surfaces, especially beneath the delicate skin of the elbow joint, the vessels, the two branches of the great veins, showed bluishly—these arms were of an inexpressible sweetness. She bent towards him, bent down to him, over him; he sensed her organic fragrance, sensed the apex-beat of her heart. Hot tenderness entwined his neck, and while, faint with pleasure and horror, he laid his hands upon the outer part of her upper arms, there where the granular skin stretched over the _triceps_ was deliciously cool, he felt upon his lips the moist suction of her kiss.

Dance of Death

Shortly after Christmas the gentleman rider died ... But first Christmas itself had just taken place, those two feast days, or, if Christmas Eve were counted, those three, towards which Hans Castorp had looked with a certain apprehension and a head-shaking expectancy, wondering what appearance they would assume up here, and which then, as natural days with morning, noon, evening, and weather of a middling, fortuitous kind (there was a slight thaw), had risen and faded no differently from others of their species:—somewhat adorned and distinguished outwardly, they had exercised, during the span allotted to them, their conscious sway over the minds and hearts of men, and, leaving behind a deposit of uncommon impressions, had become the recent and more distant past ...

The Hofrat’s son, whose name was Knut, came for a holiday visit and stayed with his father in the side wing—a handsome young man, though his neck, too, already protruded a little too markedly. The presence of young Behrens could be felt in the atmosphere; the ladies displayed mirthfulness, a passion for finery, and irritability, and their conversations dealt with encounters with Knut in the garden, in the woods, or in the neighbourhood of the Kurhaus. He, moreover, received visitors himself: a number of his university comrades came up into the valley, six or seven students who lodged in the village but took their meals with the Hofrat and, banded into a troop, roamed the countryside with their fellow student. Hans Castorp avoided them. He avoided these young men and, with Joachim, went out of their way when necessary, disinclined to meet them. A whole world separated one who belonged to those up here from these singers, hikers, and brandishers of walking-sticks; he wished to hear and know nothing of them. Besides, most of them seemed to come from the north; there might even be fellow countrymen among them, and Hans Castorp felt the greatest shyness of fellow countrymen. He often contemplated with aversion the possibility that some Hamburgers might arrive at the “Berghof,” particularly since Behrens had said that the city always furnished the institution with a respectable contingent. Perhaps there were some among the severe cases and the moribund, whom one never saw. The only visible one was a hollow-cheeked merchant who had been sitting at the Ferret’s table for several weeks and was said to come from Cuxhaven. With him in mind, Hans Castorp was glad that one came into contact so rarely here with persons who were not one’s table companions, and glad, furthermore, that the region of his native home was extensive and rich in spheres. The indifferent presence of this merchant greatly diminished the anxieties he had associated with the occurrence of Hamburgers up here.

Christmas Eve, then, drew near, stood one day at the door, and on the following day had attained the present ... There had still been a good six weeks before it, back when Hans Castorp had wondered that people were already speaking of Christmas up here: thus, reckoned mathematically, there had still remained as much time as the entire duration originally projected for his stay, together with the period during which he had been confined to bed. And yet at that time it had been a great quantity of time, particularly its first half, as Hans Castorp thought in retrospect—whereas the mathematically equal quantity now signified very little, almost nothing: those in the dining-room, he now found, had been right to hold it so cheap. Six weeks—not even as many, therefore, as the week had days: and what was that, when one considered the further question of what such a week might be, such a little circuit from Monday to Sunday and back to Monday again? One needed only to inquire each time into the value and significance of the next smaller unit in order to understand that summation could not yield very much—an operation whose effect, moreover and at the same time, was a very powerful abbreviation, effacement, contraction, and annihilation. What was a day, reckoned, say, from the moment when one sat down to luncheon until that moment recurred twenty-four hours later? Nothing—although it was, after all, twenty-four hours. But then what was an hour, spent perhaps at the rest cure, on a walk, or at a meal—which all but exhausted the possible ways of spending this unit? Again, nothing. Yet the summation of nothing was by its nature not a very serious matter. The matter became most serious when one descended to the smallest scale: those seven times sixty seconds during which one held the thermometer between one’s lips in order to continue the curve were extraordinarily tenacious and weighty; they expanded into a little eternity and formed deposits of the utmost solidity within the shadowy flitting of great time ...

The festival was scarcely capable of disturbing the order of life among the inhabitants of the Berghof. A well-grown fir tree had already been erected several days earlier at the right-hand narrow end of the dining-room, beside the Bad Russian table, and its fragrance, which now and then reached the diners through the steaming exhalations of the abundant courses, called forth something like pensiveness in the eyes of certain persons at the seven tables. At dinner on the evening of 24 December the tree appeared colourfully adorned with tinsel, glass balls, gilded fir cones, little apples hanging in nets, and all manner of confectionery, and its coloured wax candles burned during the meal and afterwards. Little trees were burning, it was said, in the rooms of those confined to bed as well; each had one of its own. And the parcel post had been plentiful during the last few days. Joachim Ziemßen and Hans Castorp, too, had received consignments from their distant and low-lying homeland, carefully packed Christmas gifts which they had spread out in their rooms: ingenious articles of clothing, neckties, luxury objects of leather and nickel, as well as a great quantity of festive baking, nuts, apples, and marzipan—stores upon which the cousins looked doubtfully, asking themselves when the moment would ever come up here to partake of them. Schalleen had made up Hans Castorp’s parcel, as he knew, and had also, after practical consultation with the uncles, procured the gifts. A letter from James Tienappel was enclosed, on thick private stationery, though typewritten. In it the uncle conveyed the great-uncle’s festive wishes and wishes for recovery, together with his own, and for practical reasons added at once the New Year’s greetings shortly to fall due, just as Hans Castorp himself had done when, in good time, he composed while lying down his Christmas letter, together with a clinical report, to Consul Tienappel.

The tree in the dining-room burned, crackled, gave forth fragrance, and kept consciousness of the hour awake in minds and hearts. Everyone had made their toilette; the gentlemen wore formal evening dress, and jewels could be seen upon the women which might have come to them from the countries of the plain by the hands of loving husbands. Clawdia Chauchat, too, had exchanged the woollen sweater customary in the place for a drawing-room gown, though it bore a touch of the arbitrary—or rather, of the national: it was a light-coloured, embroidered, belted costume of a peasant-Russian, or at least Balkan, perhaps Bulgarian, fundamental character, set with little gold spangles, whose wealth of folds lent her appearance an unaccustomed soft fullness and harmonized admirably with what Settembrini liked to call her “Tatar physiognomy,” and in particular her “steppe-wolf eyes.” There was great merriment at the Good Russian table; there the champagne cork first popped, and champagne was subsequently drunk at almost every table. At the cousins’ table it was the great-aunt who ordered it for her niece and for Marusja, and she treated everyone to it. The menu was choice; it ended with cheese pastries and bonbons; coffee and liqueurs followed, and now and then a fir branch flaring into flame and requiring efforts to extinguish it called forth a shrill and excessive panic. Settembrini, dressed as always, sat for a while towards the end of the festive meal at the cousins’ table with his toothpick, teased Frau Stöhr, and then made a few observations about the carpenter’s son and Rabbi of mankind whose birthday was purportedly being celebrated that day. Whether that person had actually lived was uncertain. But what had been born at that time and had begun its triumphal progress, uninterrupted to the present day, was the idea of the value of the individual soul, together with that of equality—in a word, individualistic democracy. In that spirit he would empty the glass that had been pushed towards him. Frau Stöhr found his mode of expression “equivocal and heartless.” She rose in protest, and since people had in any case begun to make their way to the social rooms, her table companions followed her example.

The sociability of that evening acquired substance and life from the presentation of gifts to the Hofrat, who came over for half an hour with Knut and Mylendonk. The ceremony took place in the salon containing the optical amusement apparatuses. The Russians’ special gift consisted of something silver, a very large round platter, with the recipient’s monogram engraved in its centre, whose utter uselessness was immediately apparent. One could at least lie upon the chaise longue presented by the other guests, although it was still without blanket or cushions and merely upholstered in cloth. Its headrest, however, was adjustable, and Behrens tested its comfort by stretching himself full length upon it, his useless platter under his arm, closing his eyes, and beginning to snore like a sawmill, while announcing that he was Fafnir with his hoard. The jubilation was general. Frau Chauchat, too, laughed heartily at this performance, her eyes narrowing and her mouth standing open, both in precisely the same fashion, Hans Castorp thought, as had been the case when Pribislav Hippe laughed.

Immediately after the chief’s departure, they seated themselves at the card tables. The Russian company occupied the small salon, as always. Several guests stood around the Christmas tree in the hall, watching the little candle-ends expire in their small metal sockets and nibbling at the things suspended from its branches. At the tables, which had already been laid for first breakfast, isolated persons sat far apart, variously propped upon their elbows, each in a separate silence.

Christmas Day was damp and misty. They were clouds, Behrens said, in which they were sitting; there was no such thing as mist up here. But clouds or mist, in any event the wetness made itself keenly felt. The snow upon the ground thawed at the surface and became porous and sticky. During the duties of the cure, face and hands grew numb far more painfully than in sunny frost.

The day was distinguished by a musical entertainment in the evening, a proper concert with rows of chairs and printed programmes, offered to those up here by the Berghof establishment. It was a song recital, given by a professional singer resident in the town, where she also gave lessons, with two medals worn beneath the neckline of her ball gown, one on either side, arms resembling sticks, and a voice whose peculiar lack of tone afforded melancholy information as to the reasons for her settlement up here. She sang:

“I carry my love about with me.”

The pianist who accompanied her was likewise a local resident ... Frau Chauchat sat in the front row, but used the interval to withdraw, so that from then on Hans Castorp could listen to the music—it was music, at all events—with an untroubled heart, following, during the singing, the words of the songs printed in the programme. Settembrini sat beside him for a while, but likewise disappeared after making several full-bodied, graphic remarks upon the resident lady’s muffled _bel canto_ and expressing his satirical gratification that this evening, too, they were so faithfully and cosily among themselves. To tell the truth, Hans Castorp felt relieved when both of them were gone, the narrow-eyed woman and the pedagogue, and he was free to devote his attention to the songs. He thought it a good thing that music was made throughout the whole world and under even the most exceptional circumstances—probably even on polar expeditions.

The second day of Christmas differed from an ordinary Sunday, or even an ordinary weekday, in nothing but the faint consciousness of its presence; and when it was over, the Christmas festival lay in the past—or, just as correctly, it lay once more in the distant future, a whole year distant: there were now again twelve months until it should renew itself in the cycle—after all, only seven months more than Hans Castorp had already spent up here.

But immediately after that year’s Christmas, and still before New Year, the gentleman rider did indeed die. The cousins learned of it from Alfreda Schildknecht, known as Sister Berta, the nurse of poor Fritz Rotbein, who told them of the discreet occurrence in the corridor. Hans Castorp took an earnest interest in it, partly because the gentleman rider’s manifestations of life had belonged among the first impressions he had received up here—among those which, as it seemed to him, had first called forth that reflex of warmth in the skin of his face which had since refused to leave it—and partly for moral, one might say spiritual, reasons. He kept Joachim engaged in conversation with the deaconess for a long time, while she enjoyed being addressed and exchanging words with a kind of clinging gratitude. It was a miracle, she said, that the gentleman rider had lived to see the festival. He had long since proved himself a tenacious cavalier, but what he had still been breathing with at the end was beyond anyone’s comprehension. For days, to be sure, he had sustained himself only with the aid of enormous quantities of oxygen: yesterday alone he had consumed forty cylinders, at six francs apiece. That must have run into money, as the gentlemen could calculate for themselves; and it must be borne in mind that his wife, in whose arms he had afterward expired, was left entirely without means. Joachim disapproved of this expenditure. What was the purpose of such torment and costly artificial prolongation in a wholly hopeless case? The man could not be blamed for blindly consuming the expensive gas of life, since it had been forced upon him. But those treating him ought to have thought more rationally and, in God’s name, allowed him to go his inevitable way, quite apart from the circumstances, and especially now in consideration of them. The living had their rights too, and so forth. Hans Castorp contradicted him emphatically. His cousin was already talking almost like Settembrini, without respect or reverence for suffering. The gentleman rider had died in the end, after all; that put an end to jesting, there was nothing further he could do to prove his seriousness, and a dying man was entitled to every respect and every expenditure of honour—Hans Castorp insisted upon that. He only hoped that Behrens had not shouted at the gentleman rider at the last and scolded him irreverently? There had been no occasion, Schildknecht explained. The gentleman rider had, it was true, made one small, ill-considered attempt to escape at the end and had tried to leap out of bed; but a mild reference to the futility of such an undertaking had sufficed to make him desist from it once and for all.

Hans Castorp went to view the deceased. He did so in defiance of the prevailing system of concealment, because he despised the selfish determination of the others to know nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing, and wished to contradict it by his actions. At table he had tried to bring up the death, but had met with such unanimous and obdurate rejection of the subject that he had felt ashamed and outraged. Frau Stöhr had become positively rude. What possessed him to begin talking of such things, she had asked, and what sort of nursery upbringing had he received? The rules of the establishment carefully protected them, the patients, from being touched by such stories, and now some greenhorn came along and spoke of them quite aloud, at the roast course moreover, and furthermore in the presence of Dr Blumenkohl, who might be carried off any day. (This last behind her hand.) If it happened again, she would lodge a complaint. It was then that the rebuked young man had resolved, and had also declared his resolve, to pay the departed fellow resident the last honours in his own person, by visiting his bedside and performing a silent act of devotion there; and he had persuaded Joachim to do the same.

Through Sister Alfreda’s mediation they obtained admission to the death chamber, which was situated on the first floor, beneath their own rooms. The widow received them—a small, dishevelled blonde, worn out by night watches, with a handkerchief held before her mouth, a red nose, and a thick plaid coat whose collar she had turned up, for the room was very cold. The heating had been switched off and the balcony door stood open. In subdued voices the young men said what was required, and then, sorrowfully invited by a movement of her hand, passed through the room to the bed—with reverent, forward-swaying steps they went, making no use of their boot heels, and stood contemplating the dead man’s couch, each in his own fashion: Joachim formally composed, in a half-bow resembling a salute; Hans Castorp relaxed and absorbed, his hands crossed before him, his head inclined toward one shoulder, with an expression like that which he habitually wore when listening to music. The gentleman rider’s head lay high upon the pillows, so that the body—that long edifice and manifold generative circuit of life—appeared all the flatter beneath the blanket, almost flat as a board, with the elevation of the feet at the farther end. A garland of flowers lay about the knees, and the palm branch projecting from it touched the large, yellow, bony hands folded upon the sunken chest. Yellow and bony, too, was the face, with its bald skull, humped nose, sharp cheekbones, and bushy reddish-blond moustache, whose thickness made the grey, stubbled hollows of the cheeks appear deeper still. The eyes were closed in a certain unnaturally firm manner—pressed shut, Hans Castorp could not help thinking, rather than merely closed: it was called the last office of love, although it was performed more for the sake of the survivors than for that of the dead. It had to be done betimes, immediately after death; for once the formation of myosin in the muscles had advanced, it was no longer possible, and the dead man lay and stared, and the meaningful conception of “slumber” was at an end.

Well informed and, in more than one respect, in his element, Hans Castorp stood at the bedside, knowledgeable yet devout. “He seems to be asleep,” he said out of humanity, although there were great differences. And then, in a suitably subdued voice, he began a conversation with the gentleman rider’s widow, making inquiries about the history of her husband’s sufferings, his last days and moments, and the arrangements to be made for transporting the body to Carinthia—inquiries that testified to a sympathy and initiation partly medical, partly spiritual and moral. The widow, speaking in her Austrian drawl and nasal tone and occasionally breaking into sobs, found it remarkable that young people should show themselves so disposed to occupy themselves with a stranger’s sorrow; whereupon Hans Castorp replied that his cousin and he were themselves ill, and that he, for his own part, had stood at an early age beside the deathbeds of close relatives; he was an orphan on both sides, and death had long been familiar to him, so to speak. What profession had he chosen, she asked. He answered that he “had been” an engineer.—Had been?—Had been, inasmuch as illness and a sojourn up here, whose limits were still decidedly uncertain, had now intervened, which surely represented a considerable break and possibly something like a turning point in his life—who could know? (Joachim looked at him with searching alarm.) And his cousin here?—He wished to be a soldier in the flatlands; he was an officer candidate.—Oh, she said, the military profession was indeed one that compelled a man to seriousness; a soldier must reckon with the possibility of coming into close contact with death under certain circumstances, and did well to accustom himself betimes to the sight of it. She dismissed the young men with thanks and a kindly composure that could not fail to inspire respect in view of her straitened situation, and particularly of the large oxygen bill her husband had left behind. The cousins returned to their floor. Hans Castorp showed himself satisfied with the visit and spiritually stimulated by the impressions he had received.

“_Requiescat in pace_,” he said. “_Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine._ You see, when death is in question and one speaks to the dead or of the dead, Latin comes into force again; it is the official language in such cases, and that shows you what a special matter death is. But it is not out of humanistic courtesy that Latin is spoken in its honour; the language of the dead is not the Latin of cultivation, you understand, but springs from an altogether different spirit, indeed from a directly opposite one, you might say. It is sacred Latin, a monkish dialect, the Middle Ages, a sort of muffled, monotonous, subterranean chant—Settembrini would find no pleasure in it; it is not for humanists and republicans and pedagogues of that sort, but belongs to another tendency of the spirit, the other one that exists. I think one must be clear about the different tendencies of the spirit, or spiritual moods, as one should perhaps more properly call them: there is the devout and there is the free. They both have their merits, but what I hold against the free one—the Settembrinian one, I mean—is merely that it believes it has a complete monopoly upon human dignity, and that is an exaggeration. The other contains a great deal of human dignity in its own fashion too, and gives occasion for a great deal of decorum and proper bearing and noble formality, even more than the ‘free’ one, although it keeps human weakness and frailty particularly in view, and the thought of death and decay plays so important a part in it. Have you ever seen ‘Don Carlos’ at the theatre, and the way things were conducted at the Spanish court when King Philip enters, all in black, wearing the Order of the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and slowly removes his hat, which already looks almost like one of our bowlers—he draws it upward like this and says: ‘Cover yourselves, my grandees,’ or something of the sort—it is measured in the highest degree, one may well say; there can be no question of letting oneself go or of slovenly manners there, quite the contrary, and the queen does indeed say: ‘In my France it was different,’ naturally; it is all too precise and ceremonious for her, she would like things to be more cheerful, more human. But what does human mean? Everything is human. The Spanish, God-fearing, humbly solemn, and strictly regulated manner is a very dignified form of humanity, I should say; and on the other hand one can use the word ‘human’ to cover every sort of slovenliness and laxity—you will agree with me there.”

“I do agree with you there,” Joachim said. “Naturally, I cannot endure laxity and letting oneself go either. There must be discipline.”

“Yes, you say that as a soldier, and I grant that in the military you understand these things. The widow was quite right to say that your profession is a serious business, for you must always reckon with the gravest eventuality, with the possibility of having to do with death. You have your uniform, which is close-fitting and neat and has a stiff collar; that lends you _bienséance_. And then you have your order of rank and obedience, and pay one another honour with elaborate ceremony; that is done in the Spanish spirit, out of piety, and at bottom I rather like it. Among us civilians, too, more of this spirit ought to prevail, in our manners and demeanour; I should prefer it, I should find it fitting. I think the world and life are so constituted that everyone ought to wear black, with a starched ruff in place of your collar, and conduct themselves gravely, quietly, and formally toward one another, mindful of death—that would suit me, it would be moral. You see, that is another of Settembrini’s errors and conceits, another one, and it is just as well that conversation should have brought me to it. He thinks he has not only human dignity under lease, but morality as well—with his ‘practical work of life’ and his Sunday celebrations of progress (as though Sunday were not precisely the day for thinking of something other than progress), and with his systematic extirpation of suffering, about which, incidentally, you know nothing, but of which he has told me for my instruction—systematically he means to extirpate it, by means of an encyclopaedia. And suppose that strikes me as downright immoral—what then? Naturally I do not tell him so; he talks me into the ground with his plastic rhetoric and says: ‘I warn you, Engineer!’ But one may surely be allowed one’s private thoughts—Sire, grant freedom of thought. I will tell you something,” he concluded. (They had reached Joachim’s room, and Joachim was preparing to lie down.) “I shall tell you what I have resolved to do. Up here one lives door to door with dying people and with the direst cross and misery; yet not only does one behave as though it were no concern of one’s own, one is also spared and sheltered, lest one come into contact with it or see anything of it, and the gentleman rider, too, will now be smuggled away again while we are having tea or breakfast. I find that immoral. Frau Stöhr became positively furious merely because I mentioned the death; that is too foolish for me, and even if she is uneducated and believes that ‘Softly, softly, pious strain’ occurs in ‘Tannhäuser,’ as happened to her at table the other day, she might nevertheless show a little more moral feeling in the matter, and so might the others. I have now resolved that in future I shall concern myself rather more with the grave cases and the moribund in the house; it will do me good—our visit just now has already done me good, in a way. Poor Reuter, back then, in No. 25, whom I once saw through the door during my first days, has doubtless long since gone _ad penates_ and been secretly put out of the way—he had such exaggeratedly large eyes even then. But there are others in his place; the house is full, there is never any lack of new arrivals, and Sister Alfreda, or the matron, or even Behrens himself, will surely help us to establish one acquaintance or another; that ought not to be difficult. Suppose some moribund person has a birthday and we hear of it—that can certainly be found out. Very well, we send the person—him or her, as the case may be—a flowering plant for the room, a token of regard from two unnamed fellow patients, with our best wishes for recovery—the word recovery always remains courteous and appropriate. Then our names will naturally be revealed to the person after all, and in his or her weakness the patient will send us a friendly greeting through the door, and perhaps invite us into the room for a moment, and we shall exchange a few human words before the dissolution. That is how I imagine it. Do you not agree? For my part, at any rate, I have made up my mind.”

Joachim had little to object to these intentions. “It is against the rules of the house,” he said; “in a sense, you will be breaking through them. But as an exception, and since you have set your heart upon it, Behrens will probably grant you a dispensation, I think. You can always appeal to your medical interest.”

“Yes, among other things, to that,” said Hans Castorp; for in truth the motives from which his wish arose were intertwined. Protest against the prevailing egoism was only one of them. What also entered into it, and most particularly, was his mind’s need to be allowed to take suffering and death seriously and to honour them—a need for which he hoped to derive satisfaction and strength from approaching the gravely ill and the dying, as a counterweight to the manifold affronts to which, otherwise, he found it exposed at every step, daily and hourly, and through which certain judgments of Settembrini’s received a confirmation that wounded him. Examples offered themselves in only too great abundance; had Hans Castorp been asked, he might first have spoken of those persons at the Berghof who admittedly were not ill at all and lived up here entirely of their own free will, under the official pretext of some slight delicacy, but in reality only for their pleasure and because the mode of life of the sick suited them—as did the Widow Hessenfeld, already mentioned in passing, a lively woman whose passion was betting: she bet with the gentlemen, bet on anything and everything, bet on the weather that would set in, the dishes that would be served, on the results of general examinations and on how many months would be added to someone’s stay, on certain bobsleighs, ice-sledges, skating or skiing champions in sporting contests, on the course of love affairs beginning to spin themselves among the guests, and on a hundred other matters, often wholly trivial and indifferent; she bet for chocolate, for champagne and caviar, which were then ceremoniously consumed in the restaurant, for money, for cinema tickets, and even for kisses, to be given and received—in short, by means of this passion of hers she brought a great deal of excitement and life into the dining-room, except that her activities could not, naturally, seem very serious to young Hans Castorp; indeed, her mere presence appeared to him an impairment of the dignity proper to a place of suffering.”

For inwardly he was faithfully striving to protect that dignity and maintain it before himself, however difficult this might be after a stay of nearly half a year among those up here. The glimpses he had gradually obtained into their lives and activities, their manners and opinions, did little to assist his good will. There were those two skinny little dandies, seventeen and eighteen years old and known as “Max and Moritz,” whose nightly excursions for the purpose of playing poker and carousing in female company furnished abundant matter for gossip. Recently—that is, about a week after New Year (for it must be borne in mind that, while we narrate, time advances tirelessly in its quietly flowing fashion)—the news had spread at breakfast that the bath attendant had found the pair that morning lying on their beds in crumpled evening dress. Hans Castorp laughed as well; but humiliating as this was to his good will, it was still very little in comparison with the stories told of the lawyer Einhuf from Jüterbog, a pointed-bearded man of forty with black-haired hands, who had for some time occupied the recovered Swede’s place at Settembrini’s table, and who not only came home drunk every night, but the other day had not come home at all, having instead been found in the meadow. He was regarded as a dangerous rake, and Frau Stöhr was able to point with her finger to the young lady—engaged, incidentally, down in the flatlands—who had been seen emerging from Einhuf’s room at a certain hour, wearing nothing but a fur coat, beneath which she was said to have had on no more than a pair of reform drawers. That was scandalous—not only in the general moral sense, but scandalous and insulting to Hans Castorp personally, in terms of his spiritual endeavours. To this was added the fact that he could not think of the lawyer without also including Fränzchen Oberdank, that little home-bred daughter with the sleekly parted hair, who a few weeks earlier had been escorted up here by her mother, a worthy provincial lady. Upon her arrival and after her first examination, Fränzchen Oberdank had been considered only slightly ill; but whether she had committed errors, whether hers was a case in which the air had at first been good not so much _against_ as, above all, _for_ the disease, or whether the child had become entangled in intrigues and excitements that had harmed her, four weeks after her admission it happened that, returning from a new examination, she entered the dining-room, flung her handbag into the air, and cried in a clear voice: “Hurrah, I have to stay a year!!”—at which Homeric laughter had spread throughout the room. But a fortnight later the report had begun to circulate that the lawyer Einhuf had behaved like a scoundrel toward Fränzchen Oberdank. This expression, incidentally, must be charged to our account, or at most to Hans Castorp’s; for to those who carried the news, its substance did not appear sufficiently novel to inspire such strong language. They also gave a shrugging indication that two people were always involved in stories of that kind, and that presumably nothing had happened contrary to the wish and will of anyone concerned. Such, at least, was Frau Stöhr’s attitude and moral temper in the matter under discussion.”

Karoline Stöhr was dreadful. If anything disturbed young Hans Castorp in his honestly intended spiritual endeavours, it was the being and nature of this woman. Her constant solecisms of education would alone have sufficed. She said “agonee” instead of “death agony”; “insolvent” when she wished to reproach someone for impudence; and she expounded the most appalling nonsense about the astronomical processes that produce a solar eclipse. With all the masses of snow lying about, she said, it was “a veritable capacity”; and one day she kept Herr Settembrini in prolonged astonishment by informing him that she was currently reading a book borrowed from the sanatorium library which concerned him, namely “Benedetto Cenelli in Schiller’s translation”! She loved turns of phrase that got on young Hans Castorp’s nerves because of their vapidity and fashionably vulgar overuse, such as: “That is the limit!” or: “You’ve no idea!” And since the epithet “dazzling,” long employed by fashionable mouths to mean “splendid” or “excellent,” had proved itself wholly drained, exhausted, prostituted, and therefore obsolete, she flung herself upon the newest thing, namely the word “devastating,” and now found everything “devastating,” whether in earnest or in mockery: the sledge-run, the sweet, and her own body temperature—which likewise produced a disgusting effect. To this was added her addiction to gossip, which was immoderate. Let her tell, if she liked, that Frau Salomon was wearing her costliest lace underlinen that day because she was due for examination and was decking herself out before the doctors in fine lingerie: there was truth in that; Hans Castorp himself had gained the impression that the procedure of examination, quite apart from its result, afforded the ladies pleasure, and that they adorned themselves for it coquettishly. But what was one to say of Frau Stöhr’s assurance that Frau Redisch of Posen, who was suspected of tuberculosis of the spinal cord, had once a week to walk back and forth completely naked before Hofrat Behrens for ten minutes? The improbability of this assertion almost equalled its indecency, yet Frau Stöhr maintained it and swore to it with the utmost vehemence—although it was difficult to understand how the poor woman could expend so much zeal, emphasis, and contentious insistence upon matters of this kind when her own affairs were causing her severe distress. For at intervals she was assailed by fits of cowardly and tearful anxiety, occasioned by her allegedly increasing “flabbiness” or by the rise of her curve. She came to table sobbing, her brittle red cheeks streaming with tears, and wailed into her handkerchief that Behrens wanted to send her to bed, but she wanted to know what he had said behind her back, what was wrong with her, what her condition was; she wanted to face the truth! To her horror, she noticed one day that the foot of her bed pointed toward the front door, and at this discovery she almost went into convulsions. Her fury and horror were not immediately comprehensible; Hans Castorp in particular did not grasp them at once. Well, and? How so? Why should the bed not stand as it did?—But, in God’s name, did he not understand? “_Feet first ...!_” She raised a desperate din, and the bed had to be turned round at once, although from then on she faced the light from her pillow, which impaired her sleep.”

All this was unserious; it did very little to answer Hans Castorp’s spiritual needs. A frightful incident that occurred during a meal at about this time made a particular impression upon the young man. A fairly recent patient, the schoolmaster Popów, a thin and silent man who, together with his equally thin and silent fiancée, had found a place at the Good Russian table, revealed himself, just as the meal was in full progress, to be an epileptic: he suffered a violent seizure of that kind, uttered that cry whose demonic and non-human character has so often been described, fell to the floor, and beside his chair thrashed his arms and legs about in the most hideous contortions. Matters were complicated by the fact that a fish course had just been served, so that there was reason to fear Popów might injure himself on a bone in his convulsive rapture. The uproar was indescribable. The ladies—Frau Stöhr foremost among them, though Frau Salomon, Frau Redisch, Frau Hessenfeld, Frau Magnus, Frau Iltis, Frau Levi, and whatever the rest of them might be called, yielded nothing to her—were overtaken by the most various states, so that several of them almost did as Herr Popów did. Their screams rang piercingly. Nothing was to be seen but eyes screwed shut, open mouths, and contorted upper bodies. One solitary lady preferred a quiet faint. Fits of choking occurred, since everyone had been surprised by the wild event in the very act of chewing and swallowing. Part of the company at table sought safety through all available exits, including the veranda doors, although it was very wet and cold outside. Yet the entire incident bore a peculiar note, objectionable as well as horrifying, by virtue of an association of ideas that forced itself upon everyone and connected it with Dr. Krokowski’s latest lecture. For in his exposition of love as a disease-producing power, the analyst had only last Monday come to speak of the falling sickness, and had described this malady—in which, during pre-analytic times, humanity had alternately seen a holy, indeed prophetic visitation and a devilish possession—in words half poetic and half implacably scientific as an equivalent of love and an orgasm of the brain; in short, he had cast suspicion upon it in such a sense that his listeners were obliged to understand the schoolmaster Popów’s performance, this illustration of the lecture, as a wild revelation and a mysterious scandal, so that a certain modest shame was also expressed in the ladies’ veiled flight. The Hofrat himself was present at the meal, and it was he who, together with the Mylendonk and several young and sturdy companions from the tables, carried the ecstatic man, blue, foaming, rigid, and distorted as he was, out of the dining-room and into the hall, where the doctors, the matron, and other members of the staff could be seen for some considerable time working over the senseless man, who was then carried away on a stretcher. But a very short time afterwards Herr Popów was seen once more at the Good Russian table, quietly contented in the company of his equally quietly contented fiancée, finishing his luncheon as though nothing had happened!”

Hans Castorp had witnessed the event with the outward signs of respectful horror; fundamentally, however, this too failed to strike him as serious, God help him. Popów might admittedly have choked on his mouthful of fish, but in fact he had not choked, and for all his unconscious fury and revelry had probably, in the deepest recesses of himself, taken a little care after all. Now he sat there cheerfully, finished his meal, and behaved as though he had never carried on like a berserker and a raging drunkard—nor, to be sure, could he remember having done so. His appearance, moreover, was no more calculated to strengthen Hans Castorp's reverence for suffering; in its own fashion it too augmented those impressions of frivolous dissoluteness to which, much against his will, he found himself exposed up here, and which he wished to counteract by concerning himself more closely with the gravely ill and the moribund, in defiance of the prevailing customs.

On the cousins' floor, not far from their rooms, lay a very young girl named Leila Gerngroß, who, according to Sister Alfreda's reports, was in the act of dying. Within ten days she had suffered four violent haemorrhages, and her parents had come up in the hope of taking her home perhaps still alive; but that did not appear feasible: the Hofrat declared poor little Gerngroß unfit for transport. She was sixteen or seventeen years old. Hans Castorp saw here the proper opportunity to put into effect his plan of the flowering plant and the wishes for recovery. It was true that Leila's birthday was not now, nor, according to human foresight, would she live to see it, since, as Hans Castorp had ascertained, it did not fall until spring; yet in his judgement this need be no obstacle to such a charitable tribute. During a midday walk in the neighbourhood of the Kurhaus, he and his cousin entered a flower shop, whose earthy, moist, perfume-laden atmosphere he breathed in with an agitated breast, and purchased a handsome hydrangea plant, which he directed to be sent to the little moribund without any names, but with a card bearing only the words: “From two fellow residents, with best wishes for your recovery.” He acted joyfully, pleasantly dazed by the breath of the plants and by the mild warmth of the place, which after the cold outdoors brought tears to his eyes, his heart beating with a sense of the adventurousness, boldness, and salutary character of his inconspicuous undertaking, to which in secret he attributed a symbolic import.

Leila Gerngroß had no private nurse, but was directly under the care of Fräulein von Mylendonk and the physicians; Sister Alfreda, however, went in and out of her room, and reported to the young men on the effect of their attention. In the hopeless confinement of her condition, the little girl had been childishly delighted by the greeting from strangers. The plant stood beside her bed; she caressed it with her eyes and hands, took care that it was watered, and even during the worst fits of coughing that assailed her kept her tormented eyes fixed upon it. Her parents, Major Gerngroß, retired, and his wife, had likewise been touched and pleased; and since, having no acquaintance whatever in the house, they could not even attempt to guess the donors, Schildknecht, as she confessed, had been unable to refrain from lifting the veil of anonymity and naming the cousins as the givers. She conveyed to them the request of all three Gerngroß that they come and be introduced and receive their thanks; and so, on the day after next, conducted by the deaconess, the two entered Leila's chamber of suffering on tiptoe.

The dying girl was an exceedingly lovely fair-haired creature with eyes precisely the blue of forget-me-nots, who, despite frightful losses of blood and a respiration carried on by means of a wholly inadequate remnant of serviceable lung tissue, presented a delicate, but not actually wretched, appearance. She thanked them and chatted in a voice somewhat lacking in resonance, but agreeable. A rosy glow arose upon her cheeks and remained there. Hans Castorp, having explained his conduct to her and to the parents present in the manner expected of him, and in some degree apologized for it, spoke softly and with emotion, in tender reverence. Very little was wanting—the inward impulse was certainly there—to make him sink upon one knee before the bed; and for a long time he held Leila's hand fast in his own, although the hot little hand was not merely moist but positively wet, for the child's secretion of sweat was excessive: she was continually expending so much water that her flesh ought long since to have shrivelled and dried up, had not the most avid consumption of lemonade, a full carafe of which stood on her bedside table, approximately counterbalanced the transudation. Grief-stricken though they were, the parents sustained the brief conversation in accordance with human civility by inquiries into the cousins' personal circumstances and other conversational devices. The Major was a broad-shouldered man with a low forehead and bristling moustache—a giant whose organic innocence of his little daughter's predisposition and susceptibility was obvious at a glance. The responsibility clearly lay rather with his wife, a small person of decidedly phthisical type, whose conscience indeed appeared burdened by this dowry. For when, after ten minutes, Leila showed signs of weariness—or rather of overexcitement—the rosy colour of her cheeks deepening while her forget-me-not eyes shone alarmingly—and the cousins, admonished by Sister Alfreda's glances, took their leave, Frau Gerngroß accompanied them outside the door and there launched into self-accusations that affected Hans Castorp strangely. It came from her, from her alone, she assured them contritely; from her alone could the poor child have got it—her husband was wholly uninvolved and had not the slightest thing to do with it. Yet she herself, she could assure them, had had to do with it only quite transiently, only a little and superficially, for a very short time, as a young girl. Then she had overcome it, entirely and completely, as had been certified to her, for she had wished to marry, had so dearly wished to marry and to live, and had succeeded: wholly cured and restored, she had entered into marriage with her dear husband, strong as an oak, who for his part had never entertained even the remotest thought of such matters. But pure and strong though he was, his influence had nevertheless been unable to prevent the calamity. For in the child—there lay the horror—the buried and forgotten thing had come to light again, and she could not overcome it, she was perishing of it, while she, the mother, had surmounted it and entered upon a settled maturity—the poor, dear creature was dying, the doctors no longer gave any hope, and she alone was to blame for it, with her past history.

The young men tried to comfort her, uttering words about the possibility of a favourable turn. But the Major's wife merely broke into sobs and thanked them once again, at any rate, for everything—for the hydrangea and for having diverted and delighted the child a little more by their visit. There lay the poor thing in her torment and loneliness, while other young creatures rejoiced in life and danced with handsome young gentlemen, for illness by no means extinguished the desire to do so. They had brought her a little sunshine—my God, probably the last. The hydrangea had been like a triumph at a ball, and the chat with the two fine cavaliers like a pleasant little flirtation for her; she, Mother Gerngroß, had seen that clearly enough.

This embarrassed Hans Castorp, particularly as the Major's wife had, moreover, pronounced the word “flirt” incorrectly—that is, not in the English fashion, but with a German i—which irritated him beyond measure. Nor was he a fine cavalier; he had visited little Leila in protest against the prevailing egoism and with a medico-spiritual intention. In short, he was somewhat out of humour with the final outcome of the affair, so far as the Major's wife's interpretation was concerned, but otherwise felt greatly enlivened and gratified by the execution of the undertaking. Two impressions in particular had remained from it in his soul and senses: the earthy scents of the flower shop and the wetness of Leila's little hand. And since a beginning had now been made, that same day he arranged with Sister Alfreda to visit her patient Fritz Rotbein, who, together with his nurse, was so frightfully bored, although, unless all signs were deceptive, only a very short while remained allotted to him.

It availed good Joachim nothing; he had to take part. Hans Castorp's impulse and charitable spirit of enterprise were stronger than his cousin's reluctance, which the latter could assert at most by silence and lowered eyes, since he would not have known how to justify it without betraying a want of Christian feeling. Hans Castorp saw this perfectly well and turned it to his advantage. He understood with precision, too, the military meaning of this disinclination. But if he himself felt enlivened and gladdened by such undertakings, and if they appeared salutary to him? Then he must simply override Joachim's silent resistance. He deliberated with him whether flowers might also be sent or brought to young Fritz Rotbein, although this Moribundus was of the male sex. He very much wished to do so; flowers, he felt, belonged to the occasion; the exploit with the hydrangea, which had been violet and well-shaped, had pleased him exceedingly; and so he decided that Rotbein's sex was cancelled out by his final condition, and that he need not be having a birthday in order to receive floral offerings, since the dying were quite simply and permanently to be treated like birthday children. Thus disposed, he and his cousin once more sought out the earthy, warm, fragrant atmosphere of the flower shop, and entered Herr Rotbein's room with a freshly sprinkled and fragrant bouquet of roses, carnations, and stocks, conducted by Alfreda Schildknecht, who had announced the young men.

The gravely ill man, scarcely twenty years old and already somewhat bald and grey about the head, waxen and emaciated, with large hands, a large nose, and large ears, showed himself tearfully grateful for their sympathy and diversion—he actually wept a little from weakness when he greeted the two and accepted the bouquet, but then, prompted by this gift, immediately began, though only in an almost whispering voice, to speak of the European flower trade and its still-increasing briskness, of the enormous exports from the nurseries of Nice and Cannes, the wagon-loads and postal consignments that went out daily from those places in every direction, the wholesale markets of Paris and Berlin, and the supply of Russia. For he was a businessman, and in that direction his interests lay for as long as he was alive. His father, the doll manufacturer of Coburg, had sent him to England for his training, he whispered, and there he had fallen ill. His feverish complaint, however, had been regarded as typhoid and treated accordingly—which meant that he had been placed on a diet of watery soup, whereby he had become so terribly reduced. Up here he had been permitted to eat, and had done so: in the sweat of his brow he had sat in bed and tried to nourish himself. But it had been too late; his intestine had unfortunately become involved, and in vain they sent him tongue and smoked eel from home—he could no longer tolerate anything. Now his father was on his way from Coburg, summoned by telegraph by Behrens. For a decisive intervention, the resection of his ribs, was now to be performed upon him; at any rate they meant to try it, although the chances were vanishingly small. Rotbein whispered about this very matter-of-factly, and regarded the question of the operation entirely from the business point of view as well—for as long as he was alive, he would look at things from that angle. The cost, he whispered, including spinal anaesthesia, had been fixed at one thousand francs, for practically the entire rib cage was involved, six to eight ribs; and the question now was whether this would prove an investment offering any sort of return. Behrens urged him to it, but Behrens's interest was unequivocal, whereas his own appeared doubtful, and one could not know whether he might not be wiser to die quietly with his ribs intact.

It was difficult to advise him. The cousins thought that the Hofrat's outstanding surgical skill must be entered into the calculation. They agreed to let the opinion of old Rotbein, who was even then rolling nearer, decide the issue. At their leave-taking young Fritz again wept a little; and although it occurred only from weakness, the tears he shed stood in strange contrast to the dry matter-of-factness of his thinking and manner of speech. He asked the gentlemen to repeat their visit, and they readily promised to do so, but never had the opportunity. For the doll manufacturer arrived that evening, and the operation was undertaken the following morning, after which young Fritz was no longer in a condition to receive visitors. And two days later, as Hans Castorp passed by with Joachim, he saw that Rotbein's room was being scoured out. Sister Alfreda had already left the Berghof with her little case, having been urgently summoned to another Moribundus in another institution; and sighing, the ribbon of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, she had betaken herself to him, since this was the only prospect that ever opened before her.

A “deserted,” newly vacated room being scoured out, its furniture piled one piece upon another and its double doors standing open, as one observed in passing on the way to the dining hall or outdoors—this was a sight full of meaning, yet so habitual that it scarcely meant very much to anyone any longer, especially if one had oneself, in one's time, taken possession of a room just “vacated” and scoured in this fashion and made oneself at home in it. Sometimes one knew who had occupied the number in question, which did after all give one food for thought: thus on this occasion, and thus again eight days later, when Hans Castorp, passing by, beheld little Gerngroß's room in the same condition. In this instance, at first sight his understanding resisted the meaning of the bustle reigning within. He stood and gazed, pensive and dismayed, just as the Hofrat came along.

“I am standing here watching them scour the room,” said Hans Castorp. “Good day, Herr Hofrat. Little Leila ...”

“Well—” Behrens replied, and shrugged his shoulders. After a Silentium, during which this gesture was allowed to take effect, he added:

“So you managed, quite in due form, to pay court to her just before the gates closed? I like it in you that you concern yourself a little with my little lung-pipers in their cages, relatively hale and hearty as you personally are. A handsome trait on your part—no, no, let us allow it to stand as quite a handsome trait in your character portrait. Shall I introduce you a little here and there from time to time? I still have all sorts of siskins sitting about—if it interests you. Just now, for example, I am popping in to see my ‘Overfilled One.’ Will you come along? I shall simply introduce you as a sympathetic fellow sufferer.”

Hans Castorp said that the Hofrat had taken the words from his mouth and offered him precisely what he had just been intending to ask of him. He would gratefully avail himself of the permission and accompany him. But who, then, was the “Overfilled One,” and how was he to understand the name?

“Literally,” said the Hofrat. “Quite precisely and without metaphor. Let her tell you about it herself.” A few steps brought them to the room of the “Overfilled Woman.” The Hofrat passed through the double door, bidding his companion wait. Breathlessly distressed, yet bright and merry laughter and talk sounded from the room at Behrens’s entrance, and was then shut off. But it sounded out again to greet the sympathetic visitor when, a few minutes later, he was admitted and Behrens presented him to the blonde lady lying in bed, who regarded him inquisitively out of blue eyes—propped by pillows, she lay half sitting, restless, and laughed incessantly in bubbling peals, very high and silvery-clear, while struggling for breath, excited and tickled, as it seemed, by her oppression. She laughed, no doubt, at the Hofrat’s turns of phrase as well, with which he presented the visitor to her; called Adieu and Many Thanks and Au Revoir repeatedly after him as he departed, waving her hand behind him, sighing musically, laughing silvery runs, pressing her hands against the breast that heaved beneath her batiste nightdress, and unable to keep her legs still. Her name was Frau Zimmermann.

Hans Castorp knew her slightly by sight. For several weeks she had sat at the table of Salomon and the gluttonous schoolboy and had always laughed a great deal. Then she had disappeared, without the young man’s troubling himself any further about it. She must have gone away, he had supposed, insofar as he had formed any opinion at all concerning her disappearance. Now he found her here, under the name of the “Overfilled Woman,” whose explanation he awaited.

“Hahahaha,” she bubbled, tickled, her breast fluttering. “Frightfully comical man, this Behrens, fabulously comical and amusing man, enough to make one laugh oneself crooked and ill. Do sit down, Herr Kasten, Herr Carsten, or whatever your name is—you have such a comical name, ha, ha, hee, hee, forgive me! Sit on that chair there at my feet, but allow me to kick my legs; I can’t—ha...ah,” she sighed open-mouthed, and then began bubbling again, “I simply cannot help it.”

She was almost pretty, with clear features, somewhat too pronounced but pleasing, and a small double chin. But her lips were bluish, and the tip of her nose showed the same tinge, doubtless from want of air. Her hands, agreeably thin and well set off by the lace cuffs of her nightdress, were no more capable of keeping still than her feet. Her neck was girlish, with “salt-cellars” above the delicate collarbones, and her breast too, kept beneath the linen in agitated, shallow, struggling motion by laughter and shortness of breath, seemed delicate and young. Hans Castorp resolved to send or bring her beautiful flowers too, sprinkled and fragrant, from the export nurseries of Nice and Cannes. With some anxiety he joined in Frau Zimmermann’s fluttering and distressed gaiety.

“And so you visit the advanced cases here?” she asked. “How amusing and kind of you, ha, ha, ha, ha! But just imagine, I am not advanced at all; that is, I really was not, not until quite recently, not in the least... Until the other day, when this thing happened to me... Just listen and tell me whether it is not the most comical thing that in your whole life...” And, struggling for breath amid warblings and trills, she told him what had befallen her.

She had come up here a little ill—ill, certainly, or else she would not have come; perhaps not _entirely_ a light case, but light rather than grave. The pneumothorax, that still youthful achievement of surgical technique which had so rapidly attained great popularity, had proved brilliantly successful in her case as well. The procedure had succeeded perfectly, Frau Zimmermann’s condition and general health were making the most gratifying progress, and her husband—for she was married, though childless—might expect her back in three or four months. Then, for amusement, she made an excursion to Zurich—there had been no other reason for the journey than amusement. She had amused herself to her heart’s content, but in the course of it had become aware of the necessity of having herself refilled, and had entrusted the business to a doctor there. A nice, comical young fellow, hahaha, hahaha—but what had happened? He had overfilled her! There was no other word for it; the word said everything. He had meant too well by her, had evidently not quite understood the business, and, in short, she had arrived back up here in an overfilled state—that is, suffering from oppression of the heart and shortness of breath—ha! heeheehee—and Behrens, who had stormed most murderously, had put her straight to bed. For now she was seriously ill—not really an advanced case, but botched, bungled—hahaha, what was the matter with his face, why was he making such a comical face? And she laughed, pointing her finger at it, so violently over that face that her forehead too began to turn blue. But most comical of all, she said, was Behrens with his storming and his rudeness—she had begun laughing over it beforehand, as soon as she noticed that she had been overfilled. “Your life is in absolute danger,” he had shouted at her, without circumlocution or embellishment—such a bear, hahaha, heeheehee, forgive me.

It remained doubtful in what sense she laughed so bubblingly at the Hofrat’s declaration—whether merely on account of its “rudeness” and because she did not believe it, or although she did believe it—for surely she must—and simply found the thing itself, that is, the mortal danger in which she hovered, frightfully comical. Hans Castorp had the impression that the latter was the case, and that it was merely out of childish levity and the witlessness of her bird-brain that she bubbled, trilled, and warbled, which he disapproved of. Nevertheless he sent her flowers, though he never saw the laughter-loving Frau Zimmermann again. For after she had been kept on oxygen for a few more days, she duly died in the arms of her husband, who had been summoned by telegram—a goose in folio, as the Hofrat, from whom Hans Castorp heard the news, added on his own account.

But even before that, Hans Castorp’s sympathetically enterprising spirit, with the aid of the Hofrat and the nursing staff, had established further relations with the gravely ill patients of the house, and Joachim had to come along. He had to go with him to the son of “_Tous les deux_,” the second and only remaining one, after they had long since rummaged about and fumigated with H₂CO in the room of the other next door. Then there was the boy Teddy, who had recently come up from the educational institution known as the “Fridericianum,” for which his case had proved too severe. Then the German-Russian insurance clerk Anton Karlowitsch Ferge, a good-natured sufferer. Then the unfortunate and yet so coquettish Frau von Mallinckrodt, who received flowers like those already named, and whom Hans Castorp, in Joachim’s presence, even fed with gruel several times... By degrees they acquired a reputation as Samaritans and brothers of mercy. Settembrini too addressed Hans Castorp in this vein one day.

“By thunder, Engineer, I hear remarkable things about your conduct. You have taken up charity? You seek justification through good works?”

“Hardly worth mentioning, Herr Settembrini. Nothing at all to make a fuss about. My cousin and I...”

“But leave your cousin out of it! It is with you that one has to do when the pair of you become the talk of the house, that much is certain. The lieutenant is a respectable but simple nature, intellectually unthreatened, who causes the educator little uneasiness. You will not persuade me that he is the leader. You are the more significant, but also the more endangered. You are, if I may put it so, one of life’s problem children—one must look after you. Besides, you have given me leave to look after you.”

“Certainly, Herr Settembrini. Once and for all. Very kind of you. And ‘one of life’s problem children’ is pretty. The things a writer thinks of on the spot! I am not quite sure whether I ought to feel flattered by the title, but it sounds pretty, I must say. Yes, and so now I occupy myself a little with the ‘children of death’—that is what you mean, I suppose. Here and there, when I have time, quite incidentally—the cure suffers scarcely at all by it—I look in on the grave and serious cases, you understand, those who are not up here for their amusement and behaving dissolutely, but who are dying.”

“Yet it is written: Let the dead bury their dead,” said the Italian.

Hans Castorp raised his arms and expressed with his countenance that so many things were written, this as well as that, so that it was difficult to discover the right one and act upon it. Naturally the organ-grinder had introduced a troublesome point of view; that was only to be expected. But though Hans Castorp remained as willing as ever to lend him an ear, to find his teachings worth hearing without thereby assuming any obligation, and to submit experimentally to pedagogical influence, he was nevertheless far from renouncing, for the sake of any educational considerations, undertakings which, despite Mother Gerngroß and her phrase about the “nice little flirtation,” despite also the sober disposition of poor Redleg and the foolish warbling of the Overfilled Woman, still appeared to him, in some indefinite fashion, beneficial and of considerable import.

The son of _Tous-les-deux_ was named Lauro. He had received flowers, earthily fragrant violets from Nice, “from two sympathetic fellow-residents, with best wishes for recovery”; and since anonymity had become a mere formality and everyone knew from whom these gifts proceeded, _Tous-les-deux_ herself, the black-pale mother from Mexico, addressed the cousins gratefully at an encounter in the corridor, inviting them, with rattling words but chiefly through a sorrowfully beckoning play of gestures, to receive in person the thanks of her son—_de son seul et dernier fils qui allait mourir aussi_. This was done on the spot. Lauro proved to be an astonishingly handsome young man, with glowing eyes, an aquiline nose whose nostrils fluttered, and magnificent lips above which a little black moustache was sprouting—but at the same time he displayed such a boastfully dramatic manner that the visitors, Hans Castorp truly no less than Joachim Ziemßen, were glad when the sickroom door closed behind them once more. For while _Tous-les-deux_, in her black cashmere shawl, the black veil knotted beneath her chin, horizontal furrows across her narrow forehead and enormous pouches of skin beneath her jet-black eyes, wandered about the room on bent knees, let one corner of her large mouth droop mournfully far downward, and from time to time approached those seated by the bed to repeat her tragic parrot-cry: “_Tous les dé, vous comprenez, messiés... Premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre_”—the handsome Lauro, likewise in French, launched into rolling, rattling, and intolerably grandiloquent speeches to the effect that he intended to die like a hero, _comme héros, à l’espagnol_, like his brother, _de même que son fier jeune frère Fernando_, who had likewise died like a Spanish hero—gesticulated, tore open his shirt to offer his yellow breast to the blows of death, and carried on in this manner until a fit of coughing, which brought thin, rose-coloured foam to his lips, stifled his rodomontades and caused the cousins to tiptoe out.

They said nothing further about their visit to Lauro, and even inwardly, each to himself, they refrained from passing judgment on his behaviour. But both of them liked it better with Anton Karlowitsch Ferge of Petersburg, who lay in bed with his large, good-natured moustache and his Adam’s apple, which protruded with an equally good-natured expression, and was recovering only slowly and painfully from the attempt to establish a pneumothorax in him—an attempt that had come within a hair’s breadth of costing Herr Ferge his life on the spot. He had suffered a violent shock in the course of it, pleural shock, a known complication of this fashionable procedure. In his case, however, the pleural shock had occurred in an exceptionally dangerous form, as a complete collapse and a most alarming loss of consciousness—in a word, so severely that they had been obliged to interrupt the operation and postpone it for the time being.

Herr Ferge’s good-natured grey eyes widened and his face turned ashen whenever he came to speak of the event, which must have been dreadful for him. “Without anaesthesia, gentlemen. Very well, people like us cannot tolerate it; in this case it is contraindicated, one understands that and, as a reasonable man, resigns oneself to the matter. But the local anaesthetic does not penetrate deeply, gentlemen; it deadens only the outer flesh, and when one is opened up one feels, to be sure, only pressure and crushing. I lie there with my face covered so that I shall see nothing, and the assistant holds me on the right and the matron on the left. It feels as though I were being pressed and crushed; that is the flesh being opened and forced back with clamps. But then I hear the Herr Hofrat say, ‘There!’ and at that moment, gentlemen, he begins, with a blunt instrument—it must be blunt, so that it will not pierce prematurely—to palpate the pleura: he feels it over in order to find the right place where he can pierce it and let in the gas; and as he does so, as he moves the instrument about upon my pleura—gentlemen, gentlemen! that was the end of me, I was done for, what happened to me is wholly beyond description. The pleura, gentlemen, is not meant to be touched; it must not and will not be touched; it is taboo, it is covered with flesh, isolated and inaccessible, once and for all. And now he had laid it bare and was feeling it over. Gentlemen, I grew sick. Horrible, horrible, gentlemen—I should never have thought that such a sevenfold hideous and basely infamous sensation could occur anywhere on earth, or indeed anywhere outside hell! I fainted—in three swoons at once, one green, one brown, and one violet. Moreover, there was a stench within this swoon; the pleural shock assailed my sense of smell, gentlemen; it smelt beyond all measure of hydrogen sulphide, as hell itself must smell, and through it all I heard myself laughing as I gasped my last—but not as a human being laughs; it was the most indecent and disgusting laugh I had ever heard in my life, for to have one’s pleura palpated, gentlemen, is like being tickled in the most infamous, excessive, and inhuman manner possible; that, and nothing else, is the nature of this accursed disgrace and torment, and that is pleural shock, from which may the good God preserve you.”

Often, and never otherwise than with pallid horror, Anton Karlowitsch Ferge returned to this “blackguardly” experience, and was not a little afraid that it would be repeated. He had, incidentally, declared himself from the outset to be a simple man, entirely remote from everything “lofty,” of whom no special demands of an intellectual or emotional nature ought to be made, just as he made no such demands upon anyone else. This being agreed, he spoke, not at all uninterestingly, of his former life, from which illness had then cast him out—the life of a travelling agent in the service of a fire-insurance company: from Petersburg he had made extensive journeys back and forth across the whole of Russia, visiting insured factories and investigating those whose financial position was doubtful; for statistics showed that most factory fires occurred precisely in industries that were doing badly. He had therefore been sent out, under one pretext or another, to sound out a concern and report to his company, so that serious loss might be forestalled in good time by increased reinsurance or a division of the premium. He told of winter journeys through the vast empire, of travelling throughout the night in prodigious frost, lying in a sledge beneath sheepskin covers, and of waking to see the eyes of wolves glowing like stars above the snow. He had carried frozen provisions in a chest—cabbage soup as well as white bread—which were thawed for consumption at the stations while the horses were changed, the bread proving as fresh as on the first day. The only trouble was when a thaw suddenly set in on the road: then the cabbage soup he carried in pieces melted and ran away.

Thus Herr Ferge talked, interrupting himself now and again with a sigh and the observation that all this was very fine, if only another attempt at pneumothorax did not have to be made upon him. There was nothing lofty in what he offered, but it was factual in nature and quite pleasant to hear, particularly for Hans Castorp, who found it profitable to learn about the Russian Empire and its manner of life, about samovars, pirozhki, Cossacks, and wooden churches with so many onion-domed turrets that they resembled colonies of mushrooms. He also encouraged Herr Ferge to speak of the people there, of their northern exoticism, all the more adventurous in his eyes for being northern, of the Asiatic strain in their blood, their prominent cheekbones, their Finnish-Mongolian setting of the eyes; and he listened with anthropological interest, and had Russian spoken for him as well—swift, blurred, wildly alien, and boneless, the eastern idiom issued from beneath Herr Ferge’s good-natured moustache and out of his good-naturedly protruding larynx—and Hans Castorp found all this the more entertaining (such is youth) because it was pedagogically forbidden ground upon which he was disporting himself.

They often called upon Anton Karlowitsch Ferge for a quarter of an hour. In between, they visited young Teddy from the “Fridericianum,” an elegant fourteen-year-old, fair-haired and delicate, with a private nurse and a white silk pyjama suit fastened with braid. He was an orphan and rich, as he himself related. While awaiting a more profound surgical intervention—the removal of worm-eaten parts, which they intended to try—he would sometimes, when he felt better, leave his bed for an hour and, dressed in his handsome sporting costume, take part in the social life below. The ladies liked to jest and flirt with him, and he listened to their conversations, those concerning Attorney Einhuf, for instance, the young lady in reform trousers, and little Fränzchen Oberdank. Then he lay down again. Thus young Teddy lived elegantly from day to day, letting it be understood that he expected nothing else from life henceforth but this, and always only this.

But in number fifty lay Frau von Mallinckrodt, Natalie by her Christian name, with black eyes and gold rings in her ears, coquettish and fond of finery, yet at the same time a female Lazarus and Job, smitten by God with every manner of infirmity. Her organism seemed flooded with toxins, so that every conceivable disease afflicted her alternately and simultaneously. Her skin was particularly grievously affected, large portions of it being covered by an agonizingly itching eczema, raw here and there, and present even about the mouth, which made the introduction of a spoon difficult. Internal inflammations—of the pleura, kidneys, lungs, periosteum, and even the brain, so that unconsciousness supervened—succeeded one another in Frau von Mallinckrodt; and weakness of the heart, brought on by fever and pain, caused her great anxiety and meant, for example, that when she swallowed she could not get her food properly down: it lodged at the very top of her oesophagus. In short, the woman was in a dreadful state and, moreover, entirely alone in the world; for after leaving husband and children for the sake of another man—that is, of a mere half-boy—she had in turn been deserted by her lover, as the cousins learned from her own lips, and was now homeless, though not without means, since her husband supplied her with them. Without any misplaced pride, she availed herself of his decency, or of his continuing infatuation, since she did not take herself seriously, but recognized that she was merely a dishonourable, sinful little female; and upon this basis she bore all her Job-like afflictions with astonishing patience and tenacity, with the elemental power of resistance belonging to her racial womanhood, which triumphed over the misery of her brownish body and even made a becoming article of costume of the white gauze bandage she was obliged, for some sinister reason, to wear about her head. She changed her jewellery continually, beginning the morning with coral and ending the evening with pearls. Delighted by Hans Castorp’s gift of flowers, to which she plainly attributed a significance more gallant than charitable, she invited the young gentlemen to take tea at her bedside; she drank hers from a feeding-cup, every finger, including both thumbs, covered to the joints with opals, amethysts, and emeralds. Soon, while the gold rings swung from her ears, she had told the cousins how everything had come about: of her decent but tedious husband, of her equally decent and tedious children, who took entirely after their father and for whom she had never been able to feel any particular warmth, and of the half-boy with whom she had fled, and whose poetic tenderness she knew how to praise most highly. But his relatives had torn him from her by cunning and force; and then, too, the little fellow had probably been disgusted by her illness, which had broken out at that time in manifold and violent forms. Were the gentlemen perhaps disgusted as well? she asked coquettishly; and her racial womanhood triumphed over the eczema that covered half her face.

Hans Castorp thought contemptuously of the little fellow who had been disgusted, and gave expression to this sentiment with a shrug. For his own part, he allowed the poetic half-boy’s softness of heart to spur him in the opposite direction, and took occasion, during repeated visits, to perform small nursing services for the unfortunate Frau von Mallinckrodt, services requiring no previous knowledge: that is, cautiously to spoon her midday gruel into her mouth when it happened to be served, to give her a drink from the feeding-cup when a morsel lodged in her throat, or to help her change position in bed; for, in addition to everything else, a surgical wound made lying down difficult for her. He practised these ministrations whenever, on his way to the dining-room or returning from a walk, he looked in upon her, telling Joachim always to go on ahead, as he only wished to inspect the case in number fifty for a moment—and in doing so he felt a blissful expansion of his being, a joy founded upon the sense that his actions were beneficial and possessed a secret import; a joy which, moreover, mingled with a certain furtive delight in the impeccably Christian character of his conduct and activity—a character so pious, gentle, and commendable, indeed, that from neither the military nor the humanistic-pedagogical standpoint could any serious objection be raised against it.

Karen Karstedt has not yet been mentioned, and yet Hans Castorp and Joachim took particularly solicitous care of her. She was a private patient from outside the sanatorium, commended by the Hofrat to the cousins’ charity. Four years up here already, she was without means and dependent upon hard-hearted relatives, who had once removed her from here on the ground that she must die in any case, and had sent her back up only upon the Hofrat’s protest. She lodged in the “village,” at a cheap pension—nineteen years old and slight, with smooth, oiled hair, eyes that timidly sought to conceal a brilliance corresponding to the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a voice characteristically husky, yet pleasant in sound. She coughed almost without interruption, and all her fingertips were covered with sticking-plaster, for the systemic poisoning had caused them to break open.

To her, then, at the Hofrat’s intercession, and since they were such good-hearted fellows, the two devoted themselves with especial zeal. It began with a gift of flowers, followed by a visit to poor Karen on her little balcony in the “village,” and thereafter by one extraordinary expedition or another undertaken by the three together: the viewing of a skating competition, of a bobsleigh race. For the winter-sports season in our high valley was now at its height; a festival week was being celebrated, and the events multiplied, these amusements and spectacles to which the cousins had hitherto paid no more than occasional and fleeting attention. Joachim, after all, was averse to every diversion up here. He was not here for such things—indeed, he was not here to live at all, nor to reconcile himself to his sojourn by making it pleasant and varied, but solely and entirely to rid himself of toxins as quickly as possible, so that he might perform his duty on the plain, real duty instead of cure-duty, which was a substitute and upon which he only grudgingly tolerated any encroachment. He was forbidden to take an active part in the winter pleasures, and playing the gawker had displeased him. As for Hans Castorp, he felt himself too much, in too strict and intimate a sense, a member of those up here to have either sympathy or eyes for the activities of people who regarded this valley as a sporting-ground.

But their charitable concern for poor Fräulein Karstedt now brought about a certain change in this respect—Joachim could raise no objections without appearing unchristian. They fetched the invalid from her meagre lodging in the “village” and conducted her, in splendidly hot, sun-flooded, frosty weather, through the English Quarter, named after the Hotel d’Angleterre, past the luxury shops of the main street, where sleigh-bells rang and wealthy pleasure-seekers and idlers from all over the world, residents of the Kurhaus and the other great hotels, strolled bareheaded in fashionable sporting attire of fine and costly fabrics, their faces bronzed by winter sunburn and the glare of the snow; and thence down to the skating-rink, situated in the depths of the valley not far from the Kurhaus, a meadow used for football in summer. Music sounded; the spa orchestra was giving a concert upon the gallery of the wooden pavilion overlooking the elongated rectangular rink, behind which the snow-covered mountains stood against the deep blue. They paid admission, pressed through the crowd which surrounded the rink on three sides in ascending rows of seats, found places, and watched. The figure-skaters, in close-fitting costumes, black tights, and fur-trimmed braided jackets, swayed, hovered, traced figures, leapt, and spun. A virtuoso pair, gentleman and lady, professionals competing outside the contest, performed something of which they alone in all the world were capable, unleashing a flourish and a storm of applause. In the contest for the speed prize, six young men of various nationalities, stooping, their hands behind their backs and now and then a handkerchief held before the mouth, laboured six times around the broad rectangle. A bell rang through the music. At intervals the crowd surged up in cries of encouragement and applause.

It was a motley assembly upon which the three invalids, the cousins and their protégée, gazed about them. Englishmen in Scottish caps, displaying white teeth, spoke French with pungently perfumed ladies clad from head to foot in coloured wool, some of whom wore trousers. Small-headed Americans, their hair plastered smooth, shag pipes in their mouths, wore furs with the rough side turned outward. Russians, bearded and elegant, of barbarically opulent appearance, and Dutchmen of a Malay crossbred type sat among the German and Swiss public, while all sorts of indeterminate, French-speaking elements from the Balkans or the Levant—an adventurous world for which Hans Castorp displayed a certain weakness and which Joachim rejected as equivocal and lacking in character—were scattered everywhere among them. Between the other events, children competed in whimsical contests, stumbling across the rink with a ski on one foot and a skate on the other, or with the boys pushing their little ladies before them upon shovels. They raced with lighted candles, the victor being the one who carried his flame still burning to the goal; they had to clamber over obstacles as they ran, or gather potatoes with tin spoons into watering-cans set up for the purpose. The great world cheered. People pointed out the richest, most famous, and most charming among the children: the little daughter of a Dutch multimillionaire, the son of a Prussian prince, and a twelve-year-old who bore the name of a world-renowned champagne firm. Poor Karen cheered as well, coughing as she did so. In her delight she clapped her hands with their open fingertips. She was so grateful.

The cousins took her to the bobsleigh race as well: it was not far to the finish, either from the “Berghof” or from Karen Karstedt’s lodging, for the course, descending from the Schatzalp, ended in the “village” among the settlements on the western slope. A control hut had been erected there, to which the departure of each vehicle from the starting-point was reported by telephone. Between the icy barriers of snow, over the metallically gleaming curves of the course, the low frameworks, manned by men and women in white wool with sashes in every variety of national colour across their breasts, came steering down from the heights one at a time, at considerable intervals. One saw red, straining faces into which the snow drove. Crashes—sledges striking the edge, overturning, and emptying their crews into the snow—were photographed by the public. Music played here as well. The spectators sat upon small stands or jostled one another along the narrow footpath shovelled out beside the course. Wooden bridges over which the path later passed, spanning the course and beneath which a competing bobsleigh hurtled from time to time, were likewise crowded with people. The corpses from the sanatorium above travelled the same road, hurtling beneath the bridges, down the curves, valleyward, valleyward, Hans Castorp thought—and spoke of it too.

They even took Karen Karstedt one afternoon to the bioscope theatre in “Platz,” since she enjoyed all these things so greatly. In the bad air, which physically disconcerted all three of them, accustomed as they were to nothing but the purest, and which lay heavily upon their chests and raised a turbid mist in their heads, a multitude of life flickered past their aching eyes upon the screen, chopped small, diverting and hurried, in a restlessness that sprang up, lingered twitching, and darted away, to the accompaniment of a little music which applied its present articulation of time to the fugitive apparitions of the past and, with limited means, contrived to pull out every stop of solemnity and pomp, of passion, savagery, and cooing sensuality. It was an agitated tale of love and murder that they saw unwinding silently at the court of an Oriental despot, a succession of headlong events full of splendour and nakedness, full of sovereign lust and the religious frenzy of submission, full of cruelty, desire, deadly voluptuousness, and of lingering visual explicitness whenever the musculature of executioners’ arms was to be inspected—in short, a production fashioned out of sympathetic familiarity with the secret wishes of the international civilisation that sat watching. Settembrini, as a man of judgement, would doubtless have rejected this affront to humanity in the sharpest terms and, with upright and classical irony, scourged the abuse of technology in giving life to conceptions so contemptuous of mankind, Hans Castorp thought, and whispered something of the sort to his cousin as well. Frau Stöhr, by contrast, who was likewise present and sat not far from the three of them, appeared wholly surrendered; her red, uncultivated face was contorted with enjoyment.

For that matter, it was much the same with every face one looked into. But when the final flickering image of a sequence darted away, the lights came up in the hall, and the field of visions stood before the crowd as an empty screen, there could not even be any applause. No one was there whom one might thank by clapping, whom one might summon forth in recognition of his artistry. The actors who had come together for the performance one had enjoyed had long since scattered to the four winds; one had seen only the shadow-images of their production, millions of pictures, the briefest fixations into which their actions had been recorded and dissected so that they might be restored to the element of time as often as desired, in a course that blinked by too rapidly. The silence of the crowd after the illusion had something nerveless and repellent about it. Hands lay powerless before nothingness. People rubbed their eyes, stared before them, felt ashamed of the brightness, and longed to return to the dark, to see again—to see things whose time had passed transplanted into fresh time and made up with music, happening once more.

The despot died beneath the knife, his mouth open in a roar that could not be heard. Then came pictures from all over the world: the President of the French Republic, in top hat and grand cordon, replying from the seat of his landau to an address of welcome; the Viceroy of India at the wedding of a rajah; the German Crown Prince in a barrack-yard at Potsdam. One saw the life and activity of a native village in Neumecklenburg, a cockfight on Borneo, naked savages blowing nose-flutes, the capture of wild elephants, a ceremony at the Siamese royal court, a brothel street in Japan, where geishas sat behind wooden cage-bars. One saw muffled Samoyeds driving reindeer sledges through a North Asian waste of snow, Russian pilgrims worshipping at Hebron, the bastinado being administered to a Persian culprit. One was present at all of it; space was annihilated, time turned back, the There and Then transformed into a fleeting, capering Here and Now played about by music. A young Moroccan woman in striped silk, harnessed with chains, clasps, and rings, her swelling breast half-bared, was suddenly brought near at life size. Her nostrils were broad, her eyes full of animal life, her features in motion; she laughed with white teeth, held one hand, whose nails appeared lighter than the flesh, like a visor above her eyes, and waved with the other to the audience. People stared in embarrassment into the face of the alluring shadow, which seemed to see and did not see, which was wholly untouched by their gazes, and whose laughter and waving were not meant for the present but belonged to the There and Then, so that it would have been senseless to respond. This, as has been said, mingled a feeling of powerlessness with their pleasure. Then the phantom vanished. Blank brightness spread across the screen, the word “End” was cast upon it, the cycle of performances had closed, and in silence the audience vacated the theatre while a new public pressed in from outside, eager to enjoy a repetition of the sequence.

Encouraged by Frau Stöhr, who joined them, they next visited the café of the Kurhaus, for the sake of poor Karen, who held her hands folded in gratitude. Here too there was music. A small orchestra in red tailcoats played under the direction of a Czech or Hungarian principal violinist, who, detached from the ensemble, stood among the dancing couples and worked upon his instrument amid fiery contortions of the body. Fashionable life prevailed at the tables. Rare beverages were being carried about. The cousins ordered orangeade to cool themselves and their protégée, for it was hot and dusty, while Frau Stöhr partook of a sweet liqueur. At this hour, she said, the activity here had not yet quite come into its own. The dancing grew considerably livelier as the evening advanced; numerous patients from the various sanatoriums, and invalids living at large in the hotels and the Kurhaus itself, many more than at present, joined in later, and many an advanced case had already danced her way here into eternity, after tipping the cup of life’s delight and suffering the final haemorrhage in _dulci jubilo_. What Frau Stöhr’s profound ignorance made of “_dulci jubilo_” was altogether extraordinary; she borrowed the first word from her husband’s Italian musical vocabulary and accordingly pronounced it “_dolce_,” while the second reminded one of “fire-ho,” a jubilee year, or God knew what—the cousins both snapped at the straws in their glasses when this Latin came into force, but the Stöhr was not in the least disconcerted. On the contrary, by means of insinuations and taunts, stubbornly baring her rabbit teeth, she attempted to get to the bottom of the relationship among the three young people, which was perfectly clear to her only so far as poor Karen was concerned, whom, Frau Stöhr said, it must suit very well, with her flighty ways, to be chaperoned by two such dashing knights at once. The case appeared less clear to her when viewed from the cousins’ side; yet, for all her stupidity and ignorance, her feminine intuition afforded her a certain insight, albeit only a partial and vulgar one. For she understood, and gave taunting expression to the fact, that the true and proper knight here was Hans Castorp, while young Ziemßen merely assisted, and that Hans Castorp, whose inward inclination towards Frau Chauchat was known to her, was chaperoning the wretched Karstedt only as a substitute, since he plainly did not know how to approach the other woman—an insight wholly worthy of Frau Stöhr, entirely devoid of moral depth, very inadequate and born of vulgar intuition, and Hans Castorp therefore answered it only with a weary and contemptuous glance when she betrayed it in her coarse, teasing fashion. For indeed his association with poor Karen did mean to him a kind of substitute and an indefinitely helpful expedient, as did all his charitable undertakings. Yet at the same time these pious enterprises were also ends in themselves, and the satisfaction he felt when he fed gruel to the infirm Mallinckrodt, allowed Herr Ferge to describe the infernal pleural shock to him, or saw poor Karen clap her hands with their plastered fingertips for joy and gratitude, though transferred and rich in associations, was nevertheless also immediate and pure in kind; it sprang from a spirit of cultivation opposed to that which Herr Settembrini represented pedagogically, yet one well worth applying the _Placet experiri_ to, as it seemed to young Hans Castorp.

The little house in which Karen Karstedt lived stood not far from the watercourse and the railway track, on the road leading towards “Dorf,” and so it was convenient for the cousins to collect her when they wished to take her along after breakfast on their dutiful pleasure-walk. When they went thus towards Dorf to reach the principal promenade, they saw before them the little Schiahorn, then, farther to the right, three prongs called the Grünen Türme, though these too now lay beneath dazzling, sunlit snow, and still farther to the right the rounded summit of the Dorfberg. A quarter of the way up its flank one could see the cemetery lying, the cemetery of “Dorf,” enclosed by a wall and evidently commanding a fine view, presumably of the lake, for which reason it might well be considered as the objective of a walk. And indeed the three of them once wandered up to it on a beautiful morning—and every day was beautiful now: windless and sunny, deep blue, hot with frost, and glittering white. The cousins, one brick-red in the face, the other bronzed, went without overcoats, since coats would have been burdensome in this blaze of sunlight—young Ziemßen in sporting dress with rubber snow-boots, Hans Castorp likewise wearing such boots, but with long trousers, since he was not sufficiently body-minded to wear short ones. It was between the beginning and middle of February, in the new year. Quite so: the number of the year had changed since Hans Castorp had come up; a different one was written now, the next. A great hand upon the clock of world-time had dropped forward by one unit—not precisely one of the very greatest, not, for instance, the hand that measured millennia; very few then living would see that happen; nor yet the one that marked the centuries, or even merely the decades, no. But the year-hand had recently fallen, although Hans Castorp had not yet been up here a year, but only a little more than half of one, and it now stood fast, after the fashion of the minute-hands on certain great clocks that fall only at five-minute intervals, until it should advance again. Before then, however, the month-hand must advance ten more times, a few times more often than it had done since Hans Castorp had been up here—February he no longer counted, for what had once begun was already disposed of, just as money changed was as good as spent.

Thus the three of them also went walking once to the cemetery on the Dorfberg—this excursion too shall be recorded, for the sake of an exact account. The suggestion had come from Hans Castorp, and Joachim had probably at first entertained misgivings on poor Karen’s account, but had then perceived and conceded that it would have been pointless to play hide-and-seek with her and, in the spirit of the cowardly Stöhr, anxiously shield her from everything that recalled the _exitus_. Karen Karstedt had not yet surrendered to the self-deceptions of the final stage, but knew how matters stood with her and what the necrosis of her fingertips signified. She knew, moreover, that her hard-hearted relatives would scarcely hear of the luxury of transporting her home, but that after the _exitus_ a modest little place up there would be assigned to her for her quarters. In short, one could well consider this destination morally more suitable for her than many another, the bobsleigh start or the cinema, for example—while, besides, it was no more than a decent act of comradeship to pay Those up there a visit, supposing one did not wish to regard the cemetery simply as a sight and a neutral district for walking.

They went slowly upward in single file, for the shovelled path permitted only one person to walk abreast, left the last villas, those situated highest upon the slope, behind and beneath them, and as they climbed saw the familiar landscape in its winter splendour shift and open out once more, a little, in perspective: it widened towards the north-east, towards the entrance to the valley; the expected view of the lake disclosed itself, its wooded oval frozen over and covered with snow, and beyond its farthest shore mountain slopes seemed to meet at ground level, behind which unfamiliar, snow-covered peaks rose one above another against the blue of the sky. They contemplated this while standing in the snow before the stone gateway that formed the entrance to the cemetery, and then entered the place through the iron grille door set into the stone gate and standing merely ajar.

Here too they found shovelled paths leading between the railed, snow-pillowed mounds of the graves, those neatly and evenly made-up beds with their crosses of stone and metal, their little monuments adorned with medallions and inscriptions; but no human being was to be seen or heard. The stillness, seclusion, and undisturbed privacy of the place seemed deep and secret in more senses than one; a little stone angel or cherub-god, standing somewhere among the shrubbery with a cap of snow set somewhat askew upon his small head and a finger sealing his lips, might well be regarded as its genius—which is to say, the genius of silence, and indeed of a silence that was very strongly felt as the opposite and counterpart of speech, as a falling mute, therefore, but by no means as empty of content or devoid of event. It would doubtless have been an occasion for the two male visitors to remove their hats, had they been wearing any. But they were bareheaded, Hans Castorp too, and so they merely walked in a reverential attitude, laying their bodily weight upon the balls of their feet and making, as it were, little bows to right and left, in single file behind Karen Karstedt, who led them.

The cemetery was irregular in shape, extending at first as a narrow rectangle towards the south and then broadening out, likewise at right angles, on either side. Evidently enlargement had repeatedly proved necessary and additional farmland had been annexed. Nevertheless, the enclosure appeared even now to be as good as fully occupied, both along the wall and in its inner, less favoured parts—it was scarcely possible to see or say where there might still be room for anyone within it. The three outsiders wandered discreetly for some time through the narrow channels and passages between the memorials, now and then stopping to decipher a name together with dates of birth and death. The memorial stones and crosses were unpretentious and displayed little expenditure. As for their inscriptions, the names came from every wind and quarter of the world; they sounded English, Russian, or at any rate generally Slavic, German too, Portuguese, and otherwise; but the dates bore a tender stamp, their span was on the whole strikingly brief, the interval in years between birth and _exitus_ was everywhere approximately twenty and not much more—almost nothing but youth and no virtue inhabited the resting-place, unestablished folk who had gathered here from all over the world and had now taken up their final abode in the horizontal form of existence.

Somewhere deep among the crowded resting-beds, in the interior of the burial ground, towards the middle, there was a flat little space of human length, level and unoccupied, between two raised beds about whose stones everlasting wreaths had been hung, and involuntarily the three visitors stopped before it. They stood there, the young lady a little in advance of her companions, and read the delicate particulars upon the stones—Hans Castorp relaxed, his hands crossed before him, his mouth open and his eyes drowsy; young Ziemßen closed and not merely upright but even inclined a little backwards—whereupon the cousins, with simultaneous curiosity, glanced furtively from either side into Karen Karstedt’s face. She noticed it nonetheless, and stood there shyly and modestly, her head thrust forward a little at an angle, smiling affectedly with pursed lips while rapidly blinking her eyes.

Walpurgis Night

Within the next few days it would be seven months that young Hans Castorp had sojourned up here, while Cousin Joachim, who had already had five of them on his back when the other arrived, could now look back upon twelve, upon a little year, therefore—a round year—round in the cosmic sense that, since the small, powerful locomotive had deposited him here, the earth had once completed its circuit of the sun and returned to the point at which it had stood then. It was Carnival time. Shrovetide stood at the door, and Hans Castorp asked the man of one year what it was like.

“Magnificent!” replied Settembrini, whom the cousins had once again encountered during their morning constitutional. “Splendide!” he answered. “It is as merry as the Prater, you will see, Engineer. Then we brilliant gallants shall be quite at home here,” he said, and continued his raillery with full lips, accompanying his rasping discourse with felicitous movements of arms, head, and shoulders: “What would you have? Even in the _maison de santé_ balls are held from time to time, for the madmen and imbeciles, as I have read—so why not here as well? The programme comprises the most varied _danses macabres_, as you may imagine. Unfortunately, a certain portion of last year’s participants will be unable to appear this time, since the festivities end as early as half past nine...”

“You mean... Ah, yes, excellent!” Hans Castorp laughed. “What a wag you are! ‘At half past nine’—did you hear that? Too early, that is, for ‘a certain portion’ of last year’s company to take part for even an hour, Herr Settembrini means. Ha, ha, uncanny. For that is the portion which has meanwhile said its final _valet_ to the ‘flesh.’ Do you understand my play on words? But I am curious to see it all,” he said. “I think it right that up here we should celebrate the festivals as they fall, and mark the stages, the divisions, in the customary fashion, so that there may be no unarticulated monotony; that would be too peculiar. We have had Christmas and knew that it was New Year, and now Carnival is coming. Then Palm Sunday draws near (do they have ring-cakes here?), Holy Week, Easter, and Whitsuntide, which comes six weeks later; and then it is nearly the longest day already, the summer solstice, you understand, and we are moving on towards autumn...”

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” cried Settembrini, lifting his face towards heaven and pressing his palms against his temples. “Be silent! I forbid you to let the reins fly in this fashion!”

“Forgive me, but what I am saying is precisely the opposite... Besides, Behrens will probably decide on the injections after all, in order to detoxify me, for I remain steadily at thirty-seven point four, five, six, and even seven. It refuses to change. I simply am and shall remain one of life’s problem children. I am not really a long-term case; Rhadamanthus has never sentenced me to anything definite, but he says it would be senseless to interrupt the cure prematurely, now that I have been up here so long already and invested so much time, so to speak. And what good would it do if he gave me a date? It would not mean very much, for if, by way of example, he says half a year, that is a very close estimate, and one must be prepared for more. You can see that from my cousin: he was supposed to be finished at the beginning of the month—finished in the sense of fully cured—but last time Behrens added another four months, for his complete recovery; and what does that bring us to? It brings us to the summer solstice, as I said, without meaning to provoke you, and then we are moving towards winter again. But for the moment, of course, we have Carnival first—and you hear for yourself that I think it good and proper for us to observe everything here in due order and as it stands in the calendar. Frau Stöhr said that children’s trumpets are on sale in the concierge’s lodge?”

This was true. At the very first breakfast on Shrove Tuesday, which had suddenly arrived before one had properly caught sight of it in the distance—early that morning, indeed, all manner of sounds from comic wind instruments could be heard in the dining-room, rasping and hooting; at luncheon paper streamers were already flying from the tables of the Gänsers, the Rasmussens, and the Kleefeld, and several persons, the round-eyed Marusja among them, wore paper headgear, likewise obtainable from the lame man in the lodge out front; but in the evening a festive conviviality unfolded in the dining-room and the conversation rooms which, in the course of events... We alone know for the present what, thanks to Hans Castorp’s spirit of enterprise, this Carnival gathering was to lead to in its course. But we shall not allow our knowledge to carry us away, nor out of our deliberateness; we shall render time the honour that is its due and hurry nothing—perhaps we shall even delay events, because we share the moral diffidence of young Hans Castorp, which had so long postponed their occurrence.

In the afternoon everyone had made the pilgrimage to the “Platz” to watch the Carnival life in the streets. Masks had been abroad, Pierrots and Harlequins wielding clattering slapsticks, and skirmishes with confetti had been fought between the pedestrians and the likewise masked occupants of the decorated sleighs that jingled past. Already in very high spirits, the company assembled at the seven tables for the evening meal, determined to continue cultivating the public mood within their enclosed circle. The concierge’s paper caps, rattles, and hooters had sold briskly, and Public Prosecutor Paravant had initiated further travesty by putting on a lady’s kimono and a false pigtail which, according to calls from several quarters, belonged to Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt; he had also drawn his moustache obliquely downwards with a curling iron, and thus resembled a Chinaman to the very hair. The management had not lagged behind. It had adorned each of the seven tables with a paper lantern, a coloured moon with a burning candle inside, so that Settembrini, on entering the room and brushing past Hans Castorp’s table, quoted a poetical saying inspired by the illumination:

“Just see what many-coloured flames! A merry company is gathered,”

he remarked with a refined, dry smile, strolling on towards his place, where he was received with small projectiles—thin-walled globules filled with a fragrant liquid, which burst upon impact and drenched their target in perfume.

In short, the festive mood was very pronounced from the outset. Laughter reigned; paper streamers hanging from the chandeliers swayed to and fro in the draught; confetti floated in the gravy; soon the dwarf could be seen bustling past with the first ice-bucket and the first bottle of champagne; the sparkling wine was mixed with Burgundy, at a signal from Attorney Einhuf; and when, towards the end of the meal, the overhead lights actually went out and only the lanterns remained to illuminate the dining-room with a many-coloured twilight, nocturnal and Italianate, the mood was complete. Much approval was expressed at Hans Castorp’s table when Settembrini sent across a slip of paper—entrusting it to Marusja, who sat nearest him and wore a jockey’s cap of green tissue-paper—upon which he had written in pencil:

“Only consider! The mountain is wild with magic tonight, And if a will-o’-the-wisp is to show you the way, You must not be too particular.”

Doctor Blumenkohl, who was once again feeling very poorly, murmured something to himself with that facial—or rather labial—expression peculiar to him, from which one could gather what verses these were. Hans Castorp, for his part, felt that he ought not to leave the message unanswered, and considered himself playfully obliged to write a reply upon the slip, though it could only have turned out exceedingly insignificant. He searched his pockets for a pencil, but found none, nor could he obtain one from Joachim or the schoolmistress. His red-veined eyes turned eastward in search of assistance, towards the rear left-hand corner of the room, and one could see his fleeting intention ramify into associations so far-reaching that he turned pale and entirely forgot his original purpose.

There were other reasons for turning pale. Frau Chauchat, back there, had dressed for Carnival; she wore a new gown, or at any rate one in which Hans Castorp had never seen her—a gown of light, dark, indeed black silk that only now and then shimmered faintly golden-brown; at the neck it had a small, girlish, rounded opening, scarcely deep enough to leave visible the throat, the beginnings of the collarbones, and, at the back, beneath the loose hair at her nape, the vertebrae that protruded slightly when her head was inclined forward; but it left Clawdia’s arms bare all the way to the shoulders—her arms, at once delicate and full—cool, too, in all probability, and standing out with extraordinary whiteness against the silken darkness of the gown, in so shattering a fashion that Hans Castorp closed his eyes and whispered inwardly: “My God!”—He had never seen this manner of cutting a dress. He was familiar with ball gowns, festive and permissible, indeed conventional exposures far more extensive than this one, without their producing anything remotely so sensational. Above all, the poor Hans Castorp’s earlier assumption proved mistaken: that the allure, the irrational allure, of these arms, with which he had already made acquaintance through thin gauze, might prove less profound without so portentous a “transfiguration,” as he had called it at the time. Mistaken! Fatal self-deception! The complete, emphatic, dazzling nakedness of these magnificent limbs belonging to an organism diseased by toxins was an event that proved far more powerful than the transfiguration of that former occasion, an apparition to which there was no response but to bow one’s head and repeat soundlessly: “My God!”

A little later another slip arrived, bearing the words:

“Society as one could wish— In truth, a host of brides! And bachelors, man after man, The most promising of tribes!”

“Bravo, bravo!” people cried. They had already reached the mocha, which was served in little brown earthenware pots, or, as the case might be, the liqueurs—as had Frau Stöhr, for example, who dearly loved sipping sweet spirits. The company began to break up and circulate. People visited one another and changed tables. Some of the guests had already withdrawn to the conversation rooms, while others remained seated and continued applying themselves to the mixture of wines. Settembrini now came over in person, his coffee-cup in his hand and a toothpick between his lips, and installed himself as a visitor at the corner of the table between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress.

“The Harz Mountains,” he said. “The country around Schierke and Elend. Did I promise you too much, Engineer? Now this is what I call a fair! But only wait; our wit is not so soon exhausted, we have not yet reached the height of it, much less the end. From all one hears, there are to be further masks. Certain persons have withdrawn—and that entitles us to all manner of expectations, you will see.”

And indeed new disguises appeared: ladies in masculine attire, rendered operatic and improbable by their expansive forms, their faces blackened with beards drawn in charred bottle-cork; gentlemen, conversely, who had donned women’s robes and stumbled over the skirts, as did Studiosus Rasmussen, who, in a black gown strewn with jet beads, displayed a pimply décolletage which he cooled with a paper fan, cooling his back as well. A beggar appeared, knock-kneed and leaning upon a crutch. Someone had fashioned a Pierrot costume from white underclothes and a lady’s felt hat, and powdered his face so that his eyes acquired an unnatural appearance, while his mouth had been heightened to a bloody red with lip salve. It was the youth with the fingernail. A Greek from the Bad Russian Table, with handsome legs, strutted about in lilac knitted drawers, a little cloak, a paper ruff, and a sword-stick, as a Spanish grandee or fairy-tale prince. All these masks had been hastily improvised after the conclusion of the meal. Frau Stöhr could endure her chair no longer. She vanished, to return after a short while as a scrubwoman, her skirt tucked up and her sleeves rolled, the ribbons of her paper cap knotted beneath her chin, and armed with a bucket and broom, which she began to ply by thrusting the wet scrubbing-brush beneath the tables and between the feet of those seated there.

“Old Baubo comes alone,”

Settembrini recited at the sight of her, adding the rhyming line as well, clearly and graphically. She heard him, called him an “Italian cock,” and told him to keep his “naughty little verses” to himself, addressing him with the familiar “thou” in the spirit of masked licence; for this form of intercourse had already been generally adopted during the meal. He was preparing to answer her when noise and laughter from the hall interrupted him and caused a stir in the dining-room.

Followed by guests coming from the conversation rooms, two curious figures made their entrance, having evidently only just completed their costumes. One was dressed as a deaconess, but her black habit was sewn crosswise from neck to hem with white strips of ribbon—short ones placed close together and, at wider intervals, longer ones extending beyond them, in the manner of a thermometer’s graduations. She held her forefinger before her pale mouth and carried a temperature chart in her right hand. The other mask appeared blue upon blue: with lips and eyebrows dyed blue, the rest of the face and the neck likewise painted blue, a blue woollen cap pulled crookedly over one ear, and clothed in a suit or overall of blue glazed linen, fashioned in a single piece, drawn tight with ribbons at the ankles, and padded in the middle to form a round belly. They were recognised as Frau Iltis and Herr Albin. Both wore cardboard placards hung about their necks, upon which were written: “The Silent Sister” and “Blue Heinrich.” Side by side, they made their way around the room with a kind of waddling gait.

What applause that drew! Cries of acclaim flew through the air. Frau Stöhr, her broom beneath her arm and her hands upon her knees, laughed immoderately and vulgarly to her heart’s content, under cover of her role as scrubwoman. Settembrini alone remained impervious. Beneath his handsomely curved moustache, his lips became extremely thin after he had cast one brief glance at the successful pair of masks.

Among those who had returned from the conversation rooms in the train of the Blue and the Silent figures was Clawdia Chauchat. Together with the woolly-haired Tamara and that table companion with the concave ribcage, a certain Buligin, who wore evening dress, she passed Hans Castorp’s table in her new gown and moved diagonally across to the table of young Gänser and the Kleefeld, where she remained standing with her hands behind her back, laughing and chatting through narrowed eyes, while her companions continued to follow the allegorical spectres and left the room with them once more. Frau Chauchat, too, had adorned herself with a Carnival cap—it was not even a purchased one, but the sort made for children, simply folded from white paper into a three-cornered hat; set at an angle, moreover, it became her admirably. The dark golden-brown silk gown left her feet free, and its skirt was made somewhat bouffant. We shall say no more here about the arms. They were bare all the way to the shoulders.

“Look closely at her!” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say as though from far away, while his eyes followed her as she presently moved on towards the glass door and out of the room. “That is Lilith.”

“Who?” Hans Castorp asked.

The man of letters was delighted. He replied:

“Adam’s first wife. Beware...”

Apart from the two of them, only Dr. Blumenkohl remained at the table, in his distant place. The rest of the dining company, Joachim included, had migrated to the conversation rooms. Hans Castorp said:

“Thou art full of poetry and verse today. And what sort of Lilli is this now? Was Adam married twice, then? I had no idea ...”

“Hebrew legend would have it so. This Lilith became a nocturnal spectre, dangerous to young men particularly on account of her beautiful hair.”

“Fie, the devil! A nocturnal spectre with beautiful hair. Thou canst not abide such a thing, canst thou? Then along thou comest and switchest on the electric light, so to speak, to set the young men upon the right path—is that not what thou dost?” Hans Castorp said fantastically. He had drunk a considerable quantity of the wine mixture.

“Listen, Engineer, desist from that!” Settembrini commanded, drawing his brows together. “Employ the form of address customary in the civilized West, the third person _pluralis_, if you please! What you are attempting there does not become you in the least.”

“But why not? It is Carnival! Everyone accepts it this evening ...”

“Yes, for the sake of an uncivilized thrill. ‘Thou’ among strangers—that is, among persons who by rights should address one another as ‘you’—is a repellent piece of savagery, a game played with the primitive state, a dissolute game which I abhor, because at bottom it is directed against civilization and developed humanity—directed against them insolently and shamelessly. Nor did I call you ‘thou’; do not imagine that! I was quoting a passage from the masterpiece of your national literature. I was therefore speaking poetically ...”

“So was I! I too am speaking poetically, as it were—because the moment seems to me suited to it, and that is why I speak so. I do not say that it comes altogether naturally to me or is easy for me to call thee ‘thou’; on the contrary, it costs me a certain effort of self-conquest, I have to give myself a push before I can do it, but I give myself that push gladly, joyfully and from the heart ...”

“From the heart?”

“From the heart, yes; thou canst believe me. We have been together up here for so long now—seven months, if thou reckonest it up; that is not even very much by our standards up here, but when I think back, it is a great deal of time by flatland reckoning. Well, and we have spent it together, because life brought us together here, and we have seen each other almost every day and held interesting conversations, some of them upon subjects of which I should not have understood the slightest thing down below. But here I did; here they were very important and close to me, so that whenever we discussed them I was absorbed in the matter to the highest degree. Or rather, whenever thou, as _homo humanus_, didst explain things to me; for naturally, in my inexperience hitherto, I had little to contribute and could only find everything thou saidst extraordinarily worth hearing. Through thee I have learned and understood so much ... The matter of Carducci was the least of it; but how, for instance, the republic is connected with beautiful style, or time with the progress of mankind—whereas, if there were no time, there could be no progress of mankind either, and the world would be nothing but stagnant water and a putrid pool—what should I know of that if thou hadst not been there! I simply call thee ‘thou’ without otherwise addressing thee, forgive me, because I should not know how to do it—I cannot quite manage it. There thou sittest, and I simply say ‘thou’ to thee; that is enough. Thou art not just some person with a name; thou art a representative, Herr Settembrini, a representative here and at my side—that is what thou art,” Hans Castorp affirmed, striking the tablecloth with the flat of his hand. “And now I should like to thank thee,” he continued, pushing his goblet of sparkling wine and Burgundy towards Herr Settembrini’s coffee-cup, as though to clink glasses with him upon the table—“for having taken such friendly charge of me during these seven months, and for having lent a hand to me, a young _mulus_ beset by so much that was new, in my exercises and experiments, and sought to exert a corrective influence upon me, entirely _sine pecunia_, partly through stories and partly in abstract form. I have the distinct feeling that the moment has come to thank thee for that and for everything, and to ask thy forgiveness if I have been a poor pupil, a ‘problem child of life,’ as thou saidst. I was deeply moved when thou saidst that, and every time I think of it I am moved again. A problem child I probably was for thee as well, and for thy pedagogic vein, of which thou spokest that very first day—naturally, that too is one of the connections thou hast taught me, the connection between humanism and pedagogy—and with time several more would surely occur to me. Forgive me, then, and bear me no ill will! To thy health, Herr Settembrini; long life to thee! I drain my glass in honour of thy literary endeavours to eradicate human suffering!” he concluded, leaned his head back, drank off his wine mixture in a few great swallows, and rose. “Now let us go in to the others.”

“Listen, Engineer, what has got into your head?” said the Italian, his eyes full of astonishment, as he too left the table. “That sounds like a farewell ...”

“No, why a farewell?” Hans Castorp evaded. He evaded not merely figuratively, with his words, but physically as well, describing an arc with the upper part of his body and taking hold of the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, who had just come to fetch them. The Hofrat was dispensing with his own hand, in the piano room, a Carnival punch provided by the management, she reported. The gentlemen, she said, had better come at once if they wished to secure a glass of it. And so they went in.

There, indeed, in the midst of the guests who crowded round and held out little handled glasses to him, Hofrat Behrens stood at the round table in the centre, which was covered in white, ladling a steaming beverage from a tureen. He too had enlivened his appearance with a touch of Carnival: with the clinical coat which he wore today as always, since his activity never rested, he had donned a genuine Turkish fez, carmine-red, with a black tassel dangling over his ear—those two things together were costume enough for him; they sufficed to heighten his already striking appearance into something altogether fantastic and riotous. The long white coat exaggerated the Hofrat’s height; if one allowed for the bend of his neck by mentally removing it and straightening his figure to its full stature, he appeared positively larger than life, with a small, brightly coloured head of the most singular stamp. To young Hans Castorp, at least, his face had never appeared so strange as it did today beneath that foolish covering: the snub-nosed, flat, bluishly heated physiognomy, in which the blue eyes bulged moistly beneath white-blond brows, while above the bow-shaped mouth, rearing upward, stood the pale little moustache, twisted awry. Leaning away from the steam that swirled before him out of the tureen, he let the brown beverage, a sugary arrack punch, stream in an arc from the ladle into the proffered glasses, all the while holding forth without pause in his jovial gibberish, so that volleys of laughter round the table accompanied the dispensing.

“Herr Urian sits on top,” Settembrini explained softly, gesturing towards the Hofrat, and was then drawn away from Hans Castorp’s side. Dr. Krokowski too was present. Short, stocky, and robust, his glossy black smock draped over his shoulders with its sleeves hanging empty, so that it had the effect of a domino, he held his glass at eye-level in a twisted hand and chatted merrily with a group of masks dressed as the opposite sex. Music began. The patient with the tapir face, accompanied at the piano by the gentleman from Mannheim, played Handel’s Largo on the violin and then a sonata by Grieg, national and drawing-room in character. There was benevolent applause, even at the two bridge tables that had been set up, where masked and unmasked players sat with bottles in ice-coolers beside them. The doors stood open; guests were lingering in the hall as well. A group around the round table bearing the punch-bowl watched the Hofrat, who made himself the leader in a parlour game. Standing and bending across the table, his eyes closed but his head thrown back so that everyone could see he was keeping them shut, he blindly drew a figure in pencil on the back of a visiting card—it was the outline of a little pig which his enormous hand traced without the aid of his eyes, a little pig in profile, somewhat elementary and more ideal than true to life, yet unmistakably the fundamental shape of a pig, which he contrived under such difficult conditions. It was a feat, and he could perform it. The slit of an eye came to rest approximately where it belonged, a little too far forward on the snout, but still roughly in its proper place; the same was true of the pointed ear upon the head and the little legs dangling from the rounded belly; and, continuing the similarly rounded line of the back, the little tail curled very prettily in upon itself. There were cries of “Ah!” when the work was done, and the others, seized by ambition, crowded forward to try to emulate the master. Yet very few of them would have been capable of drawing a little pig with their eyes open, let alone closed. What monstrosities resulted! There was no coherence anywhere. The little eye fell outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, which itself came nowhere near closing, while the tail curled somewhere off to one side, wholly without organic relation to the confused principal figure, an independent arabesque. They nearly split their sides with laughter. The group received fresh accessions. A stir arose at the bridge tables, and the players came over curiously, holding their cards fanned out in their hands. The bystanders watched the eyelids of whoever was making the attempt to see whether he peeped—a temptation to which some succumbed from a sense of their own helplessness—giggled and snorted as long as he continued committing his blind errors, and broke into jubilation when, tearing his eyes open, he looked down upon his absurd handiwork. Deceptive self-confidence drove each of them into the contest. The card, though spacious, was soon overcrowded on both sides, so that the misshapen figures intersected one another. But the Hofrat sacrificed a second from his wallet, upon which Public Prosecutor Paravant, after secret deliberation, attempted to draw the little pig _in a single stroke_—with the result that his failure surpassed all those preceding it: the ornament he produced bore not only no resemblance to a pig, but not the remotest resemblance to anything in the world. Shouts, laughter, and tempestuous congratulations! Menu cards were fetched from the dining-room—several people, ladies and gentlemen, could now draw at once, and every competitor had his own guards and spectators, each of whom in turn was a claimant to the pencil then in use. There were three pencils, which people snatched from one another’s hands. They belonged to guests. The Hofrat, having launched the new game and seen it excellently under way, had disappeared with his aide.

Hans Castorp, amid the crush, watched someone drawing over Joachim’s shoulder, supporting himself with his elbow upon that shoulder, holding his chin in all five fingers, and planting his other hand upon his hip. He talked and laughed. He too wanted to draw, demanded loudly to do so, and received the pencil, by now so short a thing that it could be held only between thumb and forefinger. He railed at the stump, his blindly upturned face raised towards the ceiling, railed loudly and cursed the pencil’s uselessness as his flying hand flung some hideous nonsense upon the card, finally missing even that and straying onto the tablecloth. “That does not count!” he shouted into the well-deserved laughter. “How is one supposed to draw with such a—devil take it!” And he flung the accused stump into the punch-bowl. “Who has a proper pencil? Who will lend me one? I must draw again! A pencil, a pencil! Who has another?” he called in either direction, his left forearm still resting on the tabletop while he shook his right hand high in the air. He received none. Then he turned and went into the room, continuing to call as he went—went straight towards Clawdia Chauchat, who, as he had known, was standing not far from the portière leading to the small salon and had been watching the activity at the punch table from there with a smile.

Behind him he heard someone calling, sonorous foreign words: “_Eh! Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa! Ingegnere! Un po di raggione, sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!_” But he drowned that voice with his own, and thus Herr Settembrini was seen to leave the Carnival gathering with one hand flung above his head on an outspread arm—a gesture customary in his native country, whose meaning could not easily be reduced to a single word, and which was accompanied by a long-drawn “_Ehh—!_” Hans Castorp, however, stood in the clinker-tiled court, gazed from the closest proximity into the blue-grey-green epicanthic eyes above the prominent cheekbones, and said:

“Hast _thou_ perhaps a pencil?”

He was deathly pale, as pale as he had been when he came to the conference stained with blood after his solitary walk. The vasomotor innervation of his face was at play, with the result that the bloodless skin of that young face sank in pale and cold, the nose appeared pointed, and the region beneath the eyes looked as leaden as that of a corpse. But the sympathetic nervous system made Hans Castorp’s heart pound at such a pace that regular breathing was altogether out of the question, while shudders ran over the young man through the action of the sebaceous glands of his body, which rose erect together with their hair follicles.

The woman in the paper cocked hat looked him up and down with a smile in which no pity, no concern at the devastation of his appearance could be discerned. This sex knows no such pity or concern in the face of the terrors of passion—an element with which it is evidently far more familiar than the man, who is by nature by no means at home in it and whom it never welcomes there without mockery and malicious delight. Besides, he would certainly have had no use for pity or concern.

“I?” the bare-armed invalid replied to his “thou” ... “Yes, perhaps.” And there may perhaps have been in her smile and her voice something of the excitement that arises when, after a long and silent relationship, the first address is spoken—a sly excitement which secretly gathers all that has gone before into the present moment. “Thou art very ambitious ... Thou art ... very ... eager,” she continued mockingly in her exotic pronunciation, with its foreign r and foreign, overly open e, while her slightly veiled, agreeably husky voice placed the stress in “ambitious” upon the second syllable as well, so that it sounded wholly foreign—and she rummaged in her little leather bag, peered searchingly into it, and drew out, from beneath a handkerchief which she had first brought to light, a small silver pencil, thin and fragile, a dainty little trinket scarcely fit for serious work. The pencil of former days, the first one, had been more serviceable and honest.

“_Voilà_,” she said, and held the little pencil before his eyes, grasping it by the tip between thumb and forefinger and swinging it lightly to and fro.

Since she was at once giving it to him and withholding it from him, he took it without receiving it—that is to say, he held his hand level with the pencil, close beside it, his fingers poised to grasp it but not quite closing, while his eyes, from their leaden-coloured sockets, moved alternately from the object to Clawdia’s Tatar face. His bloodless lips stood open, and remained so; he did not use them for speech when he said:

“You see, I knew you would have one.”

“_Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile_,” she said. “_C’est à visser, tu sais._”

And as their heads bent over it, she showed him the ordinary mechanism of the pencil, from which a needle-thin, probably hard and unyielding little rod of graphite dropped when the screw was loosened.

They stood close together, leaning towards each other. Since he was in evening dress, he wore a stiff collar that evening and could rest his chin upon it.

“Little, ut thine,” he said, forehead to forehead with her, looking down at the pencil with motionless lips and consequently omitting the labial consonant.

“Oh, you are witty too,” she replied with a short laugh, straightening up and now surrendering the crayon to him. (Though God alone could know wherein his wit lay, since there was manifestly not a drop of blood in his head.) “Now go, make haste, draw, draw well, distinguish yourself!” Witty on her own account, she seemed intent on driving him away.

“No, _you_ haven’t drawn yet. _You_ ’ust draw,” he said, omitting the m in “must,” and took a step backwards in a manner that drew her after him.

“I?” she repeated once more, with an astonishment that seemed directed less at his demand than at something else. Smiling in a certain confusion, she lingered for a moment, but then followed his magnetizing backward movement for a few steps towards the punch table.

It appeared, however, that the entertainment there had not endured and was now in its last throes. Someone was still drawing, but no longer had any spectators. The cards were covered with nonsense, everyone had made trial of his incapacity, and the table stood almost deserted, particularly since a countercurrent had set in. Once it had been noticed that the doctors were gone, the watchword suddenly became dancing. The table was already being dragged aside. Lookouts were posted at the doors of the writing-room and the music-room, with instructions to bring the ball to a halt by means of a signal should “the Old Man,” Krokowski, or the matron reappear. A Slavic youth struck the keyboard of the little walnut pianino with great expression. The first couples revolved within an irregular circle of armchairs and chairs on which spectators were seated.

Hans Castorp bade farewell to the table, which was just then floating away, with a gesture of the hand that said: “Begone!” Then, with his chin, he indicated some unoccupied seats he had noticed in the little salon, and the sheltered corner to the right of the portière. He said nothing, perhaps because the music was too loud. He drew a chair—it was what was known as a triumphal chair, with a wooden frame and plush upholstery—to the spot he had previously indicated in pantomime for Frau Chauchat, and himself appropriated a crackling, creaking wicker chair with rolled armrests, upon which he sat down beside her, leaning towards her, his arms on the rests, her crayon in his hands, his feet thrust far beneath the chair. She, for her part, lay much too deep in the plush sling, her knees raised; nevertheless she crossed one over the other and let her foot sway aloft, its ankle, above the rim of the black patent-leather shoe, covered by the equally black silk of her stocking. Other people sat before them, rose to dance, and made room for those who were tired. There was a continual coming and going.

“You have a new dress,” he said, so that he might be permitted to look at her, and heard her reply:

“New? Are you so well versed in my wardrobe?”

“Am I not right?”

“Yes. I had it made here recently, by Lukaček in the village. He does a great deal of work for ladies up here. Do you like it?”

“Very much,” he said, encompassing her once more with his gaze and then lowering it. “Would you like to dance?” he added.

“Would _you_ like to?” she countered, smiling with raised brows, and he replied:

“I should, if you felt inclined.”

“That is less well-behaved than I thought you were,” she said; and when he laughed dismissively, she added: “Your cousin has already gone.”

“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed unnecessarily. “I noticed a while ago that he had left. He will have gone to bed.”

“_C’est un jeune homme très étroit, très honnête, très allemand._”

“_Étroit? Honnête?_” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. You mean that he is pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic—_nous autres allemands_?”

“_Nous causons de votre cousin. Mais c’est vrai_, you are a little bourgeois. _Vous aimez l’ordre mieux que la liberté, toute l’Europe le sait._”

“_Aimer ... aimer ... Qu’est-ce que c’est! Ça manque de définition, ce mot-là._ One man has it, another loves it, _comme nous disons proverbialement_,” Hans Castorp asserted. “Of late,” he continued, “I have sometimes been thinking about freedom. That is to say, I heard the word so often that I began to think about it. _Je te le dirai en français_, what I thought was this: _Ce que toute l’Europe nomme la liberté, est peut-être une chose assez pédante et assez bourgeoise en comparaison de notre besoin d’ordre – c’est ça!_”

“_Tiens! C’est amusant. C’est ton cousin à qui tu penses en disant des choses étranges comme ça?_”

“No, _c’est vraiment une bonne âme_, a simple nature, untouched by peril, _tu sais. Mais il n’est pas bourgeois, il est militaire._”

“Untouched by peril?” she repeated with difficulty ... “_Tu veux dire: une nature tout à fait ferme, sûre d’elle-même? Mais il est sérieusement malade, ton pauvre cousin._”

“Who said so?”

“People know about one another here.”

“Did Hofrat Behrens tell you?”

“_Peut-être en me faisant voir ses tableaux._”

“_C’est-à-dire: en faisant ton portrait!_”

“_Pourquoi pas. Tu l’as trouvé réussi, mon portrait?_”

“_Mais oui, extrêmement. Behrens a très exactement rendu ta peau, oh vraiment très fidèlement. J’aimerais beaucoup être portraitiste, moi aussi, pour avoir l’occasion d’étudier ta peau comme lui._”

“_Parlez allemand, s’il vous plaît!_”

“Oh, I speak German, even in French. _C’est une sorte d’étude artistique et médicale – en un mot: il s’agit des lettres humaines, tu comprends._ Well, then, will you not dance?”

“But no, that is childish. _En cachette des médecins. Aussitôt que Behrens reviendra, tout le monde va se précipiter sur les chaises. Ce sera fort ridicule._”

“Have you such great respect for him?”

“For whom?” she said, pronouncing the interrogative shortly and with a foreign accent.

“For Behrens.”

“_Mais va donc avec ton Behrens!_ Besides, it is much too crowded for dancing. _Et puis sur le tapis_ ... Let us watch the dancing.”

“Yes, let us,” he agreed, and gazed beside her, with his pale face and his grandfather’s blue, contemplative eyes, at the capering of the masked patients here in the salon and over in the writing-room. There the Silent Sister was hopping about with Blue Henry; and Frau Salomon, dressed as a gentleman of the ball, in tailcoat and white waistcoat, with high-arched shirtfront, painted moustache, and monocle, revolved on little patent-leather high-heeled shoes that emerged unnaturally from her black gentleman’s trousers, together with the Pierrot, whose lips glowed blood-red in his whitened face and whose eyes resembled those of an albino rabbit. The Greek in the little cloak swung the symmetry of his lilac-tricot legs around the décolleté and darkly glittering Rasmussen; the public prosecutor in the kimono, Generalkonsulin Wurmbrand, and young Gänser even danced three abreast, their arms entwined about one another; and as for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, clasping it to her heart and caressing its bristles as though they were the upright hair of a human head.

“Let us,” Hans Castorp repeated mechanically. They spoke softly beneath the strains of the piano. “Let us sit here and watch as though in a dream. For me it is like a dream, you must know, that we should be sitting like this—_comme un rêve singulièrement profond, car il faut dormir très profondément pour rêver comme cela ... Je veux dire: C’est un rêve bien connu, rêvé de tout temps, long, éternel, oui, être assis près de toi comme à présent, voilà l’éternité._”

“_Poète!_” she said. “_Bourgeois, humaniste et poète, – voilà l’allemand au complet, comme il faut!_”

“_Je crains, que nous ne soyons pas du tout et nullement comme il faut_,” he replied. “_Sous aucun égard. Nous sommes peut-être des_ problem children of life, _tout simplement_.”

“_Joli mot. Dis-moi donc ... Il n’aurait pas été fort difficile de rêver ce rêve-là plus tôt. C’est un peu tard, que monsieur se résout d’adresser la parole à son humble servante._”

“_Pourquoi des paroles?_” he said. “_Pourquoi parler? Parler, discourir, c’est une chose bien républicaine, je le concède. Mais je doute, que ce soit poétique au même degré. Un de nos pensionnaires, qui est un peu devenu mon ami, M. Settembrini ..._”

“_Il vient de te lancer quelques paroles._”

“_Eh bien, c’est un grand parleur sans doute, il aime même beaucoup à réciter de beaux vers, – mais est-ce un poète, cet homme-là?_”

“_Je regrette sincèrement de n’avoir jamais eu le plaisir de faire la connaissance de ce chevalier._”

“_Je le crois bien._”

“_Ah! Tu le crois._”

“_Comment? C’était une phrase tout-à-fait indifférente, ce que j’ai dit là. Moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français. Pourtant, avec toi je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière, – sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve. Tu comprends?_”

“_A peu près._”

“_Ça suffit ... Parler_,” Hans Castorp continued, “_– pauvre affaire! Dans l’éternité, on ne parle point. Dans l’éternité, tu sais, on fait comme en dessinant un petit cochon: on penche la tête en arrière et on ferme les yeux._”

“_Pas mal, ça! Tu es chez toi dans l’éternité, sans aucun doute, tu la connais à fond. Il faut avouer, que tu es un petit rêveur assez curieux._”

“_Et puis_,” said Hans Castorp, “_si je t’avais parlé plus tôt, il m’aurait fallu te dire »vous«!_”

“_Eh bien, est-ce que tu as l’intention de me tutoyer pour toujours?_”

“_Mais oui. Je t’ai tutoyée de tout temps et je te tutoierai éternellement._”

“_C’est un peu fort, par exemple. En tout cas tu n’auras pas trop longtemps l’occasion de me dire »tu«. Je vais partir._”

The words required some time to penetrate his consciousness. Then he started up, looking confusedly about him like one disturbed from sleep. Their conversation had proceeded rather slowly, since Hans Castorp spoke French laboriously and as though immersed in hesitant reflection. The piano, which had been silent for a short while, sounded again, now beneath the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had relieved the Slavic youth and set up some music. Fräulein Engelhart sat beside him and turned the pages. The ball had thinned out. A considerable number of the residents seemed to have assumed the horizontal position. No one was sitting before them now. In the reading-room they were playing cards.

“What are you doing?” Hans Castorp asked, aghast ...

“I am leaving,” she repeated, smiling as though surprised by his petrifaction.

“Impossible,” he said. “You are only joking.”

“Not at all. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving.”

“When?”

“Why, tomorrow. _Après dîner._”

A vast collapse took place within him. He said:

“Where to?”

“Very far away.”

“To Daghestan?”

“_Tu n’es pas mal instruit. Peut-être, pour le moment ..._”

“But are you cured?”

“_Quant à ça ... non._ But Behrens thinks that, for the present, there is not much more to be accomplished for me here. _C’est pourquoi je vais risquer un petit changement d’air._”

“So you are coming back!”

“That remains to be seen. Above all, it remains to be seen when. _Quant à moi, tu sais, j’aime la liberté avant tout et notamment celle de choisir mon domicile. Tu ne comprends guère ce que c’est: être obsédé d’indépendance. C’est de ma race, peut-être._”

“_Et ton mari au Daghestan te l’accorde, – ta liberté?_”

“_C’est la maladie qui me la rend. Me voilà à cet endroit pour la troisième fois. J’ai passé un an ici, cette fois. Possible que je revienne. Mais alors tu seras bien loin depuis longtemps._”

“Do you think so, Clawdia?”

“_Mon prénom aussi! Vraiment tu les prends bien au sérieux les coutumes du carnaval!_”

“Do you know how ill I am?”

“_Oui – non – comme on sait ces choses ici. Tu as une petite tache humide là dedans et un peu de fièvre, n’est-ce pas?_”

“_Trente-sept et huit ou neuf l’après-midi_,” said Hans Castorp. “And you?”

“_Oh, mon cas, tu sais, c’est un peu plus compliqué ... pas tout-à-fait simple._”

“_Il y a quelque chose dans cette branche de lettres humaines dite la médecine_,” said Hans Castorp, “_qu’on appelle bouchement tuberculeux des vases de lymphe._”

“_Ah! Tu as mouchardé, mon cher, on le voit bien._”

“_Et toi ..._ Forgive me! Let me ask you something now, ask you urgently, and in German! That time when I left the table to go to my examination, six months ago ... You looked round after me; do you remember?”

“_Quelle question? Il y a six mois!_”

“Did you know where I was going?”

“_Certes, c’était tout-à-fait par hasard ..._”

“You knew it from Behrens?”

“_Toujours ce Behrens!_”

“_Oh, il a représenté ta peau d’une façon tellement exacte ... D’ailleurs, c’est un veuf aux joues ardentes et qui possède un service à café très remarquable ... Je crois bien qu’il connaît ton corps non seulement comme médecin, mais aussi comme adepte d’une autre discipline de lettres humaines._”

“_Tu as décidément raison de dire, que tu parles en rêve, mon ami._”

“_Soit ... Laisse-moi rêver de nouveau après m’avoir réveillé si cruellement par cette cloche d’alarme de ton départ. Sept mois sous tes yeux ... Et à présent, où en réalité j’ai fait ta connaissance, tu me parles de départ!_”

“_Je te répète, que nous aurions pu causer plus tôt._”

“Would you have wished it?”

“_Moi? Tu ne m’échapperas pas, mon petit. Il s’agit de tes intérêts, à toi. Est-ce que tu étais trop timide pour t’approcher d’une femme à qui tu parles en rêve maintenant, ou est-ce qu’il y avait quelqu’un qui t’en a empêché?_”

“_Je te l’ai dit. Je ne voulais pas te dire »vous«._”

“_Farceur. Réponds donc, – ce monsieur beau parleur, cet italien-là qui a quitté la soirée, – qu’est-ce qu’il t’a lancé tantôt?_”

“_Je n’en ai entendu absolument rien. Je me soucie très peu de ce monsieur, quand mes yeux te voient. Mais tu oublies ... il n’aurait pas été si facile du tout de faire ta connaissance dans le monde. Il y avait encore mon cousin avec qui j’étais lié et qui incline très peu à s’amuser ici: Il ne pense à rien qu’à son retour dans les plaines, pour se faire soldat._”

“_Pauvre diable. Il est, en effet, plus malade qu’il ne sait. Ton ami italien du reste ne va pas trop bien non plus._”

“_Il le dit lui-même. Mais mon cousin ... Est-ce vrai? Tu m’effraies._”

“_Fort possible qu’il va mourir, s’il essaye d’être soldat dans les plaines._”

“_Qu’il va mourir. La mort. Terrible mot, n’est-ce pas? Mais c’est étrange, il ne m’impressionne pas tellement aujourd’hui, ce mot. C’était une façon de parler bien conventionnelle, lorsque je disais »Tu m’effraies«. L’idée de la mort ne m’effraie pas. Elle me laisse tranquille. Je n’ai pas pitié – ni de mon bon Joachim ni de moi-même, en entendant qu’il va peut-être mourir. Si c’est vrai, son état ressemble beaucoup au mien et je ne le trouve pas particulièrement imposant. Il est moribond, et moi, je suis amoureux, eh bien! – Tu as parlé à mon cousin à l’atelier de photographie intime, dans l’antichambre, tu te souviens._”

“_Je me souviens un peu._”

“_Donc ce jour-là Behrens a fait ton portrait transparent!_”

“_Mais oui._”

“_Mon dieu. Et l’as-tu sur toi?_”

“_Non, je l’ai dans ma chambre._”

“_Ah, dans ta chambre. Quant au mien, je l’ai toujours dans mon portefeuille. Veux-tu que je te le fasse voir?_”

“_Mille remerciements. Ma curiosité n’est pas invincible. Ce sera un aspect très innocent._”

“_Moi, j’ai vu ton portrait extérieur. J’aimerais beaucoup mieux voir ton portrait intérieur qui est enfermé dans ta chambre ... Laisse-moi demander autre chose! Parfois un monsieur russe qui loge en ville vient te voir. Qui est-ce? Dans quel but vient-il, cet homme?_”

“_Tu es joliment fort en espionnage, je l’avoue. Eh bien, je réponds. Oui, c’est un compatriote souffrant, un ami. J’ai fait sa connaissance à une autre station balnéaire, il y a quelques années déjà. Nos relations? Les voilà: nous prenons notre thé ensemble, nous fumons deux ou trois papiros, et nous bavardons, nous philosophons, nous parlons de l’homme, de Dieu, de la vie, de la morale, de mille choses. Voilà mon compte rendu. Es-tu satisfait?_”

“_De la morale aussi! Et qu’est-ce que vous avez trouvé en fait de morale, par exemple?_”

“_La morale? Cela t’intéresse? Eh bien, il nous semble, qu’il faudrait chercher la morale non dans la vertu, c’est-à-dire dans la raison, la discipline, les bonnes mœurs, l’honnêteté, – mais plutôt dans le contraire, je veux dire: dans le péché, en s’abandonnant au danger, à ce qui est nuisible, à ce qui nous consume. Il nous semble qu’il est plus moral de se perdre et même de se laisser dépérir que de se conserver. Les grands moralistes n’étaient point des vertueux, mais des aventuriers dans le mal, des vicieux, des grands pécheurs qui nous enseignent à nous incliner chrétiennement devant la misère. Tout ça doit te déplaire beaucoup, n’est-ce pas?_”

He fell silent. He was still sitting as at first, his intertwined feet thrust deep beneath his creaking chair, leaning forward toward the reclining woman in the paper cocked hat, her crayon between his fingers, and gazing from below, out of Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes, into the room, which had grown empty. The company had scattered. The piano, in the diagonally opposite corner, now sounded only softly and brokenly, played with one hand by the patient from Mannheim, at whose side the schoolmistress sat, turning the leaves of a music book that she held upon her knees. When the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat fell silent, the pianist ceased playing altogether and laid the hand with which he had lightly touched the keys in his lap as well, while Fräulein Engelhart continued to gaze into her music. The four persons remaining from the carnival company sat motionless. The silence lasted for several minutes. Slowly, beneath its pressure, the heads of the pair at the pianino inclined lower and lower, the Mannheim patient’s descending toward the keyboard, Fräulein Engelhart’s toward the music book. At last, both at once, as though by secret agreement, rose cautiously and, softly, on tiptoe, studiously avoiding any glance toward the other corner of the room, which was still alive, their heads drawn in and their arms held stiffly against their bodies, the Mannheim patient and the schoolmistress disappeared together through the writing-and-reading room. “_Tout le monde se retire_,” Frau Chauchat said. “_C’étaient les derniers; il se fait tard. Eh bien, la fête de carnaval est finie._” And she raised her arms to remove with both hands the paper cap from her reddish hair, whose braid was wound like a coronet about her head. “_Vous connaissez les conséquences, monsieur._”

But Hans Castorp shook his head with his eyes closed, without otherwise altering his position. He replied:

“_Jamais, Clawdia. Jamais je te dirai »vous«, jamais de la vie ni de la mort_, if one may put it so—and one ought to be able to. _Cette forme de s’adresser à une personne, qui est celle de l’Occident cultivé et de la civilisation humanitaire, me semble fort bourgeoise et pédante. Pourquoi, au fond, de la forme? La forme, c’est la pédanterie elle-même! Tout ce que vous avez fixé à l’égard de la morale, toi et ton compatriote souffrant, – tu veux sérieusement que ça me surprenne? Pour quel sot me prends-tu? Dis donc, qu’est-ce que tu penses de moi?_”

“_C’est un sujet qui ne donne pas beaucoup à penser. Tu es un petit bonhomme convenable, de bonne famille, d’une tenue appétissante, disciple docile de ses précepteurs et qui retournera bientôt dans les plaines, pour oublier complètement qu’il a jamais parlé en rêve ici et pour aider à rendre son pays grand et puissant par son travail honnête sur le chantier. Voilà ta photographie intime, faite sans appareil. Tu la trouves exacte, j’espère?_”

“_Il y manque quelques détails que Behrens y a trouvés._”

“_Ah, les médecins en trouvent toujours, ils s’y connaissent ..._”

“_Tu parles comme M. Settembrini. Et ma fièvre? D’où vient-elle?_”

“_Allons donc, c’est un incident sans conséquence qui passera vite._”

“_Non, Clawdia, tu sais bien que ce que tu dis là n’est pas vrai et tu le dis sans conviction, j’en suis sûr. La fièvre de mon corps et le battement de mon cœur harassé et le frissonnement de mes membres, c’est le contraire d’un incident, car ce n’est rien d’autre_—” and his pale face, its lips twitching, bent closer to hers—“_rien d’autre que mon amour pour toi, oui, cet amour qui m’a saisi à l’instant, où mes yeux t’ont vue, ou, plutôt, que j’ai reconnu, quand je t’ai reconnue toi, – et c’était lui, évidemment, qui m’a mené à cet endroit ..._”

“_Quelle folie!_”

“_Oh, l’amour n’est rien, s’il n’est pas de la folie, une chose insensée, défendue et une aventure dans le mal. Autrement c’est une banalité agréable, bonne pour en faire de petites chansons paisibles dans les plaines. Mais quant à ce que je t’ai reconnue et que j’ai reconnu mon amour pour toi, – oui, c’est vrai, je t’ai déjà connue, anciennement, toi et tes yeux merveilleusement obliques et ta bouche et ta voix, avec laquelle tu parles, – une fois déjà, lorsque j’étais collégien, je t’ai demandé ton crayon, pour faire enfin ta connaissance mondaine, parce que je t’aimais irraisonnablement, et c’est de là, sans doute, c’est de mon ancien amour pour toi, que ces marques me restent que Behrens a trouvées dans mon corps, et qui indiquent que jadis aussi j’étais malade ..._”

His teeth chattered together. As he rhapsodized, he had drawn one foot from beneath his creaking chair, and in thrusting that foot forward he had already touched the floor with his other knee, so that he was now kneeling beside her, his head bowed and his whole body trembling. “_Je t’aime_,” he stammered, “_je t’ai aimée de tout temps, car tu es le Toi de ma vie, mon rêve, mon sort, mon envie, mon éternel désir ..._”

“_Allons, allons!_” she said. “_Si tes précepteurs te voyaient ..._”

But he shook his head desperately, his face bent over the carpet, and replied:

“_Je m’en ficherais, je me fiche de tous ces Carducci et de la République éloquente et du progrès humain dans le temps, car je t’aime!_”

She lightly stroked the close-cropped hair at the back of his head with her hand.

“_Petit bourgeois!_” she said. “_Joli bourgeois à la petite tache humide. Est-ce vrai que tu m’aimes tant?_”

And, enraptured by her touch, now upon both knees, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, he continued speaking:

„_Oh, l’amour, tu sais ... Le corps, l’amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu’un. Car le corps, c’est la maladie et la volupté, et c’est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l’amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie! Mais la mort, tu comprends, c’est d’une part une chose mal famée, impudente qui fait rougir de honte; et d’autre part c’est une puissance très solennelle et très majestueuse, – beaucoup plus haute que la vie riante gagnant de la monnaie et farcissant sa panse, – beaucoup plus vénérable que le progrès qui bavarde par les temps, – parce qu’elle est l’histoire et la noblesse et la piété et l’éternel et le sacré qui nous fait tirer le chapeau et marcher sur la pointe des pieds ... Or, de même, le corps, lui aussi, et l’amour du corps, sont une affaire indécente et fâcheuse, et le corps rougit et pâlit à sa surface par frayeur et honte de lui-même. Mais aussi il est une grande gloire adorable, image miraculeuse de la vie organique, sainte merveille de la forme et de la beauté, et l’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde! ... Oh, enchantante beauté organique qui ne se compose ni de teinture à l’huile ni de pierre, mais de matière vivante et corruptible, pleine du secret fébrile de la vie et de la pourriture! Regarde la symétrie merveilleuse de l’édifice humain, les épaules et les hanches et les mamelons fleurissants de part et d’autre sur la poitrine, et les côtes arrangées par paires, et le nombril au milieu dans la mollesse du ventre, et le sexe obscur entre les cuisses! Regarde les omoplates se remuer sous la peau soyeuse du dos, et l’échine qui descend vers la luxuriance double et fraîche des fesses, et les grandes branches des vases et des nerfs qui passent du tronc aux rameaux par les aisselles, et comme la structure des bras correspond à celle des jambes. Oh, les douces régions de la jointure intérieure du coude et du jarret avec leur abondance de délicatesses organiques sous leurs coussins de chair! Quelle fête immense de les caresser ces endroits délicieux du corps humain! Fête à mourir sans plainte après! Oui, mon dieu, laisse-moi sentir l’odeur de la peau de ta rotule, sous laquelle l’ingénieuse capsule articulaire sécrète son huile glissante! Laisse-moi toucher dévotement de ma bouche l’Arteria femoralis qui bat au front de ta cuisse et qui se divise plus bas en les deux artères du tibia! Laisse-moi ressentir l’exhalation de tes pores et tâter ton duvet, image humaine d’eau et d’albumine, destinée pour l’anatomie du tombeau, et laisse-moi périr, mes lèvres aux tiennes!_“

He did not open his eyes when he had finished speaking; he remained as he was, his head thrown back, his hands, with the little silver pencil, stretched out before him, trembling and swaying on his knees. She said:

„_Tu es en effet un galant qui sait solliciter d’une manière profonde, à l’allemande._“

And she set the paper cap upon his head.

„_Adieu, mon prince Carnaval! Vous aurez une mauvaise ligne de fièvre ce soir, je vous le prédis._“

With that she slipped down from the chair, glided across the carpet to the door, within whose frame she hesitated, half turned back, one of her bare arms raised, her hand upon the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly:

„_N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon._“

And stepped out.

Printed by the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig