Chapter + 

V + 

Soup-Everlasting + 

And now we are confronted by a phenomenon upon which the author himself may well comment, lest the reader do so in his stead. Our account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp’s stay with “those up here”⁠—twenty-one midsummer days, to which his visit, so far as human eye could see, should have been confined⁠—has consumed in the telling an amount of time and space only too well confirming the author’s half-confessed expectations; while our narrative of his next three weeks will scarcely cost as many lines, or even words and minutes, as the earlier three did pages, quires, hours, and working-days. We apprehend that these next three weeks will be over and done with in the twinkling of an eye. + 

Which is perhaps surprising; yet quite in order, and conformable to the laws that govern the telling of stories and the listening to them. For it is in accordance with these laws that time seems to us just as long, or just as short, that it expands or contracts precisely in the way, and to the extent, that it did for young Hans Castorp, our hero, whom our narrative now finds visited with such an unexpected blow from the hand of fate. It may even be well at this point to prepare the reader for still other surprises, still other phenomena, bearing on the mysterious element of time, which will confront us if we continue in our hero’s company. + 

For the moment we need only recall the swift flight of time⁠—even of a quite considerable period of time⁠—which we spend in bed when we are ill. All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself⁠—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness⁠—such words as these would better convey the idea. They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow; and it comes over you⁠—but whence or how you do not know, it makes you quite giddy to see the broth coming in⁠—that you are losing a sense of the demarcation of time, that its units are running together, disappearing; and what is being revealed to you as the true content of time is merely a dimensionless present in which they eternally bring you the broth. But in such a connection it would be paradoxical to speak of time as passing slowly; and paradox, with reference to such a hero, we would avoid. + 

Hans Castorp, then, went to bed on the Saturday afternoon, as it had been ordained by Hofrat Behrens, the highest authority in our little world. There he lay, in his nightshirt with the embroidered monogram on the pocket, his hands clasped at the back of his head, in his cleanly white bed, the deathbed of the American woman and in all probability of many another person; lay there with his confiding blue eyes, somewhat glassy with his cold, directed toward the ceiling, and contemplated the singularity of his fate. This is not to say that, if he had not had a cold, his gaze would have been any clearer or more single-minded. No, just as it was, it accurately mirrored his inner state, and that, whatever its simplicity, was full of troubled, involved, dubious, not quite ingenuous thoughts. For as he lay, he would be shaken from deep within him by a frantic burst of triumphant laughter, while his heart stood still with an anguish of extravagant anticipation like nothing he had ever known before; again, he would feel such a shudder of apprehension as sent the colour from his cheek, and then it was conscience itself that knocked, in the very throbs of his heart as it pulsed against his ribs. + 

On that first day Joachim left him to his rest, avoiding all discussion. He went two or three times tactfully into the sickroom, nodded to the patient, and inquired if he could do anything. It was easy for him to understand and respect Hans Castorp’s reserve⁠—the more in that he shared it, even feeling his own position to be more difficult than the other’s. + 

But on Sunday forenoon, when he came back from the walk which for the first time in weeks had been solitary, there was no putting it off any longer; they must take counsel together over the necessary next step. + 

He sat down by the bed and said, with a sigh: “Yes, it’s no good; we must act⁠—they are expecting you down home.” + 

“Not yet,” Hans Castorp answered. + 

“No, but inside the next few days, Wednesday or Thursday.” + 

“Oh, they aren’t expecting me so precisely on a particular day,” Hans Castorp said. “They have other things to do besides counting the days until I get back. I’ll be there when I get there and Uncle Tienappel will say: ‘Oh, there you are again,’ and Uncle James: ‘Well, had a good time?’ And if I don’t arrive, it will be some time before they notice it, you may be sure of that. Of course, after a while we’d have to let them know.” + 

“You can see how unpleasant the thing is for me,” Joachim said, sighing again. “What is to happen now? I feel in a way responsible. You come up here to pay me a visit, I take you in, and here you are, and who knows when you can get away and go into your position down below? You must see how extremely painful that is to me.” + 

“Just a moment,” said Hans Castorp, without removing his hands from their clasped position behind his neck. “Surely it is unreasonable for you to break your head over it. Did I come up here to visit you? Well, of course in a way I did; but after all, the principal reason was to get the rest Heidekind prescribed. Well, and now it appears I need more of a rest than he or any of us dreamed. I am not the first who thought of making a flying visit up here for whom it fell out differently. Remember about Tous-les-deux’s second son, and how it turned out with him⁠—I don’t know whether he is still alive or not; perhaps they have fetched him away already, while we were sitting at our meal. That I am somewhat infected is naturally a great surprise to me; I must get used to the idea of being a patient and one of you, instead of just a guest. And yet in a way I am scarcely surprised, for I never have been in such blooming health, and when I think how young both my parents were when they died, I realize that it was natural I shouldn’t be particularly robust! We can’t deny that you had a weakness that way; we make no bones of it, even if it is as good as cured now, and it may easily be that it runs a little in the family, as Behrens suggested. Anyhow, I have been lying here since yesterday thinking it all over, considering what my attitude has been, how I felt toward the whole thing, to life, you know, and the demands it makes on you. A certain seriousness, a sort of disinclination to rough and noisy ways, has always been a part of my nature; we were talking about that lately, and I said I sometimes should have liked to be a clergyman, because I took such an interest in mournful and edifying things⁠—a black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P.⁠—requiescat in pace, you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression⁠—I like it much better than ‘He’s a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy. I think all that comes from the fact that I have a weakness myself, and always felt at home with illness⁠—the way I do now. But things being as they are, I find it very lucky that I came here, and that I was examined. Certainly you have no call to reproach yourself. You heard what he said: if I were to go down and continue as I have been, I should have the whole lobe at the devil before I could say Jack Robinson.” + 

“You can’t tell,” Joachim said. “That is just what you never can tell. They said you had already had places, of which nobody took any notice and they healed of themselves, and left nothing but a few trifling dullnesses. It might have been the same way with the moist spot you are supposed to have now, if you hadn’t come up here at all. One can never know.” + 

“No, as far as knowing goes, we never can. But just for that reason, we have no right to assume the worst⁠—for instance with regard to how long I shall be obliged to stop here. You say nobody knows when I shall be free to go into the shipyard; but you say it in a pessimistic sense, and that I find premature, since we cannot know. Behrens did not set a limit; he is a long-headed man, and doesn’t play the prophet. There are the X-ray and the photographic plate yet to come before we can definitely know the facts; who knows whether they will show anything worth talking about, and whether I shall not be free of fever before that, and can say goodbye to you. I am all for our not striking before the time and crying wolf to the family down below. It is quite enough for the present if we write and say⁠—I can do it myself with the fountain-pen if I sit up a little⁠—that I have a severe cold and am febrile, that I am stopping in bed, and shall not travel for the present. The rest will follow.” + 

“Good,” said Joachim. “We can do that for the present. And for the other matters we can wait and see.” + 

“What other matters?” + 

“Don’t be so irresponsible! You only came for three weeks, and brought a steamer trunk. You will need underwear and linen, and winter clothes⁠—and more footwear. And anyhow, you will want money sent.” + 

“If,” said Hans Castorp, “if I need it.” + 

“Very well, we’ll wait and see. But we ought not”⁠—Joachim paced up and down the room as he spoke, “we ought not to behave like ostriches. I have been up here too long not to know how things go. When Behrens says there is a rough place, almost rhonchi⁠—oh well, of course, we can wait and see.” + 

There, for the time, the matter rested; and the weekly and fortnightly variations of the normal day set in. Hans Castorp could partake of them even in his present state, if not at first hand, then through the reports Joachim gave when he came and sat by the bedside for fifteen minutes. + 

His Sunday morning breakfast-tray was adorned with a vase of flowers; and they did not fail to send him his share of the Sunday pastries. After luncheon the sounds of social intercourse floated up from the terrace below, and with tantara and squealing of clarinets the fortnightly concert began. During its progress Joachim entered, and sat down by the open balcony door; his cousin half reclined in his bed, with his head on one side, and his eyes swimming with pious enjoyment as he listened to the mounting harmonies, and bestowed a momentary metaphorical shoulder-shrug upon Settembrini’s twaddle about music being “politically suspect.” + 

And, as we have said, he had Joachim post him upon the sights and events of the sanatorium life. Had there, he asked, been any toilets made in honour of the day, lace matinées or that sort of thing?⁠—though for lace matinées the weather was too cold. Whether there were people going driving (certain expeditions had in fact been undertaken, among others by the Half-Lung Club, which had gone in a body to Clavadel). On the next day, Monday, he demanded to hear all about Dr. Krokowski’s lecture, when Joachim came from it and looked in upon his cousin on his way to the rest-cure. Joachim did not feel like talking, he appeared disinclined to make a report. He would have let the subject drop, as it had after the previous lecture, had not Hans Castorp persisted, and demanded to hear details. + 

“I am lying up here,” he said, “paying full pension. I am entitled to have all that is going.” He recalled the Monday of two weeks ago, and his solitary walk, which had done him so little good; and committed himself to the view that it was that walk which had revolutionized his system and brought to the surface the latent infection. “But what a stately and solemn way the people hereabout have of talking,” he said, “I mean the common people; almost like poetry. ‘Then thank ye kindly and God be with ye,’ ” he repeated, giving the words the woodman’s intonation. “I heard that up in the woods, and I shall remember it all my life. You get to associate a thing like that with other memories and impressions, you know, and you never forget it as long as you live.⁠—Well, so Krokowski held forth again on the subject of love, did he? What did he say about it today?” + 

“Oh, nothing in particular. You know from the other time how he talks.” + 

“But what did he offer that was new?” + 

“Nothing different.⁠—Oh, well, the stuff today was pure chemistry,” Joachim unwillingly condescended to enlighten his cousin. It seemed there was a sort of poisoning, an auto-infection of the organisms, so Dr. Krokowski said; it was caused by the disintegration of a substance, of the nature of which we were still ignorant, but which was present everywhere in the body; and the products of this disintegration operated like an intoxicant upon the nerve-centres of the spinal cord, with an effect similar to that of certain poisons, such as morphia, or cocaine, when introduced in the usual way from outside. + 

“And so you get the hectic flush,” said Hans Castorp. “But that’s all worth hearing. What doesn’t the man know! He must have simply lapped it up. You just wait, one of these days he will discover what that substance is that exists everywhere in the body and sets free the soluble toxins that act like a narcotic on the nervous system; then he will be able to fuddle us all more than ever. Perhaps in the past they were able to do that very thing. When I listen to him, I could almost think there is some truth in the old legends about love potions and the like.⁠—Are you going?” + 

“Yes,” Joachim said, “I must go lie down. My curve has been rising since yesterday. This affair of yours has had its effect on me.” + 

That was the Sunday, and the Monday. The evening and the morning made the third day of Hans Castorp’s sojourn in the “caboose.” It was a day without distinction, an ordinary weekday, that Tuesday⁠—but after all, it was the day of his arrival in this place, he had been here a round three weeks, and time pressed; he would have to send a letter home and inform his uncle of the state of affairs, even though cursorily and without reference to their true inwardness. He stuffed his down quilt behind his back, and wrote upon the notepaper of the establishment, to the effect that his departure was being delayed beyond the appointed time. He was in bed with a feverish cold, which Hofrat Behrens⁠—over-conscientious as he probably was⁠—refused to take lightly; insisting on regarding it as immediately connected with his (Hans Castorp’s) constitution and general state of health. The physician had perceived directly he saw him that he was decidedly anaemic; and take it all in all, it seemed as though the limit he had originally set for his stay was not regarded by the authorities as long enough for a full recovery. He would write again as soon as he could.⁠—That’s the idea, thought Hans Castorp; not too much or too little; and whatever the issue, it will satisfy them for a while. The letter was given to the servant, with instructions that it be taken direct to the station and sent off by the earliest possible train, instead of being posted in the usual way in the house letter-box, with consequent delays. + 

Our adventurous youth felt much relieved to have set affairs in such good train⁠—if likewise a good deal plagued by his cough and the heavy-headedness caused by his catarrh⁠—and now he began to live each day as it came⁠—a day which never varied, which was always broken up into a number of sections, and which, in its abiding uniformity, could not be said either to pass too fast or to hang too heavy on the hands. In the morning the bathing-master would give a mighty thump on the door and enter⁠—a nervous individual named Turnherr, who wore his sleeves rolled up, and had great standing veins upon his forearms, and a gurgling, impeded speech. He addressed Hans Castorp, as he did all the patients, by the number of his room, and rubbed him with alcohol. Not long after he left, Joachim would appear ready dressed, to greet his cousin, inquire after his seven o’clock temperature, and communicate his own. While he breakfasted below, Hans Castorp did the same above, his down quilt tucked behind his back, in enjoyment of the good appetite a change engenders. He was scarcely disturbed by the bustling and businesslike entrance of the two physicians, who at this hour made a hurried round of the dining-hall and the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp, with his mouth full of jam, announced himself to have slept “splendidly” and looked over the rim of his cup at the Hofrat, who leaned with his fists on the centre table, and hastily scanned the fever chart. Both physicians wished him good morning, and he responded in an unconcerned drawl as they went out. Then he lighted a cigarette, and beheld Joachim returning from the morning walk, almost before he realized his departure. Again they chatted of this and that; Joachim went to lie down until second breakfast, and the interval seemed so short that even the emptiest-headed could hardly have felt bored. Hans Castorp, indeed, had so much food for thought in the events of the past three weeks, so much to ponder in his present state and what might come of it, that although two bound volumes of an illustrated periodical from the Berghof library lay upon his night-table, he had no need to resort to them. + 

It was no different with the brief hour during which Joachim took his regular walk down to the Platz. He came in to Hans Castorp afterwards, told him whatever of interest he had seen, and sat or stood a few minutes by the sickbed before he withdrew to his own balcony for the midday rest. And how long did that last? Again, only a brief hour. It seemed to Hans Castorp he had barely settled to commune a little with his own thoughts, hands folded behind his head and eyes directed upon the ceiling, before the gong droned through the house, summoning all those not bedridden or moribund to prepare for the principal meal of the day. + 

Joachim went down, and the “midday broth” was brought⁠—“broth” in a symbolic sense merely, considering in what it consisted. Hans Castorp was not on sick-diet. He lay there and paid full pension, and what they brought him in the abiding present of that midday hour was by no means broth, it was the full six-course Berghof dinner, in all its amplitude, with nothing left out. Even on weekdays this was a sumptuous meal; on Sundays it was a gala banquet and “gaudy,” prepared by a cosmopolitan chef in the kitchens of the establishment, which were precisely those of a European hotel deluxe. The “dining-room girl” whose duty it was to serve the bedridden brought it to him in dainty cook-pots under nickel-plated dish-covers. She produced an invalid-table, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjusted it across his bed, and Hans Castorp banqueted like the tailor’s son in the fairy-story. + 

As he finished, Joachim would return, and it might be as late as half past two before the latter went into his loggia, and the hush of the main rest period fell upon the Berghof. Not quite, perhaps; perhaps it would be nearer the truth to call it a quarter after, but these odd quarter-hours outside the round figures do not count, they are swallowed up unregarded, in places where one reckons time in large units⁠—on long train journeys of many hours on end, or wherever one is in a state of vacant suspense, with all one’s being concentrated on putting the time behind one. A quarter past two will pass for half past, will even pass for three, on the theory that it is already well on the way toward it. The thirty minutes are taken as a sort of onset to the full hour from three to four, and inwardly discounted. In this wise the duration of the main rest period was finally reduced to no more than an hour; and even this hour was lopped off at its latter end, elided, as it were. Dr. Krokowski played the part of apostrophe. + 

Yes, nowadays when Dr. Krokowski went his independent afternoon round, he no longer made a circle round Hans Castorp; our young man was no longer an interval and hiatus, he counted as much as the others, he too was a patient. He was questioned, not ignored, as had so long been the case, to his slight and concealed but daily recurring annoyance. It was on Monday that Dr. Krokowski for the first time manifested himself in the room⁠—“manifested” being the only proper word for the phenomenon as Hans Castorp, with an involuntary start, perceived it. He lay in half⁠—or quarter⁠—slumber, and became aware that the Assistant was beside him, having entered not through the door, but approaching from outside. His round at this time lay not through the corridor, but along the balconies, and he had come through the open door of the loggia with an effect of having flown through the air. There he stood at Hans Castorp’s bedside, in all his pallor and blackness, broad-shouldered and squat, his lips parted in a manly smile that showed the yellowish teeth through his beard⁠—the apostrophe! + 

“You seem surprised to see me, Herr Castorp,” he said, mildly baritone, drawling, unquestionably rather affected: he gave the r a foreign, palatal sound, not rolled, but pronounced with a single impact of the tongue against the upper front teeth. “But I am only performing my pleasant duty, in seeing after your welfare. Your relations with us have entered upon a new phase. Overnight the guest has become the comrade.” His patient was rather alarmed by the word “comrade.”⁠—“Who would have thought it?” he jested fraternally. “Who would have thought it on that evening when I had the honour of making your acquaintance, and you replied to my mistaken supposition⁠—at that time mistaken⁠—with the explanation that you were perfectly healthy? I believe I expressed some doubt, but I assure you I did not mean it in that sense. I will not pretend to being more sharp-sighted than I am. I was not thinking of a moist spot. My remark was meant only in the general, philosophical sense, as a doubt whether the two conceptions, man and perfect health, were after all consistent one with the other. Even today, after the examination, I confess that I personally, as distinguished from my honoured chief, cannot regard the moist spot as the most important factor in the situation. It is, for me, a secondary phenomenon⁠—the organic is always secondary⁠—” + 

Hans Castorp drew a short breath. + 

“⁠—and thus your catarrh is, in my view, a third-line phenomenon,” Dr. Krokowski concluded, very softly. “How is it? The rest in bed will undoubtedly be efficacious, in this respect. What have you measured today?” And from then on the Assistant’s visit was in the key of an ordinary professional call, to which it kept during the following days and weeks. Dr. Krokowski would enter by the open balcony door at a quarter to four or earlier, greet the patient with manly readiness, put the usual professional questions, with perhaps a little personal touch as well, a jest or two⁠—and if all this had a slight aura of the questionable about it, yet one can get used even to the questionable, provided it keeps within bounds. It was not long before Hans Castorp forgot any feeling he may have had about Dr. Krokowski’s visits. They took their place in the programme of the normal day, and performed, as it were, an elision in the latter end of the main rest period. + 

The Assistant would return along the balconies at four o’clock or thereabouts, that is to say mid-afternoon. Yes, thus suddenly, before one realized it, there one was, in the very deep of the afternoon, and steadily still deepening on toward twilight. Before tea was finished drinking, up above and down below, it was well on the way toward five o’clock; and by the time Joachim returned from his third daily round and looked in on his cousin, it would be near enough to six to reduce the remaining rest period to no more than a single hour⁠—reckoned always in round numbers. It was an easy matter to kill that much time, if one had ideas in one’s head, and a whole orbis pictus on the table to boot. + 

Joachim, on his way to the evening meal, stopped to say goodbye. Hans Castorp’s tray was brought. The valley had long since filled with shadow, and darkened apace as he ate. When he had done, he leaned back against his down quilt, with the magic table cleared before him, and looked into the growing dusk, today’s dusk, yet scarcely distinguishable from the dusk of yesterday or last week. It was evening⁠—and had just been morning. The day, artificially shortened, broken into small bits, had literally crumbled in his hands and was reduced to nothing: he remarked it to himself with a start⁠—or, at any rate, he did at least remark; for to shudder at it was foreign to his years. It seemed to him that from the beginning of time he had been lying and looking thus. + 

One day⁠—some ten or twelve had passed since Hans Castorp retired to bed⁠—there was a knock on his door at about this hour, before Joachim had returned from dinner and the social half-hour. Upon Hans Castorp’s inquiring “Come in,” it opened, and Ludovico Settembrini appeared⁠—and lo, on the instant the room was flooded with light. For the visitor’s first motion, while still on the threshold, had been to turn on the electric light, which filled the room in a trice with vibrating brilliance, and reverberated from the gleaming white ceiling and furniture. + 

The Italian had been the only one of the guests after whom Hans Castorp had expressly asked in these days. Joachim indeed, when he stood or sat by his cousin for ten or fifteen minutes⁠—and that happened ten times in the course of the day⁠—would relate whatever there was of interest or variation in the daily life of the community; and Hans Castorp’s questions, whenever he put any, had been of a general nature. The exile wished to know whether there were new guests, or if any of the familiar faces were absent; it seemed to gratify him that only the former was the case. There was one newcomer, a hollow-cheeked, green-complexioned young man, who had been given a place at the next table on the right with Frau Iltis and the ivory-skinned Levi. Hans Castorp might look forward to the pleasure of seeing him. So no one had left? Joachim answered in a curt negative, his eyes on the ground. But he had to reply to this question every day or so, until at last he became restive and sought to answer once for all by saying that, so far as he knew, no one was purposing to leave⁠—nobody did leave very much, up here, as a matter of fact. + 

But Hans Castorp had asked after Settembrini by name, and desired to hear what he had “said to it.” To what? “Why, that I am in bed and supposed to be ill.” Settembrini, it seemed, had expressed himself on the subject, though briefly. On the very day of Hans Castorp’s disappearance he had come to find out his whereabouts of Joachim, obviously prepared to hear that the guest had departed; and on learning the explanation had responded only in Italian: first “Ecco!” and then “Poveretto!”⁠—as much as to say: “There you are, poor chap!”⁠—It needed no more Italian than the cousins could boast to understand the sense in which he uttered the words. “Why ‘poveretto’?” Hans Castorp inquired. “He sits up here with his literature made of politics and humanism and he is very little good for the ordinary interests of life. He needn’t look down his nose and pity me like that, I shall get down to the flat-land before he does.” + 

And now Herr Settembrini stood here in the suddenly illuminated room⁠—Hans Castorp, who had raised himself on his elbow and turned blinking toward the door, recognized him and flushed. Settembrini wore, as usual, his thick coat with the wide lapels, a frayed turnover collar, and the check trousers. As he came from supper, he was armed with the usual wooden toothpick. The corner of his mouth, beneath the beautiful curve of his moustache, displayed the familiar fine, dry, critical smile. + 

“Good evening, Engineer! May I be permitted to look in on you? If so, I need light⁠—you will pardon my taking it upon myself”⁠—and he waved his small hand toward the lamp in the ceiling. “You were absorbed in contemplation, I should not wish to disturb you. A tendency to meditate is surely natural under the circumstances, and if you want to talk, you have your cousin. You see, I am well aware that I am superfluous. But even so⁠—we live here close together, a sympathy springs up between man and man, intellectual and emotional sympathy.⁠—It has been a full week that we have not seen you. I began to think you had left, as I saw your place empty down in the refectory. The Lieutenant told me better⁠—or should we say worse, if that would not sound impolite? Well, and how are you? How do you feel? Not too much cast down, I hope?” + 

“Ah, that is you, Herr Settembrini! How friendly of you! Refectory⁠—oh, I say, that is good! Always at your jokes⁠—but do sit down. You are not disturbing me in the least. I was lying there musing⁠—no, musing is too much to say. I was simply too lazy to turn on the light. Thanks very much, I am subjectively as good as normal, and my cold is much better from lying in bed. But it was a secondary phenomenon, so everybody tells me. My temperature is still not what it should be, I have 99.5° to 99.7°, all the time.” + 

“You take your temperature regularly?” + 

“Yes, six times a day, like the rest of you. Pardon me, I am still laughing at your calling our dining-hall a refectory. That is what they are called in a cloister, isn’t it? After all, there is some resemblance⁠—not that I have been in a cloister, but I imagine they are something like this. And I have the ‘Rule’ at my fingers’ ends, and observe it faithfully.” + 

“As a pious brother should. One might say that your novitiate is at an end and you have made your profession. My formal congratulations. You even say ‘our’ dining-hall. But, without meaning to affront your manly dignity, you remind me more of a young nun than a monk, a regular new-shorn, innocent bride of Christ, with great martyrlike eyes. I have seen such lambs, here and there about the world; never without a certain⁠—a certain access of sensibility. Yes, your cousin has told me about it. So you had yourself examined after all, at the eleventh hour.” + 

“Since I was febrile⁠—of course, Herr Settembrini. What do you want? If I had been at home, I should have consulted a physician. And here, at the source and fount so to speak, with two specialists in the house⁠—it would have been very strange⁠—” + 

“Of course, of course. And you took your temperature, too, before they told you to. But they did recommend it, from the beginning. And the Mylendonk slipped you the thermometer?” + 

“Slipped me⁠—? Since the occasion arose, I bought one from her.” + 

“I understand. An irreproachable transaction. And how many months did the chief knock you down for? Good heavens, I have asked you that before! Do you remember? You had just come. You answered with such assurance⁠—” + 

“Of course I remember. I have had many new experiences since that time, but that I remember as though it were yesterday. You were so amusing, and spoke of Behrens as the judge of the lower regions⁠—Radames, was it? No, wait, that is something else.” + 

“Rhadamanthus? Yes, I may have called him that. I am afraid I do not remember every phrase that happens to well up to my lips.” + 

“Rhadamanthus, of course. Minos and Rhadamanthus. And you spoke to us of Carducci at the same time⁠—” + 

“Pardon me, my dear young friend, we will, if you please, leave him out. The name, at this moment, sounds too strange upon your tongue.” + 

“That’s good too,” laughed Hans Castorp. “But I have learned a good deal about him through you.⁠—Yes, at that time I had not the faintest suspicion, I answered you that I was here for three weeks, I did not know any different. The Kleefeld girl had just been whistling at me with her pneumothorax, I hardly knew where I was. But I was feeling febrile even then⁠—for the air up here is not only good against the illness, you know, it is also good for it, it sometimes brings it to the surface⁠—which is of course a necessary step in the cure.” + 

“An alluring hypothesis. And has Hofrat Behrens also told you about the German-Russian woman we had here last year⁠—no, year before last⁠—for five months? He did not? He should have. A charming woman, of Russo-German origin, married, a young mother. She came from the Baltic provinces somewhere⁠—lymphatic, anaemic, but probably some more serious trouble as well. She spent a month here and complained that she felt ill all the time. They told her to be patient. Another month passes, she continues to assert that she is actually worse instead of better. They point out to her that only the physician can judge how she is⁠—she herself only knows how she feels; which does not signify. They are satisfied with the condition of her lung. Good. She says no more, she goes on with the cure, and loses weight by the week. The fourth month she faints during the examination. That is nothing, says Behrens, her lung is perfectly satisfactory. But by the fifth month she cannot get about, she goes to bed and writes to her husband, out in the Baltic provinces; Behrens gets a letter from him marked ‘personal’ and ‘urgent’ in a very firm hand⁠—I saw it myself. Yes, says Behrens, and shrugs his shoulders, it seems to be indicated that she certainly cannot stand the climate up here. The woman was beside herself. He ought to have said that before, she had felt it from the beginning, she declared⁠—they had killed her among them. Let us hope she recovered her strength when she went back to her husband.” + 

“Oh, that’s good, that’s very good! You do tell stories capitally, Herr Settembrini; every word is so plastic. And that story about the girl that went bathing in the lake, the one they gave the ‘silent sister’ to take her temperature with⁠—I have often laughed at it, all by myself. Yes, what strange things do happen. One lives and learns. But my own case is still quite uncertain. The Hofrat is supposed to have discovered a trifling weakness, places where I was infected long ago, I heard them myself when, he tapped me, and some fresh places he can hear now⁠—what a funny word ‘fresh’ is to use in such a connection! But so far there are only the acoustic indications; real diagnostic certainty we shall only arrive at when I am about again, and the X-ray and photography have taken place. Then we shall have positive knowledge.” + 

“You think so? You know that the photographic plate often shows spots that are taken for cavities when there are none there? And that, sometimes, it shows no spots although there is something there? Madonna⁠—the photographic plate! There was a young numismatician up here, with fever; and since he had fever, there were cavities plain to be seen on the plate. They could even hear them. They treated him for phthisis, and he died. The postmortem showed his lung to be sound; the cause of his death was some coccus or other.” + 

“Oh, come, Herr Settembrini. Talking about postmortems already. I haven’t got that far yet, I assure you.” + 

“Engineer, you are a wag.” + 

“And you are an out-and-out critic and sceptic, I must say. You do not even believe in science. Can you see spots on your plate, Herr Settembrini?” + 

“Yes, it shows some spots.” + 

“And you really are ill too?” + 

“Yes, I am unfortunately rather ill,” replied Settembrini, and his head drooped. There was a pause, in which he gave a little cough. Hans Castorp, from his bed, regarded his guest, whom he had reduced to silence. It seemed to him that with his two simple inquiries he had refuted Settembrini’s whole position, even the republic and the bello stile. And he did nothing on his side to resume the conversation. + 

After a while Herr Settembrini straightened himself, with a smile. + 

“Tell me, Engineer,” he said, “how have your family taken the news?” + 

“What news do you mean? Of my delayed return? Oh, my family, you know, consists of three uncles, a great-uncle and his two sons, who are more like my cousins. Other family I have none, I was doubly orphaned when I was very small. As to how they took it⁠—they know as much, and as little, as I myself. At first, when I had to go to bed, I wrote that I had a severe cold, and could not travel. Yesterday, as it seemed rather long after all, I wrote again, saying that my catarrh had drawn Hofrat Behren’s attention to the condition of my chest, and that he insisted I should remain until he is clear what the condition is. You may be perfectly sure they took it calmly⁠—it didn’t upset them.” + 

“And your position? You spoke of a sphere of practical activity, where you were intending to enter shortly on certain duties.” + 

“Yes, as volunteer apprentice. I have asked them to excuse me for the present. You must not imagine they are in despair over my defection. They can carry on indefinitely without an assistant.” + 

“Good. Everything is in order, then, in that direction. Perfect equanimity all along the line. It is a phlegmatic race of people in your part of the country, is it not? But energetic, certainly?” + 

“Oh, yes, very energetic,” said Hans Castorp. He mentally assayed the temper of his native city, and found that his interlocuter had characterized it justly. “Phlegmatic and energetic, yes, I should say they are.” + 

“I assume,” continued Herr Settembrini, “in case your stay is prolonged, we shall make the acquaintance of your uncle⁠—I mean your great-uncle⁠—shall we not? He will undoubtedly come up to ascertain your condition.” + 

“Out of the question,” cried Hans Castorp. “Under no conceivable circumstances. Wild horses could not drag him up here. My uncle is apoplectic, you understand; he has almost no neck at all. No, he has to have a reasonable atmospheric pressure; it would be worse for him up here than it was for your lady from the Baltic provinces⁠—he would be in a dreadful way.” + 

“I am disappointed. And apoplectic? Energy and phlegm are not much use under those circumstances.⁠—Your uncle is rich, I suppose? You are all rich down your way?” + 

Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini’s literary generalizations. And again, from his distant couch, he cast a metaphorical eye upon the sphere from which he had been snatched. He called up memories, he made an effort to judge objectively, and found that distance enabled him to do so. + 

He answered: “One is rich⁠—or else one isn’t. And if not, so much the worse. I myself am no millionaire, but what I have is secured to me, I have enough to live on and be independent. But personalities aside⁠—well, if you had said one must be rich, I should have agreed with you. If you aren’t rich, or if you leave off being, then woe be unto you. ‘Oh, he?’ they will say about this or that person. ‘He hasn’t any money, has he?’ Literally that, and making just such a face; I have often heard them, and I see now it made an impression on me⁠—which it would not have done, of course, unless it had struck me as strange. Or don’t you think that follows? No, I don’t think you, for instance, as homo humanus, would feel very comfortable down there; it often struck me that it was pretty strong, as I can see now, though I am a native of the place and for myself have never had to suffer from it. If a man does not serve the best and dearest wines at his dinners, people don’t go, and his daughters are left on his hands. That is what they are like. Lying here and looking at it from this distance, I find it pretty gross. What were the words you used⁠—phlegmatic and⁠—and energetic. That’s very good. But what does it mean? It means hard, cold. And what do hard and cold mean? They mean cruel. It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless. When you lie here and look at it, from a distance, it makes you shudder.” + 

Settembrini listened, and nodded; nodded after Hans Castorp had come to an end, for the present, of his pronouncement and fallen silent. + 

Then he took a breath and said: “I will not seek to extenuate the specific forms which life’s normal cruelty assumes in your native sphere. It is all one⁠—for the reproach of cruelty rests upon somewhat sentimental grounds. You would scarcely even have levelled it, while you were in that atmosphere, for fear of being ridiculous in your own eyes. You left it to the drones to make, and rightly. That you make it now bears witness to a certain estrangement, which I should be sorry to see increase; since he who falls in the habit of making it is in danger of being lost to life, to the manner of life to which he was born. Do you know, Engineer, what I mean by being lost to life? I, I know it, I see it here every day. Six months at most after they get here, these young people⁠—and they are mostly young who come⁠—have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature. And if they remain a year, they will have lost the power of grasping any other; they will find any other ‘cruel’⁠—or, more precisely, ignorant and inadequate. You are fond of anecdote⁠—I could serve your turn. I could tell you of a young man I know, a husband and son, who was up here for eleven months. He was a little older than you, yes, rather older. They let him go home, provisionally, as much improved; he returned to the bosom of his family⁠—not uncles, you understand, but his wife and his mother. The whole day he lay with the thermometer in his mouth, he took no interest in anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘No one understands who has not lived up there. Down here the fundamental conception is lacking.’ In the end it was the mother who settled it. ‘Go back,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to be done with you any more.’ He went back, went back ‘home’⁠—you know, don’t you, that they call this home when they have once lived here? He was entirely estranged from his young wife, she lacked the fundamental conception, and she gave up trying to get it. It was borne in upon her that he would find a mate up here who had it, and that he would stop with her.” + 

Hans Castorp seemed to be only half listening. He went on staring into the incandescent brilliance of his white room, as into far space. + 

He laughed belatedly, and said: “He called it home? That is sentimental, as you say. You know no end of stories. I was still thinking of what we said about hardness and cruelty; the same idea has gone through my head a number of times in these days. You see, a person has to have a rather thick skin to find it natural, the way they have of thinking and talking down there, the ‘has he got any money?’ and the face they make when they say it. It never came quite natural to me, though I am no homo humanus. I can see, now I look back, that I was always struck by it. Perhaps that had to do with my tendency to illness, though I did not know about it at the time⁠—those old places which I heard myself the other day. And now Behrens has found a fresh place. That, I must say, was a surprise to me⁠—and yet, in a way, I don’t know that it was, after all. I never have felt myself as firm as a rock, and my parents, both of them, dying so young⁠—for I have been doubly orphaned from youth up, you know⁠—” + 

Herr Settembrini described a single gesture, with head, hand, and shoulders. Pleasantly, courteously, it put the question: “Well, and what of it?” + 

“You are an author,” Hans Castorp said, “a literary man. It must be easy for you to understand a thing like that; you can feel how under those circumstances a man might not be of tough enough fibre to find that sort of cruelty quite natural, the cruelty of ordinary people, who go about joking and making money and filling their bellies.⁠—I don’t know if I am expressing myself”⁠— + 

Settembrini bowed. “You mean,” he interrupted, “that the early and repeated contact with death developed in you a tendency which made you sensitive to the harshness and crudity, let us say the cynicism, of our everyday, worldly existence.” + 

“Precisely!” cried Hans Castorp, in honest enthusiasm. “You have expressed it to a T, Herr Settembrini. Contact with death! I was sure that you, as a literary man⁠—” + 

Settembrini put out his hand, laid his head on one side, and closed his eyes. It was a mild and beautiful gesture, a plea for silence and further hearing. He held it some seconds, even after Hans Castorp had ceased to speak and was waiting in suspense for what was to come. But at length he opened his black eyes, organ-grinder eyes, and spoke: “Permit me. Permit me, Engineer, to say to you, and to bring it home to you, that the only sane, noble⁠—and I will expressly add, the only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and with the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life. It is the very opposite of sane, noble, reasonable, or religious to divorce it in any way from life, or to play it off against it. The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage, as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis. Severed from life, it becomes a spectre, a distortion, and worse. For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the spirit of man is prone.” + 

Herr Settembrini left off speaking. He finished with this generalization, and made it the definite period of his discourse. He had spoken in a very serious vein and by no means with conversational intent; he even refrained from giving Hans Castorp the opportunity for a rejoinder; but simply dropped his voice at this point and concluded his remarks. He sat now with his lips closed, his hands folded in his lap, one leg in its check trouser flung over the other, slightly swinging the foot, which he regarded with an austere expression. + 

Hans Castorp too preserved silence. He leaned back in his plumeau, turned his head to the wall, and drummed with his finger-ends on the coverlet. He felt set to rights, chidden, corrected; in his silence there was no little childish obstinacy. The pause lasted some time. + 

At length Herr Settembrini lifted his head, and said with a smile: “You very likely recall, Engineer, that we have had a similar discussion once before⁠—one might say the same discussion. We were talking about disease and dullness⁠—I think we were taking a walk⁠—and you found the combination a paradox, on the ground of your reverence for ill health. I called that reverence a dismal fancy which dishonoured human thought; and I was gratified to find you not disinclined to entertain my plea. We spoke of the neutrality and the intellectual indecision of youth, of its liberty of choice, of its inclination to play with all possible points of view, and that one should not⁠—or need not⁠—regard these experimentations as final and definite elections. Will you permit me”⁠—Herr Settembrini smiled and bent forward as he sat, his feet close together on the floor, his hands between his knees, his head stretched out and a little on one side⁠—“will you permit me”⁠—and his voice had the faintest tremor in it⁠—“to be beside you in your essays and experiments, and to exercise a corrective influence when there appears to be danger of your taking up a destructive position?” + 

“Why, certainly, Herr Settembrini”⁠—Hans Castorp hastened to abandon his forced and even peevish attitude, stop drumming on the bedcover, and turn to his guest with friendliness, even with contrition. “It is uncommonly kind of you⁠—I must ask myself if I really⁠—that is, if there is anything⁠—” + 

“Sine pecunia, of course,” quoted Herr Settembrini, as he rose. “I can’t let myself be outdone!” They both laughed. The outer door opened, next moment the inner one as well. It was Joachim, returned from “society.” When he saw the Italian he flushed, as Hans Castorp had done; the deep bronze of his face deepened by another shade. + 

“Oh, you have company,” he said. “How nice for you! I was detained, they made me make one of a table of bridge. They call it bridge,” he said, shaking his head, “as they do outside, but it was really something else entirely. I won five marks⁠—” + 

“Only so it doesn’t become a vice with you,” Hans Castorp laughed. “Ahem! Herr Settembrini has beguiled the time for me⁠—no, that is not the proper expression, though it may be all right for your mock bridge. Herr Settembrini has filled the time for me, and given it content, whereas when mock bridge breaks out in our midst, a respectable man feels he has to fight his way through. And yet to have the privilege of listening to Herr Settembrini, to get the benefit of his good counsel, I could almost wish to keep my fever, and stop up here with you indefinitely. They would have to give me a ‘silent sister’ to measure with.” + 

“I repeat, Engineer, you are a wag,” said the Italian. He took leave gracefully and went. Alone with his cousin, Hans Castorp heaved a sigh. + 

“Oh, what a schoolmaster!” he said. “A humanistic one, of course. He never leaves off setting you right⁠—first by means of anecdote, then by abstractions. And the things one gets to talk about with him, things you would never have thought you could talk about, or even understand! And if I had met him down below,” he added, “I never should have understood.” + 

At this hour Joachim would remain with him for a while, sacrificing a half or three-quarters of an hour of the evening cure. Sometimes they played chess on Hans Castorp’s magic table; Joachim had brought a set of chessmen from below. Then he would take his wrappings and go into the balcony, thermometer in mouth, and Hans Castorp too took his temperature for the last time, while soft music, near or far, stole up from the dark valley. The cure ended at ten. He heard Joachim, he heard the pair from the “bad” Russian table; he turned on his side and invited slumber. + 

The night was the harder half of the day, for Hans Castorp woke often, and lay not seldom hours awake; either because his slightly abnormal temperature kept him stimulated, or because his horizontal manner of life, detracted from the power, or the desire, to sleep. To make up for their briefness, his hours of slumber were animated by extremely lively and varied dreams, which he could ponder on awaking. And if the hours of the day were shortened by their frequent division into small sections, it was the blurred monotony of the marching hours of the night which operated with the like effect. Then as dawn came on, he found it diverting to watch the gradual grey, the slow emergence of the room and the objects in it, as though by the drawing of veils; to see day kindling outside, with smouldering or with lively glow; and it was always a surprise when the moment came round again and the thump of the bathing-master on his door announced to Hans Castorp that the daily programme was again in force. + 

He had brought no calendar with him on his holiday, and did not always find himself sure of the date. Now and then he asked his cousin; who, in turn, was not always quite sure either. True, the Sundays, particularly the fortnightly one with the concert⁠—it was the second Hans Castorp had spent in this situation⁠—gave him a fixed point. So much was certain, that by little and little they had now got well on in September, close on to the middle. Since he went to bed, the cold and cloudy weather had given place to a succession of wonderful midsummer days. Every morning Joachim appeared arrayed in white flannel trousers, to greet his cousin, and Hans Castorp felt a pang of regret, in which both heart and youthful muscles joined, at the loss of all this splendid weather. He murmured that it was “a shame,” but added to console himself that even if he were up and about he would hardly know how to take advantage of it, since it seemed it did not answer for him to exert himself much. And the wide-open balcony door did afford him some share of the warm shimmer outside. + 

But toward the end of his prescribed term of lying, the weather veered again. It grew misty and cold overnight, the valley was hid by gusts of wet snow, and the dry heat of the radiator filled the room. Such was the day on which Hans Castorp reminded the doctor, on his morning round, that the three weeks were out, and asked leave to get up. + 

“What the deuce⁠—you don’t say!” said Behrens. “Time’s up, is it? Let’s see: yes, you’re right⁠—good Lord, how fast we grow old! Things haven’t changed much with you, in the meantime. Normal yesterday? Yes, up to six o’clock in the afternoon. Well, Castorp, I won’t grudge you human society any longer. Up with you, man, and get on with your walks⁠—within the prescribed limits, of course. We’ll take a picture of the inside of you⁠—make a note of it,” he said as he went out, jerking his great thumb over his shoulder at Hans Castorp, and looking at the pallid assistant with his bloodshot, watery blue eyes. Hans Castorp left the “caboose.” + 

In galoshes, with his collar turned up, he accompanied his cousin once more to the bench by the watercourse and back. On the way he raised the question of how long the Hofrat might have let him lie had he not been reminded. And Joachim, looking worried, opened his mouth to emit a single pessimistic syllable, spread out his hands in an expressive gesture, and gave it up. + 

Sudden Enlightenment + 

A week passed before Hans Castorp received, through the Directress von Mylendonk, the summons to present himself in the X-ray laboratory. He had not liked to press matters. The Berghof was a busy place, doctors and assistants had their hands full. New guests had recently come in: two Russian students with shocks of hair and black blouses closed to the throat, showing not a vestige of linen; a Dutch married couple, who were given places at Settembrini’s table; and a hunchbacked Mexican, who frightened his table by fearful attacks of asthma, when he would clutch his neighbour, whether man or woman, in an iron grip like a vice, and draw him, as it were, struggling and crying for help, into the circle of his own extremity. The dining-room was nearly full, though the winter season did not actually begin until October. And Hans Castorp’s case was scarcely of such severity as to give him any special claim to attention. Frau Stöhr, for all her stupidity and ill breeding, was unquestionably worse off than he⁠—not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One must have lacked all discrimination not to have behaved retiringly, in Hans Castorp’s place⁠—particularly since discrimination was in the atmosphere of the house. The mild cases were of no great account, that he had often heard. They were slightingly spoken of, looked at askance, not only by the more serious and the very serious cases, but even by each other. Logically, of course, each mild case was thus driven to think slightingly of itself; yet preserved its individual self-respect by merging it with the general, as was natural and human. + 

“Oh,” they would say, of this or that patient, “there’s not much amiss with him. He hardly even ought to be up here, he has no cavities at all.” Such was the spirit⁠—it was aristocratic in its own special sense, and Hans Castorp deferred to it, out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. It was natural to him to conform to the proverb which bids us, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And indeed travellers show small breeding when they jeer at the customs and standards of their hosts, for of characteristics that do honour to their possessors there are all sorts and kinds. Even toward Joachim Hans Castorp felt a certain deference⁠—not so much because he was the older inhabitant, his guide and cicerone in these new surroundings, as because he was unquestionably the more serious case of the two. Such being the attitude, it was easy to understand that each patient inclined to make the most he could of his individual case, even exaggerating its seriousness, so as to belong to the aristocracy, or come as close to it as possible. So Hans Castorp, when asked at table, might add a couple of tenths to his temperature, and could never help feeling flattered when they shook their fingers at him and called him an artful dodger. But even when he laid it on a little, he still remained a member of the lower orders, in whom an attitude of unassuming diffidence was only right and proper. + 

He took up the life of his first three weeks, that familiar, regular, well-regulated life with Joachim, and it went as pat as though he had never left it off. The interruption, indeed, had been insignificant, as he saw when he resumed his seat at table. Joachim, who laid deliberate stress on such occasions, had decorated his place with a few flowers; but there was no great ceremony about the greetings of the other guests, these were almost what they would have been after a separation of three hours instead of three weeks. This was not due to indifference toward his simple and sympathetic personality, nor to preoccupation with their own absorbing physical state; but merely because they had actually not been conscious of the interval. And Hans Castorp could readily follow them in this; since sitting there in his place at the end of the table, between the schoolmistress and Miss Robinson, it was as though he had sat here no longer ago than yesterday at the furthest. + 

If, even at his own table, the end of his retirement caused no stir, how should it have been remarked in the rest of the dining-room? And literally no soul had taken notice of it save Settembrini, who strolled over at the end of the meal to exchange a lively greeting. Hans Castorp, indeed, would have made a mental reservation, in which he may or may not have been justified: he told himself that Clavdia Chauchat had noticed his return, that she had no sooner made her tardy entrance, and let the glass door slam behind her, than she rested her narrow gaze upon him⁠—which he had met with his own⁠—and that even after she sat down, she had turned and looked toward him, smiling over her shoulder, as she had three weeks before, on the day of his examination. The movement had been so open, so regardless⁠—regardless of both himself and the other guests⁠—that he did not know whether to be in ecstasies over it or to take it as a mark of contempt and feel angry. At all events, his heart had contracted beneath this glance, which so markedly and intoxicatingly gave the lie to the lack of social relations subsisting between him and the fair patient. It had contracted almost painfully at the moment when the glass door slammed, for to that moment he had looked forward with his breath coming thick and fast. + 

It must be said that Hans Castorp’s sentiments toward the patient of the “good” Russian table had made distinct progress during his retirement. The sympathy he entertained in his mind and his simple heart for this medium-sized person with the gliding gait and the “Kirghiz” eyes, as good as amounted to being “in love”⁠—we shall let the word stand, although in strictness it is a conception of “down below,” a word of the plains, capable of giving rise to a misconception: namely, that the tender ditty beginning “One word from thy sweet lips” was to some extent applicable to his state. Her picture had hovered before him in those early hours when he had lain awake and watched the dawn unveil his chamber; or at evening when the twilight thickened. It had been vividly present the night Settembrini had suddenly entered his room and turned on the light; was the reason why he had coloured under the humanistic eye. In each hour of his diminished day he had thought of her: her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyes, whose colour, shape, and position bit into his very soul; her drooping back, the posture of her head, her cervical vertebra above the rounding of her blouse, her arms enhanced by their thin gauze covering. Possessed of these thoughts, his hours had sped on soundless feet; if we have concealed the fact, we did so out of sympathy for the turmoil of his conscience, which mingled with the terrifying joy his visions imparted. Yes, he felt both terror and dread; he felt a vague and boundless, utterly mad and extravagant anticipation, a nameless anguish of joy which at times so oppressed the young man’s heart, his actual and corporeal heart, that he would lay one hand in the neighbourhood of that organ, while he carried the other to his brow and held it like a shield before his eyes, whispering: “Oh, my God!” + 

For behind that brow were thoughts⁠—or half-thoughts⁠—which imparted to the visions their perilous sweetness. Thoughts that had to do with Madame Chauchat’s recklessness and abandon, her ailing state, the heightening and accentuation of her physical parts by disease, the corporealization, so to speak, of all her being as an effect of disease⁠—an effect in which he, Hans Castorp, by the physician’s verdict, was now to share. He comprehended the grounds of her audacity, her total disregard in smile and glance of the fact that no social relation existed between them, that they did not even know each other; it was as though they belonged to no social system, as though it were not even necessary that they should speak to each other! Precisely this it was that frightened Hans Castorp; for frightened he was, in the same sense as when, in the consulting-room, he had looked from Joachim’s nude body with panic-stricken searching up to his eyes⁠—only that then the grounds of his fear had been pity and concern, whereas here something quite different was in play. + 

But now the Berghof life, that wonderfully favoured and well-regulated existence, was once more in full swing on its narrow stage. Hans Castorp, whilst awaiting his X-ray examination, continued to enjoy its measured course, together with good Cousin Joachim, and to do, hour for hour, precisely as he did. No question but his cousin’s society was beneficial to our young man. For though Joachim’s were but a companionship in suffering, yet he suffered, as it were, conformably with military etiquette; even, though unconsciously, to the point of finding satisfaction in the service of the cure, of substituting it for the service down below and making of it an interim profession. Hans Castorp was not so dull as not to perceive all this, yet at the same time he was aware of its corrective and restraining influence upon his more civilian temper. It may have been this companionship, its example and the control it exercised, which held him back from overt steps and rash undertakings. For he saw all that Joachim had to endure from the daily assaults of an orange-scented atmosphere, commingled of such elements as round brown eyes, a little ruby, a great deal of unwarranted laughter, and a bosom fair to outward eyes. The honour and good sense which made Joachim flee these enticements gripped Hans Castorp, kept him under control, and prevented him from “borrowing a lead-pencil” so to speak⁠—from the narrow-eyed one, a thing which he otherwise, from what we know of him, might well have been ready to do. + 

Joachim never spoke of the laughter-loving Marusja, and thus Hans Castorp could not mention Clavdia Chauchat. He made up for this by his stolen commerce with the schoolmistress at table, when he would sit supporting his chin after the manner of old Hans Lorenz, and tax the spinster with her weakness for the charming invalid, until her face positively flamed. He pressed her to find out new and interesting facts about Madame Chauchat’s personal affairs, her origin, her husband, her age, the particulars of her illness. He wanted to know if she had children. Oh, no, she had none; what should a woman like her do with children? Probably she was strictly forbidden to have any, and if she did, what kind of children would they be? Hans Castorp was forced to acquiesce. And now it was probably late in the day, he threw out, with prodigious objectivity. Madame Chauchat’s profile, at times, seemed to him already a little sharp. She must be over thirty. Fräulein Engelhart rejected the idea with scorn. Thirty? At worst not more than twenty-eight. She forbade her neighbour to use such words about Clavdia’s profile. It was the softest, sweetest, most youthful profile in the world, and at the same time interesting⁠—of course it was not the profile of any ordinary healthy bread-and-butter miss. To punish him, she went on to say that she knew Frau Chauchat entertained a male visitor, a certain fellow-countryman who lived down in the Platz. She received him afternoons in her chamber. + 

It was a good shot. Hans Castorp’s face changed in spite of himself; he tried to react, saying: “Well, well! You don’t say so!” but the words sounded strained. He was incapable of treating lightly the existence of this fellow-countryman of Frau Chauchat, much as he wished to appear to do so, and came back to it again and again, his lips twitching. A young man? Young and good-looking, according to all accounts, the schoolmistress answered; she could not say from her own observation. Was he ill? Only a light case, at most. “Let us hope,” Hans Castorp remarked with scorn, “that he displays more linen than the other two, at the ‘bad’ Russian table.” Fräulein Engelhart, on punishment intent, said she could vouch for that. He gave in, and admitted that it was a matter for concern. He earnestly charged her to find out all she could about this young man who came and went between the Platz and Frau Chauchat’s room. A few days later she brought him, not information about the young Russian, but a fresh and startling piece of news. She knew that Clavdia Chauchat was having her portrait painted, and asked Hans Castorp if he knew it too. If not, he might be assured she had it on the best authority. She had been sitting for some time, to a person here in the house, and the person was⁠—the Hofrat! Yes, Herr Hofrat Behrens, no less, and he received her for the purpose almost daily in his private dwelling. + 

This intelligence affected Hans Castorp even more than the other. He made several forced jokes about it. Why, certainly, the Hofrat was known to occupy himself with oil-painting. Why not? It wasn’t a crime, anybody was free to paint. And the sittings took place in the widower’s own house⁠—he hoped, at least, that Fräulein von Mylendonk was present! The schoolmistress objected that the Directress was probably too busy. No busier than the doctor ought to be, Hans Castorp severely rejoined. The remark sounded final; but he was far from letting the subject drop. He exhausted himself in questions: about the picture, what size it was, and whether it was a head or a knee-length; about the hours of the sitting⁠—but Fräulein Engelhart could not gratify him with these particulars, and had to put him off until she could make further inquiry. + 

Hans Castorp measured 99.7° as a result of this communication. The visits Frau Chauchat received upset him far less than these she made. Her personal and private life⁠—quite aside from what went on in it⁠—had begun to be a source of anguish and unrest; how much keener, then, were his feelings when he heard such questionable things about the way she spent her time! Speaking generally, it was altogether possible that her relations with the Russian visitor had a disinterested and harmless character. But Hans Castorp had been for some time now inclined to reject harmless and disinterested explanations as being in the nature of “twaddle”; nor could he regard in any other light this oil-painting, considered as a bond of interest between a widower with a robust vocabulary and a narrow-eyed, soft-stepping young female. The taste displayed by the Hofrat in his choice of a model was too like Hans Castorp’s own for him to put great faith in the disinterested character of the affair, and the thought of the Hofrat’s purple cheeks and bloodshot, goggling eyes only strengthened his scepticism. + 

An observation which he made in these days, of his own accord and quite by chance, had a different effect upon him, though here again what he saw confirmed his own taste. There sat, at the same table with Frau Salomon and the greedy schoolboy with the glasses, at the cousins’ left, near the side door, a patient who was, so Hans Castorp had heard, a native of Mannheim. He was some thirty years old; his hair was thin, his teeth poor, and he had a self-depreciating manner of speech. He it was who played the piano evenings, usually the wedding march from Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was said to be very religious⁠—as “those up here” naturally often were. Every Sunday he went to service down in the Platz, and in the rest-cure he read devotional books with a chalice or palm branch on the front cover. This man’s eyes, so Hans Castorp one day observed, travelled the same road as his own: they hung upon Madame Chauchat’s lissom person with timid, doglike devotion. Once Hans Castorp had remarked this, he could not forbear corroborating it again and again. He saw him stand, of an evening, in the cardroom, among the other guests, quite lost in gazing at the lovely, contaminate creature on the sofa in the small salon, in talk with the whimsical, fuzzy-haired Tamara, Dr. Blumenkohl, and the hollow-chested, stooping young men who were her tablemates. He saw him turn away, then twist his head, with a piteous expression of the upper lip, and roll his eyes back over his shoulder in her direction. He saw him colour and not look up, but then gaze avidly as with a crash the glass door fell to, and Frau Chauchat slipped to her place. And more than once he saw how the poor soul would place himself, after the meal, between the “good” Russian table and the exit, in order that she might pass close by him; she gave him neither glance nor thought, while he devoured her at close range with eyes full of sadness to their very depths. + 

This discovery of his affected young Hans Castorp no little, though the plaintive, devouring gaze of the Mannheimer did not trouble his rest like the thought of Clavdia Chauchat’s private relations with Hofrat Behrens, a man so much his superior in age, person, and position. Clavdia took no interest in the Mannheimer⁠—had she done so, it would not have escaped Hans Castorp’s perception; in this case it was not the dart of jealousy he felt pierce his soul. But he did have all the sensations which the drunkenness of passion knows, when it sees its own case duplicated in the outer world, and which form a most fantastic mixture of disgust and fellow-feeling. To explore and lay open all the windings of his emotions would keep us far too long; suffice it to say that his observation of the Mannheimer gave our poor young friend enough to think on and to suffer. + 

In this wise passed the week before his X-ray examination. He had not known it was so long. But one morning at early breakfast he received the order through the Directress (she had a fresh stye, so this harmless though disfiguring ailment was clearly constitutional) to present himself in the laboratory that afternoon; and behold, when he came to think of it, a week had passed. He and his cousin were to go together, a half-hour before tea; the occasion would serve for Joachim to have another X-ray taken, as the old one was by now out of date. + 

They shortened the main rest period by thirty minutes and, promptly as the clock struck half past three, descended the stairs to the so-called basement, and sat down in the small antechamber between the consulting-room and the laboratory. Joachim was quite cool, this being for him no new experience, Hans Castorp rather feverishly expectant, as no one, up to the present, had ever had a view into his organic interior. They were not alone. Several other patients were already sitting when they entered, with tattered illustrated magazines on their laps, and they all waited together: a young Swede, of heroic proportions, who sat at Settembrini’s table; of whom one heard that, when he entered, the previous April, he had been so ill they had almost refused to take him, but he had put on nearly six stone, and was about to be discharged cured. There was also a mother from the “bad” Russian table, herself a lamentable case, with her long-nosed, ugly boy, named Sascha, whose case was more lamentable still. These three had been waiting longer than the cousins and would therefore go in before them⁠—evidently there had been some sort of hitch in the laboratory, and a cold tea was on the cards. + 

They were busy in there. The voice of the Hofrat could be heard, giving directions. It was somewhat past the half-hour when the door was opened by the technical assistant to admit the Swedish giant and fortune’s minion. His predecessor had evidently gone out by another door. But now matters moved more rapidly. After no more than ten minutes they heard the Scandinavian stride off down the corridor, a walking testimonial to the establishment and the health resort; and the Russian mother was admitted with her Sascha. Both times, as the door opened, Hans Castorp observed that it was half dark in the X-ray room; an artificial twilight prevailed there, as in Dr. Krokowski’s analytic cabinet. The windows were shrouded, daylight shut out, and two electric lights were burning. But as Sascha and his mother went in, and Hans Castorp gazed after them, the corridor door opened, and the next patient entered the waiting-room⁠—she was, of course, too early, on account of the delay in the laboratory. It was Madame Chauchat. + 

It was Clavdia Chauchat who appeared thus suddenly in the little waiting-room. Hans Castorp recognized her, staring-eyed, and distinctly felt the blood leave his cheeks. His jaw relaxed, his mouth was on the point of falling open. Her entrance had taken place so casually, so unforeseen, she had not been there, and then, all at once, there she was, and sharing these narrow quarters with the cousins. Joachim flung a quick glance at Hans Castorp, afterwards not only casting down his eyes, but taking up again the illustrated sheet he had laid aside, and burying his face in it. Hans Castorp could not summon resolution to do the same. He grew very red, after his sudden pallor, and his heart pounded. + 

Frau Chauchat seated herself by the laboratory door, in a little round easy-chair with stumpy, as it were rudimentary arms. She leaned back, crossed one leg lightly over the other, and stared into space. She knew she was being looked at, and her Pribislav eyes shifted their gaze nervously, almost squinting. She wore a white sweater and blue skirt, and had a book from the lending-library in her lap. She tapped softly with the sole of the foot that rested on the floor. + 

After a minute and a half she changed her position; looked round, stood up, with an air of not knowing what she was to do or where to go⁠—and began to speak. She was asking something, she addressed a question to Joachim, though he sat there apparently deep in his magazine, while Hans Castorp was doing nothing at all. She shaped the words with her lips and gave them voice out of her white throat; it was the voice, not deep, but with the slightest edge, and pleasantly husky, that Hans Castorp knew⁠—had known so long ago and yet heard so lately, swing: “With pleasure, only you must be sure to give it me back after the lesson.” Those words had been uttered clearly and fluently; these came rather hesitatingly and brokenly, the speaker had no native right to them, she only borrowed them, as Hans Castorp had heard her do before, when he experienced the mingled feeling of superiority and ecstasy we have described. One hand in her sweater pocket, the other at the back of her head, Frau Chauchat asked: “May I ask for what time you had an appointment?” + 

And Joachim, with a quick look at his cousin, answered, drawing his heels together as he sat: “For half past three.” + 

She spoke again: “Mine was for a quarter to four. What is it then⁠—it is nearly four. Some people just entered, did they not?” + 

“Yes, two people. They were ahead of us. There seems to be some delay, everything is a half-hour late.” + 

“It is disagreeable,” she said, nervously touching her hair. + 

“Rather,” responded Joachim. “We have been waiting nearly half an hour already.” + 

Thus they conversed, and Hans Castorp listened as in a dream. For his cousin to speak to Frau Chauchat was almost the same as his doing it himself⁠—and yet how altogether different! That “Rather” had affronted him, it sounded odd and brusque, if not worse, in view of the circumstances. To think that Joachim could speak to her like that⁠—to think that he could speak to her at all!⁠—and very likely he prided himself on his pert “Rather”⁠—much as Hans Castorp had played up before Joachim and Settembrini when he was asked how long he meant to stay, and answered: “Three weeks.” It was to Joachim, though he had the paper in front of his nose, that she had turned with her question; because he was the older inhabitant of course, whom she had known longer by sight; but perhaps for another reason as well, because they two might meet on a conventional footing and carry on an ordinary conversation in articulate words; because nothing wild and deep, mysterious and terrifying, held sway between them. Had it been somebody brown-eyed, with a ruby ring and orange perfume, who sat here waiting with them, it would have been his, Hans Castorp’s, part to lead the conversation and say: “Rather” in the purity and detachment of his sentiments. “Yes, madame, certainly rather unpleasant,” he would have said; and might have taken his handkerchief out of his breast pocket with a flourish, and blown his nose. “Have patience, our case is no better than yours.” How surprised Joachim would have been at his fluency⁠—but without seriously wishing himself in Hans Castorp’s place. No, and Hans Castorp was not jealous of Joachim for being able to talk to Frau Chauchat. He was satisfied that she should have addressed herself to his cousin; it showed that she recognized the situation for what it was.⁠—His heart pounded. + 

After Joachim’s cavalier treatment of Madame Chauchat⁠—in which Hans Castorp seemed to savour something almost like faint hostility on his cousin’s part toward their fair fellow-patient, a hostility at which he could not help smiling, despite the commotion in his mind⁠—“Clavdia” tried a turn up and down the room. Then, finding the space too confined, she too took up an illustrated paper, and returned to the easy-chair with the rudimentary arms. Hans Castorp looked at her, with his chin in his collar, like his grandfather⁠—it was laughable to see how like the old man he looked. Frau Chauchat had crossed one leg over the other again, and her knee, even the whole slender line of the thigh, showed beneath the blue skirt. She was only of middle height⁠—a thoroughly proper and delightful height, in Hans Castorp’s eyes⁠—but relatively long-legged, and narrow in the hips. She sat leaning forward, with her crossed forearms supported on her knee, her shoulders drooping, and her back rounded, so that the neck-bone stuck out prominently, and nearly the whole spine was marked out under the close-fitting sweater. Her breasts, which were not high and voluptuous like Marusja’s, but small and maidenly, were pressed together from both sides. Hans Castorp recalled, suddenly, that she too was sitting here waiting to be X-rayed. The Hofrat painted her, he reproduced her outward form with oil and colours upon the canvas. And now, in the twilighted room, he would direct upon her the rays which would reveal to him the inside of her body. When this idea occurred to Hans Castorp, he turned away his head and put on a primly detached air; a sort of seemly obscurantism presented itself to him as the only correct attitude in the presence of such a thought. + 

The waiting together in the little room did not last for long. They evidently gave rather short shrift to Sascha and his mother in there, in their effort to make up for lost time. The technician in his white smock once more appeared, Joachim stood up and tossed his paper back on to the table, and Hans Castorp, not without inward hesitation, followed him to the open door. He was struggling with chivalrous scruples, also with the temptation to put himself, after all, upon conventional terms with Frau Chauchat, to speak to her and offer her precedence⁠—in French, if he could manage. Hastily he sought to muster the words, the sentence structure. But he did not know if such courtesies were practised up here; probably the established order was more powerful than the rules of chivalry. Joachim must know, and as he made no motion to defer to sex, even though Hans Castorp looked at him imploringly, the latter followed his cousin past Frau Chauchat, who merely glanced up from her stooping posture as they went through the door into the laboratory. + 

He was too much possessed by the events of the last ten minutes, and by what he left behind, for his mind to pass immediately with his body over the threshold of the X-ray laboratory. He saw nothing, or only vaguely, in the artificially lighted room; he still heard Frau Chauchat’s pleasantly veiled voice, with which she had said: “What is it, then?⁠ ⁠… Some people have just gone in⁠ ⁠… It is disagreeable”⁠—the sound of it still shivered sweetly down his back. He saw the shape of her knee under the cloth skirt, saw the bone of her neck, under the short reddish-blond hairs that were not gathered up into the braids⁠—and again the shiver ran down his back. Then he saw Hofrat Behrens, with his back to them, standing before a sort of built-in recess, looking at a black plate which he held at arm’s length toward the dim light in the ceiling. They passed him and went on into the room, followed by the assistant, who made preparations to dispatch their affair. It smelled very odd in here, the air was filled with a sort of stale ozone. The built-in structure, projecting between the two black-hung windows, divided the room into two unequal parts. Hans Castorp could distinguish physical apparatus. Lenses, switchboards, towering measuring-instruments, a box like a camera on a rolling stand, glass diapositives in rows set in the walls. Hard to say whether this was a photographic studio, a darkroom, or an inventor’s workshop and technological witches’ kitchen. + 

Joachim had begun, without more ado, to lay bare the upper half of his body. The helper, a square-built, rosy-cheeked young native in a white smock, motioned Hans Castorp to do the same. It went fast, and he was next in turn. As Hans Castorp took off his waistcoat, Behrens came out of the smaller recess where he had been standing into the larger one. + 

“Hallo,” said he. “Here are our Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. If you feel any inclination to blub, kindly suppress it. Just wait, we shall soon see through you both. I expect, Castorp, you feel a little nervous about exposing your inner self to our gaze? Don’t be alarmed, we preserve all the amenities. Look here, have you seen my picture-gallery?” He led Hans Castorp by the arm before the rows of dark plates on the wall, and turned on a light behind them. Hans Castorp saw various members: hands, feet, kneepans, thigh- and leg-bones, arms, and pelvises. But the rounded living form of these portions of the human body was vague and shadowy, like a pale and misty envelope, within which stood out the clear, sharp nucleus⁠—the skeleton. + 

“Very interesting,” said Hans Castorp. + 

“Interesting sure enough,” responded the Hofrat. “Useful object-lesson for the young. X-ray anatomy, you know, triumph of the age. There is a female arm, you can tell by its delicacy. That’s what they put around you when they make love, you know.” He laughed, and his upper lip with the close-cropped moustache went up still more on one side. The pictures faded. Hans Castorp turned his attention to the preparations for taking Joachim’s X-ray. + 

It was done in front of that structure on the other side of which Hofrat Behrens had been standing when they entered. Joachim had taken his place on a sort of shoemaker’s bench, in front of a board, which he embraced with his arms and pressed his breast against it, while the assistant improved the position, massaging his back with kneading motions, and putting his arms further forward. Then he went behind the camera, and stood just as a photographer would, legs apart and stooped over, to look inside. He expressed his satisfaction and, going back to Joachim, warned him to draw in his breath and hold it until all was over. Joachim’s rounded back expanded and so remained; the assistant, at the switchboard, pulled the handle. Now, for the space of two seconds, fearful powers were in play⁠—streams of thousands, of a hundred thousand of volts, Hans Castorp seemed to recall⁠—which were necessary to pierce through solid matter. They could hardly be confined to their office, they tried to escape through other outlets: there were explosions like pistol-shots, blue sparks on the measuring apparatus; long lightnings crackled along the walls. Somewhere in the room appeared a red light, like a threatening eye, and a phial in Joachim’s rear filled with green. Then everything grew quiet, the phenomena disappeared, and Joachim let out his breath with a sigh. It was over. + 

“Next delinquent,” said the Hofrat, and nudged Hans Castorp with his elbow. “Don’t pretend you’re too tired. You will get a free copy, Castorp; then you can project the secrets of your bosom on the wall for your children and grandchildren to see!” + 

Joachim had stepped down; the technician changed the plate. Hofrat Behrens personally instructed the novice how to sit and hold himself. + 

“Put your arms about it,” he said. “Embrace the board⁠—pretend it’s something else, if you like. Press your breast against it, as though it filled you with rapture. Like that. Draw a deep breath. Hold it!” he commanded. “Now, please!” Hans Castorp waited, blinking, his lungs distended. Behind him the storm broke loose: it crackled, lightened, detonated⁠—and grew still. The lens had looked into his inside. + 

He got down, dazed and bewildered, notwithstanding he had not been physically sensible of the penetration in the slightest degree. + 

“Good lad,” said the Hofrat. “Now we shall see.” The experienced Joachim had already moved over toward the entrance door and taken position at a stand; at his back was the lofty structure of the apparatus, with a bulb half full of water, and distillation tubes; in front of him, breast-high, hung a framed screen on pulleys. On his left, between switchboard and instrumentarium, was a red globe. The Hofrat, bestriding a stool in front of the screen, lighted the light. The ceiling light went out, and only the red glow illumined the scene. Then the master turned this too off, with a quick motion, and thick darkness enveloped the laboratory. + 

“We must first accustom the eyes,” the Hofrat was heard to say, in the darkness. “We must get big pupils, like a cat’s, to see what we want to see. You understand, our everyday eyesight would not be good enough for our purposes. We have to banish the bright daylight and its pretty pictures out of our minds.” + 

“Naturally,” said Hans Castorp. He stood at the Hofrat’s shoulder, and closed his eyes, since the darkness was so profound that it did not matter whether he had them open or shut. “First we must wash our eyes with darkness to see what we want to see. That is plain. I find it quite right and proper, as a matter of fact, that we should collect ourselves a little, beforehand⁠—in silent prayer, as it were. I am standing here with my eyes shut, and have quite a pleasant sleepy feeling. But what is it I smell?” + 

“Oxygen,” said the Hofrat. “What you notice in the air is oxygen. Atmospheric product of our little private thunderstorm, you know. Eyes open!” he commanded. “The magicking is about to begin.” Hans Castorp hastened to obey. + 

They heard a switch go on. A motor started up, and sang furiously higher and higher, until another switch controlled and steadied it. The floor shook with an even vibration. The little red light, at right angles to the ceiling, looked threateningly across at them. Somewhere lightening flashed. And with a milky gleam a window of light emerged from the darkness: it was the square hanging screen, before which Hofrat Behrens bestrode his stool, his legs sprawled apart with his fists supported on them, his blunt nose close to the pane, which gave him a view of a man’s interior organism. + 

“Do you see it, young man?” he asked. Hans Castorp leaned over his shoulder, but then raised his head again to look toward the spot where Joachim’s eyes were presumably gazing in the darkness, with the gentle, sad expression they had worn during the other examination. “May I?” he asked. + 

“Of course,” Joachim replied magnanimously, out of the dark. And to the pulsation of the floor, and the snapping and cracking of the forces at play, Hans Castorp peered through the lighted window, peered into Joachim Ziemssen’s empty skeleton. The breastbone and spine fell together in a single dark column. The frontal structure of the ribs was cut across by the paler structure of the back. Above, the collarbones branched off on both sides, and the framework of the shoulder, with the joint and the beginning of Joachim’s arm, showed sharp and bare through the soft envelope of flesh. The thoracic cavity was light, but blood-vessels were to be seen, some dark spots, a blackish shadow. + 

“Clear picture,” said the Hofrat, “quite a decent leanness⁠—that’s the military youth. I’ve had paunches here⁠—you couldn’t see through them, hardly recognize a thing. The rays are yet to be discovered that will go through such layers of fat. This is nice clean work. Do you see the diaphragm?” he asked, and indicated with his finger the dark arch in the window, that rose and fell. “Do you see the bulges here on the left side, the little protuberances? That was the inflammation of the pleura he had when he was fifteen years old. Breathe deep,” he commanded. “Deeper! Deep, I tell you!” And Joachim’s diaphragm rose quivering, as high as it could; the upper parts of the lungs could be seen to clear up, but the Hofrat was not satisfied. “Not good enough,” he said. “Can you see the hilus glands? Can you see the adhesions? Look at the cavities here, that is where the toxins come from that fuddle him.” But Hans Castorp’s attention was taken up by something like a bag, a strange, animal shape, darkly visible behind the middle column, or more on the right side of it⁠—the spectator’s right. It expanded and contracted regularly, a little after the fashion of a swimming jellyfish. + 

“Look at his heart,” and the Hofrat lifted his huge hand again from his thigh and pointed with his forefinger at the pulsating shadow. Good God, it was the heart, it was Joachim’s honour-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw! + 

“I am looking at your heart,” he said in a suppressed voice. + 

“Go ahead,” answered Joachim again; probably he smiled politely up there in the darkness. But the Hofrat told him to be quiet and not betray any sensibility. Behrens studied the spots and the lines, the black festoon in the intercostal space; while Hans Castorp gazed without wearying at Joachim’s graveyard shape and bony tenement, this lean memento mori, this scaffolding for mortal flesh to hang on. “Yes, yes! I see, I see!” he said, several times over. “My God, I see!” He had heard of a woman, a long-dead member of the Tienappel connection, who had been endowed or afflicted with a heavy gift, which she bore in all humility: namely, that the skeletons of persons about to die would appear before her. Thus now Hans Castorp was privileged to behold the good Joachim⁠—but with the aid and under the auspices of physical science; and by his cousin’s express permission, so that it was quite legitimate and without gruesome significance. Yet a certain sympathy came over him with the melancholy destiny of his clairvoyant relative. He was strongly moved by what he saw⁠—or more precisely, by the fact that he saw it⁠—and felt stirrings of uneasy doubt, as to whether it was really permissible and innocent to stand here in the quaking, crackling darkness and gaze like this; his itch to commit the indiscretion conflicted in his bosom with religious emotion and feelings of concern. + 

But a few minutes later he himself stood in the pillory, in the midst of the electrical storm, while Joachim, his body closed up again, put on his clothes. Again the Hofrat peered through the milky glass, this time into Hans Castorp’s own inside; and from his half-utterances, his broken phrases and bursts of scolding, the young man gathered that what he saw corresponded to his expectations. He was so kind as to permit the patient, at his request, to look at his own hand through the screen. And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he must have expected, but what it is hardly permitted man to see, and what he had never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave. The process of decay was forestalled by the powers of the light-ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand, the seal ring he had inherited from his grandfather hanging loose and black on the joint of his ring-finger⁠—a hard, material object, with which man adorns the body that is fated to melt away beneath it, when it passes on to another flesh that can wear it for yet a little while. With the eyes of his Tienappel ancestress, penetrating, prophetic eyes, he gazed at this familiar part of his own body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. At the thought there came over his face the expression it usually wore when he listened to music: a little dull, sleepy, and pious, his mouth half open, his head inclined toward the shoulder. + 

The Hofrat said: “Spooky, what? Yes, there’s something distinctly spooky about it.” + 

He closed off the current. The floor ceased to vibrate, the lightnings to play, the magic window was quenched in darkness. The ceiling light came on. As Hans Castorp flung on his clothes, the Hofrat gave the two young men the results of his observations, in nontechnical language, out of regard for their lay minds. It seemed that in Hans Castorp’s case, the test of the eye confirmed that of the ear in a way to add lustre to science. The Hofrat had seen the old as well as the fresh spots, and “strands” ran from the bronchial tubes rather far into the organ itself⁠—“strands” with “nodules.” Hans Castorp would be able to see for himself later, in the diapositive which they would give him for his very own. The word of command was calm, patience, manly self-discipline; measure, eat, lie down, wake, and drink tea. They left; Hans Castorp, going out behind Joachim, looked over his shoulder. Ushered in by the technician, Frau Chauchat was entering the laboratory. + 

Freedom + 

How did it seem now to our young Hans Castorp? Was it as though the seven weeks which, demonstrably and without the shadow of a doubt, he had spent with them up here, were only seven days? Or, on the contrary, did they seem much longer than had actually been the case? He asked himself, inwardly, and also by way of asking Joachim; but he could not decide. Both were probably true: when he looked back, the time seemed both unnaturally long and unnaturally short, or rather it seemed anything but what it actually was⁠—in saying which we assume that time is a natural phenomenon, and that it is admissible to associate with it the conception of actuality. + 

At all events October was before the door, it might enter any day. The calculation was an easy one for Hans Castorp to make, and he gathered the same result from the conversation of his fellow-patients. “Do you know that in five days it will be the first again?” he heard Hermine Kleefeld say to two of her familiars, the student Rasmussen and the thick-lipped young man, whose name was Gänser. It was after luncheon, and the guests lingered chatting in the dining-room, though the air was heavy with the odours of the meal just served, instead of going into the afternoon rest-cure. “The first of October, I saw it on the calendar in the office. That makes the second of its kind I’ve spent in the pleasure resort. Well, summer is over, in so far as there has been a summer, that is⁠—it has really been a sell, like life in general.” She shook her head, fetched a sigh from her one lung, and rolled up to the ceiling her dull and stolid eyes. “Cheer up, Rasmussen,” she said, and slapped her comrade on the drooping shoulder. “Make a few jokes!” + 

“I don’t know many,” he responded, letting his hands flap finlike before his breast, “and those I do I can’t tell, I’m so tired all the time.” + 

“ ‘Not even a dog,’ ” Gänser said through his teeth, “ ‘would want to live longer’⁠—if he had to live like this.” + 

They laughed and shrugged their shoulders. + 

Settembrini had been standing near them, his toothpick between his lips. As they went out he said to Hans Castorp: “Don’t you believe them, Engineer, never believe them when they grumble. They all do it, without exception, and all of them are only too much at home up here. They lead a loose and idle life, and imagine themselves entitled to pity, and justified of their bitterness, irony, and cynicism. ‘This pleasure resort,’ she said. Well, isn’t it a pleasure resort, then? In my humble opinion it is, and in a very questionable sense too. So life is a ‘sell,’ up here at this pleasure resort! But once let them go down below and their manner of life will be such as to leave no doubt that they mean to come back again. Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice, and materialism. As the atmosphere in which we live is obviously very favourable to such miasmic growths, I may hope, or rather, I must fear, that you understand my meaning.” + 

Truly the Italian’s words were of the sort that seven weeks ago, down in the flat-land, would have been empty sound to Hans Castorp’s ears. But his stay up here had made his mind receptive to them: receptive in the sense that he comprehended them with his mind, if not with his sympathies, which would have meant even more. For although he was at bottom glad that Settembrini, after all that had passed, continued, as he did, still to talk to him, admonishing, instructing, seeking to establish an influence upon his mind, yet his understanding had reached the point where he was critical of the Italian’s words, and at times, up to a point, withheld his assent. “Imagine,” he said to himself, “he talks about irony just as he does about music, he’ll soon be telling us that it is politically suspect⁠—that is, from the moment it ceases to be a ‘direct and classic device of oratory.’ But irony that is ‘not for a moment equivocal’⁠—what kind of irony would that be, I should like to ask, if I may make so bold as to put in my oar? It would be a piece of dried-up pedantry!” Thus ungrateful is immature youth! It takes all that is offered, and bites the hand that feeds it. + 

But it would have seemed too risky to put his opposition into words. He confined himself to commenting upon what Herr Settembrini had said about Hermine Kleefeld, which he found ungenerous⁠—or rather, had his reasons for wishing to find it so. + 

“But the girl is ill,” he said. “She is seriously ill, without the shadow of a doubt⁠—she has every reason for pessimism. What do you expect of her?” + 

“Disease and despair,” Settembrini said, “are often only forms of depravity.” + 

“And Leopardi,” thought Hans Castorp, “who definitely despaired of science and progress? And our schoolmaster himself? He is infected too and keeps coming back here, and Carducci would have had small joy of him.” + 

Aloud he said: “You are good! Why, the girl may lie down and die any day, and you call it depravity! You’ll have to make that a little clearer. If you said that illness is sometimes a consequence of depravity, that would at least be sensible.” + 

“Very sensible indeed!” Settembrini put in. “My word! So if I stopped at that, you would be satisfied?” + 

“Or if you said that illness may serve as a pretext for depravity⁠—that would be all right, too.” + 

“Grazie tanto!” + 

“But illness a form of depravity? That is to say, not originating in depravity, but itself depravity? That seems to me a paradox.” + 

“I beg of you, Engineer, not to impute to me anything of the sort. I despise paradoxes, I hate them. All that I said to you about irony I would say over again about paradoxes, and more besides. Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all! Moreover, I note that you are once more defending disease⁠—” + 

“No; what you are saying interests me. It reminds me of things Dr. Krokowski says in his Monday lectures. He too explains organic disease as a secondary phenomenon.” + 

“Scarcely the pure idealist.” + 

“What have you against him?” + 

“Just that.” + 

“You are down on analysis?” + 

“Not always⁠—I am for it and against it, both by turns.” + 

“How am I to understand that?” + 

“Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong⁠—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.” + 

“Well roared, lion,” Herr Castorp could not help thinking, as he often did when Herr Settembrini delivered himself of something pedagogic. Aloud he only said: “We’ve been having to do with X-ray anatomy in these days, down on the lower-floor. Behrens called it that, when he X-rayed us.” + 

“Oh, so you have made that stage too? Well?” + 

“I saw the skeleton of my hand,” Hans Castorp said, and sought to call up the feeling that had mounted in him at the sight. “Did you get them to show you yours?” + 

“No, I don’t take the faintest interest in my skeleton. But what was the physician’s verdict?” + 

“He saw ‘strands’⁠—strands with nodules.” + 

“The scoundrel!” + 

“I have heard you call Hofrat Behrens that before, Herr Settembrini. What do you mean by it?” + 

“I assure you the epithet was deliberately chosen.” + 

“No, Herr Settembrini, there I find you are unjust. I admit the man has his faults; his manner of speech becomes disagreeable in the long run, there is something forced about it, especially when one remembers he had the great sorrow of losing his wife up here. But what an estimable and meritorious man he is, after all, a benefactor to suffering humanity! I met him the other day coming from an operation, resection of ribs, a matter of life and death, you know. It made a great impression on me, to see him fresh from such exacting and splendid work, in which he is so much the master. He was still warm from it, and had lighted a cigar by way of reward. I envied him.” + 

“That was commendable of you. Well, and your sentence?” + 

“He has not set any definite time.” + 

“That is good too. And now let us betake us to our cure, Engineer. Each to his own place.” + 

They parted at the door of number thirty-four. + 

“You are going up to the roof now, Herr Settembrini? It must be more fun to lie in company than alone. Do you talk? Are they pleasant people?” + 

“Oh, they are nothing but Parthians and Scythians.” + 

“You mean Russians?” + 

“Russians, male and female,” said Settembrini, and the corner of his mouth spanned a little. “Goodbye, Engineer.” + 

He had said that of malice aforethought, undoubtedly. Hans Castorp walked into his own room in confusion. Was Settembrini aware of his state? Very likely, like the schoolmaster he was, he had been spying on him, and seen which way his eyes were going. Hans Castorp was angry with the Italian and also with himself, for having by his lack of self-control invited the thrust. He took up his writing materials to carry them with him into the balcony⁠—for now it was no more use; the letter home, the third letter, must be written⁠—and as he did so he went on whipping up his anger, muttering to himself about this windbag and logic chopper, who meddled with matters that were no concern of his, and chirruped to the girls in the street. He felt quite disinclined to the effort of writing, the organ-grinder had put him off it altogether, with his innuendo. But no matter what his feelings, he must have winter clothing, money, footwear, linen⁠—in brief, everything he might have brought with him had he known he was coming, not for three short summer weeks, but for an indefinite stay which was certain to last for a piece into the winter⁠—or rather, considering the notions about time current up here, was quite likely to last all the winter. It was this he must let them know at home, even if only as a possibility; he must tell the whole story, and not put them, or himself, off any longer with pretexts. + 

In this spirit, then, he wrote, practising the technique he had so often seen Joachim practise; with a fountain-pen, in his deck-chair, with his knees drawn up and the portfolio laid upon them. He wrote upon the letter-paper of the establishment, of which he kept a supply in his table drawer, to James Tienappel, who stood closest to him among the three uncles, and asked him to pass the news on to the Consul. He spoke of an unfortunate occurrence, of suspicions that had proved justified, of the medical opinion that it would be best for him to remain where he was for a part, perhaps for all of the winter, since cases like his often proved more obstinate than those that began more alarmingly and it was clearly advisable to go after the infection energetically and root it out once for all. From this point of view, he considered, it had been a most fortunate circumstance that he had chanced to come here, and been induced to submit to an examination, for otherwise he might have remained for some time in ignorance of his condition, and been apprised of it later and more alarmingly. As for the length of time which would probably be required for the cure, they must not be surprised to hear the whole winter might easily slip away before his return⁠—in short, that he might come down hardly earlier than Joachim. Ideas about time were different up here from those ordinarily held about the length of stay at the baths, or at an ordinary cure. The smallest unit of time, so to speak, was the month, and a single month was almost no time at all. + 

The weather was cool, he sat in his overcoat, with a rug about him, and his hands were cold. At times he looked up from the paper which he was covering with these reasonable and sensible phrases, at the landscape now so familiar he scarcely saw it any more: this extended valley with its retreating succession of peaks at the entrance⁠—they looked pale and glassy today⁠—with its bright and populous floor, which glistened when the sun shone full upon it, and its forest-clad or meadowy slopes, whence came the sound of cowbells. He wrote with growing ease, and wondered why he had dreaded to write. For as he wrote he felt that nothing could be clearer than his presentation of the matter, and that there was no doubt it would meet with perfect comprehension at home. A young man of his class and circumstances acted for himself when it seemed advisable; he took advantage of the facilities which existed expressly for him and his like. So it was fitting. If he had taken the journey home, they would have made him come back again on hearing his report. He asked them to send what things he needed. And at the end he asked to have money sent: a monthly cheque of eight hundred marks would cover everything. + 

He signed his name. It was done. This last letter was exhaustive, it covered the case; not according to the time-conceptions of down below, but according to those obtaining up here; it asserted Hans Castorp’s freedom. This was his own word, albeit not expressed; he would hardly have shaped the syllables even in his mind; but he felt the full sense of its meaning, as he had come to know it during his stay up here⁠—a sense which had little to do with the Settembrinian significance⁠—and his breast was shaken with that excited alarm, which swept over him in a wave, as it had done before. + 

His head was hot with the blood that had gone to it as he wrote, his cheeks burned. He took the thermometer from his lamp-stand and “measured,” as though to make use of an opportunity. Mercurius had gone up to 100°. + 

“Look at that,” he thought; and added a postscript to his letter: “It did strain me rather, after all, to write this. My temperature is 100°. I see that I must be very quiet, for the present. You must excuse me if I don’t write often.” Then he lay back, and held up his hand toward the light, palm outward, as he had held it behind the light-screen. But the light of day did not encroach upon its living outline; rather it looked more substantial and opaque for its background of bright air, only its outer edges were rosily illuminated. This was his living hand, that he was used to see, to use, to wash⁠—not that uncanny scaffolding which he had beheld through the screen. The analytic grave then opened was closed again. + 

Whims of Mercurius + 

October began as months do: their entrance is, in itself, an unostentatious and soundless affair, without outward signs and tokens; they, as it were, steal in softly and, unless you are keeping close watch, escape your notice altogether. Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. + 

To Hans Castorp the first day of October and the last day of September were as like as two peas; both were equally cold and unfriendly, and those that followed were the same. In the rest-cure one used one’s overcoat and both camel’s-hair rugs, not only in the evening, but in the daytime. The fingers that held the book were stiff and clammy, however the cheeks burned; and Joachim was strongly tempted to resort to his fur sack, but resisted, in order not to pamper himself thus early in the season. + 

Some days later, however⁠—that is, between the beginning and middle of the month⁠—there came another change: a latter summer set in, with amazing splendour. The praises of this mountain October, which Hans Castorp had heard, were not idly sung. For some two and a half weeks all the glories of heaven reigned over valley and mountain, one day outvied another in blueness and clarity, and the sun burned down with such immediate power that everyone felt impelled to don the lightest of wear, muslin frocks and linen trousers already put aside. The adjustable canvas parasol without a handle was called into requisition, and fitted by its cunning device of holes and pegs on to the arm of the reclining-chair; and even its shelter was felt to be insufficient against the midday glare. + 

“I’m glad I’m here still, for this,” said Hans Castorp to his cousin. “It has been so wretched at times, and now it is as though we had the winter behind us, and only good weather to look forward to.” He was quite right. There were indeed not many signs that pointed to the true state of the calendar; and even those there were did not strike the eye. Aside from the few oak-trees that had been set out down in the Platz, where they had just managed to survive, and long before now had despondently shed their leaves, the whole region held no deciduous trees to give the landscape an autumnal cast; only the hybrid Alpine alder, which renews its soft needles as though they were leaves, showed a wintry baldness. The other trees of the region, whether towering or stunted, were evergreen pines and firs, invincible against the assaults of this irregular winter, which might scatter its snowstorms through all the months of the year: only the many-shaded, rust-red tone that lay over the forest gave notice, despite the glowing sunshine, of a declining year. Yet, looking closer, there were the wild flowers, speaking, though softly, yet to the same effect; the meadow orchis, the bushy aquilegia were no longer in bloom, only the gentian and the lowly autumn crocus, bearing witness to the inner sharpness of the superficially heated air, that could pierce one to the bone as one sat, like a chill in fever, though one glowed outwardly from the ardour of the sun. + 

Hans Castorp did not keep inward count of the time, as does the man who husbands it, notes its passing, divides and tells and labels its units. He had not heeded the silent entry of the tenth month, but he was arrested by its appeal to the senses, this glowing heat that concealed the frost within and beneath it. It was a sensation which, to anything like this degree, he had never before experienced, and it aroused him to the culinary comparison which he made to Joachim, of an omelette en surprise, holding an ice concealed within the hot froth of the beaten egg. He often made such comments, talking headlong and volubly, as a man does in a feverish chill. But between whiles he was silent; we shall not say self-absorbed, for his attention was presumably directed outwards, though upon a single point. All else, whether of the animate or the inanimate world, swam about him in a mist⁠—a mist of his own making, which Hofrat Behrens and Dr. Krokowski would doubtless have explained as the product of soluble toxins, as the befuddled one himself did also, though without having the slightest power or even desire to rid himself of the state they induced. + 

For that is an intoxication, by which one is possessed, under the influence of which one abhors nothing more than the thought of sobriety. It asserts itself against impressions that would weaken its force, it will not admit them, it wards them off. Hans Castorp was aware, and had even spoken of the fact, that Madame Chauchat’s profile was not her strong point, that it was no longer quite youthful, was even a little sharp. And the consequence? He avoided looking at her in profile, he literally closed his eyes when he caught that view of her, even at a distance; it pained him. Why? Should not reason have leaped to take advantage of the favourable moment to reassert itself? But what do we ask? He grew pale with rapture when, tempted by the brilliant weather, she appeared at second breakfast in the white lace matinée which made her look so ravishing⁠—appeared late, accompanied by the banging of the door, smiling, her arms raised in a pretty posture, and presented herself thus to the dining-room before she glided to her seat. But he was enraptured not so much because she looked so charming, as because her charm added strength to the sweet intoxication in his brain, the intoxication that willed to be, that cared only to be justified and nourished. + 

An authority of Ludovico Settembrini’s way of thinking might have characterized as depravity, as a “form of depravity,” such a lack of good intention. Hans Castorp sometimes pondered over the literary things the Italian had said about illness and despair⁠—which he had found incomprehensible, or at least pretended to himself to find them so. He looked at Clavdia Chauchat⁠—at the flaccidity of her back, the posture of her head; he saw her come habitually late to table, without reason or excuse, solely out of a lack of order and disciplined energy. He saw the same lack when she let slam every door through which she passed, when she moulded bread pellets at the table, when she gnawed her fingers; and he had a suspicion, which he did not put into words, that if she was ill⁠—and that she was, probably incurably, since she had been up here so often and so long⁠—her illness was in good part, if not entirely, a moral one: as Settembrini had said, neither the ground nor the consequence of her “slackness,” but precisely one and the same thing. He recalled the contemptuous gesture of the humanist when he spoke of the “Parthians and Scythians” in whose company he was forced to take the rest-cure. It had been a gesture not only of deliberate, but also of natural and instinctive disdain; and that feeling was quite comprehensible to Hans Castorp. Had he not once, who always sat so erect at table, loathed and despised the banging of doors, and never, never was tempted to gnaw his fingers, because to that end Maria had been given him instead, had he not once taken deep offence at the unmannerly behaviour of Frau Chauchat, and felt an unconquerable sense of superiority when he heard the narrow-eyed one essay to speak his mother-tongue? + 

The present state of his feelings, however, had put on one side any such sentiments as these; it was now the Italian who was the object of his irritation, because he, in his benightedness, had spoken of Parthians and Scythians and had not meant thereby the persons at the “bad” Russian table, the shock-headed, linenless students, who sat there disputing endlessly in their outlandish tongue, which was obviously the only one they knew, and which, in its soft, spineless character reminded Hans Castorp of the thorax without ribs Hofrat Behrens had described to him. True, the manners and customs of such people might readily awaken feelings of disgust in the breast of a humanist. They ate with their knives, and unmentionably messed the front of their blouses. Settembrini asserted that one of them, a medical student well on in his training, was so ignorant of Latin, as not to know, for example, what the word “vacuum” meant. As for the married couple in number thirty-two, Hans Castorp’s own daily experience of them was such as to render quite credible Frau Stöhr’s report, that when the bathing-master entered their room in the morning for the usual massage, they received him lying in bed together. + 

All this might well be true. But after all, the distinction between “good” and “bad” was a plain one, it did not exist for nothing. Hans Castorp assured himself that he felt only contempt for any propagandist of the republic and the bello stile who went about with his nose in the air, and calmly⁠—with particular calm, although at the same time both febrile and fuddled⁠—lumped the members of both tables together under the title of Parthians and Scythians. Hans Castorp understood only too well the sense in which he used it, since he had begun to understand the connection between Frau Chauchat’s illness and her “slackness.” But as he had one day put it to Joachim: one begins by being angry and disgusted, and then all at once “something quite different enters in,” that has “nothing to do with moral judgment,” and it is all up with your severity; you are simply not at home to pedagogic influences, however republican, however eloquent. But, we are impelled to ask, probably again in the spirit of Ludovico Settembrini, what sort of questionable experience is this, which palsies a man’s judgment, robs him of all claim to it, or even makes him waive that claim, and experience in so doing the abandonment of ecstasy? We do not ask its name⁠—for that everyone knows. Our question rather refers to its moral quality; and we confess that we do not anticipate any very self-confident reply. In Hans Castorp’s case its nature was evident in the extent to which he not only ceased to exercise his judgment, but even began to experiment for his own part and upon his own mortal vesture. He tried, for instance, how it would feel to sit at table with his back all relaxed, and discovered that it afforded sensible relief to the pelvic muscles. Again, one day, instead of punctiliously closing a door behind him, he let it slam; and this too he found both fitting and agreeable. It corresponded to the shoulder-shrug with which Joachim had greeted him at the station, and which was so habitual among those up here. + 

In brief, our traveller was now over head and ears in love with Clavdia Chauchat⁠—we may still use the phrase, since we have already obviated any possible misunderstanding on the score of it. We have seen that the essence of his passion was something quite other than the tender and pensive mood of that oft-quoted ditty: rather it was a wild and vagrant variation upon the lovesick lute, it was mingled frost and fire, like the state of a fever patient, or the October air in these high altitudes. What he actually lacked, in fact, was an emotional bridge between two extremes. On the one hand his passion dwelt, with an immediacy that left the young man pale and staring, upon Frau Chauchat’s knee, the line of her thigh, her back, her neck-bone, her arms that pressed together her little breasts⁠—in a word, it dwelt upon her body, her idle, accentuated body, exaggerated by disease and rendered twice over body. And, on the other hand, it was something in the highest degree fleeting and tenuous; a thought, nay, a dream, the frightful, infinitely alluring dream of a young man whose unspoken, unconscious questioning of the universe has received no answer save a hollow silence. We have as much right as the next person to our private thoughts about the story we are relating; and we would here hazard the surmise that young Hans Castorp would never have overstepped so far the limits originally fixed for his stay if to his simple soul there might have been vouchsafed, out of the depth of his time, any reasonably satisfying explanation of the meaning and purpose of man’s life. + 

For the rest, his lovesick state afforded him all the joy and all the anguish proper to it the world over. The anguish is acute, it has, like all anguish, a mortifying element; it shatters the nervous system to an extent that takes the breath away, and can wring tears from the eyes of a grown man. As for the joys, to do them justice, they were manifold, and no less piercing than the anguish, though their occasion might be trifling indeed. Almost any moment of the Berghof day might bring one forth. For example, about to enter the dining-room, Hans Castorp would perceive the object of his dreams behind him⁠—an experience clear and simple in anticipation, but inwardly ravishing to the point of tears. Their eyes meet at close range, his own and her grey-green ones, whose slightly oriental shape and position pierce him to the very marrow. He is incapable of connected thought, but unconsciously steps back to give her precedence through the door. With a half-smile, a half-audible “Merci,” she accepts his conventional courtesy and, passing him by, enters the room. He stands there, within the aura of her personality as it sweeps past, idiotic with happiness at the encounter, and at the word which has been uttered by her mouth directly for his ear. He follows her, he moves unsteadily to his own table and, sinking into his chair, becomes aware that Clavdia, as she too takes her place, has turned to look at him. He thinks she wears an expression as though musing on their encounter at the door. Oh, unbelievable adventure! Oh, joy, rapture, and boundless exaltation! Ah, no, this drunkenness of fantastic bliss Hans Castorp could never have experienced at the glance of any healthy little goose down in the flat-land, to whom he might have, calmly, correctly, and with most definite intentions, “given his heart,” and devoted the sentiments described in the song. He greets the schoolmistress with feverish sprightliness⁠—she has seen the whole thing, and her downy old cheek wears its dusky signal⁠—and then bombards Miss Robinson with English conversation, so absurdly that she, not versed in the ecstatic, fairly recoils, and measures him with mistrustful eyes. + 

Another time, as they sit at the evening meal, the serene rays of the setting sun fall upon the “good” Russian table. The curtains have been drawn over the window and the verandah door, but somewhere there is a little crack, and through it the red gleam finds its way, not hot, but dazzling, and falls upon Frau Chauchat’s face, so that she shields it with her hand as she sits talking with the concave countryman on her right. It is annoying but not serious, nobody troubles about it, probably not even the fair one herself. But across the dining-room Hans Castorp sees it⁠—quiescent awhile, like the others. He examines the situation, follows the course of the ray of light, makes up his mind where it enters. It comes from the bay-window in the right-hand corner, between the verandah door and the “bad” Russian table, at a goodish distance from Frau Chauchat’s place, and almost equally far from Hans Castorp’s. Without a word he gets up and, serviette in hand, crosses over among the tables, draws the cream-coloured curtains so that they lap well over one another, convinces himself by a glance over his shoulder that the ray from the setting sun is shut out and Frau Chauchat relieved, and with an air of perfect equanimity goes back to his place. An observant young man, who takes it upon himself to perform a needful courtesy neglected by others. But few of them even noticed his act; Frau Chauchat, however, instantly felt the relief, and turned round, remaining in that position until Hans Castorp had resumed his place and, sitting down, looked over at her, when she thanked him, with a friendly, rather surprised smile, and a bow that was less an inclination than a shoving forward of the head. He acknowledged by a bow in his turn. His heart stood stock-still, it seemed not to beat. Only after the whole thing was over did it begin again, and hammered, and only then did he become conscious that Joachim had kept his eyes directed upon his plate. Afterwards, too, he realized that Frau Stöhr had nudged Dr. Blumenkohl in the side, and then looked about at their own and other tables, trying to catch people’s eyes. + 

All this is the sheerest commonplace; but the commonplace becomes remarkable when it springs from remarkable soil. There were periods of strain and periods when the tension between them beneficently relaxed⁠—though perhaps the tension existed less between them than it did in Hans Castorp’s fevered imagination, for how far Madame Chauchat was affected we can only guess. In these days of fine weather the majority of the guests betook themselves to the verandah, after the midday meal, and stood about in groups, sunning themselves, for a quarter-hour or so, in a scene much like that on the Sunday afternoons of the fortnightly concerts. All these young people, absolutely idle, overfed on a meat and sweet diet, and without exception feverish⁠—chattered and laughed, philandered, made eyes. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam would perch on the balustrade, hard pressed on the right by the knees of the thick-lipped Gänser, on the left by the Swedish minion⁠—who, it appeared, was quite recovered, but extending his cure for a little space before going home. Frau Iltis was apparently a widow; for she had rejoiced only lately in the visit of a “fiancé”⁠—a melancholy, inferior-looking person, whose presence had not in the least prevented her from accepting the attentions of the hook-nosed, fiery-eyed Captain Miklosich, him of the waxed mustachios and swelling chest. New figures turned up on the terrace: ladies of various nationalities from the general rest-halls, and new arrivals since the first of October, whom Hans Castorp barely knew by name. Then there were cavaliers of Herr Albin’s kidney, monocled youths of seventeen, a spectacled, rosyfaced young Dutchman with a mania for collecting postage stamps; certain Greeks, with pomaded hair and almond-shaped eyes, inclined to overreach at table; and a pair of young dandies who were nicknamed Max and Moritz, and bore a great reputation for breaking out of bounds. The humpbacked Mexican, whose ignorance of any language save his own lent him the facial expression of a deaf person, took endless photographs, dragging his tripod from one point to another on the terrace. Sometimes the Hofrat would appear, and perform his “stunt” with the bootlaces. And somewhere in the thick of the crowd would lurk solitary the religious devotee from Mannheim; Hans Castorp would watch disgustedly to see his great sad eyes take their secret way. + 

But to return, by way of example, to some of those strains and stresses to which Hans Castorp’s state was prone. Our young man was sitting on a painted garden chair, with his back against the wall, talking with his cousin, whom he had forced, against his will, to come outside; in front of him; by the balustrade, Frau Chauchat stood smoking with her tablemates. He talked for her benefit; she turned her back. His thirst for conversation was not satisfied by Joachim; he must needs make an acquaintance⁠—and whose? No other than Hermine Kleefeld’s. He directed a casual word toward that young lady, then presented himself and his cousin by name, and drew up another chair, in order to carry on the game. Did she know, he asked, what a deuce of a fright she had put him in, at their first encounter, when she had whistled him such an inspiriting welcome? He did not mind owning that she had accomplished her purpose; he had felt as though someone had hit him on the head⁠—she might ask his cousin! He called it an outrage, frightening harmless strangers like that, piping at them with her pneumothorax! And so forth and so on. Joachim, quite aware of the role that was being forced upon him, sat with his eyes on the ground; even Fräulein Kleefeld gradually perceived, from Hans Castorp’s distraught and wandering eye, that she was being made a tool of, and felt piqued accordingly. And still the poor youth went on smirking and turning phrases and modulating his voice, until at last he actually succeeded in making Frau Chauchat turn round and look him in the face. But only for a moment. Her Pribislav eyes glided rapidly down his figure, as he sat there one knee over the other, with a deliberate insouciance which had all the effect of scorn; they paused for a space upon his yellow boots, and then carelessly, with perhaps a smile in their depths, withdrew. + 

It was a bitter, bitter blow. Hans Castorp talked on awhile, feverishly. Then, inwardly smitten by the power of that gaze upon his boots, he fell silent almost in the middle of a word, and lapsed into deep dejection. Fräulein Kleefeld, bored and offended, went her way. Joachim remarked, not without irritation, that perhaps they might go up to the rest-cure now. And a broken spirit answered feebly that they might. + 

Hans Castorp anguished piteously for two days. Nothing occurred in that time to be balsam for his smarting wound. What had she meant by her look? Why, in the name of reason, had she visited him with her scorn? Did she regard him merely as a healthy young noodle from down in the flat-land, whose receptivity was sure to be of the harmless sort; as a guileless, ordinary chap, who went about laughing and earning his daily bread and filling his belly full; as a model pupil in the school of life, with no comprehension of anything but the tedious advantages of a respectable career? Was he, he asked himself, a mere feckless tourist and three-weeks’ guest, or was he a man who had made his profession on the score of a moist spot, a member of the order, one of those up here, with a good two months to his credit⁠—and had not Mercurius only yesterday evening climbed up to 100°? Ah, here, even here, lay the bitter drop that overflowed his cup: Mercurius had ceased to mount! The fearful depression of these days had a chilling, sobering, relaxing effect upon Hans Castorp’s system, which, to his profound chagrin, displayed itself in a reduced degree of fever, scarcely higher than normal. He had the cruel experience of proving to himself that all his anguish, all his dejection, had no other result than to separate him still further from Clavdia, and from that which was significant in her existence. + 

The third day brought the blessed release. It was early upon a magnificent October morning, sunny and fresh. The meadows were covered with silvery-grey webs. The sun and the waning moon both hung high up in a lucent heaven. The cousins were abroad earlier than usual, meaning to honour the fine weather by extending their morning walk a little further than the prescribed limits, and continuing the forest path beyond the bench by the watercourse. Joachim’s curve, too, had lately shown a gratifying decrease; he had accordingly suggested this refreshing irregularity, and Hans Castorp had not said no. + 

“We seem to be cured,” he said, “no fever, free of infection, as good as ripe for the world again. Why shouldn’t we have our fling?” They set out with walking-sticks, and hatless⁠—for since his “profession” Hans Castorp had resigned himself to the prevailing custom, despite the original assertion of his own contrary-minded conventions. But they had not yet covered the initial ascent of the reddish path, had arrived only at about that point where the novice had once encountered the pneumatic crew, when they saw at some distance ahead of them, slowly mounting, Frau Chauchat; Frau Chauchat in white, a white sweater and white flannel skirt, even white shoes. Her red-blond hair gleamed in the morning sun. To be precise, Hans Castorp saw her; Joachim was made aware of her presence by an unpleasant sensation of being dragged and pulled along by his cousin, who had started up at a great pace, after having suddenly checked and almost stood still on the path. Joachim found the compulsion exceedingly annoying. His breath came shorter, he began to cough, Hans Castorp, with his eyes on his goal, and his breathing apparatus apparently in splendid trim, gave little heed; and Joachim, having recognized the situation for what it was, drew his brows together and kept step for step, feeling it out of the question to let his cousin go on alone. + 

The lovely morning made Hans Castorp sprightly. And his soul, in that period of black depression, had secretly assembled its powers. He felt a sure intuition that the moment was come to break the ban. He strode on, dragging the panting and reluctant Joachim in his train, and they had as good as overtaken Frau Chauchat, at the point where the path grew level and turned to the right along the wooded hillock. Here the young man slackened his pace, not to be breathless with exertion in the moment of carrying out his purpose. And just beyond the bend in the path, between mountain and precipice, where the sunlight slipped athwart the boughs of the rust-coloured firs, it actually fell out, the wonder came to pass, that Hans Castorp, on Joachim’s left, overtook the fragile fair one, he went by her with a manly stride, and then, at the moment when he was beside her, on her right, greeted her with a profoundly respectful, hatless inclination of the head, and a murmured “good morning,” to which she answered by a friendly bow, that showed no trace of surprise, and a good morning in her turn. She said it in Hans Castorp’s mother-tongue, and smiled with her eyes. And all that was something different, something fundamentally and blessedly other than that look she had bent upon his boots⁠—it was a gift of fortune, an unexampled turn in affairs, a joy well-nigh beyond comprehending, it was the blessed release. + 

Transported by that word, look, and smile, half blinded by his senseless joy, Hans Castorp trod on winged feet, hurrying the misused Joachim with him, who uttered not a word, and gazed away down the steep. It had been a manoeuvre of a rather unscrupulous sort; in Joachim’s eyes, as Hans Castorp well knew, it looked very like treachery. Yet it was not the same thing as borrowing a lead-pencil of a perfect stranger; one might even say it would have been ill-bred to pass by a lady with whom one had been for months under the same roof and not salute her. They had even been in conversation with her, that time in the waiting-room. That was why Joachim could say nothing; but Hans Castorp well knew another reason that made his honour-loving cousin walk on in silence with averted head, while he himself was so supremely happy, so glad all over, at the success of his manoeuvre. Never a man down in the flat-land who had “given his heart” to some healthy, commonplace little goose, been successful in his suit, and experienced all the orthodox and anticipatory gratifications proper to his state, never could such a man be blissfuller, no, not half so blissful, as Hans Castorp now over this momentary joy which he had snatched.⁠—And so, after a while, he clapped his cousin heartily on the shoulder and said: “Hullo, what’s the matter with you? Isn’t it magnificent today? Let’s go down to the Kurhaus afterwards, there will probably be music. Perhaps they’ll play that thing from Carmen.⁠—What’s the matter? Has anything got under your skin?” + 

“No,” Joachim answered. “But you look so hot, I’m afraid your curve has gone up again.” + 

It had. The greeting he had exchanged with Clavdia Chauchat had overcome the mortifying depression; it was at bottom the consciousness of this which had lain at the root of Hans Castorp’s gratification. Yes, yes, Joachim was right, Mercurius was mounting again: when Hans Castorp consulted him, on their return from their walk, he had climbed up to 100.4°. + 

Encyclopaedic + 

If certain insinuations on Herr Settembrini’s part had angered Hans Castorp, the annoyance was quite unjustified, as also his feeling that the schoolmaster had been spying on him. A blind man must have seen how it stood with the youth; he himself did nothing to conceal his state, being prevented by a certain native and lofty simplicity. He inclined rather to wear his heart upon his sleeve, in contrast⁠—if you like, favourable contrast⁠—to the devotee from Mannheim, with his thin hair and furtive mien. But in general we would emphasize the fact that people in Hans Castorp’s state regularly feel a craving for self-revelation, an impulse to confess themselves, a blind preoccupation with self, and a thirst to possess the world of their own emotions, which is the more offensive to the sober onlooker, the less sense, reasonableness, or hope there lies in the whole affair. + 

How people in this state go about to betray themselves is hard to define; but it seems they can neither do nor leave undone anything which would not have that effect⁠—doubly so, then, in a society like that of the Berghof, where, as the critically minded Herr Settembrini once expressed it, people were possessed of two ideas, and only two: temperature⁠—and then again temperature. By the second temperature he meant preoccupation with such questions as, for instance, with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt from Vienna consoled herself for the defection of Captain Miklosich⁠—whether with the Swedish minion, or Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund, or both. Everybody knew that the bond between the lawyer and Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, after subsisting for several months, had been broken by common consent, and that Frau Salomon had followed the leanings of her time of life and taken up with callow youth. The thick-lipped Gänser from Hermine Kleefeld’s table was for the present under her wing; she had taken him “to have and to hold,” as Frau Stöhr, in legal parlance, yet not without perspicuity, had put it⁠—and thus Lawyer Paravant was free either to quarrel or to compound with the Swede over the favours of the Frau Consul-General, as seemed to him advisable. + 

These affairs then⁠—in which, of course, the passage along the balconies, at the end of the glass partitions, played a considerable role⁠—were rife in Berghof society, particularly among the fevered youth. They occupied people’s minds, they were a salient feature of life up here⁠—and even in saying thus much we are far from having precisely defined the position with regard to them. Hans Castorp, on this subject, received a singular impression: it was that a certain fundamental fact of life, which is conceded the world over to be of great importance, and is the fertile theme of constant allusion, both in jest and earnest, that this fundamental fact of life bore up here an entirely altered emphasis. It was weighty with a new weight; it had an accent, a value, and a significance which were utterly novel⁠—and which set the fact itself in a light to make it look much more alarming than it had been before. Thus far, whenever we have referred to any questionable performances at the Berghof, we have done so in what may have seemed a light and jesting tone; this without prejudice to our real opinion as to the levity, or otherwise, of the performances, and solely for the usual obscure reasons which prompt other people to adopt the same. But as a matter of fact, that tone was far less usual in our present sphere than it is elsewhere in the world. Hans Castorp had considered himself pretty well-informed on the subject of the above-named “fact of life” which has always and everywhere been such a favourite target for shafts of wit. And he may have been right in so considering. But now he found that the knowledge he had had down in the flat-land had been most inadequate, that he had actually been in a state of simple ignorance. For his personal emotions in the time of his stay up here⁠—upon the nature of which we have been at some pains to enlighten the reader, and which had been at moments so acute as to wring from the young man that cry of “Oh, my God!”⁠—had opened his eyes, had made him capable of hearing and comprehending the wild, the overstrained, the namelessly extravagant key in which all the “affairs” up here were set. Not that, even up here, they did not make jests on the subject. But up here, far more than down below, jests seemed out of place. They made one’s teeth to chatter, and took away one’s breath, they betrayed themselves too plainly for what they were, a thin and obvious disguise for a hidden extremity⁠—or rather, an extremity impossible to hide. Hans Castorp well remembered the mottled pallor of Joachim’s skin when, for the first and only time, he had innocently alluded to Marusja’s physical charms in the light tone he might have assumed at home. He remembered the chill withdrawal of the blood from his own face, the time he had drawn the curtain to shield Madame Chauchat from the sun; he knew that he had seen the same look on other faces up here, both before and since⁠—he usually remarked it in pairs, as, for example, on the faces of Frau Salomon and young Gänser, in the beginning of that relation between them so happily described by Frau Stöhr. Hans Castorp, we say, recalled all this, and realized that under such circumstances it would not only have been very hard for him not to “betray himself,” but that the effort would not have been worth his pains. In other words, not alone the noble simplicity which did him honour, but also a certain sympathetic something in the air urged him not to do violence to his feelings or make any secret of his condition. + 

Joachim had, as we know, early spoken of the difficulty of forming acquaintances up here. In reality this arose chiefly from the fact that the cousins formed a miniature group by themselves in the society of the cure; but also because the soldierly Joachim was bent on nothing else but speedy recovery, and hence objected on principle to any closer contact or more social relations with his fellow sufferers. It was a good deal this attitude of his that prevented his cousin from exposing his feelings more freely to the world at large. Even so, there came an evening when Joachim might behold his cousin the centre of a group composed of Hermine Kleefeld, Gänser, Rasmussen, and the youth of the monocle and the fingernail, making an impromptu speech on the subject of Frau Chauchat’s peculiar and exotic facial structure, and betraying himself by his unsteady voice and the excited glitter of his eyes, until his listeners exchanged glances, nudged each other, and tittered. + 

This was painful for Joachim; but the object of their mirth seemed insensible to his own self-betrayal; perhaps he felt that his state, if concealed and unregarded, would never come to any proof. He might count, however, on a general understanding of it, and as for the inevitable malice that went with it, he took that for granted. People, not only at his own table, but at neighbouring ones as well, enjoyed seeing him flush and pale when the glass door slammed. And even this gratified him; it was like an outward confirmation and assertion of his inner frenzy, which seemed to him calculated to forward his affair, and encourage his vague and senseless hopes. And so it too made him happy. It came to this: that people actually stood about in groups to observe the infatuated youth⁠—after dinner, on the terrace, or on a Sunday afternoon before the porter’s lodge, when the letters were distributed, for on that day they were not carried to the patients’ rooms. He was quite generally known to be very far gone, drunk as a lord and not caring who knew it. Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Engelhart, Hermine Kleefeld and her friend the tapir-faced girl, Herr Albin, the young man with the fingernail, and perhaps others among the guests⁠—would stand together and watch him, with the corners of their mouths drawn down, fairly chortling, whilst he, poor wight, his face aglow with the heat that from the first had never left him, with the glittering eye the gentleman rider’s cough had kindled, would gaze, forlornly and frantically smiling, in one certain direction. + 

It was really splendid of Herr Settembrini, under these circumstances, to go up to Hans Castorp, engage him in conversation, and ask him how he did. But it is doubtful whether the young man knew how to value and to be grateful for such benevolence and freedom from prejudice. One Sunday afternoon the guests were thronging about the porter’s lodge, stretching out their hands for letters. Joachim was among the foremost; but Hans Castorp had stopped in the rear, angling, in the fashion we have described, for a look from Clavdia Chauchat. She was standing near by, among a group of her tablemates, waiting until the press about the lodge should be lightened. It was an hour when all the patients mingled, an hour rich in opportunity, and for that reason beloved of our young man. The week before, he had stood at the window so close to Madame Chauchat that she had in fact jostled him, and then, with a little bow, had said: “Pardon.” Whereat he, with a feverish presence of mind for which he thanked his stars, had responded: “Pas de quoi, madame.” + 

What a blessed dispensation of providence, he thought, that there should be a regular Sunday afternoon distribution of letters! One might say that he spent the week in waiting for the next week’s delivery. And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waking, we say, is long. We might just as well⁠—or more accurately⁠—say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older. But in practice, of course, there is hardly such a thing as pure and unadulterated waiting. + 

Well, the week had been somehow devoured, and the hour for the Sunday afternoon post came round again, so like the other it seemed never to have changed. Like to that other, what thrilling opportunities it offered, what prospects lay concealed within it of coming into social relations with Frau Chauchat! Prospects that made the heart of young Hans Castorp leap and contract, yet without actually issuing in action; for against their doing so lay certain obstacles of a nature partly military, partly civil. In other words, they were in part the fruit of Joachim’s presence, in part the result of Hans Castorp’s own moral compunctions; but also, in part, they rested upon his sure intuition that social relations with Frau Chauchat, conventional relations, in which one made bows and addressed her as madame, and spoke French as far as possible, were not the thing at all, were neither necessary nor desirable. He stood and watched her laugh as she spoke, precisely as Pribislav Hippe had laughed as he spoke, that time in the school yard: she opened her mouth rather wide, and her slanting, grey-green eyes narrowed themselves to slits above the cheekbones. That was, to be sure, not “beautiful”; but when one is in love, the aesthetic judgment counts for as little as the moral. + 

“You are expecting dispatches, Engineer?” + 

Only one person could talk like that⁠—and he a disturber of Hans Castorp’s peace. The young man started and turned toward Herr Settembrini, who stood there smiling the same fine, humanistic smile that had sat upon his features when he greeted the newcomer, at the bench by the watercourse. Now, as then, it mortified Hans Castorp. We know how often, in his dreams, he had sought to drive away the organ-grinder as an element offensive to his peace; but the waking man is more moral than the sleeping, and, as before, the sight of that smile not only had a sobering effect upon Hans Castorp, but gave him a sense of gratitude, as though it had responded to his need. + 

“Dispatches, Herr Settembrini? Good Lord, I’m no ambassador! There might be a postcard there for one of us. My cousin is just asking.” + 

“That devil on two sticks in there has handed mine out to me already,” Herr Settembrini said, and carried his hand to the side pocket of the inevitable pilot coat. “Interesting matter, I must confess, of literary and social import. It is about an encyclopaedic publication, to which a philanthropic institution has considered me worthy to contribute. Beautiful work, in short⁠—” Herr Settembrini interrupted himself. “But how about you?” he asked. “How are your affairs going? For instance, how far has the process of acclimatization gone? You have not been so long among us but that one may still put the question.” + 

“Thanks, Herr Settembrini. It still has its difficulties it seems. It very likely will have, up to the last day. My cousin told me when I came that many people never got used to it. But one gets used in time to not getting used.” + 

“A complicated process,” laughed the Italian. “An odd way of settling down in a place. But of course youth is capable of anything. It doesn’t get used to things, but it strikes roots.” + 

“And after all, this isn’t a Siberian penal settlement.” + 

“No. Ah, you have a fancy for oriental simile. Natural enough. Asia surrounds us—wherever one’s glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.” Herr Settembrini gave a discreet glance over his shoulder. “Genghis Khan,” he said. “Wolves of the steppes, snow, vodka, the knout, Schlüsselburg, Holy Russia. They ought to set up an altar to Pallas Athene, here in the vestibule⁠—to ward off the evil spell. Look yonder⁠—there is a species of Ivan Ivanovitch without a shirtfront, having a disagreement with Lawyer Paravant. Both of them want to be in the front rank to receive their letters. I can’t tell which of them is in the right, but, for my part, Lawyer Paravant fights under the aegis of the goddess. He is an ass, of course; but at least he knows some Latin.” + 

Hans Castorp laughed⁠—a thing Herr Settembrini never did. One could not imagine him laughing heartily; he never got further than the fine, dry crisping of the corner of his mouth. He looked at the laughing young man, and presently asked: “Have you received your diapositive?” + 

“I have received it,” Hans Castorp weightily affirmed. “Just the other day. Here it is,” and he felt for it in his inner breast pocket. + 

“Ah, you carry it in a case. Like a certificate, as it were⁠—a sort of membership card. Very good. Let me see it.” And Herr Settembrini held it against the light, between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand; a little glass plate framed in strips of black paper. The gesture was a common one up here, one often saw it. His face, with the black almond-shaped eyes, displayed a slight grimace as he did so, but whether this happened in the effort to see more clearly or for other causes, he did not permit it to appear. + 

“Yes, yes,” he said, after a while. “Here is your identity card. Thanks very much,” and he handed the plate back to Hans Castorp over his shoulder, without looking. + 

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

“You know,” Herr Settembrini answered him very deliberately, “my opinion of these productions. You know too that those spots and shadows there are very largely of physiological origin. I have seen a hundred such pictures, looking very like this of yours; the decision as to whether they offered definite proof or not was left more or less to the discretion of the person looking at them. I speak as a layman, but a layman of a good many years’ experience.” + 

“Does your own look much worse than this one?” + 

“Rather worse. I am aware, however, that our lords and masters do not base any diagnosis on the evidence of these toys alone. Then you purpose stopping the winter up here with us?” + 

“Yes⁠—Lord knows⁠—I am beginning to get used to the idea of not going back until my cousin does.” + 

“Getting used, that is, to not getting used⁠—you put that very wittily. I hope you have received supplies from home⁠—winter clothing, stout footgear?” + 

“Everything⁠—all in the proper order. I informed my relatives, and our housekeeper sent me everything by express delivery. I shall do nicely now.” + 

“I am relieved. But hold⁠—you need a bag, a fur sack! What are we thinking of? This late summer is treacherous⁠—it can turn to winter inside an hour. You will be spending the coldest months up here.” + 

“Yes, the sleeping-sack,” Hans Castorp said. “That is a requisite, I suppose. It had crossed my mind that we must be going down to the Platz one of these days soon to buy one. One never needs the thing again, of course⁠—but even for the five or six months it is worth while. ‘ + 

“It is, it is.⁠—Engineer,” said Herr Settembrini in a low voice, coming close to the young man as he addressed him, “don’t you know there is something frightful in the way you fling the months about? Frightful because unnatural, inconsistent with your character; it is due solely to the facility of your time of life. Ah, the fatal facility of youth! It is the despair of the teacher, for its proneness to display itself in the wrong direction. I beg you, my young friend, not to adopt the phrases current up here, but to speak the language of the European culture native to you. Up here there is too much Asia. It is not without significance that the place is full of Muscovite and Mongolian types. These people⁠—” Herr Settembrini motioned with his chin over his shoulder⁠—“do not put yourself in tune with them, do not be infected with their ideas; rather set yourself against them, oppose your nature, your higher nature against them; cling to everything which to you is by nature and tradition holy, as a son of the godlike West, a son of civilization: and, for example, time. This barbaric lavishness with time is in the Asiatic style; it may be a reason why the children of the East feel so much at home up here. Have you never remarked that when a Russian says four hours, he means what we do when we say one? It is easy to see that the recklessness of these people where time is concerned may have to do with the space conceptions proper to people of such endless territory. Great space, much time⁠—they say, in fact, that they are the nation that has time and can wait. We Europeans, we cannot. We have as little time as our great and finely articulated continent has space, we must be as economical of the one as of the other, we must husband them, Engineer! Take our great cities, the centres and foci of civilization, the crucibles of thought! Just as the soil there increases in value, and space becomes more and more precious, so, in the same measure, does time. Carpe diem! That was the song of a dweller in a great city. Time is a gift of God, given to man that he might use it⁠—use it, Engineer, to serve the advancement of humanity.” + 

Whatever difficulty, if any, his phrases offered Herr Setternbrini’s Mediterranean palate, he brought them out with a clarity, a euphony, one might almost say a plasticity, that was truly refreshing. Hans Castorp made no answer save the short, stiff, embarrassed bow of a pupil receiving a reprimand. What could he have said? Herr Settembrini had delivered a private lecture, almost whispered it into his ear, with his back to the rest of the people in the room; it had been so pointed, so unsocial, so little conversable in its nature, that merely to commend its eloquence seemed lacking in tact. One does not tell a schoolmaster that he has expressed himself well. Hans Castorp, indeed, had done so once or twice in the early days of their acquaintance, probably from an instinct to preserve the social equilibrium; but the humanist’s utterances had never before reached quite such a didactic pitch. There was nothing for it but to pocket the admonition, feeling as embarrassed as a schoolboy at so much moralizing. Moreover, one could see by Herr Settembrini’s expression that he had not finished his train of thought. He still stood so close to Hans Castorp that the young man was constrained to bend a little backwards; and his black eyes gazed fixedly into the other’s face. + 

“You suffer, Engineer,” he went on. “You are like one distraught⁠—who could help seeing it? But your attitude toward suffering can be a European attitude; it should not be the oriental, which in its soft abandonment inclines so readily to seek this spot. The oriental attitude toward suffering is one of pity and a boundless patience⁠—that cannot, it ought not to be ours, to be yours!⁠—Look⁠—we were speaking of what the post had brought us, look at these! Or better, come with me, it is impossible here⁠—let us withdraw, and I will disclose to you certain matters. Come with me!” And turning, he drew Hans Castorp away, and they entered one of the small reception-rooms, the first on the right next the vestibule, which stood empty. It was furnished as a reading- and writing-room, with oak panelling and a light, vaulted ceiling, bookcases, a centre table covered with newspapers in holders and surrounded with seats, and writing appurtenances arranged in the bay-windows. Herr Settembrini advanced as far as the neighbourhood of one of the windows, Hans Castorp followed. The door remained open. + 

The Italian sought the baggy side pocket of his pilot coat, and drew thence with impetuous hand a bundle of papers in a large, already opened envelope. Its contents⁠—various printed matter, and a sheet of writing⁠—he ran through his fingers under Hans Castorp’s eye. + 

“These papers,” he said, “bear the stamp, in French, of the International League for the Organization of Progress. I have them from Lugano, where there is an office of a branch of the League. You inquire after its principles, its scope? I will define them for you, in two words. The League for the Organization of Progress deduces from Darwinian theory the philosophic concept that man’s profoundest natural impulse is in the direction of self-realization. From this it follows that all those who seek satisfaction of this impulse must become co-labourers in the cause of human progress. Many are those who have responded to the call; there is a considerable membership, in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and in Germany itself. I myself have the honour of having my name inscribed on the roll. A comprehensive and scientifically executed programme has been drawn up, embracing all the projects for human improvement conceivable at the moment. We are studying the problem of our health as a race, and the means for combating the degeneration which is a regrettable accompanying phenomenon of our increasing industrialization. The League envisages the founding of universities for the people, the resolution of the class conflict by means of all the social ameliorations which recommend themselves for the purpose, and finally the doing away with national conflicts, the abolition of war through the development of international law. You perceive that the objects toward which the League directs its efforts are ambitious and broad in their scope. Several international periodicals are evidence of its activities⁠—monthly reviews, which contain articles in three or four languages on the subject of the progressive evolution of civilized humanity. Numerous local groups have been established in the various countries; it is expected that they will exert an edifying and enlightening influence by means of discussion evenings and appropriate Sunday observances. Above all, the League will strive its utmost to aid with the material at its disposal the political party of progress in every country. You follow me, Engineer?” + 

“Absolutely,” Hans Castorp replied, with precipitation. He had, as he spoke, the feeling of a man who finds himself slipping, but for the moment contrives to keep his feet. + 

Herr Settembrini appeared satisfied. “I assume that these are new and surprising ideas to you?” + 

“Yes, I confess this is the first time I have heard of these⁠—these endeavours.” + 

“Ah,” Settembrini murmured, “ah, if you had only heard of them earlier! But perhaps it is not yet too late. These circulars⁠—you would like to know what they say? Listen. Last spring a formal meeting of the League was called, at Barcelona. You are aware that that city can boast of a quite special affinity with progressive political ideas. The congress sat for a week, with banquets and festivities. I wanted to go⁠—good God, I yearned to be there and take part in the deliberations. But that scurvy rascal of a Hofrat forbade me on pain of death, so⁠—well, I was afraid I should die, and I didn’t go. I was in despair, as you may imagine, over the trick my unreliable health had played me. Nothing is more painful than to be prevented by our physical, our animal nature from being of service to reason. My satisfaction, therefore, over this communication from Lugano is the more lively. You are curious to know what it says? I can imagine. But first, a few brief explanations: the League for the Organization of Progress, mindful of its task of furthering human happiness⁠—in other words, of combating human suffering by the available social methods, to the end of finally eliminating it altogether; mindful also of the fact that this lofty task can only be accomplished by the aid of sociology, the end and aim of which is the perfect State, the League, in session at Barcelona, determined upon the publication of a series of volumes bearing the general title: The Sociology of Suffering. It should be the aim of the series to classify human suffering according to classes and categories, and to treat it systematically and exhaustively. You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systematization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject⁠—the actual enemy is the unknown. We must lead the human race up out of the primitive stages of fear and patient stupidity, and set its feet on the path of conscious activity. We must enlighten it upon two points: first, that given effects become void when one first recognizes and then removes their causes; and second, that almost all individual suffering is due to disease of the social organism. Very well; this is the object of the Sociological Pathology. It will be issued in some twenty folio volumes, treating every species of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the great collective struggles arising from the conflicting interests of classes and nations; it will, in short, exhibit the chemical elements whose combination in various proportions results in all the ills to which our human flesh is heir. The publication will in every case take as its norm the dignity and happiness of mankind, and seek to indicate the measures and remedies calculated to remove the cause of each deviation. Famous European specialists, physicians, psychologists, and economists will share in the composition of this encyclopaedia of suffering, and the general editorial bureau at Lugano will act as the reservoir to collect all the articles which shall flow into it. I can read in your eyes the question as to what my share is to be in all these activities. Hear me to the end. This great work will not neglect the belletrist in so far as he deals with human suffering: a volume is projected which shall contain a compilation and brief analysis of such masterpieces of the world’s literature as come into question by depicting one or other kind of conflict⁠—for the consolation and instruction of the suffering. This, then, is the task entrusted to your humble servant, in the letter you see here.” + 

“You don’t say, Herr Settembrini! Allow me to offer you my heartiest congratulations! That is a magnificent commission, just in your line, I should think. No wonder the League thought of you! And what joy you must feel to aid in the elimination of human suffering!” + 

“It is a work very broad in its scope,” Herr Settembrini said thoughtfully, “and will require much consideration and wide reading. Especially,” he added, and his gaze seemed to lose itself in the immensity of his task, “since literature has regularly chosen to depict suffering, and even second- and third-rate masterpieces treat of it in one form or another. But what of that? So much the better! However comprehensive the work may be, it is at least of a nature that will permit me to carry it on, if needs must, even in this accursed place⁠—though I hope I need not be here long enough to bring it to a conclusion. That is something,” he said, moving closer to Hans Castorp, and subduing his voice nearly to a whisper, “that is something which can hardly be said of the duties nature lays upon you, Engineer! This is what I wanted to bring out, this is the word of warning I have been trying to utter. You know what admiration I feel for your profession. But as it is a practical, not an intellectual calling, you are differently situated from myself, in that you can only pursue it down in the world⁠—only there can you be a true European, only there can you actively fight suffering, improve the time, further progress, with your own weapons and in your own way. If I have told you of the task that has fallen to my lot, it was only to remind you, only to recall you to yourself, only to clarify certain conceptions of yours which the atmospheric conditions up here were obviously beginning to becloud. I would urge it upon you: hold yourself upright, preserve your self-respect, do not give ground to the unknown. Flee from this sink of iniquity, this island of Circe, whereon you are not Odysseus enough to dwell in safety. You will be going on all fours⁠—already you are inclining toward your forward extremities, and presently you will begin to grunt⁠—have a care!” + 

The humanist had uttered these admonitions in the same low voice, shaking his head impressively. He finished with drawn brows and eyes directed toward the ground. To answer him slightly or jestingly, as Hans Castorp would once have done, was out of the question. The young man weighed that possibility for a second, standing with lowered lids. Then he lifted his shoulders and spoke, no louder than Herr Settembrini: “What shall I do?” + 

“What I told you.” + 

“You mean⁠—go away?” + 

Herr Settembrini was silent. + 

“What you mean to say is that I should leave for home?” + 

“It was the advice I gave you on the first evening, Engineer.” + 

“Yes⁠—and then I was free to do so, though it seemed to me silly to throw up the sponge just because the air up here put me about a bit. But now it is a rather different state of affairs: I have been examined, and Hofrat Behrens told me in so many words that it would be no good my going home, I should only have to come back again; and that if I stopped down there, the whole lobe would be at the devil before you could say Jack Robinson.” + 

“I know; and now you have the evidence in your pocket.” + 

“You say that so ironically⁠—with the right kind of irony, of course, that cannot for a moment be misunderstood, the direct and classic device of oratory⁠—you see, I remember the things you say. But do you mean that after you have seen this photograph, after the X-ray and Behrens’s diagnosis, you take it upon yourself to advise me to go home?” + 

Settembrini hesitated for a second. Then he drew himself up, and directed the gaze of his black eyes full upon Hans Castorp’s face. He answered, with an emphasis not quite without theatrical effect: “Yes, Engineer, I take it upon myself.” + 

But Hans Castorp’s bearing too had stiffened. He stood with his heels together, and looked straight at Herr Settembrini in his turn. This time it was a duel. Hans Castorp stood his ground. Influences from not far off gave him strength. Here was a schoolmaster⁠—but yonder was a woman with narrow eyes. He made no apologies for his words, he did not beg Herr Settembrini not to take offence; he answered: “Then you are more prudent for yourself than for others. You did not go to Barcelona in the face of the doctor’s orders. You were afraid of death, and you stopped up here.” + 

To a certain point Herr Settembrini’s pose was undeniably shaken; his smile, as he answered, was slightly forced. + 

“I know how to value a ready answer⁠—even though your logic smacks of sophistry. It would disgust me to enter the lists in the sort of rivalry that is too current up here; otherwise I might reply that my case is far more serious than yours⁠—so much more, in fact, that it is only by artificial means, almost by deliberate self-deception, that I can keep alive the hope of leaving this place and having sight of the world below before I die. In the moment when that hope can no longer be decently sustained, in that moment I shall turn my back on this establishment, and take private lodgings somewhere in the valley. That will be sad; but as the sphere of my labours is the freest, the least material in the world, the change cannot prevent me from resisting the forces of disease and serving the cause of humanity, up to my latest breath. The difference between us, in this respect, I have already pointed out to you. Engineer, you are not the man to assert your better self in these surroundings. I saw it at our first meeting. You reproach me with not having gone to Barcelona. I submitted to the prohibition, not to destroy myself untimely. But I did so with the most stringent reservations; my spirit protested in pride and anguish against the dictates of my wretched body. Whether that protest survives in you, as you comply with the behests of our powers that be⁠—whether it is not rather the body, the body and its evil propensities, to which you lend a ready ear⁠—” + 

“What have you against the body?” interrupted Hans Castorp suddenly, and looked at him with wide blue eyes, the whites of which were veined with blood. He was giddy with his own temerity and showed as much.⁠—Whatever am I saying? he thought. I’m getting out of my depth. But I won’t give way; now I have begun, I won’t give him the last word if I can help it. Of course he will have it anyhow, but never mind, I will make the most of it while I can.⁠—He enlarged upon his objection: “But you are a humanist, are you not? What can you have to say against the body?” + 

Settembrini’s smile this time was unforced and confident. “ ‘What have you against analysis?’ ” he quoted, with his head on one side. “ ‘Are you down on analysis?’ You will always find me ready to answer you, Engineer,” he said, with a bow and a sweeping downward motion of the hand, “particularly when your opposition is spirited; and you parry not without elegance. Humanist⁠—yes, certainly, I am a humanist. You could never convict me of ascetic inclinations. I affirm, honour, and love the body, as I protest I affirm, honour, and love form, beauty, freedom, gaiety, the enjoyment of life. I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism. I think my position is unequivocal. But there is one power, one principle, which commands my deepest assent, my highest and fullest allegiance and love; and this power, this principle, is the intellect. However much I dislike hearing that conception of moonshine and cobwebs people call ‘the soul’ played off against the body, yet, within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature, and nature⁠—within the sphere, I repeat, of her antagonism to the mind, and to reason⁠—is evil, mystical and evil. ‘You are a humanist?’ By all means I am a humanist, because I am a friend of mankind, like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human nobility. That nobility is comprehended in the mind, in the reason, and therefore you will level against me in vain the reproach of Christian obscurantism⁠—” + 

Hans Castorp demurred. + 

“You will,” Herr Settembrini persisted, “level this reproach in vain, if humanistic pride one day learns to feel as a debasement and disgrace the fact that the intellect is bound up with the body and with nature. Did you know that the great Plotinus is said to have made the remark that he was ashamed to have a body?” asked Settembrini. He seemed eager for a reply, and Hans Castorp was constrained to confess that this was the first he had heard of it. + 

“We have it from Porphyrius. An absurd remark, if you like. But the absurd is the intellectually honourable; and nothing can be more pitiable than the reproach of absurdity, levelled against the mind as it asserts its dignity against nature, and refuses to abdicate before her.⁠—Have you heard of the Lisbon earthquake, Engineer?” + 

“An earthquake? No⁠—I see no newspapers up here⁠—” + 

“You misunderstand me. En passant, let me say it is a pity, and very indicative of the spirit of this place, that you neglect to read the papers. But you misunderstand me, the convulsion of nature to which I refer is not modern. It took place some hundred and fifty years ago.” + 

“I see. Oh, wait⁠—I have it. I have read that Goethe said to his servant, that night in his bedchamber⁠—” + 

“No, it was not of that I was speaking,” Settembrini interrupted him, closing his eyes, and shaking his small sallow hand in the air. “Besides, you are confusing two catastrophes. You are thinking of the earthquake of Messina. I have in mind the one that visited Lisbon in the year 1755.” + 

“Pardon.” + 

“Well, Voltaire was outraged by it.” + 

“Outraged? That is⁠—how do you mean?” + 

“He rebelled. Yes. He declined to accept that brutal fatum et factum. His spirit refused to abdicate before it. He protested in the name of reason and the intellect against that scandalous dereliction of nature, to which were sacrificed thousands of human lives, and three-quarters of a flourishing city. You are astonished? You smile? You may well be astonished; but as for smiling, give me leave to tell you it is out of place. Voltaire’s attitude was that of a worthy descendant of those old Gauls that shot their arrows against the heavens. There, Engineer, you have the hostility the intellect feels against nature, its proud mistrust, its high-hearted insistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, reason-denying power. Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it⁠—to abdicate, that is, inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of involving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hypocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing⁠—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut goût of the grave. And thus too with the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs the movement toward light; we must despise it in so far as it represents the principle of disease and death, in so far as its specific essence is the essence of perversity, of decay, sensuality, and shame.” + 

These last words Settembrini had uttered standing close to Hans Castorp, very rapidly and tonelessly, as though to make an end of the subject. Succour was nigh for the youth: Joachim entered the reading-room, with two postcards in his hand. The Italian broke off; and the dexterity with which he altered his tone for one in a lighter and fitting social key was not lost upon his pupil⁠—if so Hans Castorp may be called. + 

“There you are, Lieutenant! Have you been looking for your cousin? I must apologize; we had fallen into conversation⁠—if I am not mistaken, we have even had a slight disagreement. He is not a bad reasoner, your cousin, a by no means contemptible antagonist in an argument⁠—when he takes the notion.” + 

Humaniora + 

Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen, arrayed in white trousers and blue blazers, were sitting in the garden after dinner. It was another of those much-lauded October days: bright without being heavy, hot and yet with a tang in the air. The sky above the valley was a deep southern blue and the pastures beneath, with the cattle tracks running across and across them, still a lively green. From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peaceful, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights. + 

The cousins were sitting on a bench at the end of the garden, in front of a semicircle of young firs. The small open space lay at the northwest of the hedged-in platform, which rose some fifty yards above the valley, and formed the foundations of the Berghof building. They were silent. Hans Castorp was smoking. He was also wrangling inwardly with Joachim, who had not wanted to join the society on the verandah after luncheon, and had drawn his cousin against his will into the stillness and seclusion of the garden, until such time as they should go up to their balconies. That was behaving like a tyrant⁠—when it came to that, they were not Siamese twins, it was possible for them to separate, if their inclinations took them in opposite directions. Hans Castorp was not up here to be company for Joachim, he was a patient himself. Thus he grumbled on, and could endure to grumble, for had he not Maria? He sat, his hands in his blazer pockets, his feet in brown shoes stretched out before him, and held the long, greyish cigar between his lips, precisely in the centre of his mouth, and drooping a little. It was in the first stages of consumption, he had not yet knocked off the ash from its blunt tip; its aroma was peculiarly grateful after the heavy meal just enjoyed. It might be true that in other respects getting used to life up here had mainly consisted in getting used to not getting used to it. But for the chemistry of his digestion, the nerves of his mucous membrane, which had been parched and tender, inclined to bleeding, it seemed that the process of adjustment had completed itself. For imperceptibly, in the course of these nine or ten weeks, his organic satisfaction in that excellent brand of vegetable stimulant or narcotic had been entirely restored. He rejoiced in a faculty regained, his mental satisfaction heightened the physical. During his time in bed he had saved on the supply of two hundred cigars which he had brought with him, and some of these were still left; but at the same time with his winter clothing from below, there had arrived another five hundred of the Bremen make, which he had ordered through Schalleen to make quite sure of not running out. They came in beautiful little varnished boxes, ornamented in gilt with a globe, several medals, and an exhibition building with a flag floating above it. + 

As they sat, behold, there came Hofrat Behrens through the garden. He had taken his midday meal in the dining-hall today, folding his gigantic hands before his place at Frau Salomon’s table. After that he had probably been on the terrace, making the suitable personal remark to each and everybody, very likely displaying his trick with the bootlaces for such of the guests as had not seen it. Now he came lounging through the garden, wearing a check tailcoat, instead of his smock, and his stiff hat on the back of his head. He too had a cigar in his mouth, a very black one, from which he was puffing great white clouds of smoke. His head and face, with the overheated purple cheeks, the snub nose, watery blue eyes, and little clipped moustache, looked small in proportion to the lank, rather warped and stooping figure, and the enormous hands and feet. He was nervous; visibly started when he saw the cousins, and seemed embarrassed over the necessity of passing them. But he greeted them in his usual picturesque and expansive fashion, with “Behold, behold, Timotheus!” going on to invoke the usual blessings on their metabolisms, while he prevented their rising from their seats, as they would have done in his honour. + 

“Sit down, sit down. No formalities with a simple man like me. Out of place too, you being my patients, both of you. Not necessary. No objection to the status quo,” and he remained standing before them, holding the cigar between the index and middle fingers of his great right hand. + 

“How’s your cabbage-leaf, Castorp? Let me see, I’m a connoisseur. That’s a good ash⁠—what sort of brown beauty have you there?” + 

“Maria Mancini, Postre de Banquett, Bremen, Herr Hofrat. Costs little or nothing, nineteen pfennigs in plain colours⁠—but a bouquet you don’t often come across at the price. Sumatra-Havana wrapper, as you see. I am very wedded to them. It is a medium mixture, very fragrant, but cool on the tongue. Suits it to leave the ash long, I don’t knock it off more than a couple of times. She has her whims, of course, has Maria; but the inspection must be very thorough, for she doesn’t vary much, and draws perfectly even. May I offer you one?” + 

“Thanks, we can exchange.” And they drew out their cases. + 

“There’s a thoroughbred for you,” the Hofrat said, as he displayed his brand. “Temperament, you know, juicy, got some guts to it. St. Felix, Brazil⁠—I’ve always stuck to this sort. Regular ‘begone, dull care,’ burns like brandy, has something fulminating toward the end. But you need to exercise a little caution⁠—can’t light one from the other, you know⁠—more than a fellow can stand. However, better one good mouthful than any amount of nibbles.” + 

They twirled their respective offerings between their fingers, felt connoisseur-like the slender shapes that possessed, or so one might think, some organic quality of life, with their ribs formed by the diagonal parallel edges of the raised, here and there porous wrapper, the exposed veins that seemed to pulsate, the small inequalities of the skin, the play of light on planes and edges. + 

Hans Castorp expressed it: “A cigar like that is alive⁠—it breathes. Fact. Once, at home, I had the idea of keeping Maria in an airtight tin box, to protect her from damp. Would you believe it, she died! Inside of a week she perished⁠—nothing but leathery corpses left.” + 

They exchanged experiences upon the best way to keep cigars⁠—particularly imported ones. The Hofrat loved them, he would have smoked nothing but heavy Havanas, but they did not suit him. He told Hans Castorp about two little Henry Clays he had once taken to his heart, in an evening company, which had come within an ace of putting him under the sod. + 

“I smoked them with my coffee,” he said, “and thought no more of it. But after a while it struck me to wonder how I felt⁠—and I discovered it was like nothing on earth. I don’t know how I got home⁠—and once there, well, this time, my son, I said to myself, you’re a goner. Feet and legs like ice, you know, reeking with cold sweat, white as a tablecloth, heart going all ways for Sunday⁠—sometimes just a thread of a pulse, sometimes pounding like a trip-hammer. Cerebration phenomenal. I made sure I was going to toddle off⁠—that is the very expression that occurred to me, because at the time I was feeling as jolly as a sand-boy. Not that I wasn’t in a funk as well, because I was⁠—I was just one large blue funk all over. Still, funk and felicity aren’t mutually exclusive, everybody knows that. Take a chap who’s going to have a girl for the first time in his life; he is in a funk too, and so is she, and yet both of them are simply dissolving with felicity. I was nearly dissolving too⁠—my bosom swelled with pride, and there I was, on the point of toddling off; but the Mylendonk got hold of me and persuaded me it was a poor idea. She gave me a camphor injection, applied ice-compresses and friction⁠—and here I am, saved for humanity.” + 

The Hofrat’s large, goggling blue eyes watered as he told this story. Hans Castorp, seated in his capacity of patient, looked up at him with an expression that betrayed mental activity. + 

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

The Hofrat pretended to stagger backwards. “What the deuce! What do you take me for, youngster?” + 

“I beg your pardon. I happened to hear somebody say so, and it just crossed my mind.” + 

“Well, then, I won’t trouble to lie about it. We’re all poor creatures. I admit such a thing has happened. Anch’ io sono pittore, as the Spaniard used to say.” + 

“Landscape?” Hans Castorp asked him succinctly, with the air of a connoisseur, circumstances betraying him to this tone. + 

“As much as you like,” the Hofrat answered, swaggering out of sheer self-consciousness. “Landscape, still life, animals⁠—chap like me shrinks from nothing.” + 

“No portraits?” + 

“I’ve even thrown in a portrait or so. Want to give me an order?” + 

“Ha ha! No, but it would be very kind of you to show us your pictures some time⁠—we should enjoy it.” + 

Joachim looked blankly at his cousin, but then hastened to add his assurances that it would be very kind indeed of the Hofrat. + 

Behrens was enchanted at the flattery. He grew red with pleasure, his tears seemed this time actually on the point of falling. + 

“With the greatest pleasure,” he cried. “On the spot if you like. Come on, come along with me, I’ll brew us a Turkish coffee in my den.” + 

He pulled both young men from the bench and walked between them arm in arm, down the gravel path which led, as they knew, to his private quarters in the northwest wing of the building. + 

“I’ve dabbled a little in that sort of thing myself,” Hans Castorp explained. + 

“You don’t say! Gone in for it properly⁠—oils?” + 

“Oh, no, I never went further than a watercolour or so. A ship, a sea-piece, childish efforts. But I’m fond of painting, and so I took the liberty⁠—” + 

Joachim in particular felt relieved and enlightened by this explanation of his cousin’s startling curiosity; it was in fact more on his account than on the Hofrat’s that Hans Castorp had offered it. They reached the entrance, a much simpler one than the impressive portal on the drive, with its flanking lanterns. A pair of curving steps led up to the oaken house door, which the Hofrat opened with a latchkey from his heavy bunch. His hand trembled, he was plainly in a nervous state. They entered an antechamber with clothes-racks, where Behrens hung his bowler on a hook, and thence passed into a short corridor, which was separated by a glass door from that of the main building. On both sides of this corridor lay the rooms of the small private dwelling. Behrens called a servant and gave an order; then to a running accompaniment of whimsical remarks ushered them through a door on the right. + 

They saw a couple of rooms furnished in banal middle-class taste, facing the valley and opening one into another through a doorway hung with portières. One was an “old-German” dining-room, the other a living- and working-room, with woollen carpets, bookshelves and sofa, and a writing-table above which hung a pair of crossed swords and a student’s cap. Beyond was a Turkish smoking-cabinet. Everywhere were paintings, the work of the Hofrat. The guests went up to them at once on entering, courteously ready to praise. There were several portraits of his departed wife, in oil; also, standing on the writing-table, photographs of her. She was a thin, enigmatic blonde, portrayed in flowing garments, with her hands, their fingertips just lightly enlaced, against her left shoulder, and her eyes either directed toward heaven or else cast upon the ground, shaded by long, thick, obliquely outstanding eyelashes. Never once was the departed one shown looking directly ahead of her toward the observer. The other pictures were chiefly mountain landscapes, mountains in snow and mountains in summer green, mist-wreathed mountains, mountains whose dry, sharp outline was cut out against a deep-blue sky⁠—these apparently under the influence of Segantini. Then there were cowherds’ huts, and dewlapped cattle standing or lying in sun-drenched high pastures. There was a plucked fowl, with its long writhen neck hanging down from a table among a setting of vegetables. There were flower-pieces, types of mountain peasantry, and so on⁠—all painted with a certain brisk dilettantism, the colours boldly dashed on to the canvas, and often looking as though they had been squeezed on out of the tube. They must have taken a long time to dry⁠—but were sometimes effective by way of helping out the other shortcomings. + 

They passed as they would along the walls of an exhibition, accompanied by the master of the house, who now and then gave a name to some subject or other, but was chiefly silent, with the proud embarrassment of the artist, tasting the enjoyment of looking on his own works with the eyes of strangers. The portrait of Clavdia Chauchat hung on the window wall of the living-room⁠—Hans Castorp spied it out with a quick glance as he entered, though the likeness was but a distant one. Purposely he avoided the spot, detaining his companions in the dining-room, where he affected to admire a fresh green glimpse into the valley of the Serbi, with ice-blue glaciers in the background. Next he passed of his own accord into the Turkish cabinet, and looked at all it had to show, with praises on his lips; thence back to the living-room, beginning with the entrance wall, and calling upon Joachim to second his encomiums. But at last he turned, with a measured start, and said: “But surely that is a familiar face?” + 

“You recognize her?” the Hofrat wanted to know. + 

“It is not possible I am mistaken. The lady at the ‘good’ Russian table, with the French name⁠—” + 

“Right! Chauchat. Glad you think it’s like her.” + 

“Speaking,” Hans Castorp lied. He did so less from insincerity than in the consciousness that, on the face of things, he ought not to have been able to recognize her. Joachim could never have done so⁠—good Joachim, who saw the whole affair now in its true light, after the false one Hans Castorp had first cast upon it; saw how the wool had been pulled over his eyes; and with a murmured recognition applied himself to help look at the painting. His cousin had paid him out for not going into society after luncheon. + 

It was a bust-length, in half profile, rather under life-size, in a wide, bevelled frame, black, with an inner beading of gilt. Neck and bosom were bare or veiled with a soft drapery laid about the shoulders. Frau Chauchat appeared ten years older than her age, as often happens in amateur portraiture where the artist is bent on making a character study. There was too much red all over the face, the nose was badly out of drawing, the colour of the hair badly hit off, too straw-colour; the mouth was distorted, the peculiar charm of the features ungrasped or at least not brought out, spoiled by the exaggeration of their single elements. The whole was a rather botched performance, and only distantly related to its original. But Hans Castorp was not particular about the degree of likeness, the relation of this canvas to Frau Chauchat’s person was close enough for him. It purported to represent her, in these very rooms she had sat for it, that was all he needed; much moved he reiterated: “The very image of her!” + 

“Oh, no,” the Hofrat demurred. “It was a pretty clumsy piece of work, I don’t flatter myself I hit her off very well, though we had, I suppose, twenty sittings. What can you do with a rum sort of face like that? You might think she would be easy to capture, with those hyperborean cheekbones, and eyes like cracks in a loaf of bread. Yes, there’s something about her⁠—if you get the detail right, you botch the ensemble. Riddle of the sphinx. Do you know her? It would probably be better to paint her from memory, instead of having her sit. Did you say you knew her?” + 

“No; that is, only superficially, the way one knows people up here.” + 

“Well, I know her under her skin⁠—subcutaneously, you see: blood pressure, tissue tension, lymphatic circulation, all that sort of thing. I’ve good reason to. It’s the superficies makes the difficulty. Have you ever noticed her walk? She slinks. It’s characteristic, shows in her face⁠—take the eyes, for example, not to mention the complexion, though that is tricky too. I don’t mean their colour, I am speaking of the cut, and the way they sit in the face. You’d say the eye slit was cut obliquely, but it only looks so. What deceives you is the epicanthus, a racial variation, consisting in a sort of ridge of integument that runs from the bridge of the nose to the eyelid, and comes down over the inside corner of the eye. If you take your finger and stretch the skin at the base of the nose, the eye looks as straight as any of ours. Quite a taking little dodge⁠—but as a matter of fact, the epicanthus can be traced back to an atavistic vestige⁠—it’s a developmental arrest.” + 

“So that’s it.” Hans Castorp said. “I never knew that⁠—but I’ve wondered for a long time what it is about eyes like that.” + 

“Vanity,” said the Hofrat, “and vexation of spirit. If you simply draw them in slanting, you are lost. You must bring about the obliquity the same way nature does, you must add illusion to illusion⁠—and for that you have to know about the epicanthus. What a man knows always comes in handy. Now look at the skin⁠—the epidermis. Do you find I’ve managed to make it lifelike, or not?” + 

“Enormously,” said Hans Castorp. “Simply enormously. I’ve never seen skin painted anything like so well. You can fairly see the pores.” And he ran the edge of his hand lightly over the bare neck and shoulders, the skin of which, especially by contrast with the exaggerated red of the face, was very white, as though seldom exposed. Whether this effect was premeditated or not, it was rather suggestive. + 

And still Hans Castorp’s praise was deserved. The pale shimmer of this tender, though not emaciated, bosom, losing itself in the bluish shadows of the drapery, was very like life. It was obviously painted with feeling; a sort of sweetness emanated from it, yet the artist had been successful in giving it a scientific realism and precision as well. The roughness of the canvas texture, showing through the paint, had been dexterously employed to suggest the natural unevennesses of the skin⁠—this especially in the neighbourhood of the delicate collarbones. A tiny mole, at the point where the breasts began to divide, had been done with care, and on their rounding surfaces one thought to trace the delicate blue veins. It was as though a scarcely perceptible shiver of sensibility beneath the eye of the beholder were passing over this nude flesh, as though one might see the perspiration, the invisible vapour which the life beneath threw off; as though, were one to press one’s lips upon this surface, one might perceive, not the smell of paint and fixative, but the odour of the human body. Such, at least, were Hans Castorp’s impressions, which we here reproduce⁠—and he, of course, was in a peculiarly susceptible state. But it is none the less true that Frau Chauchat’s portrait was by far the most telling piece of painting in the room. + 

Hofrat Behrens rocked back and forth on his heels and the balls of his feet, his hands in this trouser pockets, as he gazed at his work in company with the cousins. + 

“Delighted,” he said. “Delighted to find favour in the eyes of a colleague. If a man knows a bit about what goes on under the epidermis, that does no harm either. In other words, if he can paint a little below the surface, and stands in another relation to nature than just the lyrical, so to say. An artist who is a doctor, physiologist, and anatomist on the side, and has his own little way of thinking about the under sides of things⁠—it all comes in handy too, it gives you the pas, say what you like. That birthday suit there is painted with science, it is organically correct, you can examine it under the microscope. You can see not only the horny and mucous strata of the epidermis, but I’ve suggested the texture of the corium underneath, with the oil- and sweat-glands, the blood-vessels and tubercles⁠—and then under that still the layer of fat, the upholstering, you know, full of oil ducts, the underpinning of the lovely female form. What is in your mind as you work runs into your hand and has its influence⁠—it isn’t really there, and yet somehow or other it is, and that is what gives the lifelike effect.” + 

All this was fuel to Hans Castorp’s fire. His brow was flushed, his eyes fairly sparkled, he had so much to say he knew not where to begin. In the first place, he had it in mind to remove the picture of Frau Chauchat from the window wall, where it hung somewhat in shadow, and place it to better advantage; next, he was eager to take up the Hofrat’s remarks about the constitution of the skin, which had keenly interested him; and finally, he wanted to make some remarks of his own, of a general and philosophical nature, which interested him no less mightily. + 

Laying his hands upon the painting to unhook it, he eagerly began: “Yes, yes indeed, that is all very important. What I’d like to say is⁠—I mean, you said, Herr Hofrat, if I understood rightly, you said: ‘In another relation.’ You said it was good when there was some other relation besides the lyric⁠—I think that was the word you used⁠—the artistic, that is; in short, when one looked at the thing from another point of view⁠—the medical, for example. That’s all so enormously to the point, you know⁠—I do beg your pardon, Herr Hofrat, but what I mean is that it is so exactly and precisely right, because after all it is not a question of any fundamentally different relations or points of view, but at bottom just variations of one and the same, just shadings of it, so to speak, I mean: variations of one and the same universal interest, the artistic impulse itself being a part and a manifestation of it too, if I may say so. Yes, if you will pardon me, I will take down this picture, there’s positively no light here where it hangs, permit me to carry it over to the sofa, we shall see if it won’t look entirely⁠—what I meant to say was: what is the main concern of the study of medicine? I know nothing about it, of course⁠—but after all isn’t its main concern with human beings? And jurisprudence⁠—making laws, pronouncing judgment⁠—its main concern is with human beings too. And philology, which is nearly always bound up with the profession of pedagogy? And theology, with the care of souls, the office of spiritual shepherd? All of them have to do with human beings, all of them are degrees of one and the same important, the same fundamental interest, the interest in humanity. In other words, they are the humanistic callings, and if you go in for them you have to study the ancient languages by way of foundation, for the sake of formal training, as they say. Perhaps you are surprised at my talking about them like that, being only a practical man and on the technical side. But I have been thinking about these questions lately, in the rest-cure; and I find it wonderful, I find it a simply priceless arrangement of things, that the formal, the idea of form, of beautiful form, lies at the bottom of every sort of humanistic calling. It gives it such nobility, I think, such a sort of disinterestedness, and feeling, too, and⁠—and⁠—courtliness⁠—it makes a kind of chivalrous adventure out of it. That is to say⁠—I suppose I am expressing myself very ridiculously, but⁠—you can see how the things of the mind and the love of beauty come together, and that they always really have been one and the same⁠—in other words, science and art; and that the calling of being an artist surely belongs with the others, as a sort of fifth faculty, because it too is a humanistic calling, a variety of humanistic interest, in so far as its most important theme or concern is with man⁠—you will agree with me on that point. When I experimented in that line in my youth, I never painted anything but ships and water, of course. But notwithstanding, in my eyes the most interesting branch of painting is and remains portraiture, because it has man for its immediate object⁠—that was why I asked at once if you had done anything in that field.⁠—Wouldn’t this be a far more favourable place for it to hang?” + 

Both of them, Behrens no less than Joachim, looked at him amazed⁠—was he not ashamed of this confused, impromptu harangue? But no, Hans Castorp was far too preoccupied to feel self-conscious. He held the painting against the sofa wall, and demanded to know if it did not get a much better light. Just then the servant brought a tray, with hot water, a spirit-lamp, and coffee-cups. + 

Behrens motioned them into the cabinet, saying: “Then you must have been more interested in sculpture, originally, than in painting, I should think. Yes, of course, it gets more light there; if you think it can stand it. I should suppose so, because sculpture concerns itself more purely and exclusively with the human form. But we mustn’t let the water boil away.” + 

“Quite right, sculpture,” Hans Castorp said, as they went. He forgot either to hang up or put down the picture he had been holding, but tugged it with him into the neighbouring room. “Certainly a Greek Venus or athlete is more humanistic, it is probably at bottom the most humanistic of all the arts, when one comes to think about it!” + 

“Well, as far as little Chauchat goes, she is a better subject for painting than sculpture. Phidias, or that other chap with the Mosaic ending to his name, would have stuck up their noses at her style of physiognomy.⁠—Hullo, where are you going with the ham?” + 

“Pardon me, I’ll just lean it here against the leg of my chair, that will do very well for the moment. The Greek sculptors did not trouble themselves about the head and face, their interest was more with the body, I suppose that was their humanism.⁠—And the plasticity of the female form⁠—so that is fat, is it?” + 

“That is fat,” the Hofrat said concisely. He had opened a hanging cabinet, and taken thence the requisites for his coffee-making: a cylindrical Turkish mill, a long-handled pot, a double receptacle for sugar and ground coffee, all in brass. “Palmitin, stearin, olein,” he went on, shaking the coffee berries from a tin box into the mill, which he began to turn. “You see I make it all myself, it tastes twice as good.⁠—Did you think it was ambrosia?” + 

“No, of course I knew. Only it sounds strange to hear it like that,” Hans Castorp said. + 

They were seated in the corner between door and window, at a bamboo tabouret which held an oriental brass tray, upon which Behrens had set the coffee-machine, among the smoking utensils. Joachim was next Behrens on the ottoman, overflowing with cushions; Hans Castorp sat in a leather armchair on castors, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat’s picture. A gaily-coloured carpet was beneath their feet. The Hofrat ladled coffee and sugar into the long-handled pot, added water, and let the brew boil up over the flame of the lamp. It foamed brownly in the little onion-pattern cups, and proved on tasting both strong and sweet. + 

“Your own as well,” Behrens said. “Your ‘plasticity’⁠—so far as you have any⁠—is fat too, though of course not to the same extent as with a woman. With us fat is only about five percent of the body weight, in females it is one sixteenth of the whole. Without that subcutaneous cell structure of ours, we should all be nothing but fungoid growths. It disappears, with time, and then come the unaesthetic wrinkles in the drapery. The layer is thickest on the female breast and belly, on the front of the thighs, everywhere, in short, where there is a little something for heart and hand to take hold of. The soles of the feet are fat and ticklish.” + 

Hans Castorp turned the cylindrical coffee-mill about in his hands. It was, like the rest of the set, Indian or Persian rather than Turkish; the style of the engraving showed that, with the bright surface of the pattern standing out against the purposely dulled background. He looked at the design, without immediately seeing what it was. When he did, he blushed unawares. + 

“Yes, that is a set for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “I keep it locked up, you see, my kitchen queen might hurt her eyes looking at it. It won’t do you gentlemen any harm, I take it. It was given to me by a patient, an Egyptian princess who once honoured us with a year or so of her presence. You see, the pattern repeats itself on the whole set. Pretty roguish, what?” + 

“Yes, it is quite unusual,” Hans Castorp answered. “Ha ha! No, it doesn’t trouble me. But one can take it perfectly seriously; solemnly, in fact⁠—only then it is rather out of place on a coffee-machine. The ancients are said to have used such motifs on their sarcophagi. The sacred and the obscene were more or less the same thing to them.” + 

“I should say the princess was more for the second,” Behrens said. “Anyhow she still sends me the most wonderful cigarettes, superfinissimos, you know, only sported on first-class occasions.” He fetched the garish-coloured box from the cupboard and offered them. Joachim drew his heels together as he received his cigarette. Hans Castorp helped himself to his; it was unusually large and thick, and had a gilt sphinx on it. He began to smoke⁠—it was wonderful, as Behrens had said. + 

“Tell us some more about the skin,” he begged the Hofrat; “that is, if you will be so kind.” He had taken Frau Chauchat’s portrait on his knee, and was gazing at it, leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips. “Not about the fat-layer, we know about that now. About the human skin in general, that you know so well how to paint.” + 

“About the skin. You are interested in physiology?” + 

“Very much. Yes, I’ve always felt a good deal of interest in it. The human body⁠—yes, I’ve always had an uncommon turn for it. I’ve sometimes asked myself whether I ought not to have been a physician⁠—it wouldn’t have been a bad idea, in a way. Because if you are interested in the body, you must be interested in disease⁠—specially interested, isn’t that so? But it doesn’t signify, I might have been such a lot of things⁠—for example, a clergyman.” + 

“Indeed?” + 

“Yes, I’ve sometimes had the idea I should have been decidedly in my element there.” + 

“How did you come to be an engineer, then?” + 

“I just happened to⁠—it was more or less outward circumstances that decided the matter.” + 

“Well, about the skin. What do you want to hear about your sensory sheath? You know, don’t you, that it is your outside brain⁠—ontogenetically the same as that apparatus of the so-called higher centres up there in your cranium? The central nervous system is nothing but a modification of the outer skin-layer; among the lower animals the distinction between central and peripheral doesn’t exist, they smell and taste with their skin, it is the only sensory organ they have. Must be rather nice⁠—if you can put yourself in their place. On the other hand, in such highly differentiated forms of life as you and I are, the skin has fallen from its high estate; it has to confine itself to feeling ticklish; that is to say, to being simply a protective and registering apparatus⁠—but devilishly on the qui vive for anything that tries to come too close about the body. It even puts out feelers⁠—the body hairs, which are nothing but hardened skin cells⁠—and they get wind of the approach of whatever it is, before the skin itself is touched. Just between ourselves, it is quite possible that this protecting and defending function of the skin extends beyond the physical. Do you know what makes you go red and pale?” + 

“Not very precisely.” + 

“Well, neither do we, ‘very precisely,’ to be frank⁠—at least, as far as blushing is concerned. The situation is not quite clear; for the dilatory muscles which are presumably set in action by the vasomotor nerves haven’t yet been demonstrated in relation to the blood-vessels. How the cock really swells his comb, or any of the other well-known instances come about, is still a mystery, particularly where it is a question of emotional influences in play. We assume that a connection subsists between the outer rind of the cerebrum and the vascular centre in the medulla. Certain stimuli⁠—for instance, let us say, like your being powerfully embarrassed, set up the connection, and the nerves that control the blood-vessels function toward the face, and they expand and fill, and you get a face like a turkey-cock, all swelled up with blood so you can’t see out of your eyes. On the other hand, suppose you are in suspense, something is going to happen⁠—it may be something tremendously beautiful, for aught I care⁠—the blood-vessels that feed the skin contract, it gets pale and cold and sunken, you look like a dead man, with big, lead-coloured eye-sockets and a peaked nose. But the Sympathicus makes your heart thump away like a good fellow.” + 

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

“Something like that. Those are reactions, you know. But it is the nature of reactions and reflexes to have a reason for happening; we are beginning to suspect, we physiologists, that the phenomena accompanying emotion are really defence mechanisms, protective reflexes of the system. Gooseflesh, now. Do you know how you come to have gooseflesh?” + 

“Not very clearly either, I’m afraid.” + 

“That is a little contrivance of the sebaceous glands, which secrete the fatty, albuminous substance that oils your skin and keeps it supple, and pleasant to feel of. Not very appetizing, maybe, but without it the skin would be all withered and cracked. Without the cholesterin, it is hard to imagine touching the human skin at all. These sebaceous glands have little erector-muscles that act upon them, and when they do so, then you are like the lad when the princess poured the pail of minnows over him. Your skin gets like a file, and if the stimulus is very powerful, the hair ducts are erected too, the hair on your head bristles up and the little hairs on your body, like quills upon the fretful porcupine⁠—and you can say, like the youth in the story, that now you know how to shiver and shake.” + 

“Oh,” said Hans Castorp, “I know how already. I shiver rather easily, on all sorts of provocation. Only what surprises me is that the glands are erected for such different reasons. It gives one gooseflesh to hear a slate-pencil run across a pane of glass; but when you hear particularly beautiful music you suddenly find you have it too, and when I was confirmed and took my first communion, I had one shiver after another, it seemed as though the prickling and stickling would never leave off. Imagine those little muscles acting for such different reasons!” + 

“Oh,” Behrens said, “tickling’s tickling. The body doesn’t give a hang for the content of the stimulus. It may be minnows, it may be the Holy Ghost, the sebaceous glands are erected just the same.” + 

Hans Castorp regarded the picture on his knee. + 

“Herr Hofrat,” he said, “I wanted to come back to something you said a moment ago, about internal processes, lymphatic action, and that sort of thing. Tell us about it⁠—particularly about the lymphatic system, it interests me tremendously.” + 

“I believe you,” Behrens responded. “The lymph is the most refined, the most rarefied, the most intimate of the body juices. I dare say you had an inkling of the fact in your mind when you asked. People talk about the blood, and the mysteries of its composition, and what an extraordinary fluid it is. But it is the lymph that is the juice of juices, the very essence, you understand, ichor, blood-milk, crème de la crème; as a matter of fact, after a fatty diet it does look like milk.” And he went on, in his lively and whimsical phraseology, to gratify Hans Castorp’s desire. And first he characterized the blood, a serum composed of fat, albumen, iron, sugar and salt, crimson as an opera-cloak, the product of respiration and digestion, saturated with gases, laden with waste products, which was pumped at 98.4° of heat from the heart through the blood-vessels, and kept up metabolism and animal warmth throughout the body⁠—in other words, sweet life itself. But, he said, the blood did not come into immediate contact with the body cells. What happened was that the pressure at which it was pumped caused a milky extract of it to sweat through the walls of the blood-vessels, and so into the tissues, so that it filled every tiny interstice and cranny, and caused the elastic cell-tissue to distend. This distension of the tissues, or turgor, pressed the lymph, after it had nicely swilled out the cells and exchanged matter with them, into the vasa lymphatica, the lymphatic vessels, and so back into the blood again, at the rate of a litre and a half a day. He went on to speak of the lymphatic tubes and absorbent vessels; described the secretion of the breast milk, which collected lymph from legs, abdomen, and breast, one arm, and one side of the head; described the very delicately constructed filters called lymphatic glands which were placed at certain points in the lymphatic system, in the neck, the armpit, and the elbow-joint, the hollow under the knee, and other soft and intimate parts of the body. + 

“Swellings may occur in these places,” Behrens explained. “Indurations of the lymphatic glands, let us say, in the kneepan or the arm-joint, dropsical tumours here and there, and we base our diagnosis on them⁠—they always have a reason, though not always a very pretty one. Under such circumstances there is more than a suspicion of tubercular congestion of the lymphatic vessels.” + 

Hans Castorp was silent a little space. + 

“Yes,” he said, then, in a low voice, “it is true, I might very well have been a doctor. The flow of the breast milk⁠—the lymph of the legs⁠—all that interests me very, very much. What is the body?” he rhapsodically burst forth. “What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What is he made of? Tell us this afternoon, Herr Hofrat, tell us exactly, and once and for all, so that we may know!” + 

“Of water,” answered Behrens. “So you are interested in organic chemistry too? The human body consists, much the larger part of it, of water. No more and no less than water, and nothing to get wrought up about. The solid parts are only twenty-five percent of the whole, and of that twenty are ordinary white of egg, protein, if you want to use a handsomer word. Besides that, a little fat and a little salt, that’s about all.” + 

“But the white of egg⁠—what is that?” + 

“Various primary substances: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur. Sometimes phosphorus. Your scientific curiosity is running away with itself. Some albumens are in composition with carbohydrates; that is to say, grape-sugar and starch. In old age the flesh becomes tough, that is because the collagen increases in the connective tissue⁠—the lime, you know, the most important constituent of the bones and cartilage. What else shall I tell you? In the muscle plasma we have an albumen called fibrin; when death occurs, it coagulates in the muscular tissue, and causes the rigor mortis.” + 

“Right-oh, I see, the rigor mortis,” Hans Castorp said blithely. “Very good, very good. And then comes the general analysis⁠—the anatomy of the grave.” + 

“Yes, of course. But how well you put it! Yes, the movement becomes general, you flow away, so to speak⁠—remember all that water! The remaining constituents are very unstable; without life, they are resolved by putrefaction into simpler combinations, anorganic.” + 

“Dissolution, putrefaction,” said Hans Castorp. “They are the same thing as combustion: combination with oxygen⁠—am I right?” + 

“To a T. Oxidization.” + 

“And life?” + 

“Oxidization too. The same. Yes, young man, life too is principally oxidization of the cellular albumen, which gives us that beautiful animal warmth, of which we sometimes have more than we need. Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter⁠—une destruction organique, as some Frenchman with his native levity has called it. It smells like that, too. If we don’t think so, our judgment is corrupted.” + 

“And if one is interested in life, one must be particularly interested in death, mustn’t one?” + 

“Oh, well, after all, there is some sort of difference. Life is life which keeps the form through change of substance.” + 

“Why should the form remain?” said Hans Castorp. + 

“Why? Young man, what you are saying now sounds far from humanistic.” + 

“Form is folderol.” + 

“Well, you are certainly in great form today⁠—you’re regularly kicking over the traces. But I must drop out now,” said the Hofrat. “I am beginning to feel melancholy,” and he laid his huge hand over his eyes. “I can feel it coming on. You see, I’ve drunk coffee with you, and it tasted good to me, and all of a sudden it comes over me that I am going to be melancholy. You gentlemen must excuse me. It was an extra occasion, I enjoyed it no end⁠—” + 

The cousins had sprung up. They reproached themselves for having taxed the Hofrat’s patience so long. He made proper protest. Hans Castorp hastened to carry Frau Chauchat’s portrait into the next room and hang it once more on the wall. They did not need to re-traverse the garden to arrive at their own quarters; Behrens directed them through the building, and accompanied them to the dividing glass door. In the mood that had come over him so unexpectedly, his goggling eyes blinked, and the bone of his neck stuck out, both more than ever; his upper lip, with the clipped, one-sided moustache, had taken on a querulous expression. + 

As they went along the corridors Hans Castorp said to his cousin: “Confess that it was a good idea of mine.” + 

“It was a change, at least,” responded Joachim. “And you certainly took occasion to air your views on a good many subjects. It was a bit complicated for me. It is high time now that we went in to the rest-cure, we shall have at least twenty minutes before tea. You probably think it is folderol to pay so much attention to it, now you’ve taken to kicking over the traces. But you don’t need it so much as I do, after all.” + 

Research + 

And now came on, as come it must, what Hans Castorp had never thought to experience: the winter of the place, the winter of these high altitudes. Joachim knew it already: it had been in full blast when he arrived the year before⁠—but Hans Castorp rather dreaded it, however well he felt himself equipped. Joachim sought to reassure him. + 

“You must not imagine it grimmer than it is,” he said, “not really arctic. You will feel the cold less on account of the dryness of the air and the absence of wind. It’s the thing about the change of temperature above the fog line; they’ve found out lately that it gets warmer in the upper reaches, something they did not know before. I should say it is actually colder when it rains. But you have your sleeping-bag, and they turn on the heat when they absolutely must.” + 

And in fact there could be no talk of violence or surprises; the winter came mildly on, at first no different from many a day they had seen in the height of summer. The wind had been two days in the south, the sun bore down, the valley seemed shrunken, the side walls at its mouth looked near and bald. Clouds came up, behind Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn, and drove northeastwards. It rained heavily. Then the rain turned foul, a whitish-grey, mingled with snowflakes⁠—soon it was all snow, the valley was full of flurry; it kept on and on, the temperature fell appreciably, so that the fallen snow could not quite melt, but lay covering the valley with a wet and threadbare white garment, against which showed black the pines on the slopes. In the dining-room the radiators were lukewarm. That was at the beginning of November⁠—All Souls’⁠—and there was no novelty about it. In August it had been even so; they had long left off regarding snow as a prerogative of winter. White traces lingered after every storm in the crannies of the rocky Rhätikon, the chain that seemed to guard the end of the valley, and the distant monarchs to the south were always in snow. But the storm and the fall in the temperature both continued. A pale grey sky hung low over the valley; it seemed to dissolve in flakes and fall soundlessly and ceaselessly, until one almost felt uneasy. It turned colder by the hour. A morning came when the thermometer in Hans Castorp’s room registered 44°, the next morning it was only 40°. That was cold. It kept within bounds, but it persisted. It had frozen at night; now it froze in the daytime as well, and all day long; and it snowed, with brief intervals, through the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh days. The snow mounted apace, it became a nuisance. Paths had been shovelled as far as the bench by the watercourse, and on the drive down to the valley; but these were so narrow that you could only walk single file, and if you met anyone, you must step off the pavement and at once sink knee-deep in snow. A stone-roller drawn by a horse, with a man at his halter, rolled all day long up and down the streets of the cure, while a yellow diligence on runners, looking like an old-fashioned post-coach, plied between village and cure, with a snowplough attached in front, shovelling the white masses aside. The world, this narrow, lofty, isolated world up here, looked now well wadded and upholstered indeed: no pillar or post but wore its white cap; the steps up to the entrance of the Berghof had turned into an inclined plane; heavy cushions, in the drollest shapes, weighed down the branches of the Scotch firs⁠—now and then one slid off and raised up a cloud of powdery white dust in its fall. Round about, the heights lay smothered in snow; their lower regions rugged with the evergreen growth, their upper parts, beyond the timber line, softly covered up to their many-shaped summits. The air was dark, the sun but a pallid apparition behind a veil. Yet a mild reflected brightness came from the snow, a milky gleam whose light became both landscape and human beings, even though these latter did show red noses under their white or gaily-coloured woollen caps. + 

In the dining-room the onset of winter⁠—the “season” of the region⁠—was the subject of conversation at all seven tables. Many tourists and sportsmen were said to have arrived and taken up residence at the hotels in the Dorf and the Platz. The height of the piled-up snow was estimated at two feet; its consistency was said to be ideal for skiing. The bob-run, which led down from the northwestern slope of the Schatzalp into the valley, was zealously worked on, it would be possible to open it in the next few days, unless a thaw put out all calculations. Everyone looked forward eagerly to the activities of these sound people down below⁠—to the sports and races, which it was forbidden to attend, but which numbers of the patients resolved to see, by cutting the rest-cure and slipping out of the Berghof. Hans Castorp heard of a new sport that had come from Scandinavia, “ski-jöring”: it consisted in races in which the participants were drawn by horses while standing in their skis. It was to see this that so many of the patients had resolved to slip out.⁠—There was talk too of Christmas. + 

Christmas! Hans Castorp had never once thought of it. To be sure, he had blithely said, and written, that he must spend the winter up here with Joachim, because of what the doctors had discovered to be the state of his health. But now he was startled to realize that Christmas would be included in the programme⁠—perhaps because (and yet not entirely because) he had never spent the Christmas season anywhere but in the bosom of the family. Well, if he must he must; he would have to put up with it. He was no longer a child; Joachim seemed not to mind, or else to have adjusted himself uncomplainingly to the prospect; and, after all, he said to himself, think of all the places and all the conditions in which Christmas has been celebrated before now! + 

Yet it did seem to him rather premature to begin thinking about Christmas even before the Advent season, six weeks at least before the holiday! True, such an interval was easily overleaped by the guests in the dining-hall: it was a mental process in which Hans Castorp had already some facility, though he had not yet learned to practise it in the grand style, as the older inhabitants did. Christmas, like other holidays in the course of the year, served them for a fulcrum, or a vaulting-pole, with which to leap over empty intervening spaces. They all had fever, their metabolism was accelerated, their bodily processes accentuated, keyed up⁠—all this perhaps accounted for the wholesale way they could put time behind them. It would not have greatly surprised him to hear them discount the Christmas holiday as well, and go on at once to speak of the New Year and Carnival. But no⁠—so capricious and unstable as this they were not, in the Berghof dining-room. Christmas gave them pause, it gave them even matter for concern and brain-racking. It was customary to present Hofrat Behrens with a gift on Christmas eve, for which a collection was taken up among the guests⁠—and this gift was the subject of much deliberation. A meeting was called. Last year, so the old inhabitants said, they had given him a travelling-trunk; this time a new operating-table had been considered, an easel, a fur coat, a rocking-chair, an inlaid ivory stethoscope. Settembrini, asked for suggestions, proposed that they give the Hofrat a newly projected encyclopaedic work called The Sociology of Suffering; but he found only one person to agree with him, a book-dealer who sat at Hermine Kleefeld’s table. In short, no decision had been reached. There was difficulty about coming to an agreement with the Russian guests; a divergence of views arose. The Muscovites declared their preference for making an independent gift. Frau Stöhr went about for days quite outraged on account of a loan of ten francs which she inadvisedly laid out for Frau Iltis at the meeting, and which the latter had “forgotten” to return. She “forgot” it. The shades of meaning Frau Stöhr contrived to convey in this word were many and varied, but one and all expressive of an entire disbelief in Frau Iltis’s lack of memory, which, it appeared, had been proof against the hints and proddings Frau Stöhr freely admitted having administered. Several times she declared she would resign herself, make Frau Iltis a present of the sum. “I’ll pay for both of us,” she said. “Then my skirts will be cleared!” But in the end she hit upon another plan and communicated it to her tablemates, to their great delight: she had the “management” refund her the ten francs and insert it in Frau Iltis’s weekly bill. Thus was the reluctant debtor outwitted, and at least this phase of the matter settled. + 

It had stopped snowing, the sky began to clear. The blue-grey cloud-masses parted to admit glimpses of the sun, whose rays gave a bluish cast to the scene. Then it grew altogether fair; a bright hard frost and settled winter splendour reigned in the middle of November. The arch of the loggia framed a glorious panorama of snow-powdered forest, softly filled passes and ravines, white, sunlit valleys, and radiant blue heavens above all. In the evening, when the almost full moon appeared, the world lay in enchanted splendour, marvellous. Crystal and diamond it glittered far and wide, the forest stood up very black and white, the quarter of the heavens where the moon was not showed deeply dark, embroidered with stars. On the flashing surface of the snow, shadows, so strong, so sharp and clearly outlined that they seemed almost more real than the objects themselves, fell from houses, trees, and telegraph-poles. An hour or so after sunset there would be some fourteen degrees of frost. The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in a deathlike, enchanted trance. + 

Hans Castorp stopped until far into the night in his balcony above the ensorcelled winter scene⁠—much longer than Joachim, who retired at ten or a little later. His excellent chair, with the sectional mattress and the neck-roll, he pulled close to the snow-cushioned balustrade; at his hand was the white table with the lighted reading-lamp, a stack of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the “evening milk” which was brought to each of the guests’ rooms at nine o’clock. Hans Castorp put a dash of cognac in his, to make it more palatable. Already he had availed himself of all his means of protection against the cold, the entire outfit: lay ensconced well up to his chest in the buttoned-up sleeping-sack he had acquired in one of the well-furnished shops in the Platz, with the two camel’s-hair rugs folded over it in accordance with the ritual. He wore his winter suit, with a short fur jacket atop, a woollen cap, felt boots, and heavily lined gloves, which, however, could not prevent the stiffening of his fingers. + 

What held him so late⁠—often until midnight and beyond, long after the “bad” Russian pair had left their loge⁠—was partly the magic of the winter night, into which, until eleven, were woven the mounting strains of music from near and far. But even more it was inertia and excitement, both of these at once, and in combination: bodily inertia, the physical fatigue which hated any idea of moving; and mental excitement, the busy preoccupation of his thoughts with certain new and fascinating studies upon which the young man had embarked, and which left his brain no rest. The weather affected him, his organism was stimulated by the cold; he ate enormously, attacking the mighty Berghof meals, where the roast goose followed upon the roast beef, with the usual Berghof appetite, which was always even larger in winter than in summer. At the same time he had a perpetual craving for sleep; in the daytime, as well as on the moonlit evenings, he would drop off over his books, and then, after a few minutes’ unconsciousness, betake himself again to research. Talk fatigued him. He was more inclined than had been his habit to rapid, unrestrained, even reckless speech; but if he talked with Joachim, as they went on their snowy walks, he was liable to be overtaken by giddiness and trembling, would feel dazed and tipsy, and the blood would mount to his head. His curve had gone up since the oncoming of winter, and Hofrat Behrens had let fall something about injections; these were usually given in cases of obstinate high temperature, and Joachim and at least two-thirds of the guests had them. But he himself felt sure that the increase in his bodily heat had to do with the mental activity and excitation which kept him in his chair on the balcony until deep into the glittering, frosty night. The reading which held him so late suggested such an explanation to his mind. + 

No little reading was done, in the rest-halls and private loggias of the International Sanatorium Berghof; largely, however, by the newcomers and “short-timers,” for the patients of many months’ or years’ standing had long learned to kill time without mental effort or means of distraction, by dint of a certain inner virtuosity they came to possess. They even considered it beginners’ awkwardness to glue yourself to a book. It was enough to have one lying in your lap or on your little table, in case of need. The collection of the establishment was an amplification of the literature found in a dentist’s waiting-room⁠—in many languages, profusely illustrated, and offered free of charge. The guests exchanged volumes from the loan-library down in the Platz; now and again there would be a book for which everybody scrambled, even the condescending old inhabitants reaching out their hands with ill-concealed eagerness. At the moment it was a cheap paper-backed volume, introduced by Herr Albin, and entitled The Art of Seduction: a very literal translation from the French, preserving even the syntax of that language, and thus gaining in elegance and pungency of presentation. In matter it was an exposition of the philosophy of sensual passion, developed in a spirit of debonair and man-of-the-worldly paganism. Frau Stöhr had read it early, and pronounced it simply ravishing. Frau Magnus, the same who had lost her albumen tolerance, agreed unreservedly. Her husband the brewer purported to have profited personally by a perusal, but regretted that his wife should have taken up that sort of thing, because such reading spoiled the women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks not a little increased the circulation of the volume. Two ladies of the lower rest-hall, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrial magnate, and Frau Hessenfeld, a widow from Berlin, both of these new arrivals since October, claimed the book at the same time, and a regrettable incident arose after dinner, yes, more than regrettable, for there was a violent scene, overheard by Hans Castorp, in his loggia above. It ended in spasms of hysteria on the part of one of the women⁠—it might have been Frau Redisch, but equally well it might have been Frau Hessenfeld⁠—and she was borne away beside herself to her own room. The youth of the place had got hold of the treatise before those of riper years; studying it in part in groups, after supper, in their various rooms. Hans Castorp himself saw the youth with the fingernail hand it to Fränzchen Oberdank in the dining-room⁠—she was a new arrival and a light case, a flaxen-haired young thing whose mother had just brought her to the sanatorium. + 

There may have been exceptions; there may have been those who employed the hours of the rest-cure with some serious intellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing else besides. Perhaps here and there was one⁠—not, of course, to mention Herr Settembrini, with his zeal for eliminating human suffering, or Joachim with his Russian primer—yes, there might be one, or two, thus occupied; if not among the guests in the dining-room, which seemed not very likely, then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp inclined to believe it. He himself, after imbibing all that Ocean Steamships had to offer him, had ordered certain books from home, some of them bearing on his profession, and they had arrived with his winter clothing: scientific engineering, technique of shipbuilding, and the like. But these volumes lay now neglected in favour of other textbooks belonging to quite a different field, an interest in which had seized upon the young man: anatomy, physiology, biology, works in German, French and English, sent up to the Berghof by the book-dealer in the village, obviously because Hans Castorp had ordered them, as was indeed the case. He had done so of his own motion, without telling anyone, on a solitary walk he took down to the Platz while Joachim was occupied with the weekly weighing or injection. His cousin was surprised when he saw the books in Hans Castorp’s hands. They were expensive, as scientific works always are: the prices were marked on the wrappers and inside the front covers. Joachim asked why, if his cousin wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them of the Hofrat, who surely possessed a well-chosen stock. The young man answered that it was quite a different thing to read when the book was one’s own; for his part, he loved to mark them and underline passages in pencil. Joachim could hear, hours on end, the noise made by the paperknife going through the uncut leaves. + 

The volumes were heavy, unhandy. Hans Castorp propped them against his chest or stomach as he lay; they were heavy, but he did not mind. Lying there, his mouth half open, he let his eye glide down the learned page, upon which fell the light from his red-shaded lamp, though he might have read, if need were, by the brilliance of the moonlight alone. He read, following the lines down the page with his head, until at the bottom his chin lay sunk upon his breast⁠—and in this position the reader would pause perhaps for reflection, dozing a little or musing in half-slumber, before lifting his eyes to the next page. He probed profoundly. While the moon took its appointed way above the crystalline splendours of the mountain valley, he read of organized matter, of the properties of protoplasm, that sensitive substance maintaining itself in extraordinary fluctuation between building up and breaking down; of form developing out of rudimentary, but always present, primordia; read with compelling interest of life, and its sacred, impure mysteries. + 

What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed⁠—a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil⁠—and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself. + 

What was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point whence it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the domain of life seemed uncausated, or insufficiently causated, from that point on; but life itself seemed without antecedent. If there was anything that might be said about it, it was this: it must be so highly developed, structurally, that nothing even distantly related to it was present in the inorganic world. Between the protean amoeba and the vertebrate the difference was slight, unessential, as compared to that between the simplest living organism and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was inorganic. For death was only the logical negation of life; but between life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. They tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any the less deep or broad. Seeking for a connecting link, they had condescended to the preposterous assumption of structureless living matter, unorganized organisms, which darted together of themselves in the albumen solution, like crystals in the mother-liquor; yet organic differentiation still remained at once condition and expression of all life. One could point to no form of life that did not owe its existence to procreation by parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of the depth of the sea, and great had been the jubilation⁠—but the end of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for protoplasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a miracle⁠—for life that built itself up out of, and fell in decay into, the same sort of matter as inorganic nature, would have been, happening of itself, miraculous⁠—they were driven to believe in a spontaneous generation⁠—that is, in the emergence of the organic from the inorganic⁠—which was just as much of a miracle. Thus they went on, devising intermediate stages and transitions, assuming the existence of organisms which stood lower down than any yet known, but themselves had as forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to achieve life: primitive forms of which no one would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic size, and previous to whose hypothetic existence the synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place. + 

What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material⁠—it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh. + 

As he lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the bodily warmth preserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty night illumined by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its horny, scale-like regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation. Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its weight on one leg, the hipbone stood out sharply under the flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent knee against the inside of the supporting leg, and poised the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired symmetry of its limbs and trunk. The acrid, steaming shadows of the armpits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic darkness, just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly below. Under the impulsion of a central organ and of the motor nerves originating in the spinal marrow, chest and abdomen functioned, the peritoneal cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membrane of the respiratory canal, saturated with secretions, streamed out between the lips, after it had joined its oxygen to the haemoglobin of the blood in the air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework of bones⁠—marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones, vertebrae⁠—which with the addition of lime had developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong enough to support the body weight; with the capsules and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, its more than two hundred muscles, its central organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secretions; with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly complicated interior surface, communicating through the body-openings with the outer world⁠—he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built up out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses and functions, separated, differentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth. + 

This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent with their essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic elements that the functions of some had become limited to sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others only understood how to change their shape or produce digestive secretions through contraction; others, again, were developed and functional to no other end than protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or reproduction. There were modifications of this organic plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the multitude of subordinate entities were only grouped in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living unit. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell colonies; he read about half-organisms, algae, whose single cells, enveloped in a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, which, if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to procreation. The act of fructification, the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding of every multiple-celled individual, as it did at the beginning of every row of generations of single elementary forms, and led back to itself. For this act was carried through many species which had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation; until a moment came when the non-sexually produced offspring found themselves once more constrained to a renewal of the copulative function, and the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent cells, the association of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle came full again when sex-cells, specially developed elements for the purpose of reproduction, had established themselves and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on afresh. + 

Our young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the organism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of conception, which the protoplasm of the outside of the ovum arched against its approach. There was no conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In some animals, the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who for long had given it Greek and Latin names as an independent form of life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and animalculists: the first of whom asserted that the egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human being, the male element being only the incitement to its growth; while the second saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed forth, to which the egg performed only the office of “nourisher in life’s feast.” In the end they agreed to concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of which, after all, sprang from originally indistinguishable procreative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructified egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellae of the mucous membrane; saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close itself in to form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin the functions of receiving and digesting food. That was the gastrula, the protozoon, primeval form of all animal life, primeval form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and the inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved to be primitive organs out of whose foldings-in and -out, were developed the glands, the tissues, the sensory organs, the body processes. A strip of the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm, thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself into a nerve canal, became a spinal column, became the brain. And as the foetal slime condensed into fibrous connective tissue, into cartilage, the colloidal cells beginning to show gelatinous substance instead of mucin, he saw in certain places the connective tissue take lime and fat to itself out of the sera that washed it, and begin to form bone. Embryonic man squatted in a stooping posture, tailed, indistinguishable from embryonic pig; with enormous abdomen and stumpy, formless extremities, the facial mask bowed over the swollen paunch; the story of his growth seemed a grim, unflattering science, like the cursory record of a zoological family tree. For a while he had gill-pockets like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable, contemplating the various stages of development through which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous development of the mucous membrane of the olfactory organs; his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part in the play of the features, and were much better adapted than ours for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a third, nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting the third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary trace, and which was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers from the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine, many molars, and sound-pouches on the larnyx the better to roar with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of the intestinal cavity. + 

Anatomy presented our investigator with charts of human limbs, skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons: those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm, the upper and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with which medicine, that subdivision of the humanities, had gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the development of which presented new points of view⁠—among them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself reminded of his own field⁠—or shall we say his former field?⁠—the scientific calling which he had announced himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr. Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his arrival up here. In order to learn something⁠—it had not much mattered what⁠—he had learned in his technical school about statics, about supports capable or flection, about loads, about construction as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature; but just as little might one say that they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in such a way that the static demands were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the demands made by draught and pressure upon it, can withstand the same weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible that, step for step with the formation of the solid exterior, the inner parts, which were mechanically superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The thighbone was a crane, in the construction of which organic nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic nature generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought. + 

But with all this the achievements of the protoplasm remained unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it should understand itself. Most of the biochemical processes were not only unknown, it lay in their very nature that they should escape attention. Almost nothing was known of the structure or composition of the living unit called the “cell.” What use was there in establishing the components of lifeless muscle, when the living did not let itself be chemically examined? The changes that took place when the rigor mortis set in were enough to make worthless all investigation. Nobody understood metabolism, nobody understood the true inwardness of the functioning of the nervous system. To what properties did the taste corpuscles owe their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of excitation of certain sensory nerves by odour-possessing substances? In what, indeed, the property of smell itself? The specific odours of man and beast consisted in the vaporization of certain unknown substances. The composition of the secretion called sweat was little understood. The glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals undoubtedly played an important role, but whose significance for the human species we were not in a position to explain. The physiological significance of important regions of the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to mention the vermiform appendix, which was a mystery; in rabbits it was regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of which there was nothing to say as to how it got in or renewed itself. But what about the white and grey substance which composed the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and the grey inlay of the pons Varolii? The substance composing the brain and marrow was so subject to disintegration, there was no hope whatever of determining its structure. What was it relieved the cortex of activity during slumber? + 

What prevented the stomach from digesting itself⁠—as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened oxidization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there not an increased expenditure of warmth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But such contraction took place only in the case of “chills and fever,” for otherwise, in fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the central nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did not know how to define it. + 

But what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter helplessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as memory, or of that other more prolonged and astounding memory which we called the inheritance of acquired characteristics? Out of the question to get even a glimpse of any mechanical possibility of explication of such performances on the part of the cell-substance. The spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father was visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served together the next higher order of existence. + 

Those were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores⁠—lying there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to make acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked himself excitedly, even after more light on the subject was forthcoming, how could their elementary nature be established? If they were living, they must be organic, since life depended upon organization. But if they were organized, then they could not be elementary, since an organism is not single but multiple. They were units within the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they were, then, however impossibly small they were, they must themselves be built up, organically built up, as a law of their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant by definition that it was built up out of smaller units which were subordinate; that is, organized with reference to a higher form. As long as division yielded organic units possessing the properties of life⁠—assimilation and reproduction⁠—no limits were set to it. As long as one spoke of living units, one could not correctly speak of elementary units, for the concept of unity carried with it in perpetuity the concept of subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no such thing as elementary life, in the sense of something that was already life, and yet elementary. + 

And still, though without logical existence, something of the kind must be eventually the case; for it was not possible to brush aside like that the idea of the original procreation, the rise of life out of what was not life. That gap which in exterior nature we vainly sought to close, that between living and dead matter, had its counterpart in nature’s organic existence, and must somehow either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late, division must yield “units” which, even though in composition, were not organized, and which mediated between life and absence of life; molecular groups, which represented the transition between vitalized organization and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the molecule, one stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic nature: the gulf between the material and the immaterial. For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was nowhere near large enough even to be spoken of as extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early, transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of energy, that it was scarcely possible yet⁠—or, if it had been, was now no longer possible⁠—to think of it as material, but rather as mean and borderline between material and immaterial. The problem of another original procreation arose, far more wild and mysterious than the organic: the primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the abyss between material and immaterial yawned as widely, pressed as importunately⁠—yes, more importunately⁠—to be closed, as that between organic and inorganic nature. There must be a chemistry of the immaterial, there must be combinations of the insubstantial, out of which sprang the material⁠—the atoms might represent protozoa of material, by their nature substance and still not yet quite substance. Yet arrived at the “not even small,” the measure slipped out of the hands; for “not even small” meant much the same as “enormously large”; and the step to the atom proved to be without exaggeration portentous in the highest degree. For at the very moment when one had assisted at the final division of matter, when one had divided it into the impossibly small, at that moment there suddenly appeared upon the horizon the astronomical cosmos! + 

The atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun; through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of light years, kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of the central body. And that was as little a mere comparison as it would be were one to call the body of any multiple-celled organism a “cell state.” The city, the state, the social community regulated according to the principle of division of labour, not only might be compared to organic life, it actually reproduced its conditions. Thus in the inmost recesses of nature, as in an endless succession of mirrors, was reflected the macrocosm of the heavens, whose clusters, throngs, groups, and figures, paled by the brilliant moon, hung over the dazzling, frost-bound valley, above the head of our muffled adept. Was it too bold a thought that among the planets of the atomic solar system⁠—those myriads and milky ways of solar systems which constituted matter⁠—one or other of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies might find itself in a condition corresponding to that which made it possible for our earth to become the abode of life? For a young man already rather befuddled inwardly, suffering from abnormal skin-conditions, who was not without all and any experience in the realm of the illicit, it was a speculation which, far from being absurd, appeared so obvious as to leap to the eyes, highly evident, and bearing the stamp of logical truth. The “smallness” of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies would have been an objection irrelevant to the hypothesis; since the conception of large or small had ceased to be pertinent at the moment when the cosmic character of the “smallest” particle of matter had been revealed; while at the same time, the conceptions of “outside” and “inside” had also been shaken. The atom-world was an “outside,” as, very probably, the earthly star on which we dwelt was, organically regarded, deeply “inside.” Had not a researcher once, audaciously fanciful, referred to the “beasts of the Milky Way,” cosmic monsters whose flesh, bone, and brain were built up out of solar systems? But in that case, Hans Castorp mused, then in the moment when one thought to have come to the end, it all began over again from the beginning! For then, in the very innermost of his nature, and in the inmost of that innermost, perhaps there was just himself, just Hans Castorp, again and a hundred times Hans Castorp, with burning face and stiffening fingers, lying muffled on a balcony, with a view across the moonlit, frost-nighted high valley, and probing, with an interest both humanistic and medical, into the life of the body! + 

He held a volume of pathological anatomy in the red ray from his table-lamp, and conned its text and numerous reproductions. He read of the existence of parasitic cell-juncture and of infectious tumours. These were forms of tissue⁠—and very luxuriant forms too⁠—produced by foreign cell-bodies in an organism which had proved receptive to them, and in some way or other⁠—one must probably say perversely⁠—had offered them peculiarly favourable conditions. It was not so much that the parasite took away nourishment from the surrounding tissues, as that, in the process of building up and breaking down which went on in it as in every other cell, it produced organic combinations which were extraordinarily toxic⁠—undeniably destructive⁠—to the cells where it had been entertained. They had found out how to isolate the toxin from a number of microorganisms and produce it in concentrated form; and it was amazing to see what small doses of this substance, which simply belonged to a group of protein combinations, could, when introduced into the circulation of an animal, produce symptoms of acute poisoning and rapid degeneration. The outward sign of this inward decay was a growth of tissue, the pathological tumour, which was the reaction of the cells to the stimulus of the foreign bacilli. Tubercles developed, the size of a millet-seed, composed of cells resembling mucous membrane, among or within which the bacilli lodged; some of these were extraordinarily rich in protoplasm, very large, and full of nuclei. However, all this good living soon led to ruin; for the nuclei of these monster cells began to break down, the protoplasm they contained to be destroyed by coagulation, and further areas of tissue to be involved. They were attacked by inflammation, the neighbouring blood-vessels suffered by contagion. White blood-corpuscles were attracted to the seat of the evil; the breaking-down proceeded apace; and meanwhile the soluble toxins released by the bacteria had already poisoned the nerve-centres, the entire organization was in a state of high fever, and staggered⁠—so to speak with heaving bosom⁠—toward dissolution. + 

Thus far pathology, the theory of disease, the accentuation of the physical through pain; yet, in so far as it was the accentuation of the physical, at the same time accentuation through desire. Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonoured; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it. + 

The books lay piled upon the table, one lay on the matting next his chair; that which he had latest read rested upon Hans Castorp’s stomach and oppressed his breath; yet no order went from the cortex to the muscles in charge to take it away. He had read down the page, his chin had sunk upon his chest, over his innocent blue eyes the lids had fallen. He beheld the image of life in flower, its structure, its flesh-borne loveliness. She had lifted her hands from behind her head, she opened her arms. On their inner side, particularly beneath the tender skin of the elbow-points, he saw the blue branchings of the larger veins. These arms were of unspeakable sweetness. She leaned above him, she inclined unto him and bent down over him, he was conscious of her organic fragrance and the mild pulsation of her heart. Something warm and tender clasped him round the neck; melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh of her upper arms, where the fine-grained skin over the triceps came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his lips he felt the moist clinging of her kiss. + 

The Dance of Death + 

Not long after Christmas, the gentleman rider died.⁠—But before that event the Christmas holidays came and went, the two, or if you reckoned Holy Night the three feast-days, to which Hans Castorp had looked forward with some alarm and headshaking dubiety, as to what they would really be like, up here. In the event, they came on and passed like other days, with a morning, an afternoon, and an evening; only moderately unreasonable in respect of weather⁠—it thawed a little⁠—and not greatly different from others of their kind. Outwardly, they had been somewhat garnished and set off; inwardly they had held sway in the heads and hearts of men for their appointed time; then, leaving behind them some deposit of impressions out of the common run, they slipped away into the recent, then into the distant past. + 

The Hofrat’s son, Knut by name, came for the holidays and lived with his father in the wing of the building; a good-looking young man, save that his cervical vertebra was already too prominent. The presence of young Behrens could be felt in the air: the ladies showed a proneness to laugh, to bicker, and to adorn their persons. They boasted in conversation of having met Knut in the garden, the wood, or the English quarter. He himself had guests: a number of his fellow students came up to the valley, six or seven young men who lodged in the village but ate at the Hofrat’s table, and with others of their corps scoured the region in a body. Hans Castorp avoided them. He gave them a wide berth with Joachim whenever necessary; he felt no least desire to meet them. A whole world divided those up here from these singing, roving, staff-brandishing youths⁠—he wished neither to see nor to hear anything of them. They looked, most of them, like northerners, there might be Hamburgers among them; and Hans Castorp felt very shy of meeting his fellow townsmen. He had often uncomfortably considered the possibility that somebody or other from home might arrive at the Berghof⁠—had not the Hofrat said that Hamburg always furnished a handsome contingent to the establishment? There might be some among the bedridden and moribund; but the only one visible was a hollow-cheeked business man, said to come from Cuxhaven, who had been sitting for two weeks at Frau Iltis’s table. Hans Castorp, seeing him, rejoiced in the knowledge that one came little into touch with guests at other tables than one’s own; and further, that his native sphere was an extended one. He saw that the presence of the man from Cuxhaven made no difference to his happiness, and this went far to relieve his fears about the arrival of other Hamburgers. + 

Christmas eve came on apace, one day it was at hand, the next it was here. When first it had been talked of at table⁠—to Hans Castorp’s great surprise⁠—it had been yet a good six weeks away, as much time as his original term up here, plus the three weeks in bed. But those first six weeks, as he thought of them in retrospect, seemed a very long time, while the six just passed had been insignificant. His fellow-guests were right to make light of them. Six weeks, why, that was not so many as the week had days; little indeed, when one considered what a small affair a week was, from Monday to Sunday and then Monday again. One needed only to see how valueless the next smaller time-unit was to realize that not much could come even of a whole row of them put together. Rather the total effect was to intensify the process of contraction, shrinkage, blurring, and effacement. What was one day, taken for instance from the moment one sat down to the midday meal to the same moment four-and-twenty hours afterwards? It was, to be sure, four-and-twenty hours⁠—but equally it was the simple sum of nothings. Or take an hour spent in the rest-cure, at the dinnertable, or on the daily walk⁠—and these ways of employing the time-unit practically exhausted its possibilities⁠—what was an hour? Again, nothing. And nothing were all these nothings, they were not serious in the nature of them, taken together. The only unit it was possible to regard with seriousness was the smallest one of all: those seven times sixty seconds during which one held the thermometer between one’s lips and continued one’s curve⁠—they, indeed, were full of matter and tenacious of life; they could expand into a little eternity; they formed small concretions of high density within the scurrying shadows of time’s general course. + 

The holidays disturbed but little the even tenor of the Berghof ways. A well-grown fir-tree had been set up a few days beforehand on the right-hand wall of the dining-room, the side wall next the “bad” Russian table; a waft of its fragrance came to the noses of the diners now and then, above the heavy odours of the food, and wakened something like pensiveness in the eyes of a few among the guests seated at the seven tables. When they came to supper on the twenty-fourth, they found the tree gaily decked with tinsel, little glass balls, gilded pine-cones, tiny apples in nets, and varied confections. The coloured wax tapers burned throughout the meal and afterwards. And a tiny, taper-decked tree burned likewise, it was said, in the rooms of the bedridden and moribund⁠—each had his own. The parcel post in the last few days had been very heavy. Joachim Ziemssen and Hans Castorp received carefully packed remembrances from their faraway home, and spread them out in their rooms: judicious gifts of cravats and other articles of clothing, expensive trifles in leather and nickel, and quantities of Christmas cakes, nuts, apples and marzipan⁠—the cousins looked doubtfully at these last supplies, wondering whenever they should have occasion to consume them. Schalleen, as Hans Castorp knew, had not only packed his presents, but bought them, after consultation with the uncles. There was a letter too from James Tienappel, typescript to be sure, but upon heavy paper with his private letterhead, communicating his own and his father’s best wishes for the holidays and for a speedy recovery, and including at once greetings for the oncoming New Year as well⁠—a sensible and practical procedure, which followed Hans Castorp’s own: he having sent his Christmas messages betimes, under cover with the monthly clinical report. + 

The tree in the dining-room burned, crackled, and dispensed its fragrance, waking the minds and hearts of the guests to a realization of the day. People had dressed for dinner, the men wore evening clothes and the women jewels, mayhap presents from loving husbands down below. Clavdia Chauchat had exchanged the customary sweater for a frock with a hint of the fanciful about it, suggesting a national costume⁠—Russian peasant, or Balkan, perhaps Bulgarian; a light-coloured, flowing, and girdled arrangement, embroidered, and set with tiny tinsel ornaments. Such a garment gave her figure an unwonted softness and fullness, and suited what Settembrini called her “Tartar physiognomy,” particularly the “prairie-wolf’s eyes.” They were gay at the “good” Russian table; there the first champagne cork was heard to pop. It set the example, which was followed by nearly all the others. At the cousins’ table it was the great-aunt who dispensed champagne for her niece and Marusja, and treated the others as well. The menu was choice. It finished with cheese straws and bonbons, to which the guests added coffee and liqueurs. Now and then a twig would flare up on the Christmas-tree; there would be work to put it out, and shrill, immoderate panic among the ladies. Toward the end of the meal Settembrini came to sit for a while at the end of the cousins’ table; he wore his everyday clothes, and sported his toothpick. He quizzed Frau Stöhr with spirit, and made a few remarks about the carpenter’s son and rabbi of humanity, whose birthday they fancied they were celebrating today. Whether he had actually lived, Settembrini said, was uncertain; yet his time had given birth to an idea, which had continued its triumphant course even up to today: the idea of the dignity of the human spirit, the idea of equality⁠—in a word, they were celebrating the birth of individualistic democracy, and to it he would empty the glass they gave him. Frau Stöhr found his remarks équivoque and unfeeling: she rose under protest to the toast, and as the other tables were being emptied, they followed the general movement toward the drawing-rooms. + 

Hofrat Behrens, with Knut and Fräulein von Mylendonk, attended the social evening for half an hour. The occasion was to be signalized by the presentation of the gift to the head of the establishment, which accordingly took place, in the room with the optical apparatus. The Russians presented their gift, a large round silver plate, with the Hofrat’s monogram engraved in the middle; its utter inutility was plain to every eye. He might at least lie on the chaise-longue which was the gift of the rest of the guests⁠—though it was at present without cover or cushions, having merely a cloth drawn over it. The head end was adjustable; Behrens stretched out full length, with his silver plate under his arm, closed his eyes, and began to snore like a sawmill, giving out that he was Fafnir with the treasure hoard. Much laughter and applause ensued; Frau Chauchat laughed so hard that her eyes became two cracks, and her mouth stood open⁠—precisely, Hans Castorp remarked, as had been the case with Pribislav Hippe when he laughed. + 

Directly the head went out, the guests sat down to cards, the Russians occupying, as usual, the small salon. Some of the patients still stood about the room where the Christmas-tree was, watching the candle stumps die down in their sockets, and munching the goodies hanging from the boughs. Here and there at the tables, which were already laid for breakfast, sat a solitary person, with his head on his hand, silently brooding. + 

Christmas-day was damp and misty. These were clouds they were among, Behrens asserted; mist there was none, up here. But mist or clouds, the damp was perceptible. The surface of the lying snow began to thaw, grew soft and porous. In the rest-cure, one’s face and hands were stiff and red⁠—one suffered far more than in colder, sunny weather. + 

The feast-day was marked by an evening concert, a real concert with rows of chairs and printed programmes, offered to the guests by House Berghof; consisting of songs by a professional singer who lived up here and gave lessons. She wore two medals pinned side by side on her corsage, had arms like sticks, and a voice whose peculiar toneless quality cast a saddening light upon the grounds for her stay in these regions. She sang: + 

“Ich trage meine Minne + 

Mit mir herum.” + 

Her accompanist was likewise a resident. Frau Chauchat sat in the first row, but took advantage of the intermission to go out, leaving Hans Castorp free to enjoy the music in peace⁠—after all, it was music⁠—and to read the text of the songs, as printed upon the programme. Herr Settembrini sat awhile beside him, and made a few plastic and resilient phrases upon the dull quality of the singer’s bel canto, expressing also ironic satisfaction over the home talent displayed in the entertainment. It was so charming, he said, that they were just among themselves. Then he too went away⁠—to tell truth, Hans Castorp was not sorry to see the backs of them both, the narrow-eyed one and the pedagogue; he could the better devote himself to the singing, and draw comfort from the reflection that all over the world, even in the most extraordinary places, music was made⁠—very likely even on polar expeditions. + 

One had a slight differentiating consciousness of the day after Christmas, something that just made it not quite the same as an ordinary Sunday or weekday. Then it was over, and the whole holiday lay in the past⁠—or, equally, it lay in the distant future, a year away: twelve months would bring it round again, seven more than the time Hans Castorp had spent up here. + 

But just after the Christmas season, and before the New Year broke, the gentleman rider died. The cousins learnt of the death from Fritz Rotbein’s nurse, Alfreda Schildknecht, called Sister Berta, who met them in the corridor and discreetly communicated the sad event. Hans Castorp felt a profound interest; partly because the signs of life he had heard from the gentleman rider were among the earliest impressions of his stay up here, those which had first, or so it seemed to him, called up the flush to his face which since had never left it; but partly also upon moral, one might almost say upon spiritual grounds. He detained Joachim long in talk with the deaconess, who hung with the extreme of pleasure upon their conversation. It was a wonder, she said, that the gentleman rider had lived over the holidays. He had long since shown himself a doughty cavalier, but what it was he breathed with, at the end, nobody could tell. For days and days he had lived only by the aid of enormous quantities of oxygen. Yesterday alone he had consumed forty containers, at six francs apiece⁠—that mounted up, the gentlemen could reckon the cost themselves; and his wife, in whose arms he had died, was left wholly penniless. Joachim expressed disapproval of the expenditure. Why delay by these torturing and costly artificial expedients a death absolutely certain to supervene? One could not blame the man for blindly consuming the precious gas they urged upon him. But those in charge should have behaved with more reason, they should have let him go his way, in God’s name, quite aside from the circumstances, more so when taking them into consideration. The living, after all, had their rights⁠—and so on. Hans Castorp disagreed emphatically. His cousin, he said, talked almost like Settembrini, without any regard or reverence for suffering. The man had died in the end, that finished it; there was no more to be done to show one’s concern, and it had been due to the dying to spend what one could. Thus Hans Castorp. He only hoped the Hofrat had not showed a lack of decent feeling by railing at the poor man at the end. There had been no need, Fräulein Schildknecht said. Only one little thoughtless effort he had made to escape, to spring out of bed; but the merest hint of the futility of such a proceeding had been enough to make him desist once and for all. + 

Hans Castorp went to view the gentleman rider’s mortal remains. He did this of set purpose, to show his contempt for the prevailing system of secrecy, to protest against the egotistic policy of seeing and hearing nothing of such events; to register by his act his disapproval of the others’ practice. He had tried to introduce the subject of the death at table, but was met with such a flat and callous rebuff on all sides as both to anger and embarrass him. Frau Stöhr had been downright gruff. What did he mean by introducing such a subject⁠—what kind of upbringing had he had? The house regulations protected the patients from having such things come to their knowledge; and now here was a young whippersnapper bringing it up at table, and even in the presence of Dr. Blumenkohl, whom the same fate might any day overtake (this behind her hand). If it happened again, she would complain. Then it was that, thus reproved, Hans Castorp had taken⁠—and expressed⁠—a resolve: he would visit their departed comrade, and discharge the last duty of silent respect toward his remains. He persuaded Joachim to do the same. + 

Sister Berta arranged that they be admitted to the gentleman rider’s room, which lay in the first storey beneath their own. The widow received them⁠—a small, distracted blonde, much reduced by night watching, with a red nose, her handkerchief before her mouth, and wearing a plaid cloak, with the collar turned up, as it was very cold in the room. The heat was turned off, the balcony door stood open. The young people said what was fitting to say, in voices respectfully subdued; then, upon a woeful gesture from the widow, they passed through the room to the bed, walking on their tiptoes and weaving reverently forward. They stood by the dead, each after his fashion: Joachim with heels together, half inclined in a salute, Hans Castorp relaxed and pensive, with hands clasped before him and head on one side, much as he often stood to listen to music. The gentleman rider lay with his head pillowed high, so that his body, that elongated structure, the outgrowth of life’s manifold processes, with the elevation of the feet at the end beneath the sheet, looked very flat, almost like a board. A garland of flowers lay at about the knees; a palm-leaf outstanding from it touched the great, yellow, bony hands resting crossed upon the sunken breast. Yellow and bony was the face too, with its bald skull and hooked nose, its angular cheekbones and bushy, reddish-yellow moustaches, whose full curve gave the grey and stubbly hollows of the cheeks a yet hollower look. The eyes were closed, with a certain unnatural definiteness⁠—pressed down, not shut, thought Hans Castorp. That was what they called the last service of love; but it happened rather as a service to the survivors than to the dead. And it must be done betimes too, soon after death; for if the myosin process went far in the muscles, it would be too late, he would lie there and stare and one could no longer sustain the illusion of his slumber. + 

Perfectly at home, in more than one respect in his element, Hans Castorp stood at the bier, expertly reverential. “He seems to sleep,” said he, humanely; though such was far from being the case. Then, in a voice appropriately subdued, he began a conversation with the widow, eliciting information about the sufferings, the last days and moments of her departed husband, and the arrangements for transporting the body to Carinthia; displaying a sympathy and conversance that was in part physicianly, in part priestly and moralizing. The widow, speaking in her drawling, nasal, Austrian accent, with now and then a sob, found it remarkable that young folk should so occupy themselves with a stranger’s pain. Hans Castorp answered that he and his cousin were themselves ill; that he, when still very young, had stood at the deathbed of near relatives; he was a double orphan, and, if he might say so, long familiar with the sight of death. She asked what profession he had chosen; he replied that he “had been” an engineer. + 

“Had been?” she queried. + 

“Had been,” he replied, in the sense that his illness and a stay up here of still undetermined length had come between him and his work; that might mean a considerable interruption, even a turning-point in his career, he could not tell. Joachim, at this, searched his face in some alarm. And his cousin? He was a soldier, was at present in training for an officer. + 

“Ah,” she said, “the trade of a soldier is another serious calling, one must be prepared to come into close touch with death, it is well to accustom oneself to the sight beforehand.” She dismissed the cousins with thanks and expressions of friendliness, which could not but touch them, considering her distressed state, and the bill for oxygen her departed husband had left behind him. + 

They returned to their own storey, Hans Castorp greatly pleased and edified by the visit. + 

“Requiescat in pace,” he said. “Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. You see, when death is in question, when one speaks to or of the dead, then the Latin comes in force; it is, so to say, the official language. So then you see that death is a thing apart. But it isn’t a humanistic gesture, speaking Latin in honour of death; and the Latin isn’t what you learn at school, either⁠—the spirit of it is quite different, one might almost say hostile. It is ecclesiastical Latin, monkish Latin, medieval dialect, a sort of dull, monotonous, underground chanting. Settembrini has no use for it, it is nothing for humanists and republicans and suchlike pedagogues, it comes from quite another point of the compass. I find one ought to be clear about these two intellectual trends, or perhaps it would be better to say states of mind: I mean the devout and the freethinking. They both have their good sides; what I have against Settembrini’s⁠—the freethinking line⁠—is that he seems to imagine it has a corner in human dignity. That’s exaggerated, I consider, because the other has its own kind of dignity too, and makes for a tremendous lot of decorum and correct bearing and uplifting ceremony; more, in fact, than the freethinking, when you remember it has our human infirmity and proneness to err directly in mind, and thoughts of death and decay play such an important role in it. Have you seen Don Carlos given at the theatre? Do you remember at the Spanish court, when King Philip comes in, all in black, with the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and takes off his hat⁠—it looks pretty much like one of our melons⁠—he lifts it from the top, and says: ‘Cover, my lords,’ or something like that? That is the last degree of formality, I should think; no talk of any free-and-easy manners there! The Queen herself says: ‘In my own France how different!’ Of course it is too precise for her, too fussy, she would like it a little gayer and more human. But what is human? Everything is human. I find all that strict punctilio and God-fearing solemnity of the Spanish is a very dignified kind of humanity; while on the other hand the word ‘human’ can be used to cover up God knows what loose and slovenly ways⁠—you know that yourself.” + 

“I do indeed,” Joachim said. “Naturally, I can’t abide any kind of looseness or slovenliness. There must be discipline.” + 

“Yes, you say that as a soldier; and I must admit the military has an understanding of these matters. The widow was right when she said your trade is a solemn one, that has to reckon on coming to grips with death. You have your tight-fitting, immaculate uniform, with a stiff collar⁠—there’s your bienséance for you; then your regulations of rank, and military obedience, and all the forms you preserve toward each other⁠—quite in the Spanish spirit, there is something reverent about it, I can do with it very well, at bottom. We civilians ought to show more of the same spirit in our customs and manners, I should really like it, and find it fitting. I think the world, and life generally, is such as to make it appropriate for us all to wear black, with a starched ruff instead of your stand-up collar; and for all our intercourse with each other to be subdued and ceremonial, and mindful of death. That would seem right and moral to me. There is another of Settembrini’s arrogant ideas; I may tell him so, some time: he thinks he has a monopoly of morals as well as of human dignity⁠—with his talk about ‘practical lifework’ and Sunday services in the name of ‘progress’⁠—as though one hadn’t something else to think about, on Sundays, besides progress!⁠—and his ‘systematic elimination of suffering’; you have not heard anything about that, but he has instructed me on the subject, and it is to be systematically eliminated by means of a lexicon. I may find all that positively immoral⁠—but what of it? I don’t tell him so, naturally. He fairly goes for me, you know, of course in his plastic way, and says: ‘I warn you, Engineer.’ But a person can take leave to think what he pleases, at least: ‘Sire, grant freedom of thought.’ Let me tell you something,” he went on⁠—they had by now arrived in Joachim’s room, and Joachim was making ready for the rest-cure⁠—“let me tell you something I propose to do. We live up here, next door to the dying, close to misery and suffering; and not only we act as though we had nothing to do with it, but it is all carefully arranged in order to spare us and prevent our coming into contact with it, or seeing anything at all⁠—they will take away the gentleman rider while we are at breakfast or tea⁠—and that I find immoral. The Stöhr woman was furious, simply because I mentioned his death. That’s too absurd for words. She is ignorant, to be sure, and thinks that ‘Leise, leise, fromme Weise’ comes out of Tannhäuser, she said so the other day. But even so, she might have a little human feeling, and the rest of them too. Well, I have made up my mind to concern myself a bit in future with the severe cases and the moribund. It will do me good⁠—I feel our visit just now has done me good already. That poor chap Reuter in number twenty-five, whom I saw through the door when I first came, he has most likely long ago been gathered to his fathers, and been spirited away on the quiet. His eyes were so enormous even then. But there are more of them, the house is full, and they keep coming. Sister Alfreda or the Directress, or even Behrens himself, would most likely be glad to put us in the way of it. Say that one of the moribund was having a birthday, and we hear of it⁠—that could easily be brought about. Good. We send him, or her, whichever it is, a pot of flowers, an attention from two fellow-guests, who prefer to remain anonymous, with best wishes for recovery; it is always polite to say that. Then afterwards, of course, it is found out who sent it, and he⁠—or she⁠—in her infirmity, lets us greet her, in a friendly way, through the doorway; she may even ask us in for a minute, and we have a little human intercourse with him, before he sinks away. That’s how I imagine it. Are you agreed? For my part, my mind is made up.” + 

Joachim had not much to bring up against the plan. “It is against the rules of the house,” he said. “In a certain way you would be transgressing them. But Behrens would probably be willing to make an exception, and give permission, if you wanted it, I should think. You might refer to your interest in the medical side.” + 

“Yes, among other things,” Hans Castorp answered: for in truth somewhat involved motives lay at the bottom of his desire. His protest against the prevailing egotism was only one of these: there was also and in particular a spiritual craving to take suffering and death seriously, and pay them the respect that was their due. Contact with the suffering and dying would, or so he hoped, feed and strengthen this craving of the spirit, by counteracting the manifold woundings to which it was daily and hourly subjected, and which he felt the more keenly on account of the Settembrinian critique. Instances there were only too many: if one had asked Hans Castorp for them, he would probably have mentioned certain persons who were admittedly not much ailing, and not under the smallest compulsion, but who made a pretext of slight illness to live up here, for their own pleasure, and because the life suited them. Such was the Widow Hessenfeld, whom we have mentioned in passing. Her passion was betting; she staked against the gentlemen every conceivable object upon every conceivable subject: the weather, the dishes at dinner, the result of the monthly examination, the prescribed length of stay of this or that person, the champions in the skating, sleighing, bob-racing, and skiing competitions, the duration of this or that amour among the guests of the cure, and a hundred other, often quite indifferent or trifling subjects. Staked chocolate, champagne, and caviar, which were then ceremonially partaken of in the restaurant; or money, or cinematograph tickets, or even kisses, given and received⁠—in brief, she brought with her passion for betting much life and excitement into the dining-room; though her proceedings were not such as could be taken seriously by Hans Castorp, who even felt that her mere presence was prejudicial to the dignity of a serious cure. + 

For he was inwardly concerned to protect that dignity and uphold it in his own eyes⁠—though now, after nearly half a year among those up here, it cost him something to do so. The insight he gradually won into their lives and activities, their practices and points of view, was not encouraging. We have mentioned the two slim young elegants, seventeen and eighteen years old, nicknamed Max and Moritz, whose exploits were the talk of the cure, and who were in the habit of climbing out of the window at night in order to play poker and dissipate down below in female society. Only lately⁠—that is to say, perhaps a week after the New Year, for we must bear in mind that while we tell the story, time streams silently and ceaselessly on⁠—it had been spread abroad at breakfast that the bathing-master had just caught the pair, in crumpled evening clothes, lying on their beds. Even Hans Castorp laughed; but this, however humiliating it was to his better feelings, was nothing compared to the tales that circulated about a certain lawyer from Jüterbog, Einhuf by name; a man perhaps forty years old, with a pointed beard and very hairy hands, who had taken the Swede’s place at Herr Settembrini’s table. It was reported of him not only that he came home drunk every night, but that recently he had failed to do even that, having been discovered lying in the meadow. He passed for a Don Juan: Frau Stöhr could point out the damsel⁠—of whom it was also known that she had an affianced lover down in the flat-land⁠—who was seen at a certain hour coming our of Lawyer Einhuf’s room, clad in a fur coat with combinations underneath, and nothing more. That was a scandal; not only to the general, but even more to Hans Castorp’s private sense, and derogatory to his spiritual endeavours. It even came to this: that the thought of Lawyer Einhuf could not enter his mind without calling up there, by an association of ideas, the thought of Fränzchen Oberdank, the little creature with the sleek blond head, whose mamma, a worthy dame from the provinces, had brought her up to the Berghof a few weeks before. Fränzchen’s case, on her arrival, and even after the examination, had been thought a light one. But perhaps she had failed in the service of the cure, perhaps hers was one of those cases in which the air proved in the first instance to be good not against but for the disease. Or perhaps the child may have become involved in some intrigue, the excitement of which was seriously bad for her. Four weeks after her arrival she entered the dining-room fresh from a second examination, tossing her little handbag in the air, and crying out in her fresh young voice: “Hurrah, hurrah! I shall have to stop a year!”⁠—at which the whole room resounded with Homeric laughter. But two weeks later the whisper went round that Lawyer Einhuf had behaved like a blackguard to Fränzchen Oberdank. The expression is ours, or, rather, Hans Castorp’s; for those who spread the news found it too old a story to be moved to the use of strong language. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it out as their view that it took two to play at such games, and that it was unlikely anything had happened against the will of either participant. This, at least, was Frau Stöhr’s demeanour, her ethical reaction to the affair in question. + 

Caroline Stöhr was dreadful. If anything had power to distract our young Hans Castorp, in the course of his sincerely felt spiritual strivings, it was the personality, the very existence of this woman. Her perpetual malapropisms were quite enough. She said “insolvent” when she meant “insolent,” and uttered the most amazing rubbish by way of explaining the astronomical phenomena involved in an eclipse of the sun. One day she almost reduced Herr Settembrini to permanent stupefaction by telling him that she was reading a book from the library which would interest him; namely, “Schiller’s translation of Benedetto Cenelli.” She adored expressions of a cheap and common stamp, worn threadbare by overuse, which got on Hans Castorp’s nerves⁠—as, for example, “you haven’t the faintest idea!” or “how utterly too-too!” It had for long been the fashionable jargon to say “simply gorgeous” to express the idea of brilliant, or excellent; this phrase now proved to have outlived its usefulness. It was entirely prostituted, the juice quite sucked out of it; and Frau Stöhr clutched eagerly at the newest currency: everything, whether in jest or earnest, was “devastating,” the bob-run, the sweet for dinner, her own temperature⁠—and this sounded equally offensive in her mouth. She had a boundless appetite for gossip. One day she might relate that Frau Salomon was wearing the most costly lace underwear in preparation for her examination, and prided herself very much upon her appearance before the physicians on these occasions. There was probably more truth than poetry in the statement. Hans Castorp himself had the impression that the examinations, quite aside from their result, had their pleasurable side for the ladies, and that they adorned themselves accordingly. But what should one say to Frau Stöhr’s assertion that Frau Redisch, from Posen, who, it was feared, suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, had to walk up and down entirely naked before Hofrat Behrens, for ten minutes once a week? This statement was almost as improbable as it was objectionable; but Frau Stöhr swore to it by all that was holy⁠—though it was hard to understand how the poor creature could expend so much zeal and energy, and be so dogmatic, upon matters like these, when her own personal condition gave so much cause for concern. She was sometimes seized by attacks of panic and whimpering, caused by the lassitude which seemed to be constantly on the increase, or by her rising curve; when she would come sobbing to table, the chapped red cheeks streaming with tears, and wail into her handkerchief: Behrens wanted to send her to bed, she would like to know what he had said behind her back was the matter with her, she wanted to look the truth in the face. One day she had remarked to her horror that her bed had been placed with the foot in the direction of the entrance door; the discovery nearly sent her into spasms. It was not easy to understand her rage and terror; Hans Castorp did not see at once what she meant, and inquired: “Well? And what then? What was there about the bed standing like that?” + 

For God’s sake, couldn’t he understand? Feet first! She had made desperate outcry, and the position of the bed had to be altered at once, though it caused her to lie with her face to the light, and thus disturbed her sleep. + 

But none of this was really serious; it could not meet Hans Castorp’s spiritual needs. A frightful occurrence, which happened at about this time, during a meal, made a profound impression upon him. Among the newer patients was a schoolmaster named Popoff, a lean and silent man, with his equally lean and silent wife. They sat together at the “good” Russian table; and one day, while the meal was in full swing, the man was seized with a violent epileptic fit, and with that oft-described demoniac unearthly shriek fell to the floor, where he lay beside his chair, striking about him with dreadfully distorted arms and legs. To make matters worse, it was a fish dish that had just been handed, and there was ground for fear that Popoff, in his spasm, might choke on a bone. The uproar was indescribable. The ladies, Frau Stöhr in the lead, with Mesdames Salomon, Redisch, Hessenfeld, Magnus, Iltis, Levi, and the rest following hard upon, were taken in a variety of ways, some of them almost as badly as Popoff. Their yells resounded. Everywhere were twitching eyelids, gaping mouths, writhing torsos. One of them elected to faint, silently. There were cases of choking, some of them having been in the act of chewing and swallowing when the excitement began. Many of the guests at the various tables fled, through any available exit, even actually seeking the open, though the weather was very cold and damp. The whole occurrence, however, took a peculiar cast, offensive even beyond the horror of it, through an association of ideas due to Dr. Krokowski’s latest lecture. In the course of his exposition of love as a power making for disease, the psychoanalyst had touched upon the “falling sickness.” This affliction, which, in pre-analytic times, he said, men had by turns interpreted as a holy, even a prophetic visitation, and as a devilish possession, he went on to treat of, half poetically, half in ruthlessly scientific terminology, as the equivalent of love and an orgasm of the brain. In brief, he had cast such an equivocal light upon the disease that his hearers were bound to see, in Popoff’s seizure, an illustration of the lecture, an awful manifestation and mysterious scandal. The flight on the part of the ladies was, accordingly, a disguised expression of modesty. The Hofrat himself had been present at the meal; he, with Fräulein von Mylendonk and one or two more robust guests, carried the ecstatic from the room, blue, rigid, twisted, and foaming at the mouth as he was; they put him down in the hall, where the doctors, the Directress, and other people could be seen hovering over the unconscious man, whom they afterwards bore away on a stretcher. But a short time thereafter Herr Popoff, quite happy and serene, with his equally serene and happy wife, was to be seen sitting at the “good” Russian table, finishing his meal as though nothing had happened. + 

Hans Castorp was present at this episode, and evinced all the outward signs of concern and alarm, but at bottom he was not edified, God help him! True, Popoff might have choked on his mouthful of fish; but he had not. Perhaps, in all his unconscious mouthings and goings-on, he had all the while somehow taken jolly good care not to. Now he was sitting there, eating blithely away, as though he had never been behaving like a drunken berserk⁠—very probably he remembered nothing at all about it. But in his person he was not a man to strengthen Hans Castorp’s respect for suffering; his wife, too, after her fashion, only added to those impressions of frivolous irregularity against which Hans Castorp wrestled and which he sought to counteract by coming into closer touch, despite the prevailing attitude, with the suffering and dying in the establishment. + 

In the same storey with the cousins, not far from their rooms, lay a young girl named Leila Gerngross. According to Sister Berta, she was about to die. Inside ten days she had had four violent hemorrhages, and her parents had come, in the hope to take her home while she still lived. But it was impossible; the Hofrat said poor little Gerngross could not stand the journey. She was sixteen or seventeen years old. Hans Castorp saw here the opportunity to carry out his plan with the pot of flowers and the good wishes for speedy recovery. There was, it is true, no birthday feast to celebrate, in all human probability little Leila would never see another⁠—it came in the spring, Hans Castorp learned. But he felt the fact need not prevent his offering his respectful sympathy. When he went down with his cousin for their morning walk, he entered a flower-shop near the Kurhaus; and breathing in agreeably the moist, earthy, scent-laden air, he chose with care from the array a charming hortensia, and ordered it conveyed to the little sufferer’s room, with a card, upon which he wrote no names, but simply “From two housemates, with best wishes for recovery.” All this was an exquisite activity to Hans Castorp; he enjoyed the fragrant breath of the plants; the soft warmth of the shop, after the cold outside, made his eyes fill with tears. His heart beat with a feeling of adventure and audacity, a conviction of the good sense of his modest enterprise, to which, privately, he ascribed a certain symbolic value. + 

Leila Gerngross had no private nursing, she was under the immediate supervision of Fräulein von Mylendonk and the physicians. Sister Berta too went in and out of her room, and it was she who gave the young people news of the result of their attention. The little one, in her hopeless and circumscribed state, was as pleased as a child with the strangers’ greeting. The pot stood at her bedside, she caressed it with eyes and hands, saw that it was kept watered, and even in her severest fits of coughing rested her tortured gaze upon it. Likewise the parents, retired Major Gerngross and wife, were touched and pleased; and since it was impossible, for them, as complete strangers, to guess the givers, Fräulein Schildknecht could not⁠—she confessed it⁠—refrain from revealing the cousins’ identity. She transmitted the desire of the whole family that they should come and receive the thanks due their gift; and thus, on the next day but one, the deaconess ushered the two on tiptoe into Leila’s apartment. + 

The dying girl was indeed a charming blond creature, with eyes of true forget-me-not blue. Despite great loss of blood, and the effort to breathe with an utterly insufficient remnant of sound lung-tissue, she looked fragile indeed, yet not too distressing. She thanked them, and talked a little, in a pleasant, though toneless voice, while a faint rosy glow overspread her cheeks and lingered there. Hans Castorp suitably explained and excused his seeming intrusion, speaking in a low, moved voice, with delicate reverence. He did not lack much⁠—the impulse was present in him⁠—of falling upon his knees by the bedside; and he clasped the patient’s hot little hand long and closely in his, despite its being not moist but actually wet, for the child’s sweat secretion was so great, she perspired so much, that the flesh must have been shrivelled, if the transudation had not been counteracted by copious draughts of lemonade, a carafe of which stood on the bedside table. The parents, afflicted as they were, sustained the brief colloquy with courteous inquiries as to the state of the cousins’ health, and other conversational devices. The Major was a broad-shouldered man, with a low forehead and bristling moustaches, a tower of strength; his organic innocence of his little daughter’s phthisical tendency was plain to any eye. It was rather the mother who was responsible for the inherited taint; she was small, and of a distinctly consumptive type, and her conscience seemed burdened with the knowledge of her fatal bequest. Leila, after ten minutes’ talk, gave signs of fatigue, or rather of over-excitement; the flush deepened in her cheek, and her forget-me-not eyes glittering disquietingly. The cousins, on a sign from the nurse, made their adieux; and then the poor mother followed them into the corridor, and broke out into self-reproachings, which affected Hans Castorp very painfully. From her, from her alone it came, she said remorsefully, again and again. Her husband had nothing whatever to do with it. Even she, she assured them, had been only temporarily affected, only a slight and superficial case, when she was quite a young girl. She had outgrown it entirely, had been sure that she was quite cured. For she had wished to marry, she had so longed to marry and live, and she had done it: healed and sound she had wedded her dear husband, himself as sound as a berry, who on his side had no notion at all of such things. But sound and strong as he was, that had not helped: the dreadful, hidden, and forgotten thing had come to light in the child, it would end by destroying her; she, the mother, had escaped and was entering into a healthy old age, but the poor, lovely darling would die, the physicians gave them no hope⁠—and she, she alone was to blame, with her buried past. + 

The young people sought to console her, to say something about the possibility of a turn for the better. But the Major’s wife only sobbed and thanked them for all they had done, for the gift of the plant, and the diversion and pleasure their visit had brought her child. She lay there, poor little one, lonely and suffering upon her bed, while other young creatures were glad of life, and could dance with fine young men to their heart’s desire⁠—and even the disease could not kill the desire to dance. They had brought her a ray of sunshine⁠—my God, it would be the last. The hortensia had been like homage at a ball, the brief chat with the two fine young cavaliers a tiny affaire de cœur; she, the mother, had seen it. + 

All this impressed Hans Castorp rather painfully⁠—and she had pronounced the French badly too, which irritated him beyond words. He was no fine cavalier, he had visited little Leila only as a protest against the ruling spirit of egotism in the place, and in a physicianly and priestly capacity. He was rather put out over the turn the affair had taken, and the interpretation the mother had put upon it. But on the other hand, he felt a lively pleasure at having actually carried out his undertaking. Two impressions in particular lingered from the enterprise: one, the earthy odours of the flower-shop; the other, Leila’s wet little hand⁠—they had sunk into his mind and soul. And as thus a beginning had been made, he arranged on the same day with Alfreda Schildknecht a visit to her patient, Fritz Rotbein, who was as bored with life as his nurse, though to him, unless all signs failed, only a short term still remained. + 

Nothing for it but that the good Joachim must go along. Hans Castorp’s charitable impulse was stronger than his cousin’s distaste; which the latter, moreover, could only manifest by silence and averted eyes, since he could not stand for it except by betraying a lack of Christian feeling. Hans Castorp saw that very well, and drew advantage from it. Equally he perceived the military grounds for the distaste; but if he himself felt the happier and stronger for such undertakings, if they seemed to him conducive to good ends? In that case, he must simply override Joachim’s silent disapproval. He deliberated with his cousin whether they might send or bring flowers to Fritz Rotbein, he being a man. He desired to do so. Flowers, he felt, were proper to the occasion, and the purchase of the pretty, well-shaped purple hortensia had greatly pleased him. He came to the conclusion that Fritz Rotbein’s sex was, so to speak, neutralized by his mortal state; also that there was no need of a birthday to serve as excuse, since the dying are to be treated as though in enjoyment of a permanent birthday. Thus minded, he sought once more with his cousin the warm, earthy, scent-laden air of the flower-shop, and brought back a dewy fragrant bunch of roses, wallflowers, and carnations, with which they entered Herr Rotbein’s room, ushered by Alfreda Schildknecht. + 

The sufferer was not more than twenty years old, if so much, but rather bald and grey. He looked waxen and wasted, with large hands, nose, and ears; showed himself glad unto tears for the kindness of the visit, and the diversion it afforded him, and indeed, out of weakness, did weep a little as he greeted the two and received the bouquet. His first words, uttered almost in a whisper, were with reference to the flowers, and he went on to talk about the European flower trade, and its ever-increasing proportions⁠—about the enormous exportation from the nurseries of Nice and Cannes, the shipments by trainload and post that went off daily from these places all over Europe; about the wholesale markets of Paris and Berlin, and the supplies for Russia. For he was a business man; his point of view was the commercial one, and would be so long as life remained to him. His father, a doll-manufacturer in Coburg, had sent him to England to be educated, he told them in a whisper, and there he had fallen ill. They had taken his fever for typhoid, and treated it accordingly, with liquid diet, which had much reduced him. Up here they had let him eat, and eat he had; in the sweat of his brow he had sat in his bed and tried to build himself up. But it was all too late, the intestinal tract was already involved. In vain they sent him tongue and spiced eel from home⁠—he could not digest it. His father, whom Behrens summoned by telegraph, was now on the way from Coburg; for decisive action was to be taken, they would try at least what they could do with rib resection, though the chances of success diminished daily. Rotbein conveyed all this in a whisper, and with great objectivity. Even in the matter of the operation he took a business view, for, so long as he lived, that would be his angle of approach. The expense, he whispered, was fixed at a thousand francs, including the anesthesia of the spinal cord; practically the whole thoracic cavity was involved, six or eight ribs, and the question was whether it would pay. Behrens would like to persuade him; but the doctor’s interest in the matter was single, whereas his own seemed equivocal; he was not at all clear that he would not do better just to die in peace, with his ribs intact. + 

It was hard to advise him. The cousins thought the Hofrat’s brilliant reputation as a surgeon should be considered. It was agreed at length to leave the decision to the elder Rotbein, soon to arrive. Young Fritz wept again a little as they took their leave; his tears fell in strange contrast to the dry matter-of-factness of his thought and speech. He begged the gentlemen to repeat their visit, and they willingly promised to do so, but it did not come about. The doll-manufacturer arrived in the evening, next morning they proceeded to operate, and after that young Fritz was in no condition to receive callers. Two days later, passing the room with Joachim, Hans Castorp saw that it was being turned out. Sister Alfreda had already packed her little trunk and left the Berghof, to go to another moribundus in another establishment. Heaving a sigh, her eyeglass ribbon behind her ear, she had betaken herself thither, since such and only such was the prospect life held out to her. + 

An empty room, a room that had been “vacated”⁠—with its furniture turned topsy-turvy, and both doors standing wide, as one saw it in passing, on the way to the dining-room or one’s daily walks⁠—was a most significant, and yet withal such an accustomed sight that one thought little of it, especially when one had, in one’s time, taken possession of just such a “vacated” room, and settled down to feel at home in it. Sometimes you knew whose room it had been, and that indeed gave you to think. Thus a week later Hans Castorp passed by and saw Leila Gerngross’s room in just that condition; and in this instance his understanding rebelled for the moment against what he saw. He stood and looked, perplexed and startled, and the Hofrat came that way, to whom he spoke. + 

“I see it is being turned out here. Good morning, Herr Hofrat. Then little Leila⁠—” + 

“Ay,” answered Behrens, and shrugged his shoulders. After a pause for the meaning of the gesture to take effect, he added: “So you paid court to her in form, just before the doors were shut? Decent of you, to take an interest in my lungers, considering you are relatively sound yourself. Shows a pretty trait of character⁠—no, no, don’t be shy, quite a pretty trait. Shall I introduce you a bit here and there, what? I have all sorts of jailbirds in their little cells, if you want to see them. Just now, for instance, I am on my way to visit my ‘Overfilled.’ Want to come? I’ll introduce you as a sympathetic fellow sufferer.” + 

Hans Castorp replied that the Hofrat had taken the words out of his mouth, and offered him what he was on the point of asking. He would gratefully accept the permission to accompany him; but who was the “Overfilled” and how did Hofrat Behrens mean him to understand the title? + 

“Quite literally,” said the Hofrat. “Quite exactly, no metaphors. She’ll tell you about herself.” A few paces brought them before the room, and the Hofrat entered, bidding his companion wait. + 

As the double doors opened, the visitor heard the sound of clear and hearty laughter, which yet sounded short-winded, as though the person within were gasping for breath. Then it was shut away; but he heard it again when, a few minutes later, he was bidden to enter, and Behrens presented him to the blonde lady lying there in bed and looking at him with curiosity out of her blue eyes. She lay half sitting, supported by pillows, and seemed very restless; she laughed incessantly, struggling the while for breath: a high, purling, silver laughter, as though her plight excited or amused her. She was amused too, very likely, by the Hofrat’s turns of phrase in introducing the visitor, and called out repeated thanks and goodbyes as he went off; waved her hand at his departing back; sighed melodiously, with runs of silver merriment, and pressed her hand against her heaving breast under the batiste nightgown. Her legs, it seemed, were never still. + 

The lady’s name was Frau Zimmermann. Hans Castorp knew her by sight; she had sat for some weeks at the table with Frau Salomon and the lad who bolted his food; then she had disappeared, and so far as Hans Castorp may have troubled about it, he supposed that she had gone home. Now he found her again, under the name of the “Overfilled,” and awaited an explanation. + 

“Ha ha, ha ha!” she carolled, in high glee, holding her fluttering bosom. “Frightfully funny man, is Behrens; killingly funny, makes you die of laughing. But sit down, Herr Kasten, or Garsten, or whatever your name is; you have such a funny name⁠—ha ha, ha ha! You must please excuse me; do sit down on that chair near my feet, but please don’t mind if I thrash about with my legs, I cannot help it.” + 

She was almost pretty, with clear-cut, rather too well-defined though agreeable features, and a tiny double chin. Her lips and even the tip of her nose were blue, probably from lack of air. Her hands had an appealing thinness; the laces of the nightdress set them off; but she could keep them quiet no more than her feet. Her throat was like a girl’s, with “saltcellars” above the delicate collarbones; and her breast, heaving and struggling under the nightgown with her laughter and gasping breaths, looked tender and young. Hans Castorp decided to send or bring her flowers, a bouquet from the nurseries of Nice and Cannes, dewy and fragrant. With some misgiving he joined in her breathless and volatile mirth. + 

“And so you go round visiting the fever cases?” she asked. “That’s very amusing and friendly of you! But I’m not a fever case; that is, I wasn’t in the least, until just now⁠—until this business⁠—listen, and tell me if it isn’t just the funniest thing you ever heard in all your life!” And wrestling for air, amid trills and roulades of laughter, she related her story. + 

She had come up a little ill⁠—well, ill, of course, for otherwise she would not have come; perhaps not quite a slight case, but rather slight than grave. The pneumothorax, that newest triumph of modern surgical technique, so rapidly become popular, had been brilliantly successful in her case. She made most gratifying progress, her condition was entirely satisfactory. Her husband⁠—for she was married, though childless⁠—might hope to have her home again in three or four months. Then, to divert herself, she made a trip to Zürich⁠—there had been no other reason for her going, save simply to amuse herself⁠—she had amused herself to her heart’s content, but found herself overtaken by the need to be “filled up” again and entrusted the business to a physician where she was. A nice, amusing young man⁠—but what was the result? Here she was overtaken by a perfect paroxysm of laughter. He had filled her too full! There were no other words to describe it, that said it all. He had meant too well by her, he had probably not too well understood the technique; the long and short of it was, in that condition, not able to breathe, suffering from cardiac depression, she had come back⁠—ah, ha, ha, ha! and Behrens, cursing and storming with a vengeance, had stuck her into bed. For now she was ill indeed, not actually in high fever, but finished, done, made a mess of⁠—oh, what a face he was making, how funny he looked, ha, ha, ha! She pointed at Hans Castorp and laughed so hard that even her brow grew blue. The funniest thing of all, she said, was the way Behrens raved and reviled⁠—it had made her laugh, at first, when she discovered that she was overfilled. + 

“You are in absolute danger of your life,” he had bellowed at her, just like that, without making any bones of it. “What a bear⁠—ah, ha, ha, ha!⁠—you really must please forgive me.” + 

It remained unclear what aspect of Behrens’s outburst had made her laugh; whether his brusqueness, and because she did not believe what he said, or whether she did believe it⁠—as indeed she must, it would seem⁠—and quite simply found the fact of her imminent danger “too funny for words.” Hans Castorp got the impression that it was the latter; and that she was pealing, trilling, and cascading with laughter only out of childish irresponsibility and the incomprehension of her birdlike brain. He disapproved. He sent her some flowers, but never again beheld the laughter-loving lady⁠—who, indeed, after she had sustained life upon oxygen for some days, expired in the arms of her hurriedly summoned husband. “As big a goose as they make them,” the Hofrat called her, in telling Hans Castorp of her death. + 

But the young man had by then made further connections among the serious cases, thanks to the Hofrat and the house nurses; and Joachim had to accompany him on the visits he made; for instance to the son of Tous-les-deux⁠—the second, for the room of the first had long since been swept and garnished and fumigated with H2CO. They paid visits as well to Teddy, a boy who had lately been sent up from the “Fridericianum”⁠—as the school below was called⁠—because his case proved too severe for the life there; to Anton Farlowitsch Ferge, the Russo-German insurance agent, a good-natured martyr; and to that unhappy, and yet so coquettish creature, Frau von Mallinckrodt. She, like all the foregoing, received flowers, and was even fed more than once from the hands of Hans Castorp, in the presence of Joachim. They gradually acquired the name of good Samaritans and Brothers of Charity; Settembrini thus referred to their activities one day to Hans Castorp. + 

“Sapperlot, Engineer! What is this I am hearing of your activities? So you have thrown yourself into a career of benevolence? You are seeking justification through good works?” + 

“Nothing worth mentioning, Herr Settembrini. Nothing to make a fuss about. My cousin and I⁠—” + 

“Don’t talk to me about your cousin. When the two of you make yourselves talked about, it is you we are dealing with. Your cousin’s is a good and simple nature, most worthy of respect; exposed to no intellectual perils, the sort that gives a schoolmaster not one anxious moment. You’ll not make me believe he is the moving spirit. No; yours is the more gifted, if also the more exposed nature. You are, if I may so express myself, life’s delicate child, one has to trouble about you. And moreover you have given me permission to trouble about you.” + 

“Certainly, Herr Settembrini⁠—once and for all. Very kind of you. ‘Life’s delicate child,’ why, that’s very pretty⁠—only an author would think of it. I don’t know if I’ve to flatter myself over the title, but I like the sound of it at least, I must say that. Yes, I do occupy myself rather with the ‘children of death,’ if that is what you refer to. I look in here and there among the serious cases and the dying when I have time, the service of the cure doesn’t suffer from it. I visit the ones who aren’t here for the fun of the thing, leading a disorderly life⁠—the ones who are busy dying.” + 

“And yet it is written: ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ ” said the Italian. + 

Hans Castorp raised his arms, to signify that there was so much written, on both sides, it was hard to know the rights of it. Of course, the organ-grinder had voiced a disturbing point of view, that was to be expected. Hans Castorp was ready, now as ever, of his own free will to lend an ear to Settembrini’s teachings, and by way of experiment to be influenced by them. But he was far from being prepared to give up, for the sake of a pedagogic point of view, enterprises which he vaguely, despite Mother Gerngross and her phrases, despite the uninspiring young Rotbein and the cachinnations of the “Overfilled,” found somehow helpful and significant. + 

Tous-les-deux’s son was named Lauro. He too received flowers, earthy, heavenly-smelling violets from Nice, “from two sympathetic housemates, with best wishes for recovery”; and as this anonymity had by now become purely formal, since everyone knew the source whence such attentions came, Tous-les-deux herself thanked the cousins when they chanced to meet in the corridor. The pale, dark Mexican mother begged them, with a few incoherent words, and chiefly by means of a pathetic gesture of invitation, to come and receive in person the thanks of her son⁠—son seul et dernier fils, qui allait mourir aussi. They went at once. Lauro proved to be an astonishingly handsome young man, with great glowing eyes, a nose like an eagle’s beak, quivering nostrils, and beautiful lips, with a small black moustache sprouting above them. But his bearing was so theatrical and swaggering that Hans Castorp, this time no less than Joachim Ziemssen, was glad when they closed the invalid’s door behind them. Tous-les-deux had ranged forlornly up and down the room, with her long, bent-kneed stride, in her black cashmere shawl, with the black scarf knotted beneath her chin, her forehead crossed with wrinkles, great pouches of skin under the jet-black eyes, and one corner of her large mouth pathetically drooping. Sometimes she approached them as they sat by the bed, to reiterate her parrotlike speech: “Tous les dé, vous comprenez, messiés⁠—premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre.” And the handsome Lauro delivered himself of rolling, ranting, intolerably bombastic phrases, also in French, to the effect that he knew how a hero should die and meant to do it: comme heros, à l’espagnol, like his young brother, de même quo son fier jeune frère Fernando, who likewise had died like a Spanish hero. He gesticulated, he tore open his shirt to offer his yellow breast to the stroke of fate; and continued thus, until an attack of coughing, which forced a thread of red foam to his lips, quenched his harangue and gave the cousins an excuse to go out, on tiptoe. + 

They did not mention the visit to Lauro’s bedside; even to themselves they refrained from comment on his behaviour. But both were better pleased with their call upon Anton Karlowitsch Ferge from St. Petersburg, who lay in bed, with his great good-natured beard and his just as good-natured-looking great Adam’s apple, recovering slowly from the unsuccessful attempt which had been made to install the pneumothorax in his interior economy, and which had been within a hair’s breadth of costing Herr Ferge his life on the spot. He had suffered a frightful shock, the pleura-shock⁠—a quite frequent occurrence in cases where this fashionable technique was applied. But Herr Ferge’s shock had been exceptionally dangerous, a total collapse and critical loss of consciousness, in a word so severe an attack that the operation had been broken off at once, and was indefinitely postponed. + 

Herr Ferge’s good-natured grey eyes grew large and round, his face went ashen-coloured, when he came to speak of the operation, which must have been horrible indeed. “No anesthesia, my dear sir. In this case it doesn’t do, a sensible man understands that and accepts the situation as it is. But the local doesn’t reach very far down, it only benumbs the surface flesh, you feel it when they lay you open, like a pinching and squeezing. I lie there with my face covered, so I can’t see anything: the assistant holds me on one side and the Directress on the other. I feel myself being pinched and squeezed, that is the flesh they are laying back and pegging down. Then I hear the Hofrat say: ‘Very good’; and then he begins, with a blunt instrument⁠—it must be blunt, not to pierce through too soon⁠—to go over the pleura and find the place where he can make an incision and let the gas in; and when he begins moving about over my pleura with his instrument⁠—oh, Lord, oh, Lord! I felt like⁠—I felt it was all up with me⁠—it was something perfectly indescribable. The pleura, my friends, is not anything that should be felt of; it does not want to be felt of and it ought not to be. It is taboo. It is covered up with flesh and put away once and for all; nobody and nothing ought to come near it. And now he uncovers it and feels all over it. My God, I was sick at my stomach. Horrible, awful; never in my life have I imagined there could be such a sickening feeling, outside hell and its torments. I fainted; I had three fainting-fits one after the other, a green, a brown, and a violet. And there was a stink⁠—the shock went to my sense of smell and I got an awful stench of hydrogen sulphide, the way it must smell in the bad place; with all that I heard myself laughing as I went off⁠—not the way a human being laughs⁠—it was the most indecent, ghastly kind of laughing I ever heard. Because, when they go over your pleura like that, I tell you what it is: it is as though you were being tickled⁠—horribly, disgustingly tickled⁠—that is just what the infernal torment of the pleura-shock is like, and may God keep you from it!” + 

Often, and never without blanching and shuddering, did Anton Karlowitsch Ferge come back to this infernal experience of his, and torture himself with it in retrospect. He had from the first professed himself a simple man; the “higher things” of this life, he said, were utterly beyond him, he expressly stipulated that no intellectual or emotional demands be made upon him; he, for his part, made none upon anybody else. This bargain once struck, he turned out to talk not unentertainingly of his experiences in the life from which his illness had withdrawn him. He had been in the employ of a fire-insurance company, and made constant extended journeys from St. Petersburg up and down the whole of Russia, visiting insured factory buildings and spying out those which were financially suspect; for it was a fact supported by statistics that the larger percentage of fires occurred in just those factories where business was not going too well. Thus he was sent out to study a plant, under this or that pretext, and render an account to his company, so that serious loss could be provided against betimes, by increased counter-insurance or dividing the risk. He told of winter journeys through the length and breadth of Russia, of night travel in extreme cold, in sledges that you lay down in, under sheepskin covers, and when you roused you could see the eyes of wolves gleaming like stars across the snow. He carried his provisions frozen, cabbage soup and white bread, in boxes; when they stopped to change horses, at a station, these could be thawed out, as required, and the bread would be as fresh as on the day it was baked. But when there came a sudden mild spell, he would find that the soup he had brought with him in chunks had melted and run away. + 

Thus Herr Ferge; now and then interrupting his narrative with a sigh, and the remark that it was all very well⁠—if only they did not try the pneumothorax again. His talk was devoid of the “higher things,” but it was full of facts, and interesting to listen to, particularly for Hans Castorp, who found it profited him to hear about Russia and life as it was lived there: about samovars and pirogues, Cossacks, and wooden churches with so many towers shaped like onion-tops as to look like a whole colony of mushrooms. He led Herr Ferge to talk about the people, the strange and exotic northern types, with their Asiatic tincture, the prominent cheekbones and Finnish-Mongolian slant to the eye; listening with anthropological interest to all that he heard. At his request, Herr Ferge spoke Russian to him; the outlandish, spineless, washed-out idiom came pouring from under the good-natured moustaches, out of the good-natured Adam’s apple; and Hans Castorp enjoyed it the more, youthlike, because all this was, pedagogically considered, forbidden fruit he was tasting. + 

He and Joachim spent many a quarter-hour with Anton Karlowitsch. Also they visited the lad Teddy from the Fridericianum, a young exquisite of fourteen years, blond and elegant, with a private nurse, and arrayed in white silk corded pyjamas. He was rich, he told them, and an orphan. He was here awaiting the moment for a serious operation they intended to try, for the removal of certain infected parts. Now and again, when he had a good day, he would leave his bed and dress in his neat sports attire to mingle for an hour in the company below. The ladies liked to dally with him, and he listened to their talk, for example to that concerning Lawyer Einhuf, the young lady in the combinations, and Fränzchen Oberdank. Then he would return to his bed. Thus idly and elegantly passed the time for the lad Teddy; and it was very plain that he expected nothing more from life than just this which he had. + 

Then there was Frau Mallinckrodt in number fifty, Natalie by name, with the black eyes and the gold rings in her ears; coquettish, fond of dress, but a perfect Lazarus and Job in female form, whom God had been pleased to afflict with every kind of infirmity. Her entire organism seemed infected, and she suffered from all possible complaints by turns and simultaneously. The skin was sympathetically involved, being covered in large tracts by an itching eczema, with open sores here and there, even on the mouth, which made feeding difficult. Then she suffered from internal inflammations of various kinds⁠—of the pleura, the kidneys, the lungs, the periosteum, even of the brain, so that she was subject to loss of consciousness; finally cardiac weakness, the result of constant pain and fever, gave her the greatest distress and even made it, at times, impossible for her to swallow, so that a mouthful of food would remain stuck in her throat. The woman’s state was truly pitiable, and she was alone in the world; for she had left home and children for the sake of a lover, a mere youth, only to be forsaken in her turn⁠—all this she herself related to the cousins⁠—and now was without a home, if not without means, since her husband saw that she should not want. She accepted with no false pride the fruits of his charity or his unquenched love, whichever it was, seeing herself quite humbly as a dishonoured and sinful creature; and so bore all the plagues of Job with astounding patience and resilience, with the elementary powers of resistance of her sex, which triumphed over all the misery of her tawny body, and even made of the gauze dressings which she had to wear about her head a becoming personal adornment. She changed her jewels many times in the day, began with corals in the morning and ended at night with pearls. Hans Castorp’s flowers greatly delighted her; she obviously regarded them as the expression of gallant rather than charitable sentiments, and invited both young men to tea in her room. She drank from an invalid cup, all her fingers decked to the joint with opals, amethysts, and emeralds; in no long time she had told her guests her story, the golden earrings swaying as she talked. Told of her respectable, tiresome husband, her no less respectable and tiresome children, who were precisely like their father, and for whom she had not been able to feel great warmth of affection; of the half boy, half man with whom she had fled, whose poetic tenderness she never tired of describing. But his family had taken him away from her, by guile and force commingled⁠—and perhaps he too had been revolted by her illness, which had then suddenly and violently broken out. Perhaps the gentlemen were revolted too, she asked coquettishly, and her inborn femininity triumphed even over the eczema that covered half her face. + 

Hans Castorp felt only contempt for the revolted lover and expressed it by a shoulder-shrug. The poetic youth’s defection was as a spur to himself and he began to take occasion to perform what services he could for the unhappy woman, in the repeated visits he made to her room: services that required no nursing skill, as, for instance, feeding her the midday broth after his own meal, giving her to drink when the food stuck in her throat, helping her to change her position in bed⁠—for to add to everything else she had a wound from an operation, which made lying difficult. He practised himself in these acts of benevolence, looking in on her on his way to the dining-hall, or when returning from a walk, and telling Joachim to go on ahead, he would stop for a moment in number fifty, to see after a case; he experienced a pleasing sense of expanding being, the fruit of his conviction that what he did was both useful in itself and possessed of a secret significance. There was also a malicious satisfaction he had in the blamelessly Christian stamp his activities bore⁠—it was so clear that on no ground whatever, either the military or the humanistic and pedagogic, were they open to any serious reproach. + 

It was some time after this that they took up Karen Karstedt; and both Hans Castorp and Joachim felt peculiarly drawn to her. She had been up here for years and was an outpatient of the Hofrat, who had commended her to the cousins’ benevolence. She was entirely without private means and dependent upon unfeeling relatives⁠—once, in fact, they had taken her away, since she was sure to die in any case; and only at the Hofrat’s intercession did they send her back. She lived in a modest pension in the village; a nineteen-year-old, undersized little person, with sleek, oily hair, and eyes forever timidly trying to hide a brilliance that accorded only too well with the hectic flush on her cheek. Her voice had the characteristic huskiness, but was sympathetic. She coughed almost constantly; and all her finger-ends were plastered up, as they had running sores. + 

The Hofrat, then, had appealed to the cousins in Karen’s behalf⁠—they were such kindhearted chaps⁠—and they made her their especial ward; beginning with the gift of flowers, following on with a visit to the poor child upon her little balcony in the village; and continuing with various outings which the three took together, to see a skating race or a bobsleigh competition. For the winter sport season was now at its height, there was a special week overcrowded with “events”⁠—those feats and displays to which the cousins had previously paid only cursory attention. Joachim was averse from every kind of distraction up here. He was not here, he said, on their account; he was not here to enjoy life, and to put up with his sojourn in the measure in which it furnished him agreeable change and diversion. He was here solely and simply to get well as quickly as he could, in order to join the service below, real service, not the service of the cure, which was but a substitute⁠—though to be sure he grudged any falling off in the duty he owed it. He was forbidden to join in the sports, to go and gape at them he did not like. As for Hans Castorp, he took too seriously, in too stern an inward a sense, his own share in the life of those up here to have a thought or a glance for the doings of people who made a sports station of the valley. + 

But now his benevolent preoccupation with poor Fräulein Karstedt made some change in these views⁠—and Joachim could hardly dissent without seeming unchristian. They fetched the patient at her humble lodging, in glorious, frosty-sunny weather, and escorted her through the English quarter, so named after the Hotel d’Angleterre, and along the main street, lined with luxurious shops. Sleighs were jingling up and down; there were hosts of people, the idle rich and pleasure-loving from all over the world, who filled the Kurhaus and the other hotels of the place; all hatless, all clad in sports costumes which were the last word in elegance and beauty of fabric, all bronzed with winter sunburn and the glaring reflections from snowy slopes. All this world, including the cousins and their protégée, were betaking themselves to the rink, which lay in the depth of the valley not far from the Kurhaus; in summer it was a meadow, used for football. Music was playing, the Kurhaus band, stationed in the gallery of the wooden pavilion, above the four-cornered racecourse. Beyond all lay the mountains, in deep snow, against a dark-blue sky. Our young people passed through the entrance and the crowd that, seated in ascending tiers, surrounded the course on three sides; they found places for themselves, and sat down to look on. The professional skaters, in close-fitting costumes of black tricot with furred and braided jackets, cut figures, hovered and balanced, leaped and spun. A pair of virtuosi, male and female, professionals and hors concours, performed feats which they alone in all the world could perform, and evoked storms of applause and fanfares of trumpets. Six young men of various nationalities competed for the speed prize, and laboured six times round the four-sided course, bent over, with their hands behind their backs, some with handkerchiefs tied round their mouths. A bell rang in the midst of the music, and the crowd would burst out now and again with shouts of encouragement and applause. + 

It was a gay company, in which the three invalids, the cousins and their protégée, sat and looked about them. There were white-teethed Englishmen in Scotch caps, talking in French to highly-scented ladies dressed from head to foot in bright-coloured woollens⁠—some of them even wore knickerbockers; Americans with small, neat heads, on which the hair was plastered down, pipe in mouth, and wearing shaggy furs the skin-side out; bearded, elegant Russians, looking barbarically rich, and Malayan Dutchmen, all these sitting among the German and Swiss population, as well as a sprinkling of indeterminate types⁠—all speaking French⁠—perhaps from the Balkans or the Levant. Hans Castorp showed certain weakness for this motley semi-barbarous world; but Joachim put it aside as mongrel and questionable. At intervals there were events for children, who staggered over the course with a snowshoe on one foot and a ski on the other. In one race each boy pushed a girl before him on a shovel; in another the winner carried a lighted taper, and must arrive at the goal with it still burning; or must climb over obstacles in his path, or pick up potatoes with a tin spoon and deposit them in watering-pots placed along the course. Everybody was in extravagant spirits. The richest children were pointed out, the prettiest and those from well-known families: there were the little daughter of a Dutch multimillionaire, the son of a Prussian prince, and a twelve-year-old lad who bore the name of a champagne known the world over. Young Karen was gay with the rest, and coughed persistently as she laughed; clapping for joy and very gratitude her poor hands with the running finger-ends. + 

The cousins took her to see the bobsleigh races as well. It was no distance to the terminus, either from Karen’s lodging or from the Berghof; for the track came down from the Schatzalp and ended in the village, among the houses on the western slope. At that point a hut had been erected, where word was received by telephone of the departures up above. + 

Then the low sleds would come singly, with long intervals between, around the curves of the white course, that shone metallic between frozen barriers of snow. The riders were men and women, in white woollens, with gay-coloured scarves of all nationalities wound about them. They were all red and lusty, and it snowed into their faces as they came on. Sledges would skid and upset, rolling their riders into the snow⁠—and the onlookers would take photographs of the scene. Here too music played. The spectators sat in small tribunes, or pressed upon the narrow path that had been shovelled alongside the course; or thronged the wooden bridges which spanned it, watching the sleds that from time to time whizzed beneath. This was the path taken by the corpses from the sanatorium above, Hans Castorp thought: round these curves, under these bridges they came, down, down, to the valley below. He spoke of it to the others. + 

They even took Karen, one afternoon, to the Bioscope Theatre in the Platz⁠—she loved it all so very much. The bad air they sat in was offensive to the three, used as they were to breathing the purest; it oppressed their breathing and made their heads feel heavy and dull. Life flitted across the screen before their smarting eyes: life chopped into small sections, fleeting, accelerated; a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing, performed to a thin accompaniment of music, which set its actual tempo to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means at its command, yet managed to evoke a whole gamut of pomp and solemnity, passion, abandon, and gurgling sensuality. It was a thrilling drama of love and death they saw silently reeled off; the scenes, laid at the court of an oriental despot, galloped past, full of gorgeousness and naked bodies, thirst of power and raving religious self-abnegation; full of cruelty, appetite, and deathly lust, and slowing down to give a full view of the muscular development of the executioner’s arms. Constructed, in short, to cater to the innermost desires of an onlooking international civilization. Settembrini, as critic, Hans Castorp thought, and whispered as much to his cousin, would doubtless have sharply characterized what they saw as repugnant to a humanistic sense, and have scarified with direct and classic irony the prostitution of technical skill to such a humanly contemptible performance. On the other hand, Frau Stöhr, who was sitting not far from our three friends, seemed utterly absorbed; her ignorant red face was twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment. + 

And so were the other faces about them. But when the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away, when the lights in the auditorium went up, and the field of vision stood revealed as an empty sheet of canvas, there was not even applause. Nobody was there to be applauded, to be called before the curtain and thanked for the rendition. The actors who had assembled to present the scenes they had just enjoyed were scattered to the winds; only their shadows had been here, their activity had been split up into millions of pictures, each with the shortest possible period of focus, in order to give it back to the present and reel it off again at will. The silence of the crowd, as the illusion passed, had about it something nerveless and repellent. Their hands lay powerless in face of the nothing that confronted them. They rubbed their eyes, stared vacantly before them, blinking in the brilliant light and wishing themselves back in the darkness, looking at sights which had had their day and then, as it were, had been transplanted into fresh time, and bedizened up with music. + 

The despot died beneath the knife, with a soundless shriek. Then came scenes from all parts of the world: the President of the French Republic, in top-hat and cordon, sitting in a landau and replying to a speech of welcome; the Viceroy of India, at the wedding of a rajah; the German Crown Prince in the courtyard of a Potsdam garrison. There was a picture of life in a New Mecklenburg village; a cockfight in Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose-horns, a wild elephant hunt, a ceremony at the court of the King of Siam, a courtesans’ street in Japan, with geishas sitting behind wooden lattices; Samoyeds bundled in furs, driving sledges drawn by reindeer through the snowy wastes of Siberia; Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron; a Persian criminal under the knout. They were present at all these scenes; space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here. A young Moroccan woman, in a costume of striped silk, with trappings in the shape of chains, bracelets, and rings, her swelling breasts half bared, was suddenly brought so close to the camera as to be life-sized; one could see the dilated nostrils, the eyes full of animal life, the features in play as she showed her white teeth in a laugh, and held one of her hands, with its blanched nails, for a shade to her eyes, while with the other she waved to the audience, who stared, taken aback, into the face of the charming apparition. It seemed to see and saw not, it was not moved by the glances bent upon it, its smile and nod were not of the present but of the past, so that the impulse to respond was baffled, and lost in a feeling of impotence. Then the phantom vanished. The screen glared white and empty, with the one word Finis written across it. The entertainment was over, in silence the theatre was emptied, a new audience took the place of that going out, and before their eager eyes the cycle would presently unroll itself again. + 

Incited by Frau Stöhr, who joined them at the exit, they paid a visit to the café at the Kurhaus, Karen clapping her hands in delighted gratitude. Here too there was music, a small, red-uniformed orchestra, conducted by a Bohemian or Hungarian first violin, who stood apart from the others, among the dancing couples, and belaboured his instrument with frantic wreathings of his body. Life here was mondaine: strange drinks were handed at the tables. The cousins ordered orangeade for the refreshment of their charge and themselves, while Frau Stöhr took a brandy and sugar. The room was hot and dusty. At this hour, she said, the café life was not yet in full swing, the dancing became much livelier as the evening advanced, and numerous patients from the sanatoria, as well as dissipated folk from the hotels and the Kurhaus, many more than were here as yet, came later to join the fun. More than one serious case had here danced himself into eternity, tipping up the beaker of life to drain the last drop, and in dulci jubilo suffering his final haemorrhage. The dulci jubilo became, on her unlettered lips, something extraordinary. The first word she pronounced dolce, with some reminiscence of her musical husband’s Italian vocabulary; but the second suggested jubilee, or an attempt to yodel, or goodness alone knew what. The cousins both devoted themselves assiduously to the straws in their glasses, when this Latin was given out⁠—but Frau Stöhr took no offence. She began, drawing back her lips and showing her rodent-like teeth, to drop hints and make insinuations on the subject of the relations of the three young people. As far as poor Karen was concerned, it was all pretty obvious, and, as Frau Stöhr said, she could not but enjoy being chaperoned, on her little outings, by such fine cavaliers. But the other side was not so easy to come at. However, ignorance and stupidity notwithstanding, the creature’s feminine intuition helped her to a glimpse, even though a partial and vulgarized one, of the truth. For she saw, and even teasingly aimed at the fact, that Hans Castorp was the cavalier, and young Ziemssen merely in attendance; further⁠—for she was aware of the state of Hans Castorp’s feeling toward Madame Chauchat⁠—that he was playing the gallant to poor little Karstedt because he did not know how to approach the other. It was a simple guess, lacking profundity and not actually covering all the facts of the case⁠—in short, it was only too worthy of Frau Stöhr, and when she came out with it, flat-footed, he did not even answer, save by a faint smile and an impenetrable stare. So much was true, after all, that poor Karen did afford him a substitute, an intangible yet real support, as did the rest of his charitable activities. But at the same time they were an end in themselves too. The inward satisfaction he experienced whenever he fed the afflicted Frau Mallinckrodt her broth, or suffered Herr Ferge to tell him once more the tale of the infernal pleura-shock, or saw poor Karen clapping her ravaged and mortifying hands in grateful joy, was perhaps of a vicarious and relative kind; yet it was none the less pure and immediate. It was rooted in a tradition diametrically opposed to the one Herr Settembrini, as pedagogue, represented⁠—yet seemed to him, young Hans Castorp, for all that, not unworthy of having applied to it the placet experiri. + 

The little house where Karen Karstedt lived lay near the railway track and the watercourse, on the way to the Dorf, quite conveniently for the cousins to fetch her after breakfast for the morning walk. Going thence toward the village, to arrive upon the main street, one had before one the little Schiahorn, and on its right three peaks which were called the Green Towers, but were now covered like the rest with snow that gleamed blindingly in the sun. Still further to the right came the round summit of the Dorfberg, and a quarter of the way up its slope was visible the cemetery of the Dorf, surrounded by a wall, obviously commanding a fine view, very likely of the distant lake, and thus suggesting itself naturally as the goal of a promenade. Thither they went, one lovely morning⁠—indeed, all the days now were lovely; with a hot sun, a sparkling frost, a deep-blue, windless air, and a scene that glittered whitely all abroad. The cousins, one of them brick-red in the face, the other bronzed, walked without overcoats, which would have been intolerable in this sunshine: young Ziemssen in sports clothes, with “arctics,” Hans Castorp in arctics as well, but with long trousers, not feeling worldly enough to don short ones. This was the new year, between the beginning and middle of February⁠—yes, the last figure in the date had changed since Hans Castorp came up here, it was written now with the next higher digit. The minute-hand on time’s clock had moved one space further on: not one of the large spaces, not one which measured the centuries or the decades; it was only the year that had been shoved forward by one figure; though Hans Castorp had been up here not a whole year yet, but scarcely more than half a one, it had jerked itself on, as does the minute-hand of certain large clocks, which only register by five minutes at a time; and was now pointing motionless, awaiting the moment to move forward again. But the hand that marked the months would have to move on for ten spaces more, only two more, in fact, than it had moved since he came up here; for February did not count, being once begun⁠—as money changed counts as money spent. + 

To the graveyard then, on the slope of the Dorfberg, the three wended their way⁠—we tell it to complete the tale of their excursions. It was Hans Castorp’s idea; Joachim probably had scruples at first, on the score of poor Karen, but in the end agreed that it was useless to pretend with her, or to carry out Frau Stöhr’s cowardly policy of shielding her from all that could remind her of her end. Karen Karstedt was not yet so far on as to display the self-deception that marks the last stage. She knew quite well how it stood with her, and what the necrosis of her fingertips meant: knew too that her unfeeling relatives would not hear of the unnecessary expense of having her sent back home, and that it would be her lot, after her exit, to fill a modest space up yonder. In short, it might even be said that such an excursion was more fitting, morally spoken, than many another, than the cinematograph or the bobsleigh races, for example⁠—and surely it was no more than proper to make those lying up there a visit once in a way, as a comradely attention, provided one did not regard it as in the same class with an ordinary walk or excursion to a point of interest. + 

Slowly they went, in single file, up the narrow path that had been made in the snow, leaving the highest villas behind and below them, and watching the familiar scene unroll in its winter splendour, a little altered in perspective, and opening out to the northwest, toward the entrance of the valley. There was the hoped-for view of the lake, now a frozen and snow-covered round, bordered with trees; the mountains seemed to slope directly down to its farther shore, while beyond these again showed unfamiliar peaks, all in full snow, overtopping each other against the blue sky. The young folk looked at the view, standing in the snow before the stone gateway to the cemetery; then they entered through the ironwork grille, which was on the latch. + 

Here too they found paths shovelled between the small enclosures, each of which was surrounded with its railing, each containing a number of graves. The snow rounded over and built up each smooth and even elevation, with its cross of stone or metal, its small monument adorned with medallions and inscriptions. No soul was to be seen or heard, the quiet remoteness and peace of the spot seemed deep and unbroken in more than one sense. A little stone angel or cupid, finger on lip, a cap of snow askew on its head, stood among the bushes, and might have passed for the genius of the place⁠—the genius of a silence so definite that it was less a negation than a refutation of speech. The silence it guarded was far from being empty of content or character. Here it would have been in place for our two male visitors to take off their hats, had they had any on. But they were, even Hans Castorp, bareheaded; and could only walk reverently, their weight on the balls of their feet, making instinctive inclinations on one side and the other, single file in the wake of Karen Karstedt, as she led the way. + 

The cemetery was irregular in shape, having begun as a narrow rectangle facing the south, and then thrown out other rectangles on both sides. Successive increases in size had evidently been necessary, and ploughed land had been taken in. Even so, the present enclosure seemed fairly full, both along the wall and in the less desirable inner plots; one could hardly see or say just where another interment was to take place. The three wandered for some time discreetly along the paths, among the enclosures, stopping to decipher a name or date here or there. The tablets and crosses were modest affairs, that must have cost but little. The inscriptions bore names from every quarter of the earth, they were in English or Russian⁠—or other Slavic tongues⁠—also German, Portuguese, and more. The dates told their own sad story, for the time they covered was generally a short span indeed, the age between birth and death averaging not much more than twenty years. Not crabbed age, but youth peopled the spot; folk not yet settled in life, who from all corners of the earth had come together here to take up the horizontal for good and all. + 

Somewhere in the thick of the graves, near the heart of the acre, lay a small, flat, levelled place, the length of a man, between two rounded mounds with wreaths of everlasting hanging on their headstones. Involuntarily the three paused here, the young girl first, to read the mournful inscriptions; Hans Castorp stood relaxed, his hands clasped before him, his eyes veiled and his mouth somewhat open, young Ziemssen very self-controlled, and not only erect, but even bending a thought backward; and both the cousins stole a glance at Karen’s face. She stood there, aware of their glance, with modest and shamefaced mien, her head bent on her shoulder, blinking her eyes and smiling a strained little smile. + 

Walpurgis-Night + 

Within the next few days it would be seven months since Hans Castorp’s advent among those up here; while Cousin Joachim, who had already had five to his credit, would soon be able to look back upon twelve; that is to say, upon a whole round year. Round, indeed, in a cosmic sense; for since the doughty little locomotive had set him down at these heights, the earth had completed one full course round the sun, and was returned to the point whence it had then set out. The carnival season was at hand, and Hans Castorp inquired among the old inhabitants of the Berghof what it would be like. + 

“Magnifique,” answered Settembrini, whom the cousins had again encountered on the morning walk. “Gorgeous,” he said. “Every bit as lively as it is in the Prater. You shall see, Engineer, ‘the gayest gallants of the night, in brilliant rows advancing,’ ” he quoted, and went on in his most mocking vein, couching his gibes in sounding phrases, with a telling accompaniment of arm, shoulder, and head movements. “What do you expect? Even in maisons de santé they have their balls for the fools and idiots, I’ve read; why not up here as well? The programme includes various danses macabres, as you may imagine; but unfortunately some of last year’s guests will not be here⁠—the party being over at half past nine, you perceive⁠—” + 

“Do you mean⁠—oh, capital!” laughed Hans Castorp. “Herr Settembrini, you are a wretch! Half past nine⁠—I say, did you get that?” he turned to his cousin. “Herr Settembrini means it would be too early for some of last year’s guests to take part. Ha ha⁠—spooky! He means the ones that have taken leave of the flesh and the things of the flesh in the meantime. But I am all excitement,” he said. “I think it’s quite proper to celebrate the feasts up here as they come, and mark off the time in the usual way. Just a dead level of monotony, without any breaks at all, would be too awful for words. We have had Christmas already, we took notice of the beginning of the New Year; and now comes Shrove Tuesday; after that, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Easter; then six weeks after that, Whitsunday; then it is almost midsummer, the solstice, and we begin to go toward autumn⁠—” + 

“Stop, stop, stop!” Settembrini cried, lifting his face to heaven and pressing his temples with the palms of his hands. “Be quiet, I cannot listen to you letting go the reins like that!” + 

“Pardon me, I mean it just the other way. Behrens will finally have to make up his mind to the injections, to get rid of my infection; my temperature sticks at 99.3° to four, five, six, and even seven. I am, and I continue to be, life’s delicate child! I don’t mean I am a long-termer, Rhadamanthus hasn’t let me in for any definite number of months; but he did say it would be nonsense to interrupt the cure, when I’ve been up here so long already, and invested so much time, so to speak. Even if he did set a term, what good would it do me? When he says, for instance, half a year, that is to be taken as the minimum, it is always more. Look at my cousin; he was to have finished the beginning of the month⁠—finished in the sense of being healed, cured⁠—and the last time Behrens saw him, he stuck on four more to make sure he is entirely sound⁠—well, then, where are we? Why, at the summer solstice, just as I said, without the faintest notion of offending you, and on the way to winter. Well, well, for the present what we have before us is Fasching, and as I say, I consider it fit and proper to celebrate it in the usual way, just as it comes in the calender. Frau Stöhr tells me the concierge sells tin horns in his lodge, did you know that?” + 

And so it fell out. Shrove Tuesday came on apace; before one had actually seen it on the way, it arrived. All sorts of absurd instruments were snarling and squealing in the dining-hall, even at early breakfast; at midday, paper snakes were launched from the table where Gänser, Rasmussen, and Fräulein Kleefeld sat. Paper caps were mounted; they, like the trumpets, were to be had of the concierge. The round-eyed Marusja was among the first to appear in one. But in the evening⁠—ah, in the evening there were festivities in the hall and the reception-rooms, in the course of which⁠—but we alone know to what, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit, these carnival gaieties led up in their course; and we do not mean to let our knowledge betray us into indiscretion. We shall pay time all the honour due it, and precipitate nothing. Nay, rather, we shall incline to protract the tale, out of feeling for young Hans Castorp’s moral compunctions, which have so long prevented him from crossing his Rubicon. + 

Everybody went down to the Platz in the afternoon, to see the streets in carnival mood, with harlequins and columbines shaking their rattles, with maskers on foot and in jingling, decorated sleighs, among whom went forward lively skirmishes, and much confetti was flung. Spirits were very high at all seven tables when the guests assembled for the evening meal; there was every indication that the fun begun abroad would continue in the same key within doors. The concierge had done a thriving trade in rattles and tin trumpets; Lawyer Paravant had been the first to go further in the same line, putting on a lady’s kimono and a braid of false hair belonging to Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt; he wore his moustaches drawn down on each side of his mouth with the tongs, and looked the very picture of a Chinaman, evoking loud applause from all quarters. The management had done its share. Each of the seven tables was decked with a paper lantern, a coloured moon with a lighted candle inside; when Settembrini entered, and passed by Hans Castorp’s, he quoted: + 

“See the gorgeous tongues of fire⁠— + 

Club as gay as heart’s desire⁠—” + 

He brought out the words with his fine, dry smile, and sauntered to his place, where he was greeted with a rain of missiles like tiny pellets, that broke and scattered a spray of perfume where they fell. + 

Yes, from the first moment the key was high. The bursts of laughter were unintermitted; paper snakes hung down from the chandeliers, swaying to and fro; confetti swam in the sauces; very early the dwarf waitress brought in the first ice-pail, the first bottle of champagne. Inspired by Lawyer Einhuf, the guests drank it mixed with burgundy. Toward the end of the meal the ceiling light went out, and only the colourful twilight of the paper lanterns illumined the room, making of the scene an Italian night, and setting the crown upon the mood of the evening. Settembrini passed over a paper to Hans Castorp’s table, by the hand of Marusja, who sat nearest him, with a green tissue-paper jockey cap on her head; on it he had written with a pencil: + 

“But mind, the mountain’s magic-mad tonight, + 

And if you choose a will-o’-the-wisp to light + 

Your path, take care, ’twill lead you all astray.” + 

This was received with enthusiasm, though Dr. Blumenkohl, whose state had now much altered for the worse, muttered something to himself, with the expression peculiar to him upon his face, or rather upon his lips; he seemed to be asking what sort of verses were these. But Hans Castorp considered that an answer was due, he felt it incumbent on him to cap the quotation, though it was unlikely he would have produced anything very striking. He searched his pockets for a pencil, but found none, nor could Joachim or the schoolmistress supply his need; and his bloodshot eyes looked to the east for aid, to the farther left-hand corner of the room⁠—it was plain that his fleeting purpose was dissipated in a widening circle of associations. He paled a little, and entirely lost sight of his original intention. + 

Other good ground there was for paling. Frau Chauchat had made special toilet for carnival, she wore a new gown, or at least one new to our hero, of thin, dark silk, probably black, or at most shot with a golden brown. It was cut with a modest little round neck like a schoolgirl’s frock, hardly so much as to show the base of the throat, or the collarbones, or the slightly prominent bone at the back of the neck, beneath the soft fringes or her hair. But it left free to the shoulder Clavdia’s arms, so tender and yet so full, so cool, so amazingly white, set off against the dark silk of her frock, with such ravishing effect that it made Hans Castorp close his eyes, and murmur within himself: “O my God!” He had never seen such a mode before. Ball gowns he had seen, stately and ceremonial, cut in conformity with a fashion that exposed far more of the person than this one did, without achieving a jot of its sensational effect. Poor Hans Castorp! He was reminded of a theory he had once held about these arms, on making their acquaintance for the first time, veiled in diaphanous gauze: that it was the gauze itself, the “illusion” as he called it, which had lent them their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of these arms, these splendid members of an infected organism, was an experience so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our young man no other recourse than again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: “O my God!” + 

Later on, another paper was handed over, on which was written: + 

“Society to heart’s desire⁠— + 

In faith, of brides, a party, + 

And jolly bachelors on fire + 

With forward hopes and hearty.” + 

“Bravo, bravo!” they shouted. They were drinking coffee by now, served in little brown earthenware jugs, and some of them liqueurs as well, for instance Frau Stöhr, who adored the sweet and spirituous. The company began to rise from table, to move about, to pay visits. Part of the guests had already moved into the reception-rooms, others remained seated, still faithful to the drink they had mingled. Settembrini, coffee-cup in hand, sporting his toothpick, crossed over and sat down between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress. + 

“ ‘The Harz,’ ” he said. “ ‘Near Schierke and Elend.’ Did I exaggerate, Engineer? Here’s a bedlam for you! But wait, the fun is not over so soon; far from leaving off, it has not even reached its height. From what I hear, there will be more masquerading; certain people have left the room, we are justified in anticipating almost anything.” + 

Even as he spoke, new maskers entered: women dressed as men, with beards and moustaches of burnt cork, betraying themselves by their figures and looking like characters in comic opera; men in women’s clothes, tripping over their skirts. Here was the student Rasmussen in a black jet-trimmed toilet, displaying a pimpled décolleté and fanning himself front and back with a paper fan; there was a Pierrot, costumed in white underwear, with a lady’s felt hat, a powdered face that gave his eyes an unnatural expression, and lips garish with bloodred pomade⁠—the youth with the fingernail. A Greek from the “bad” Russian table, who rejoiced in beautiful legs, strutted in tights, with short cloak, paper ruff, and dagger, personating a fairy prince, or a Spanish grandee. All these costumes had been improvised since the end of the meal. Frau Stöhr could sit still no longer. She too disappeared, and presently returned dressed as a charwoman, with skirt looped up and sleeves rolled back; a paper cap tied under her chin, armed with pail and brush; she began scrubbing about under the tables, among the feet of those still sitting. + 

“ ‘See beldam Baubo riding now,’ ” quoted Settembrini, as she appeared; and gave the next line too, in his clear and “plastic” delivery. She heard it, and retorted by calling him a turkey-cock and bidding him keep his filthy jokes to himself. With the licence of the season she addressed him, Herr Settembrini, with the “thou.” But indeed this familiarity had become quite general during the meal. He girded himself to reply, when a fresh stir and laughter in the hall interrupted him, and those in the dining-room looked up expectantly. + 

Followed by a troop of guests, two singular figures entered. One was dressed like a nurse; but her black uniform was marked off from head to foot by short white strips close under each other, with a longer one at regular intervals, like degrees on a thermometer. She had one finger laid to her pallid lips, and in her other hand a fever chart. Her companion was all in blue, with blue paint on lips, brows, throat, cheeks, and chin, and a blue woollen cap wry over one ear. He was dressed in a “pullover” of glazed blue linen, tied round the ankles, and stuffed out into a great paunch round the middle. These were Frau Iltis and Herr Albin; they wore cardboard placards, on which were written “The Silent Sister” and “The Blue Peter”; together, with sidling gait they moved through the room. + 

What applause there was! What ringing shouts! Frau Stöhr, her broom under her arm and her hands on her knees, laughed like the charwoman she impersonated. Only Settembrini was unmoved. He cast one glance at the successful maskers and his lips became a fine thin line beneath the waving moustaches. + 

Among the troop streaming in the rear of the blue and silent ones, came Clavdia Chauchat, together with the woolly-haired Tamara and the man with the hollow chest, named Buligin, who was dressed in evening clothes. Clavdia brushed Hans Castorp’s table with the folds of her new gown, and crossed the room to where young Gänser and the Kleefeld were sitting. Her companions followed the rout out of the dining-hall after the two allegorical maskers, but she stood there, her hands behind her back, laughing and chatting, her eyes like narrow slits. She too had mounted a cap⁠—it was not a bought one, but the kind one makes for children, a simple cocked hat of white paper, set rakishily on her head, and suiting her, of course, to a marvel. Her feet showed beneath the dark golden-brown silk of her frock, whose skirt was somewhat draped. Of her arms we shall say no more in this place. They were bare to the shoulder. + 

“ ‘Look at her well,’ ” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say, as though from a distance, following her with his glance as she presently left the room. “ ‘The fair one, see! ’Tis Lilith!’ ” + 

“Who?” asked Hans Castorp. + 

Herr Settembrini’s literary soul was pleased. He answered: “ ‘Adam’s first wife is she.’ ” + 

Besides themselves there was only Dr. Blumenkohl at the table, sitting in his place at the other end. Everyone else, even Joachim, was now in the drawing-rooms. Hans Castorp said⁠—and he too addressed his companion with the licence of the season, and said “thou” to him: “Dear me, you’re full of poetry tonight. What Lily do you mean? Did Adam marry more than once? I didn’t know it.” + 

“According to the Hebraic mythus, Lilith became a night-tripping fairy, a ‘belle dame sans merci,’ dangerous to young men especially, on account of her beautiful tresses.” + 

“What the deuce! A hobgoblin with beautiful tresses! You couldn’t stand that, could you? You would come along and turn on the electric light and bring the young men back to the path of virtue⁠—that’s what you do, isn’t it?” Hans Castorp said whimsically. He had drunk rather freely of the mixed burgundy and champagne. + 

“Hark ye, Engineer⁠—and take heed what I say,” Settembrini answered frowning. “You will kindly address me with the accepted form employed in the educated countries of the West, the third person pluralis, if I may make bold to suggest it.” + 

“Why? Isn’t this carnival? The other is the accepted form everywhere tonight.” + 

“Yes, it is⁠—and its charm lies in its very abandon. When strangers, who would regularly use the third person, speak to each other in the second, it is an objectionable freedom, it is wantonly playing with the roots of things, and I despise and condemn it, because at the bottom the usage is audaciously and shamelessly levelled against our civilization and our enlightened humanity. Do not, for one moment, imagine I addressed you with this form just now. I was quoting from the masterpiece of your national literature⁠—I used poetic licence.” + 

“So did I. I am using a sort of poetic licence now, because it seems to me to suit the occasion, and that is why I do it. I don’t say I find it perfectly natural and easy to say ‘thou’ to you, on the contrary it costs me an effort, I have to poke myself up to it; but I do so freely, gladly, and with all my heart⁠—” + 

“With all your⁠—” + 

“Yes, quite sincerely, with all my heart. We have been up here for some time together⁠—do you realize it is seven months? That is not much, perhaps, as they reckon time here; but in the ordinary way it is a good deal, after all. Well, we have spent it with each other, because life brought us together. We have met almost daily, and had interesting conversations, in part upon subjects of which, down below, I should not have had the faintest understanding. But up here I have, they seem to me very real and pertinent; and I was always very keen, in our discussions, or rather, when you explained things to me, as a homo humanus, for of course I was too inexperienced to contribute anything, and could only feel that all you said was highly worth listening to. It is through you I have learned to understand such a lot⁠—that about Carducci was the least part of it⁠—take the republic and the bello stile and how they hang together, or time with human progress, and how if there was no time there could be no human progress, and the world would be only a standing drain and stagnant puddle⁠—what should I have known of all that if it weren’t for you? So I simply address you as though we were old and close friends, without further ceremony, and you must excuse me, because I don’t know any other way. You sit there, and I speak to you like this, and it is all that’s necessary. For you are not, to me, just any man, with a name, like another; you are a representative, Herr Settembrini, an ambassador to this place and to me. Yes, that is what you are,” Hans Castorp asserted, and struck the table with the flat of his hand. “So now I will thank you,” he went on, and shoved his champagne and burgundy along the table toward Herr Settembrini’s coffee-cup, as though to touch glasses with him. “I thank you for having taken trouble for me in these seven months, for having lent a hand to a young donkey in all the new experiences that came to him, and tried to influence him for his good⁠—sine pecunia, of course⁠—partly by means of anecdote and partly in abstractions. I distinctly feel the moment has come to thank you for all you have done, and to beg your pardon for being a troublesome pupil⁠—a ‘difficult,’ no, a ‘delicate child of life’⁠—that was what you called me. It touched me very much to have you say that; and I feel touched every time I think of it. The troublesome child⁠—that I have been for you, in your capacity as pedagogue⁠—you remember, you came to speak of that on the first day we met, it is one of the associations you have taught me, the relation between humanism and pedagogy; and there are many others I shall think of as time goes on. You must forgive me, then, and not think too hardly of me. I drink your health, Herr Settembrini; I drink to those literary endeavours of yours for the elimination of human suffering.” He ceased speaking, bent over and drained his glass, hiccupped twice, and stood up. “Now let us join the others.” + 

“Why, Engineer, what has come over you?” the Italian asked in surprise, rising in his turn. “That sounds like a parting.” + 

“A parting? No⁠—why?” Hans Castorp evaded him⁠—not only in words, but in action, for he turned as he spoke, describing a curve with the upper part of his body, and came to a stop before Fräulein Engelhart, who had just entered to fetch them. She said that a carnival punch, contributed by the management, was being dispensed by no less a person than the Hofrat himself, and bade them come if they cared for a glass. So they went together. + 

The little round white-covered table, with Hofrat Behrens behind it, stood the centre of a press of guests, each holding out a sherbet cup to be filled, into which the dispenser ladled the steaming drink out of a tureen. He too had made concessions to the carnival spirit: he wore his usual white surgeon’s coat, for even today his professional activity must go on; but he had added a genuine Turkish fez, crimson, with a black tassel dangling over one ear. His appearance, of itself sufficiently striking, needed no more than this to render it quite outlandish. The long white smock exaggerated his height; one felt that if he were to stand erect and hold up his head, he would be more than life-size; and atop was the small head, with its high colour and unique cast of feature. Never before had Hans Castorp been so impressed with its oddity as when he saw it today under this absurd headgear: the flat, snub-nosed, purple-flushed physiognomy, the watery, goggling blue eyes beneath tow-coloured brows, and the blond, close-trimmed moustache mounted crookedly above the full, bow-shaped lips. Turned away from the steam that wreathed upwards from the bowl, he held the ladle high and let the sweet arrack punch run in a brown, flowing stream into the glasses they held toward him, rattling on the while with his usual flow of whimsical jargon. + 

“Herr Urian sits up above,” Settembrini interpreted in a low voice with a wave of the hand. + 

Dr. Krokowski was there too, short, stout, solid, with his black alpaca shirt fastened like a domino on his shoulders, the sleeves dangling. He was holding his punch-glass with his hand at the level of his eyes and twisting the wrist round as he talked and jested with a group of masqueraders. Music was heard; the tapir-faced lady was playing Handel’s “Largo” on the violin, and then a drawing-room sonata by Grieg, characteristically northern in mood. The Mannheimer accompanied her on the piano. There was good-natured applause, even from the bridge-tables, which had been set up and occupied by maskers, with bottles in coolers at their sides. The doors were all open, and some of the guests stood in the hall as well. A group about the punch-table watched the Hofrat, who was introducing a new diversion. Bent over the table with his eyes closed and his head thrown back in evidence of good faith, he was sketching with his mighty hand a figure on the back of a visiting-card, the outline of a pig. It was rather more fanciful than realistic, yet undoubtably the lineaments of a pig, which under these difficult conditions, without the help of his eyes, he had managed to trace. It was a feat, and he could perform it. The little eyes were almost in the right place, so was the pointed ear, and the tiny legs under the rounded little belly; the curving line of the back ended in a small neat ringlet of tail. There was a general “Ah!” as he finished; then everyone was fired with an ambition to emulate the master. What abortions were brought forth! They lacked all coherence. The eyes were outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, the line of the latter came nowhere near joining, the little tail curled away by itself without organic connection with the figure, an independent arabesque. They nearly split with laughing; the group increased. The notice of the bridge party was attracted, the players were drawn by curiosity and came up holding their cards fan-shaped in their hands. The bystanders watched the performer to see that he did not wink⁠—which his feeling of powerlessness made him sometimes do; they giggled and guffawed while he committed his frantic blunders, and burst out in extravagant mirth when he at last opened his eyes and looked down upon his ridiculous handiwork. Blatant self-confidence lured everyone on to try his hand. The card, a large one, was soon filled on both sides with overlapping failures. The Hofrat contributed a second from his case; whereon Lawyer Paravant, after taking thought, essayed to draw a pig without lifting the pencil⁠—and lo, the measure of his unsuccess led all the rest: his creation had no faintest likeness either to a pig or to anything else on the broad earth. It was greeted with hilarity and boisterous congratulations. Menu cards were fetched from the dining-room, and now several people could draw at the same time; each performer having his own circle of onlookers and aspirants, waiting for the pencil he was using. There were three pencils, they snatched them out of each other’s hands. The Hofrat, having set the sport afoot, and seen it thriving, withdrew with his adjutants. + 

Hans Castorp stood in the thick of the crowd, at Joachim’s back, watching. He rested his elbow on his cousin’s shoulder and supported his chin with all five fingers of that hand, his other arm set akimbo on his hip. He was talking and laughing, anxious to try his skill; asked on all sides for a pencil, and at length received a stump of a thing, hardly to be held between thumb and forefinger. Then he shut his eyes, lifted his face to the ceiling, and drew, all the time uttering objurgations against the pencil, some horrible inanity upon the paper, in his haste spoiling even this, and running off the paper on to the tablecloth. “That doesn’t count!” he cried as his audience burst out in well-merited jeers. “What can you do with a pencil like that⁠—deuce take it!” and he flung the offending morsel into the punch-bowl. “Has anybody a decent one? Who will lend me a pencil? I must have another try. A pencil, a pencil, who has a pencil?” he shouted, leaning with his left hand on the table, and shaking the other high in the air. There was no answer. Then he turned and, passing through the room, went straight up to Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he was well aware, was standing near the door of the little salon, watching with a smile the throng round the punch-table. + 

Behind him he heard someone calling⁠—euphonious words, in a foreign tongue: “Eh, Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa, Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!” But he drowned out the voice with his own, and Herr Settembrini, flinging up his hand with a swing of the arm⁠—a gesture common in his own country, whose meaning it would be hard to put into words⁠—and giving vent to a long-drawn “Eh⁠—h!” turned his back on the room and the carnival gaieties.⁠—But Hans Castorp was standing on the tiled court of the school yard, gazing at close quarters into these blue-grey-green epicanthus eyes, above the prominent cheekbones, and saying: “Do you happen to have a pencil?” + 

He was deadly pale, as pale as when he had come back blood-spattered to the lecture, from that walk of his. The nerves controlling the blood-vessels that supplied his face functioned so well that the skin, robbed of all its blood, went quite cold, the nose looked peaked, and the hollows beneath the young eyes were lead-coloured as any corpse’s. And the Sympathicus caused his heart, Hans Castorp’s heart, to thump, in such a way that it was impossible to breathe except in gasps; and shivers ran over him, due to the functioning of the sebaceous glands, which, with the hair follicles, erected themselves. + 

She stood there, in her paper cap, and looked him up and down, with a smile that betrayed no trace of pity, nor any concern for the ravages written on his brow. The sex knows no such compassion, no mercy for the pangs that passion brings; in that element the woman is far more at home than the man, to whom, by his very nature, it is foreign. Nor does she ever encounter him in it save with mocking and malignant joy⁠—compassion, indeed, he would have none of. + 

He had used the second person singular. She answered: “I? Perhaps I have, let me see.” Her voice and smile did betray an excitement, a consciousness⁠—such as comes when the first word is uttered in a relationship long secretly sustained⁠—a subtle consciousness, which concentrates all the past in a single moment of the present. “You are so eager⁠—you are very ambitious”⁠—she continued thus to mock him, in her slightly veiled, pleasantly husky voice, with her quaint pronunciation, giving a foreign sound to the r and making the vowels too open, even accenting the word “ambitious” on the first syllable, with exotic effect; rummaging and peering the while in her leather bag, whence she fetched out, first a handkerchief, and then a little silver pencil, slender and fragile, a pretty trinket scarcely meant for use⁠—the other, the first one, had been something more to take hold of. + 

“Voilà,” she said, and held the toy by its end before his eyes, between thumb and forefinger, and lightly turned it to and fro. + 

Since she thus both gave and withheld it, he took it, so to speak, without receiving it: that is, he held out his hand, with the fingers ready to grasp the delicate thing, but not actually touching it. His eyes⁠—in their leaden sockets⁠—went from the little object to Clavdia’s Tartar physiognomy. His bloodless lips were open, and so remained, he did not use them to utter the words, as 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.” + 

Their heads bent over it together, and she showed him the mechanism⁠—it was quite ordinary, the little needle of hard, probably worthless lead came down as one loosened the screw. + 

They stood bent toward each other. The stiff collar of his evening dress served him to support his chin. + 

“A poor thing⁠—but yours,” he said, brow to brow with her, speaking down upon the pencil, stiff-lipped, so that most of the labials went unsounded. + 

“Ah, so you are even witty,” she answered him, with a short laugh. She straightened up, and surrendered the pencil. It is a question by what means he was witty, since it was plain there was not a drop of blood in his head. “Well, away with you, go and draw, draw yourself out!” And wittily in her turn, she seemed to drive him away. + 

“But you have not drawn yet, you must draw too,” he said, without managing the m in “must,” and drew a step backwards, invitingly. + 

“I?” she said again, with an inflection of surprise which seemed to have reference to something else than his invitation. She stood a moment in smiling confusion, then as if magnetized followed him a few steps toward the punch-table. + 

But interest in the activity there seemed to have fallen away. Someone was still drawing, but without an audience. The cards were covered with futilities, they had all done their worst, and now the current had set in another direction. Directly the doctors had left the scene, the word had gone round for a dance, already the tables were being pushed back; spies were posted at the doors of the writing- and music-rooms, with orders to give the sign in case the “old man,” Krokowski, or the Oberin should show themselves. A young Slavic youth attacked con espressione the keyboard of the little nut-wood piano, and the first couple began to turn about within an irregular circle of chairs and tables, on which the spectators perched themselves. + 

Hans Castorp dismissed the departing punch-table with a wave of the hand, and indicated with his chin two empty seats in a sheltered corner of the small salon, near the portières. He did not speak, perhaps because the music was too loud. He drew up a seat⁠—it was a reclining-chair with plush upholstery⁠—for Frau Chauchat, in the corner he had indicated, and took for himself a creaking, crackling basket-chair with curling arms, in which he sat down, bent forward toward her, his own arms on the arms of the chair, her pencil in his hand and his feet drawn back under his seat. She lay buried in the plushy slope, her knees brought high; notwithstanding which, she crossed one leg over the other, and swung her foot in the air, in its black patent-leather shoe and black silk stocking spanned over the anklebone. There was a coming and going in the room, some of the guests standing up to dance, while others took their places to rest. + 

“You’ve a new frock on,” he said, as an excuse for looking at her; and heard her answer. + 

“New? So you are acquainted with my wardrobe?” + 

“Am I right?” + 

“Yes⁠—I had it made here lately; the tailor down in the village, Lukaçek, did it. He does work for several of the ladies up here. Do you like it?” + 

“Very much,” he said, surveying her once more and then casting down his eyes. + 

“Would you like to dance?” he added. + 

“Would you like to?” she asked, with lifted brows, yet smiling, and he answered: + 

“I would, if you wished.” + 

“That is not so brave as I thought you were,” she said, and when he laughed deprecatingly, she went on: “Your cousin has gone up already.” + 

“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed her, unnecessarily. “I noticed he had gone, he is probably in the rest-cure by now.” + 

“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 he is pedantic. You think we are pedantic, we Germans⁠—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. We love what we have not⁠—that is proverbial,” Hans Castorp asserted. “Lately,” he went on, “I’ve thought very much about liberty. That is, I’ve heard the word so often, I’ve begun to think about it. Je te le dirai en français, what I have been thinking. Ce que toute l’Europe nomme la liberté, c’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, not exposed to intellectual dangers, tu sais. Mais il n’est pas bourgeois, il est militaire.” + 

“Not exposed?” she repeated his word, not without difficulty. “Tu veux dire une nature tout à fait ferme, sûr d’elle-même? Mais il est sérieusement malade, ton pauvre cousin.” + 

“Who told you so?” + 

“We all know about each other, up here.” + 

“Was it Hofrat Behrens?” + 

“Peut-être en me faisant voir ces 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.⁠—What do you say, shall we dance?” + 

“Oh, no, it would be childish⁠—behind their backs! Aussitôt que Behrens reviendra, tout le monde va se précipiter sur les chaises. Ce sera fort ridicule.” + 

“Have you such respect for him as that?” + 

“For whom?” she said, giving her query a curt, foreign intonation. + 

“For Behrens.” + 

“Mais va donc avec ton Behrens! But there really is not room to dance. Et puis sur le tapis⁠—Let us look on.” + 

“Yes, let’s,” he assented, and gazed beyond her, with his blue eyes, his grandfather’s musing eyes, in his pale young face, at the antics of the masked patients in salon and writing-room. There was the Silent Sister capering with the Blue Peter, there was Frau Salomon as master of ceremonies, dressed in evening clothes with a white waistcoat and swelling shirtfront; she wore a monocle and a tiny painted moustache, and twirled upon tiny, high-heeled patent-leather shoes, that came out oddly beneath her black trousers, as she danced with the Pierrot, whose bloodred lips stared from his ghastly white face, with the eyes of an albino rabbit. The Greek flourished his symmetrical legs in their lavender tights alongside the darkly glittering Rasmussen in his low-cut gown. Lawyer Paravant in his kimono, Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt, and young Gänser danced all three together, with their arms round each other. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing the bristles as though they were a man’s hair. + 

“Yes, let’s,” Hans Castorp repeated, mechanically. They spoke in low tones, covered by the music. “Let us sit here, and look on, as though in a dream. For it is like a dream to me, that we are sitting like this⁠—comme un rêve singulièrement profond, car il faut dormir très profondément pour rêver comme çela. 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 answered. “Sous aucun égard. Nous sommes peut-être des delicate 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 connaissançe 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,” went on Hans Castorp, “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 le 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 tutoyé 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.” + 

It took time for the words to penetrate his consciousness. Then he started up, staring about him as though roused out of a dream. The conversation had proceeded rather slowly, for Hans Castorp spoke French uneasily, feeling for the sense. The piano had been silent awhile, now it sounded again, under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had relieved the Slavic youth. He put some music in place, and Fräulein Engelhart sat down beside him to turn the leaves. The party was thinning out; many of the guests had presumably taken up the horizontal. From where they sat they could see no one; but there were players at the card-tables in the writing-room. + 

“You are going to⁠—what?” Hans Castorp asked, quite dashed. + 

“I am going away,” she repeated, smiling with pretended surprise at his discomfiture. + 

“Impossible,” he said. “You are jesting.” + 

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

“When?” + 

“Tomorrow. Après dîner.” + 

There took place within him a feeling of general collapse. He said: “Where?” + 

“Far away.” + 

“To Daghestan?” + 

“Tu n’es pas mal instruit. Peut-être, pour le moment⁠—” + 

“Are you cured, then?” + 

“Quant à ça⁠—non. But Behrens thinks there is not greatly more to be gained here, for the present. C’est pourquoi je vais risquer un petit changement d’air.” + 

“Then you are coming back!” + 

“That is the question. Or, rather, the question is 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: d’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.” + 

“You think so, Clavdia?” + 

“Mon prénom aussi! Vraiment tu les prends bien au sérieux, les coutumes du carnaval!” + 

“Then you know about my case too?” + 

“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,” Hans Castorp said, “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 a question⁠—ask it in all earnestness: six months ago, when I left the table for my first examination⁠—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—” + 

“Behrens had told you?” + 

“Toujours çe 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 connaissançe, tu me parles de départ!” + 

“Je te répète, que nous aurions pu causer plus tôt.” + 

“You would have liked 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 connaissançe 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 connaissançe 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 de 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 was silent; sitting as before, with his feet twined together, thrust back beneath the creaking wicker chair, leaning toward the figure opposite, in its cocked hat; her pencil between his fingers. With Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes he looked out into the room. It was empty, the company dispersed. The piano, in the corner diagonally opposite, was being touched softly and lightly with one hand, by the Mannheimer, by whose side sat Fräulein Engelhart, turning the leaves of a music-book she held on her knee. At this pause which had ensued in the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, the pianist left off playing, and sat with his hand in his lap, while Fräulein Engelhart continued to turn the pages of her music-book. These four alone remained, from all the carnival merrymakers; they sat here motionless. The silence lasted several minutes. Deeper and deeper, under its weight, sank the heads of the pair at the piano: his toward his keyboard, hers toward her book; but at last the two as by common consent stood up cautiously, and carefully refraining from any glance in the direction of the opposite corner, their heads drawn down in their shoulders, their arms hanging stiffly at their sides, disappeared together, on tiptoe, through the writing-room. + 

“Everyone is going,” said Frau Chauchat. “C’étaient les derniers. Il se fait tard. Eh bien, la fête de carnaval est finie.” She raised her arms to remove the paper cap from her head, with its reddish braid wound round it like a wreath. “Vous connaissez les conséquences, monsieur.” + 

But Hans Castorp gainsaid them, closing his eyes, and not otherwise changing his position. He answered: “Jamais, Clavdia. Jamais je te dirai ‘vous,’ jamais de la vie ni de la mort, if one may say that⁠—one should be able to. Cette forme de s’adresser à une personne, qui est cette 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, Clavdia, 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 frissonement de mes membres, c’est le contraire d’un incident, car ce n’est rien d’autre”⁠—and his pale face with the twitching lips bent closer over 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 fea demandé ton crayon, pour faire enfin ta connaissançe mondaine, parceque je t’aimais irraisonablement, 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 struck together. As he raved, he had drawn one foot from under his chair, and moved it forward, so that the other knee touched the floor, there he knelt before her, his head bent, his whole body quivering. “Je t’aime,” he babbled, “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, violently, bowed as it was toward 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 caressed softly the close-cropped hair at the back of his head. + 

“Petit bourgeois!” she said. “Joli bourgeois à la petite tache humide. Est-ce vrai que tu m’aimes tant?” + 

And beside himself at her touch, now on both his knees, with bowed head and closed eyes, he went on: “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—parcequ’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 stir, or open his eyes; on his knees with bowed head, his hands holding the silver pencil outstretched before him, he remained, swaying and quivering. + 

She said: “Tu es en effet un galant qui sait solliciter d’une manière profonde, à l’allemande.” And she set the paper cap on his head. + 

“Adieu, mon prince Carnaval! Vous aurez une mauvaise ligne de fièvre ce soir, je vous le prédis.” + 

She slipped from her chair, and glided over the carpet to the door, where she paused an instant, framed in the doorway; half turned toward him, with one bare arm lifted high, her hand upon the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly: “N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon.” + 

And went out. + 