Chapter + 

IV + 

Necessary Purchases + 

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

There had come a violent change of scene. + 

On the visitor’s second full day up here, the most brilliant summer weather prevailed. Above the aspiring lance-shaped tips of the fir-trees the sky gleamed deepest blue, the village down in the valley glared white in the heat, and the air was filled with the sound, half gay, half pensive, of bells, from the cows that roamed the slopes, cropping the short, sun-warmed meadow grass. At early breakfast the ladies appeared in lingerie blouses, some with openwork sleeves, which did not become them all alike. In particular it did not suit Frau Stöhr, the skin of whose arms was too porous; such a fashion was distinctly not for her. The masculine population too had in various ways taken cognizance of the fine weather: they sported mohair coats and linen suits⁠—Joachim Ziemssen had put on white flannel trousers with his blue coat, and thus arrayed looked more military than ever. + 

As for Settembrini, he had more than once announced his intention of changing. “Heavens, how hot the sun is!” he said, as he and the cousins strolled down to the village after luncheon. “I see I shall have to put on thinner clothes.” Yet after this explicit expression of his intentions, he continued to appear in his check trousers and pilot coat with the wide lapels. They were probably all his wardrobe could boast. + 

But on the third day it seemed as though nature suffered a sudden reverse; everything turned topsy-turvy. Hans Castorp could scarcely trust his eyes. It happened when they were lying in their balconies, some twenty minutes after the midday meal. Swiftly the sun hid its face, ugly turf-coloured clouds drew up over the southwestern ridge, and a wind from a strange quarter, whose chill pierced to the marrow, as though it came out of some unknown icy region, swept suddenly through the valley; down went the thermometer⁠—a new order obtained. + 

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

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

“Certainly,” answered Joachim. “We know that wind. When it comes, it means sleighing.” + 

“Rubbish!” Hans Castorp said. “If I remember rightly, it is the beginning of August.” + 

But Joachim, versed in the signs of the region, knew whereof he spoke. For in a few minutes, accompanied by repeated claps of thunder, a furious snowstorm set in, so heavy that the landscape seemed wrapped in white smoke, and of village and valley scarcely anything could be seen. + 

It snowed away all the afternoon. The heat was turned on. Joachim availed himself of his fur sack, and was not deterred from the service of the cure; but Hans Castorp took refuge in his room, pushed up a chair to the hot pipes, and remained there, looking with frequent head-shakings at the enormity outside. By next morning the storm had ceased. The thermometer showed a few degrees above freezing, but the snow lay a foot deep, and a completely wintry landscape spread itself before Hans Castorp’s astonished eyes. They had turned off the heat. The temperature of the room was 45°. + 

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin, in bitter irony. + 

“You can’t tell,” answered the matter-of-fact Joachim. “We may have fine summer weather yet. Even in September it is very possible. The truth is, the seasons here are not so distinct from each other; they run in together, so to speak, and don’t keep to the calendar. The sun in winter is often so strong that you take off your coat, and perspire as you walk. And in summer⁠—well, you see for yourself! And then the snow, that puts out all one’s calculations. It snows in January, but in May not much less, and, as you observe, it snows in August too. On the whole, one may say there is never a month without snow; you may take that for a rule. In short, there are winter days and summer days, spring and autumn days; but regular seasons we don’t actually have up here.” + 

“A fine mixed-up state of affairs,” said Hans Castorp. In overcoat and galoshes he went with his cousin down to the village, to buy himself blankets for the out-of-doors cure, since it was plain his plaid would not suffice. For the moment he even weighed the thought of purchasing a fur sack as well, but gave it up, indeed, felt a certain revulsion from the idea. + 

“No, no,” he said, “we’ll stop at the covers. I’ll have use for them down below, and everybody has covers; there’s nothing strange or exciting about them. But a fur sack is altogether too special⁠—if I buy one, it is as if I were going to settle down here, as if I belonged, understand what I mean? No, for the present we’ll let it go at that; it would absolutely not be worth while to buy a sack for the few weeks I’m up here.” + 

Joachim agreed, and they acquired two camel’s-hair rugs like his own, in a fine and well-stocked shop in the English quarter. They were in natural colour, long, broad, and delightfully soft, and were to be sent at once to the International Sanatorium Berghof, Room 34: Hans Castorp looked forward to using them that very afternoon. + 

This, of course, was after second breakfast, for otherwise the daily programme left no time sufficient to go down into the Platz. It was raining now, and the snow in the streets had turned to a slush that spattered as they walked. They overtook Settembrini on the road, climbing up to the sanatorium under an umbrella, bareheaded. The Italian looked sallow; his mood was obviously elegiac. In well-chosen, clearly enunciated phrases he complained of the cold and damp from which he suffered so bitterly. If they would only heat the building! But the ruling powers, in their penuriousness, had the fire go out directly it stopped snowing⁠—an idiotic rule, an insult to human intelligence. Hans Castorp objected that presumably a moderate temperature was part of the regimen of the cure; it would certainly not do to coddle the patients. But Settembrini answered with embittered scorn. Oh, of course, the regimen of the cure! Those august and inviolate rules! Hans Castorp was right in referring to them, as he did, with bated breath. Yet it was rather striking (of course only in the pleasantest sense) that the rules most honoured in the observance were precisely those which chimed with the financial interest of the proprietors of the establishment; whereas, on the other hand, to those less favourable they were inclined to shut an eye. The cousins laughed, and Settembrini began to speak of his deceased father, who had been brought to his mind in connection with the talk about heated rooms. + 

“My father,” he said slowly, in tones replete with filial piety, “my father was a most delicately organized man, sensitive in body as in soul. How he did love his tiny, warm little study! In winter a temperature of twenty degrees Réaumur must always obtain there, by means of a small red-hot stove. When you entered it from the corridor on a day of cold and damp, or when the cutting tramontana blew, the warmth of it laid itself about you like a shawl, so that for very pleasure your eyes would fill with tears. The little room was stuffed with books and manuscripts, some of them of great value; he stood among them, at his narrow desk, in his blue flannel nightshirt, and devoted himself to the service of letters. He was small and delicately built, a good head shorter than I⁠—imagine!⁠—but with great tufts of grey hair on his temples, and a nose⁠—how long and pointed it was! And what a Romanist, my friends! One of the first of his time, with a rare mastery of our own tongue, and a Latin stylist such as no longer exists⁠—ah, a ‘uomo letterato’ after Boccaccio’s own heart! From far and wide scholars came to converse with him⁠—one from Haparanda, another from Krakow they came to our city of Padua, expressly to pay him homage, and he received them with dignified friendliness. He was a poet of distinction too, composing in his leisure tales in the most elegant Tuscan prose⁠—he was a master of the idioma gentile,” Settembrini said, rolling his native syllables with the utmost relish on his tongue and turning his head from side to side. “He laid out his little garden after Virgil’s own plan⁠—and all that he said was sane and beautiful. But warm, warm he must have it in his little room; otherwise he would tremble with cold, and he could weep with anger if they let him freeze. And now imagine, Engineer, and you, Lieutenant, what I, the son of my father, must suffer in this accursed and barbarous land, where even at summer’s height the body shakes with cold, and the spirit is tortured and debased by the sights it sees.⁠—Oh, it is hard! What types about us! This frantic devil of a Hofrat, Krokowski”⁠—Settembrini pretended to trip over the name⁠—“Krokowski, the father-confessor, who hates me because I’ve too much human dignity to lend myself to his papish practices.⁠—And at my table⁠—what sort of society is that in which I am forced to take my food? At my right sits a brewer from Halle⁠—Magnus by name⁠—with a moustache like a bundle of hay. ‘Don’t talk to me about literature,’ says he. ‘What has it to offer? Anything but beautiful characters? What have I to do with beautiful characters? I am a practical man, and in life I come into contact with precious few.’ That is the idea he has of literature⁠—beautiful characters! Mother of God! His wife sits there opposite him, losing flesh all the time, and sinking further and further into idiocy. It is a filthy shame.” + 

Hans Castorp and Joachim were in silent agreement about this talk of Settembrini’s: they found it querulous and seditious in tone, if also highly entertaining and “plastic” in its verbal pungency and animus. Hans Castorp laughed good-humouredly over the “bundle of hay,” likewise over the “beautiful characters”⁠—or, rather, the drolly despairing way Settembrini spoke of them. + 

Then he said: “Good Lord, yes, the society is always mixed in a place like this, I suppose. One’s not allowed to choose one’s tablemates⁠—that would lead to goodness knows what! At our table there is a woman of the same sort, a Frau Stöhr⁠—I think you know her? Ghastly ignorant, I must say⁠—sometimes when she rattles on, one doesn’t know where to look. But she complains a lot about her temperature, and how relaxed she feels, and I’m afraid she is by no means a light case. That seems so strange to me: diseased and stupid both⁠—I don’t exactly know how to express it, but it gives me a most peculiar feeling, when somebody is so stupid, and then ill into the bargain. It must be the most melancholy thing in life. One doesn’t know what to make of it; one wants to feel a proper respect for illness, of course⁠—after all there is a certain dignity about it, if you like. But when such asininity comes on top of it⁠—‘cosmic’ for ‘cosmetic,’ and other howlers like that⁠—one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to weep. It is a regular dilemma for the human feelings⁠—I find it more deplorable than I can say. What I mean is, it’s not consistent, it doesn’t hang together; I can’t get used to the idea. One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual. At least as a rule⁠—or I don’t know, perhaps I am saying more than I could stand for,” he finished. “It was only because we happened to speak of it”⁠—He stopped in confusion. + 

Joachim too looked rather uncomfortable, and Settembrini lifted his eyebrows and said not a word, with an air of waiting politely for the end of his speech. He was, in fact, holding off until Hans Castorp should break down entirely before he answered. But now he said: “Sapristi, Engineer! You are displaying a most unexpected gift of philosophy! By your own theory, you must be yourself more ailing than you look, you are so obviously possessed of esprit. But, if you will permit me to say so, I can hardly subscribe to your deductions; I must deny them; my position is one of absolute dissent. I am, as you see, rather intolerant than otherwise in things of the intellect; I would rather be reproached as a pedant than suffer to pass unchallenged a point of view which seemed to me so untenable as this of yours.” + 

“But, Herr Settembrini, I⁠—” + 

“Per‑mit me. I know what you would say: that the views you represent are not, of necessity, your own; that you have only chanced upon that one of all the possible ones there are, as it were, in the air, and you try it on, without personal responsibility. It befits your time of life, thus to avoid the settled convictions of the mature man, and to make experiments with a variety of points of view. Placet experiri,” he quoted, giving the Italian pronunciation to the c. “That is a good saying. But what troubles me is that your experiment should lead you in just this direction. I doubt if it is a question of sheer chance. I fear the presence of a general tendency, which threatens to crystallize into a trait of character, unless one makes head against it. I feel it my duty, therefore, to correct you. You said that the sight of dullness and disease going hand in hand must be the most melancholy in life. I grant you, I grant you that. I too prefer an intelligent ailing person to a consumptive idiot. But I take issue where you regard the combination of disease with dullness as a sort of aesthetic inconsistency, an error in taste on the part of nature, a ‘dilemma for the human feelings,’ as you were pleased to express yourself. When you professed to regard disease as something so refined, so⁠—what did you call it?⁠—possessing a ‘certain dignity’⁠—that it doesn’t ‘go with’ stupidity. That was the expression you used. Well, I say no! Disease has nothing refined about it, nothing dignified. Such a conception is in itself pathological, or at least tends in that direction. Perhaps I may best arouse your mistrust of it if I tell you how ancient and ugly this conception is. It comes down to us from a past seething with superstition, in which the idea of humanity had degenerated and deteriorated into sheer caricature; a past full of fears, in which well-being and harmony were regarded as suspect and emanating from the devil, whereas infirmity was equivalent to a free pass to heaven. Reason and enlightenment have banished the darkest of these shadows that tenanted the soul of man⁠—not entirely, for even yet the conflict is in progress. But this conflict, my dear sirs, means work, earthly labour, labour for the earth, for the honour and the interests of mankind; and by that conflict daily steeled anew, the powers of reason and enlightenment will in the end set humanity wholly free and lead it in the path of progress and civilization toward an even brighter, milder, and purer light.” + 

“Lord bless us,” thought Hans Castorp, in shamefaced consternation. “What a homily! How, I wonder, did I call all that down on my head? I must say, I find it rather prosy. And why does he talk so much about work all the time? It is his constant theme; not a very pertinent one up here, one would think.” Aloud he said: “How beautifully you do talk, Herr Settembrini! What you say is very well worth hearing⁠—and could not be more⁠—more plastically expressed, I should think.” + 

“Backsliding,” continued Settembrini, as he lifted his umbrella away above the head of a passerby, “spiritual backsliding in the direction of that dark and tortured age, that, believe me, Engineer, is disease⁠—a disease already sufficiently studied, to which various names have been given: one from the terminology of aesthetics and psychology, another from the domain of politics⁠—all of them academic terms which are not to the point, and which I will spare you. But as in the spiritual life everything is interrelated, one thing growing out of another, and since one may not reach out one’s little finger to the Devil, lest he take the whole hand, and therewith the whole man; since, on the other side, a sound principle can produce only sound results, no matter which end one begins at⁠—so disease, far from being something too refined, too worthy of reverence, to be associated with dullness, is, in itself, a degradation of mankind, a degradation painful and offensive to conceive. It may, in the individual case, be treated with consideration; but to pay it homage is⁠—mark my words⁠—an aberration, and the beginning of intellectual confusion. This woman you have mentioned to me⁠—you will pardon me if I do not trouble to recall her name⁠—ah, thank you, Frau Stöhr⁠—it is not, it seems to me, the case of this ridiculous woman which places the human feelings in the dilemma to which you refer. She is ill, and she is limited; her case is hopeless, and the matter is simple. There is nothing left but to pity and shrug one’s shoulders. The dilemma, my dear sir, the tragedy, begins where nature has been cruel enough to split the personality, to shatter its harmony by imprisoning a noble and ardent spirit within a body not fit for the stresses of life. Have you heard of Leopardi, Engineer, or you, Lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my own land, a crippled, ailing man, born with a great soul, which his sufferings were constantly humiliating and dragging down into the depths of irony⁠—its lamentations rend the heart to hear.” + 

And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the beautiful syllables melt upon his tongue, as he closed his eyes and swayed his head from side to side, heedless that his hearers understood not a syllable. Obviously it was all done for the sake of impressing his companions with his memory and his pronunciation. + 

“But you don’t understand; you hear the words, yet without grasping their tragic import. My dear sirs, can you comprehend what it means when I tell you that it was the love of woman which the crippled Leopardi was condemned to renounce; that this it principally was which rendered him incapable of avoiding the embitterment of his soul? Fame and virtue were shadows to him, nature an evil power⁠—and so she is, stupid and evil both, I agree with him there⁠—he even despaired, horrible to say, he even despaired of science and progress! Here, Engineer, is the true tragedy. Here you have your ‘dilemma for the human feelings,’ here, and not in the case of that wretched woman, with whose name I really cannot burden my memory. Do not, for heaven’s sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering! A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul⁠—though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul. A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement. In most cases he is little better than a carcass⁠—” + 

“Funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, on Herr Settembrini’s farther side. “You were saying something quite like that just lately.” + 

“Was I?” said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it may be something of the kind went through my head.” + 

Settembrini was silent a few paces. Then he said: “So much the better. So much the better if that is true. I am far from claiming to expound an original philosophy⁠—such is not my office. If our engineer here has been making observations in harmony with my own, that only confirms my surmise that he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view. The young man with parts is no unwritten page, he is rather one upon which all the writing has already been done, in sympathetic ink, the good and the bad together; it is the schoolmaster’s task to bring out the good, to obliterate forever the bad, by the methods of his profession.⁠—You have been making purchases?” he asked, in a lighter tone. + 

“No,” Hans Castorp said. “That is, nothing but⁠—” + 

“We ordered a pair of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim answered unconcernedly. + 

“For the afternoon cure⁠—it’s got so beastly cold; and I am supposed to do as the Romans do, up here,” Hans Castorp said, laughing and looking at the ground. + 

“Ah ha! Blankets⁠—the cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes. In fact: placet experiri,” he repeated, with his Italian pronunciation, and took his leave, for their conversation had brought them to the door of the sanatorium, where they greeted the lame concierge in his lodge. Settembrini turned off into one of the sitting-rooms, to read the newspapers before luncheon. He evidently meant to cut the second rest period. + 

“Bless us and keep us!” Hans Castorp said to Joachim, as they stood in the lift. “What a pedagogue it is! He said himself that he had the ‘pedagogic itch.’ One has to watch out with him, not to say more than one means, or he is down on you at once with all his doctrines. But after all, it is worth listening to, he talks so well; the words come jumping out of his mouth so round and appetizing⁠—when I listen to him, I keep seeing a picture of fresh hot rolls in my mind’s eye.” + 

Joachim laughed. “Better not tell him that. He’d be very put out I’m sure, to hear the sort of image his words call up in your mind.” + 

“Think so? I’m not so sure. I get the impression that it is not simply and solely for the sake of edifying us that he talks; perhaps that’s only a secondary motive. The important one, I feel sure, is the talk itself, the way he makes his words roll out, so resilient, just like a lot of rubber balls! He is very pleased when you notice the effect. I suppose Magnus, the brewer, was rather stupid, after all, with his ‘beautiful characters’; but I do think Settembrini might have said what the point really is in literature. I did not like to ask, for fear of putting my foot in it; I am not just clear about it, and this is the first time I have ever known a literary man. But if it isn’t the beautiful characters, then obviously it must be the beautiful words, and that is the impression I get from being in Settembrini’s society. What a vocabulary! and he uses the word ‘virtue’ just like that, without the slightest embarrassment. What do you make of that? I’ve never taken the word in my mouth as long as I’ve lived; in school, when the book said ‘virtus,’ we always just said ‘valour’ or something like that. It certainly gave me a queer feeling in my inside, to hear him. And it makes me nervous to hear him scolding, about the cold, and Behrens, and Frau Magnus because she is losing weight, and about pretty well everything. He is a born objector, I saw that at once, down on the existing order; and that always gives me the impression that the person is spoilt⁠—I can’t help it.” + 

“You say that,” Joachim answered consideringly, “and yet he has a kind of pride about him that makes an altogether different impression: as of a man who has great respect for himself, or for humanity in general; and I like that about him; it has something good, in my eyes.” + 

“You are right, there,” Hans Castorp answered. “He’s even austere; he makes one feel rather uncomfortable, as if you were⁠—well, shall I say as if you were being taken to task? That’s not such a bad way to describe it. Can you believe it, I had the feeling he was not at all pleased at my buying the blankets? He had something against it, and he kept dwelling on it.” + 

“Oh, no,” Joachim said after reflecting, in some surprise. “How could he have? I shouldn’t think so.” And then, thermometer in mouth, with sack and pack, he went to lie down, while Hans Castorp began at once to wash and change for dinner⁠—which was rather less than an hour away. + 

Excursus on the Sense of Time + 

When they came upstairs after the meal, the parcel containing the blankets lay on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room; and that afternoon he made use of them for the first time. The experienced Joachim instructed him in the art of wrapping himself up, as practised in the sanatorium; they all did it, and each newcomer had to learn. First the covers were spread, one after the other, over the chair, so that a sizable piece hung down at the foot. Then you sat down and began to put the inner one about you: first lengthwise, on both sides, up to the shoulders, and then from the feet up, stooping over as you sat and grasping the folded-over end, first from one side and then from the other, taking care to fit it neatly into the length, in order to ensure the greatest possible smoothness and evenness. Then you did precisely the same thing with the outer blanket⁠—it was somewhat more difficult to handle, and our neophyte groaned not a little as he stooped and stretched out his arms to practise the grips his cousin showed him. Only a few old hands, Joachim said, could wield both blankets at once, flinging them into position with three self-assured motions. This was a rare and enviable facility, to which belonged not only long years of practice, but a certain knack as well. Hans Castorp had to laugh at this, lying back in his chair with aching muscles; Joachim did not at once see anything funny in what he had said, and looked at him dubiously, but finally laughed too. + 

“There,” he said, when Hans Castorp lay at last limbless and cylindrical in his chair, with the yielding roll at the back of his neck, quite worn out with all these gymnastic exercises; “there, nothing can touch you now, not even if we were to have ten below zero.” He withdrew behind the partition, to do himself up in his turn. + 

That about the ten below zero Hans Castorp doubted; he was even now distinctly cold. He shivered repeatedly as he lay looking out through the wooden arch at the reeking, dripping damp outside, which seemed on the point of passing over into snow. It was strange that with all that humidity his cheeks still burned with a dry heat, as though he were sitting in an overheated room. He felt absurdly tired from the practice of putting on his rugs; actually, as he held up Ocean Steamships to read it, the book shook in his hands. So very fit he certainly was not⁠—and totally anaemic, as Hofrat Behrens had said; this, no doubt, was why he was so susceptible to cold. But such unpleasing sensations were outweighed by the great comfort of his position, the unanalysable, the almost mysterious properties of his reclining-chair, which he had applauded even on his first experience of it, and which reasserted themselves in the happiest way whenever he resorted to it anew. Whether due to the character of the upholstering, the inclination of the chair-back, the exactly proper width and height of the arms, or only to the appropriate consistency of the neck roll, the result was that no more comfortable provision for relaxed limbs could be conceived than that purveyed by this excellent chair. The heart of Hans Castorp rejoiced in the blessed fact that two vacant and securely tranquil hours lay before him, dedicated by the rules of the house to the principal cure of the day; he felt it⁠—though himself but a guest up here⁠—to be a most suitable arrangement. For he was by nature and temperament passive, could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him, and not to have the sense of its passing banished, wiped out or eaten up by prosaic activity. At four o’clock he partook of afternoon tea, with cake and jam. Followed a little movement in the open air, then rest again, then supper⁠—which, like all the other mealtimes, afforded a certain stimulus for eye and brain, and a certain sense of strain; after that a peep into one or other of the optical toys, the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the cinematograph. It might be still too much to say that Hans Castorp had grown used to the life up here; but at least he did have the daily routine at his fingers’ ends. + 

There is, after all, something peculiar about the process of habituating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it all off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one’s former state. It is an interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation, into the tenor of life’s main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in danger, almost in process, of being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald, unjointed monotony of its daily course. But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing-down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time, so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment. Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what “make the time pass”; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares. Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident. Our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and sweeping, flow, persisting for some six or eight days. Then, as one “gets used to the place,” a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings or, better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet. On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with a broader flow, freshly and youthfully⁠—but only the first few, for one adjusts oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or⁠—and this is a sign of low vitality⁠—it was never very well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and-twenty hours it is as though one had never been away, and the journey had been but a watch in the night. + 

We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later, he said to his cousin, and fixed him with his bloodshot eyes: “I shall never cease to find it strange that the time seems to go so slowly in a new place. I mean⁠—of course it isn’t a question of my being bored; on the contrary, I might say that I am royally entertained. But when I look back⁠—in retrospect, that is, you understand⁠—it seems to me I’ve been up here goodness only knows how long; it seems an eternity back to the time when I arrived, and did not quite understand that I was there, and you said: ‘Just get out here’⁠—don’t you remember?⁠—That has nothing whatever to do with reason, or with the ordinary ways of measuring time; it is purely a matter of feeling. Certainly it would be nonsense for me to say: ‘I feel I have been up here two months’⁠—it would be silly. All I can say is ‘very long.’ ” + 

“Yes,” Joachim answered, thermometer in mouth, “I profit by it too; while you are here, I can sort of hang on by you, as it were.” Hans Castorp laughed, to hear his cousin speak thus, quite simply, without explanation. + 

He Practises His French + 

No, after all, he was by no means, even yet, adjusted to his surroundings. Neither in familiarity with the features peculiar to life as lived up here⁠—a familiarity impossible to achieve in so few days, which, as he was quite aware, and had even said to Joachim, he could hardly hope to acquire in the three weeks of his stay⁠—nor in the adaptation of his physical organism to the prevailing peculiar atmospheric conditions. For this adaptation was bitterly hard; so hard, indeed, that it looked as though it would never be a success. + 

The daily routine was clearly articulated, carefully organized; one fell quickly into step and, by yielding oneself to the general drift, was soon proficient. After that, indeed, within the weekly round, and also within other larger divisions of time, one discovered the existence of certain regular variations of the programme, which showed themselves, one at a time, a second one sometimes appearing only after the first had repeated itself. But even the phenomena of everyday life held much that Hans Castorp had still to learn: faces and facts already noted had to be conned, new ones to be absorbed with youth’s receptivity. + 

Those great-bellied vessels, for example, with the short necks, which he had noticed the first evening standing in the corridors before certain doors. They contained oxygen; he had asked, and Joachim informed him. That was pure oxygen, six francs the container. The reviving gas was given the dying in a last effort to kindle or reinforce their strength. They drew it up through a tube. For behind those doors where such vessels were placed lay the dying⁠—the “moribundi,” as Herr Hofrat Behrens called them when Hans Castorp met him one day in the first storey. Purple of cheek, in his white smock-frock, he rowed along the corridor, and they went down the steps together. + 

“Well, and how are you, you disinterested spectator, you?” said Behrens. “Are we finding favour in your critical eye, what? Thanks so much. Yes, yes, our summer season, it’s not too bad, there’s something to be said for it. I’ve spent a little money myself to push it. But it’s a pity you won’t be here in the winter⁠—you’re stopping only eight weeks, I hear? Ah, three? That’s nothing but a weekend!⁠—won’t pay you to take off your hat. Oh well, just as you think. Only it is a pity you won’t be here for the winter; that’s when the nobs come,” he said comically, “the international nobs, down in the Platz; they don’t come except in winter⁠—you ought to see them, if only for the sake of your education. Regular high-flyers. You ought to see the jumps they make with those skis of theirs. And then the ladies! O Lord, the ladies! Birds of paradise, I tell you, and regularly out for adventure. Well, I must go in here, to my moribundus, number twenty-seven. Last stage, you know⁠—off centre. Five dozen fiascos of oxygen he’s had all together, yesterday and today, the soak! But he will be going to his own place by middle-day. Well, my dear Reuter,” he was saying as he entered, “what do you say⁠—shall we break the neck of another bottle?” The sound of his words died away as he closed the door. But Hans Castorp had had a moment’s glimpse into the background of the room, where on the pillow lay the waxen profile of a young man with a little chin beard, who slowly rolled his great eyeballs toward the open door. + 

This was the first dying man Hans Castorp had ever seen; for his father and mother, and his grandfather too had died, so to speak, behind his back. How full of dignity the young man’s head, with the little beard thrust upward, had lain upon his pillow! How speaking the glance those unnaturally great eyes had slowly turned upon the door! Hans Castorp, still quite absorbed by that glimpse, instinctively tried to make his own eyes as large, as slowly gazing and meaningful as those of the dying man, walking on as he did so, toward the stairs, and encountering a lady who came out of a room behind him and overtook him at the landing. He did not at once realize that it was Madame Chauchat; she, on her side, smiled at the eyes he was making at her, put her hands to the braids at the back of her head, and passed before him down the stairs, soundless, supple, with her head somewhat thrust out. + 

Acquaintances he made scarcely any in these early days, nor for a long time afterwards. The daily routine was not favourable. Hans Castorp, too, was of a retiring disposition, felt himself very much the “disinterested spectator,” as Hofrat Behrens had called him, and was in general content with the society and conversation of his cousin Joachim. The corridor nurse, indeed, continued to crane her neck after them, until Joachim, who had already favoured her with a little converse now and then, introduced his cousin. She wore the ribbon of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, and spoke with excruciating affectation. On closer acquaintance, indeed, one got the impression that her reason had suffered on the rack of continual boredom. It was hard to get away from her, she showed such evident distress whenever the conversation gave signs of languishing; when the cousins seemed about to go on their way, she sought to hold them by a stream of words, by glances and despairing smiles, until, for very pity, they refrained. She spoke at random, of her papa, who was a jurist, and of her cousin, who was a physician⁠—obviously with the idea of presenting herself in a good light and impressing them with her cultured origin. Her present charge, she said, was the son of a Coburg doll-manufacturer, named Rotbein; the disease had attacked young Fritz’s intestinal tract. That was hard for all concerned; the gentlemen could understand how hard it was, for one who came from cultured surroundings and had the delicacy of feeling of the upper classes. And one couldn’t turn one’s back a minute. A little time ago she had just gone out a few minutes⁠—to get some tooth-powder, in fact; when she came back, there sat her patient in bed, with a glass of stout, a salame, a thick wedge of rye bread, and a pickle before him. All these clandestine dainties his family had sent to give him strength. The next day, of course, he was more dead than alive. He was himself hastening his own end. But that would be only a mercy for him, a blessed relief. For her, Sister Berta, however⁠—whose real name was Alfreda Schildknecht⁠—it would mean little or nothing; she would just go on to another case, in a more or less advanced stage, either here or elsewhere; such was the prospect that opened before her⁠—and there was no other. + 

Yes, Hans Castorp said, her calling was a hard one, but satisfying, he should think. + 

Of course, she answered, it was. Satisfying, but very hard. + 

Well, kind regards to the patient⁠—and the cousins tried to take leave. + 

But she so hung upon them, with words and looks, that it was painful to see, putting forth all her powers to hold them only a little longer⁠—it would have been cruel not to have vouchsafed her another few minutes. + 

“He is asleep,” she said. “He does not need me. I came out here for a second or so.” She began complaining about Hofrat Behrens, whose manner with her was altogether too free, considering her origin. She much preferred Dr. Krokowski, she found him so full of soul. Then she returned to her papa and her cousin, her mental resources being exhausted. In vain she struggled to hold the young men, letting her voice rise until it was almost a shriek as she saw them moving. They escaped her finally and went; she kept on looking after them awhile, her body bent forward, her gaze so avid it seemed as though she would fairly suck them back with her eyes. Her breast was wrung with a sigh as she turned and went into her patient’s room. + 

Hans Castorp made but one other acquaintance in these days: the pale, black-clad Mexican lady he had seen in the garden, whose nickname was Tous-les-deux. It came to pass that he heard from her own lips the tragic formula; and being forearmed, preserved a suitable demeanour and was satisfied with himself afterwards. The cousins met her before the front door, as they were setting forth on their prescribed walk after early breakfast. She was restlessly ranging there, with her pacing step, her legs bent at the knee-joints, wrapped in a black cashmere shawl, a black veil wound about her disordered silver hair and tied under her chin, her ageing face, with the large writhen mouth, gleaming dead-white against her mourning. Joachim, bareheaded as usual, greeted her with a bow, which she slowly acknowledged, the furrows deepening in her narrow forehead as she looked at him. Then, seeing a new face, she paused and waited, nodding gently as they came up to her; obviously she found it of importance to learn if the stranger was acquainted with her sad case, and to hear what he would say about it. Joachim presented his cousin. She drew her hand out of her shawl and gave it to him, a veined, emaciated, yellowish hand, with many rings, as she continued to gaze in his face. + 

Then it came: “Tous les dé, monsieur,” she said. “Tous les dé, vous savez.” + 

“Je le sais, madame,” Hans Castorp answered gently, “et je le regrette beaucoup.” + 

The lax pouches of skin under her jet-black eyes were larger and heavier than he had ever seen. She exhaled a faint odour as of fading flowers. A mild and pensive feeling stole about his heart. + 

“Merci,” she said, with a loose, clacking pronunciation, oddly consonant with her broken appearance. Her large mouth drooped tragically at one corner. She drew her hand back beneath her mantle, inclined her head, and turned away. + 

But Hans Castorp said as they walked on: “You see, I didn’t mind it at all, I got on with her quite well; I always do with such people; I understand instinctively how to go at them⁠—don’t you think so? I even think, on the whole, I get on better with sad people than with jolly ones⁠—goodness knows why. Perhaps it’s because I’m an orphan, and lost my parents early; but when people are very serious, or down in the mouth, or somebody dies, it doesn’t deject or embarrass me; I feel quite in my element, a good deal more so than when everything is going on greased wheels. I was thinking just lately that it is pretty flat of the women up here to take on as they do about death and things connected with death, so that they take such pains to shield them from contact with it, and bring the Eucharist at mealtimes, and that. I call it very feeble of them. Don’t you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime. Funerals have something very edifying; I always think one ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make a bad joke, the way they do in ordinary life. It’s good for people to be serious, once in a way. I’ve sometimes asked myself if I ought not to have become a clergyman⁠—in a certain way it wouldn’t have suited me so badly.⁠—I hope I didn’t make any mistake in my French?” + 

“No,” Joachim answered, “ ‘Je le regrette beaucoup’ was perfectly right as far as it went.” + 

Politically Suspect + 

Regular variations in the daily routine began to discover themselves. The first was Sunday, Sunday with a band on the terrace, which, it appeared, played there once a fortnight. Hans Castorp had arrived in the latter half of one of these periods. He had come on a Tuesday, and thus the Sunday was his fifth day up here⁠—a day whose springlike character contrasted with the late extraordinary change and relapse into winter. It was mild and fresh, with pure white clouds in a pale blue sky, and gentle sunshine over vale and slopes, which displayed once more the green proper to the season, for the recent snow had been fated to speedy melting. + 

All hands, it was plain, took pains to observe Sunday and distinguish it from the rest of the week, management and guest seconding each other in their efforts to this end. At early breakfast there was seed-cake, and each guest had before his place a small glass with a few flowers, mountain pinks and even Alpine roses, which the gentlemen stuck in their buttonholes. Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund had put on a black frock-coat with a spotted waistcoat, and the ladies’ toilets were suitably festal and diaphanous. Frau Chauchat appeared in a flowing lace matinée, with open sleeves. As she entered and the glass door crashed into its lock behind her, she paused a second facing the room and gracefully as it were presented herself before she glided to her table. The garment so became her that Hans Castorp’s neighbour, the Danzig schoolmistress, was quite ravished. Even the barbaric pair at the “bad” Russian table had taken notice of the day: he by exchanging his leather jacket for a short coat, and the felt boots for leather shoes; she, though she still wore the soiled feather boa, by putting on a green silk blouse with a neck-ruche. Hans Castorp wrinkled his brows when he saw them, and coloured⁠—he seemed, since he had been up here, to blush so easily. + 

Directly after second breakfast the concert began on the terrace; there were all kinds of horns and woodwind, and they played by turns sprightly and sostenuto, until nearly luncheon-time. The morning rest, during the concert, was not obligatory. A few guests did regale themselves with this feast for the ears, at the same time lying on their balconies; in the garden rest-hall a few chairs were occupied. But the majority sat at the small, white tables on the covered platform, while the more frivolous spirits, finding it too prim to sit upon chairs, encamped on the stone steps that led down into the garden, where they presently gave evidence of their high spirits. These were youthful patients of both sexes, most of whose names or faces Hans Castorp knew by now. There were Hermine Kleefeld, and Herr Albin⁠—who carried about a great flowered box of chocolates, and offered them to all the guests, he himself eating none, but with a benevolent, paternal air smoking gold-tipped cigarettes; there were the thick-lipped youth who belonged to the Half-Lung Club, the thin and ivory-coloured Fräulein Levi, an ash-blond young man who answered to the name of Rasmussen and carried his hands breast-high, with the wrists relaxed, like a pair of flippers; Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, a woman of full bodily habit, in a red frock, who had attached herself to the group of young folk; the tall, thin-haired young man who could play out of the Midsummer Night’s Dream sat on the step behind her, his arms about his bony knees, and gazed steadfastly down on the tanned back of her neck. There was a red-haired Greek girl, another of unknown origin with a face like a tapir’s; the voracious lad with the thick eyeglasses, and another fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, with a monocle stuck in his eye, who carried his little finger, with its abnormally long nail shaped like a salt-spoon, to his mouth when he coughed, and was manifestly a first-class donkey⁠—these, and numerous others. + 

The person with the fingernail, Joachim related in a low voice, had been only a light case when he came. He had had no fever and had been sent up merely as a precautionary measure, by his father, who was a physician. The Hofrat had advised a stay of three months. The three months had passed, and now he had 100 to 100.5 degrees of fever and was seriously ill. But he lived so wide of all common sense that he needed his ears boxed. + 

The cousins sat at a table by themselves, rather apart from the others, for Hans Castorp was smoking with his dark beer, which he had brought out from breakfast. From time to time his cigar gave him a little pleasure. Rendered torpid, as often, by the beer and the music, he sat with his head on one side and his mouth slightly open, watching the gay, resortish scene, feeling, not as a disturbing influence, but rather as heightening the general singularity, and lending it one mental fillip the more, the fact that all these people were inwardly attacked by well-nigh resistless decay, and that most of them were feverish. They sat at the little tables drinking effervescent lemonade; the group on the steps were photographing each other. Postage stamps were exchanged. The red-haired Greek girl sketched Herr Rasmussen’s portrait on a drawing-pad, but would not let him see it. She turned this way and that, laughing with wide-open mouth, showing her broad far-apart teeth⁠—it was long before he could snatch it from her. Hermine Kleefeld perched on her step, eyes half open, beating time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper; she permitted Herr Albin to fasten a bunch of wild flowers on the front of her blouse. The youth with the voluptuous lips, sitting at Frau Salomon’s feet, turned his head upwards to talk with her, while behind them the thin-haired pianist directed his unchanging gaze down the back of her neck. + 

The physicians came and mingled with the guests of the cure, Hofrat Behrens in his white smock, Krokowski in his black. They passed along the row of tables, the Hofrat letting fall a pleasantry at nearly every one, till a wave of merriment followed in his wake; and so down the steps among the young folk, the female element of which straightway trooped up sidling and becking about Dr. Krokowski, while the Hofrat honoured the sabbath by performing a “stunt” with his bootlaces before the gentlemen’s eyes. He rested one mighty foot upon a step, unfastened the laces, gripped them with practised technique in one hand, and without employing the other, hooked them up again crosswise, with such speed and agility that the beholders marvelled, and many of them tried to emulate him, but in vain. + 

Somewhat later Settembrini appeared on the terrace. He came out of the dining-room leaning on his cane, dressed as usual in his pilot coat and yellow check trousers, looked about him with his critical, alert, and elegant air, and approached the cousins’ table. “Bravo!” he said, and asked permission to sit with them. + 

“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland! I rejoice to see you in your element, Engineer⁠—you have a feeling for national atmosphere, it seems. May I bask in the sunshine of your well-being?” + 

Hans Castorp looked lowering⁠—his features took on that expression directly he set eyes on the Italian. He said: “You are late for the concert, Herr Settembrini; it must be nearly over. You don’t care for music?” + 

“Not to order,” responded Settembrini. “Not by the calendar week. Not when it reeks of the prescription counter and is doled out to me by the authorities for the good of my health. I cling to my freedom⁠—or rather to such vestiges of freedom and personal dignity as remain to the likes of us. At these affairs I play the guest, as you do up here: I come for a quarter-hour and go away⁠—it gives me the illusion of independence. That it is more than an illusion I do not claim⁠—enough if it please me! It is different with your cousin. For him it all belongs to the service⁠—that is the light, is it not, Lieutenant, in which you regard it? Ah, yes, I know, you have the trick of hugging your pride, even in a state of slavery. A puzzling trick; not everybody in Europe understands it. Music? You were asking if I profess to be an amateur of music? Well, when you say amateur” (Hans Castorp could not recall saying anything of the sort), “the word is perhaps not ill chosen; it has a slight suggestion of superficiality⁠—yes, very well, I am an amateur of music⁠—which is not to say that I set great store by it; not as I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.⁠—Music? It is the half-articulate art, the dubious, the irresponsible, the insensible. Perhaps you will object that she can be clear when she likes. But so can nature, so can a brook⁠—what good is that to us? That is not true clarity, it is a dreamy, inexpressive, irresponsible clarity, without consequences and therefore dangerous, because it betrays one into soft complacence.⁠—Let music play her loftiest role, she will thereby but kindle the emotions, whereas what concerns us is to awaken the reason. Music is to all appearance movement itself⁠—yet, for all that, I suspect her of quietism. Let me state my point by the method of exaggeration: my aversion from music rests on political grounds.” + 

Hans Castorp could not refrain from slapping his knee as he exclaimed that never in all his life before had he heard the like. + 

“Pray do not, on that account, refuse to entertain it,” Settembrini said with a smile. “Music, as a final incitement to the spirit of men, is invaluable⁠—as a force which draws onward and upward the spirit she finds prepared for her ministrations. But literature must precede her. By music alone the world would get no further forward. Alone, she is a danger. For you, personally, Engineer, she is beyond all doubt dangerous. I saw it in your face as I came up.” + 

Hans Castorp laughed. + 

“Oh, you shouldn’t look at my face, Herr Settembrini. You can’t believe how the air up here sets me on fire. It is harder than I thought to get acclimatized.” + 

“I fear you deceive yourself.” + 

“How so? I know, at least, how deucedly hot and tired I am all the time.” + 

“It seems to me we should be grateful to the management for the concert,” Joachim said reflectively. “I wouldn’t contradict you, Herr Settembrini, because you look at the question from a higher point of view, so to speak, as an author. But I find one ought to be grateful up here for a bit of music. I am far from being particularly musical, and then the pieces they play are not exactly elevating, neither classic nor modern, but just ordinary band-music. Still, it is a pleasant change. It takes up a couple of hours very decently; I mean it breaks them up and fills them in, so there is something to them, by comparison with the other days, hours, and weeks that whisk by like nothing at all. You see an unpretentious concert-number lasts perhaps seven minutes, and those seven minutes amount to something; they have a beginning and an end, they stand out, they don’t so easily slip into the regular humdrum round and get lost. Besides they are again divided up by the figures of the piece that is being played, and these again into beats, so there is always something going on, and every moment has a certain meaning, something you can take hold of, whereas usually⁠—I don’t know whether I am making myself⁠—” + 

“Bravo!” cried Settembrini. “Bravo, Lieutenant! You are describing very well indeed an aspect of music which has indubitably a moral value: namely, that her peculiarly life-enhancing method of measuring time imparts a spiritual awareness and value to its passage. Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time; she quickens⁠—and in so far she has moral value. Art has moral value, in so far as it quickens. But what if it does the opposite? What if it dulls us, sends us to sleep, works against action and progress? Music can do that too; she is an old hand at using opiates. But the opiate, my dear sirs, is a gift of the Devil; it makes for lethargy, inertia, slavish inaction, stagnation. There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.” + 

He went on in this vein, and Hans Castorp listened without precisely following; first on account of his fatigue, and second because his attention was distracted by the proceedings of the lightheaded young folk on the steps. Did his eyes deceive him, or was the tapir-faced girl really occupied in sewing on a button for the monocled youth⁠—and, forsooth, on the knee-band of his knickerbockers? She breathed asthmatically as she sewed, and he coughed and carried his little finger, with the salt-spoon-shaped nail, to his mouth. Of course they were ill⁠—but, after all, these young folk up here did have peculiar social standards! The band played a polka. + 

Hippe + 

Thus Sunday passed. The afternoon was marked by drives undertaken by various groups; several times after tea a carriage and pair drove up the winding road and halted before the portal to receive its occupants⁠—these being, for the most part, Russian ladies. + 

“Russians drive a great deal,” Joachim said to Hans Castorp, as they stood before the entrance and amused themselves with watching the carriages move off. “They will be going to Clavadel, or into the valley of the Flüela, or as far as Klosters. Those are the usual objectives. We might have a drive too while you are up here, if you like. But for the present I think you have enough to do to get used to things, and don’t require more diversion.” + 

To which Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands in his trouser pockets; and stood so to watch the lively little old Russian lady, as she, with her lean grandniece and two other ladies, took their seats in a carriage. The ladies were Madame Chauchat and Marusja. Madame Chauchat had put on a thin dust-cloak belted in at the back, but wore no hat. She sat down beside the old dame in the body of the carriage, while the two girls took their places behind. All four were in lively vein and chattered without stopping in their soft, spineless tongue. They chattered about the top of the carriage, which was hard for them all to get underneath, about the Russian comfits the great-aunt had brought for them to munch, in a little wooden box lined with cotton-wool and lace paper, and was already handing round.⁠—Hans Castorp distinguished with interest Frau Chauchat’s slightly husky voice. As always whenever he set eyes on that heedless creature, the likeness reasserted itself which had puzzled him for a while and then been revealed in a dream. But Marusja’s laugh, the expression of her round, brown eyes, staring childlike above the tiny handkerchief she held over her mouth, the full bosom, which was yet so ailing within, reminded him of something else, something which gave him a sudden thrill and made him glance cautiously at his cousin without turning his head. No, thank goodness, Joachim had not gone mottled, like that other time; his lips were not so painfully compressed. But he was gazing at Marusja, and his bearing, the expression in his eyes, was anything but military. Indeed that absorbed and yearning look could only have been characterized as typically civilian. However, he pulled himself quickly together and stole a glance at Hans Castorp, which the latter had only just time to avoid, by turning his own eyes away and staring up into the sky. He felt his heart give a sudden beat⁠—without rhyme or reason, of its own accord, as it had taken to doing up here. + 

The Sunday was not further remarkable, except perhaps for the meals, which, since they could not well be more abundant than they already were, displayed greater refinement in the menu. At luncheon there was a chaud-froid of chicken, garnished with crayfish and stoned cherries; with the ices came pastry served in baskets of spun sugar, and fresh pineapple besides. In the evening, after he had drunk his beer, Hans Castorp felt heavier in the limbs and more chilled and exhausted than on the day before; toward nine o’clock he bade his cousin good night, drew his plumeau up to his chin, and slept like the dead. + 

But next day, the first Monday spent by the guest up here, there came another regularly recurring variation in the daily routine: the lectures, one of which Dr. Krokowski delivered every other Monday morning in the dining-room, before the entire adult population of the sanatorium, with exception of the “moribund” and those who could not understand the language. The course, Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, consisted of a series of popular-scientific lectures, under the general title: “Love as a force contributory to disease.” These instructive entertainments took place after second breakfast; it was not permissible, Joachim reiterated, to absent oneself from them⁠—or, at least, absence was frowned upon. It was thus very daring of Settembrini, who surely must have more command of the language than anyone else, not only never to appear, but to refer to the entertainment in most disparaging terms. For Hans Castorp’s part, he straightway resolved to be present, in the first place out of courtesy, but also with unconcealed curiosity as to what he should hear. Before the appointed hour, however, he did something quite perverse and ill-judged, which proved worse for him than one could possibly have guessed: he went out for a long, solitary walk. + 

“Now listen to me,” had been his first words, when Joachim entered his room that morning. “I can see that it can’t go on with me like this. I’ve had enough of the horizontal for the present; one’s very blood goes to sleep. Of course it is different with you; you are a patient, and I have no intention of tempting you. But I mean to take a proper walk after breakfast, if you don’t mind, just walking at random for a couple of hours. I’ll stick a little something in my pocket for second breakfast; then I shall be independent. We shall see if I am not quite a different chap when I come back.” + 

Joachim warmly agreed, as he saw his cousin was in earnest in his desire and his project. “But don’t overdo it,” he said; “that’s my advice. It’s not the same thing up here as at home. And be sure to come back in time for the lecture.” + 

In reality young Hans Castorp had more ground than the physical for his present resolve. His overheated head, the prevailing bad taste in his mouth, the fitful throbbing of his heart, were, or so he felt, less evil accompaniments to the process of acclimatization than such things as the goings-on of the Russian pair next door, the table-talk of the stupid and afflicted Frau Stöhr, the gentleman rider’s pulpy cough daily heard in the corridor, the utterances of Herr Albin, the impression he received of the manners and morals of the ailing young folk about him, the expression on Joachim’s face when he looked at Marusja⁠—these and a hundred observations more made him feel it would be good to escape awhile from the Berghof circle, to breathe the air deep into his lungs, to get some proper exercise⁠—and then, when he felt tired at night, he would at least know why. He took leave of Joachim in a spirit of enterprise, when his cousin addressed himself, after breakfast, to the usual round as far as the bench by the watercourse; then, swinging his walking-stick, he took his own way down the road. + 

It was about nine o’clock of a cool morning, with a covered sky. According to programme, Hans Castorp drew in deep draughts of the pure morning air, the fresh, light atmosphere that breathed in so easily, that held no hint of damp, that was without associations, without content. He crossed the stream and the narrow-gauge road to the street, with its scattered buildings; but left this again soon to strike into a meadow path, which went only a short way on the level and then slanted steeply up to the right. The climbing rejoiced Hans Castorp’s heart, his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back on his forehead with the crook of his stick; having gained some little height he looked back, and, seeing in the distance the mirror-like lake he had passed on his journey hither, he began to sing. + 

He sang what songs he had at his command, all kinds of sentimental folk-ditties, out of collections of national ballads and students’ songbooks; one of them, that went: + 

Let poets all of love and wine, + 

Yet oft of virtue sing the praises, + 

he sang at first softly, in a humming tone, then louder, finally at the top of his voice. His baritone lacked flexibility, yet today he found it good, and sang on with mounting enthusiasm. When he found he had pitched the beginning too high, he shifted into falsetto, and even that pleased him. When his memory left him in the lurch, he helped himself out by setting to the melody whatever words and syllables came to hand, heedless of the sense, giving them out like an operatic singer, with arching lips and strong palatal r. He even began to improvise both words and music, accompanying his performance with theatrical gesturings. It is a good deal of a strain to sing and climb at the same time, and Hans Castorp found his breath growing scant, and scanter. Yet for sheer pleasure in the idea, for the joy of singing, he forced his voice and sang on, with frequent gasps for breath, until he could no more, and sank, quite out of wind, half blind, with coloured sparks before his eyes and racing pulses, beneath a sturdy pine. His exaltation gave way on the sudden to a pervading gloom; he fell a prey to dejection bordering on despair. + 

When, his nerves being tolerably restored, he got to his feet again to continue his walk, he found his neck trembling; indeed his head shook in precisely the same way now, at his age, in which the head of old Hans Lorenz Castorp once had shaken. The phenomenon so freshly called up to him the memory of his dead grandfather that, far from finding it offensive, he took a certain pleasure in availing himself of that remembered and dignified method of supporting the chin, by means of which his grandfather had been wont to control the shaking of his head, and to which the boy had responded with such inward sympathy. + 

He mounted still higher on the zigzag path, drawn by the sound of cowbells, and came at length upon the herd, grazing near a hut whose roof was weighted with stones. Two bearded men approached him, with axes on their shoulders. They parted, a little way off him, and “Thank ye kindly, and God be with ye,” said the one to the other, in a deep guttural voice, shifted his axe to the other shoulder, and began breaking a path through crackling pine-boughs to the valley. The words sounded strange in this lonely spot: they came dreamlike to Hans Castorp’s senses, strained and benumbed. He repeated them, softly, trying to reproduce the guttural, rustically formal syllables of the mountain tongue, as he climbed another stretch higher, above the hut. He had in mind to reach the height where the trees left off, but on glancing at his watch resisted. + 

He took the left-hand path in the direction of the village. It ran level for some way, then led downhill, among tall-trunked pines, where, as he went, he once more began to sing, tentatively, and despite the fact that he felt his knees to tremble more than they had during the ascent. On issuing from the wood he paused, struck by the charm of the small enclosed landscape before him, a scene composed of elements both peaceful and sublime. + 

A mountain stream came flowing in its shallow, stony bed down the right-hand slope, poured itself foaming over the terraced boulders lying in its path, then coursed more calmly toward the valley, crossed at this point by a picturesque railed wooden footbridge. The ground all about was blue with the bell-like blossoms of a profusely growing, bushy plant. Sombre fir-trees of even, mighty growth stood in the bed of the ravine and climbed its sides to the height. One of them, rooted in the steep bank at the side of the torrent, thrust itself aslant into the picture, with bizarre effect. The whole remote and lovely spot was wrapped in a sounding solitude by the noise of the rushing waters. Hans Castorp remarked a bench that stood on the farther bank of the stream. + 

He crossed the footbridge and sat down to regale himself with the sight of the foaming, rushing waterfall and the idyllic sound of its monotonous yet modulated prattle. For Hans Castorp loved like music the sound of rushing water⁠—perhaps he loved it even more. But hardly had he settled himself when he was overtaken by a bleeding at the nose, which came on so suddenly he had barely time to save his clothing from soilure. The bleeding was violent and persistent, taking to stanch it nearly half an hour of going to and fro between bench and brook, snuffing water up his nostrils, rinsing his handkerchief and lying flat on his back upon the wooden seat with the damp cloth on his nose. He lay there, after the blood at length was stanched, his knees elevated, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed, and ears full of the noise of water. He felt no unpleasant sensation, the bloodletting had had a soothing effect, but he found himself in a state of extraordinarily reduced vitality, so that when he exhaled the air, he felt no need to draw it in again, and lay there moveless, for the space of several quiet heartbeats, before taking another slow and superficial breath. + 

Quite suddenly he found himself in the far distant past, transported to a scene which had come back to him in a dream some nights before, summoned by certain impressions of the last few days. But so strongly, so resistlessly, to the annihilation of time and space, was he rapt back into the past, one might have said it was a lifeless body lying here on the bench by the waterside, while the actual Hans Castorp moved in that faraway time and place⁠—in a situation which was for him, despite its childishness, vibrant with daring and adventure. + 

It happened when he was a lad of thirteen, in knee-breeches, in the lower third form at school. He stood in the school yard in talk with another boy of like years, from a higher form. The conversation had been begun, rather arbitrarily, by himself and, dealing as it did with a narrowly circumscribed subject of a practical nature, could in no case be prolonged; yet it gave him the greatest satisfaction. It took place in the break between the last two periods, a history and a drawing hour for Hans Castorp’s form; the pupils were walking up and down, or standing about in groups, or lounging against the glazed abutments of the school-building wall. A murmur of voices filled the red-tiled courtyard, which was shut off from the street by a wall topped with shingles and provided with two entrance gates. Supervision was exercised by a master in a slouch hat, who munched a ham sandwich the while. + 

He with whom Hans Castorp spoke was called Hippe, Pribislav Hippe. A peculiarity of this given name was that you were to pronounce it as though it were spelled “Pschibislav”; and the singularity of the appellation suited the lad’s appearance, which did indeed have something exotic about it. Hippe was the son of a scholar and history professor in the gymnasium. He was, by consequence, a notorious model pupil, and, though not much older than Hans Castorp, already a form higher up. He came from Mecklenburg and was in his person obviously the product of an ancient mixture of races, a grafting of Germanic stock with Slavic, or the reverse. True, his close-shorn round pate was blond; but the eyes were a grey-blue, or a blue-grey⁠—an indefinite, ambiguous colour, like the hue of far-distant mountain ranges⁠—and of an odd, narrow shape; were even, to be precise, a little slanting, with strongly marked, prominent cheekbones directly under them. It was a type of face which in this instance, far from seeming an abnormality, was distinctly pleasing, though odd enough to have won for him the nickname of “the Kirghiz” among his schoolmates. Hippe already wore long trousers, and a blue jacket belted in at the back and closed to the throat, the collar of which was usually whitened by a few scales of dandruff. + 

Now, the thing was that Hans Castorp, for a long time, had had his eye upon this Pribislav; had chosen him out of the whole host, known and unknown, in the courtyard of the school, taken an interest in him, followed him with his eyes⁠—shall we say admired him?⁠—at all events observed him with peculiar sympathy. Even on the way to school he looked forward with pleasure to watching him among his fellows, seeing him speak and laugh, singling out his voice from the others by its pleasantly veiled, husky quality. Granted that there was no sufficient ground for his preference, unless one might refer it to Hippe’s heathenish name, his character as model pupil⁠—this latter was, of course, out of the question⁠—or to the “Kirghiz” eyes, whose grey-blue glance could sometimes melt into a mystery of darkness when one caught it musing sidewise; whichever it might be, or none of these, Hans Castorp troubled not a whit to justify his feelings, or even to question by what name they might suitably be called. For, since he did not “know” Hippe, the relation could hardly be one of friendship. But in the first place there was not the faintest need of calling it anything; it could never be a subject of discussion; that would be out of place, and he had no desire for it; and, in the second, giving a thing a name implies, if not passing judgment on it, at least defining it; that is to say, classifying it among the familiar and habitual; whereas Hans Castorp was penetrated by the unconscious conviction that an inward good of this sort was above all to be guarded from definition and classification. + 

But whether well or ill founded, and however far from being the subject of conversation, or even from being touched on in Hans Castorp’s own mind, these feelings of his flourished there in great strength, as they had done for almost a year now⁠—or a year as nearly as one could fix the time, for it was hard to be precise about their beginnings. For about a year, then, he had carried them about in secret, which spoke for the loyalty and constancy of his character, when one reflects what a great space of time a year is at that age. But alas, every characterization of this kind involves a moral judgment, whether favourable or unfavourable⁠—though, to be sure, each trait of character has its two sides. Thus Hans Castorp’s “loyalty”⁠—upon which, be it said, he was not prone to plume himself⁠—consisted, baldly, in a certain temperamental heaviness, sluggishness, and quiescence, a fundamental tendency to feel respect for conditions of duration and stability; and the more respect, the longer they lasted. He inclined to believe in the permanence of the particular state or circumstances in which he for the moment found himself; prized it for that very quality, and was not bent on change. Thus he had grown used to his silent and remote relation to Pribislav Hippe, and considered it a regular feature of his life; loved the emotions it brought in its train, the suspense as to whether he was likely to meet him that day, whether Pribislav would pass close by him, even look at him; loved the subtle and wordless satisfaction imparted by his secret, loved even the disappointments inseparable from it⁠—the greatest of which was Pribislav’s absence from school. When this happened, the school yard became a desert, the day lacked all charm, hope alone lingered. + 

The affair had lasted a year, up to that intrepid and culminating moment; after which, thanks to Hans Castorp’s constancy of spirit, it lasted another. Then it was over. And it is a fact that he marked no more the loosening and dissolving of the bond which united him to Pribislav than he had previously marked its beginnings. Moreover, in consequence of his father’s taking another position, Pribislav left the school and the city; but that was all one to Hans Castorp; he had already forgotten him before he went. One may put it that the figure of the “Kirghiz” had glided out of the mist into Hans Castorp’s life, and slowly grown vivid and tangible there, up to that moment of the greatest nearness and corporeity, in the school court; had stood awhile thus in the foreground, then slowly receded, and, with no pain of parting, dissolved again into the mist. + 

But that moment, that bold, adventurous situation, into which Hans Castorp found himself transported after all these years, the conversation⁠—an actual conversation with Pribislav Hippe⁠—came about thus. The drawing-lesson was the next period, and Hans Castorp found himself without a pencil. His classmates needed their own, but he had among the other pupils this and that acquaintance, of whom he might have sought a loan. Yet he found it was Pribislav who after all stood nearest to him, with whom, in secret, he had had to do; and with a joyous impulse of his entire being he determined to seize the opportunity⁠—for so he called it⁠—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. It was rather an odd thing to do, since he did not, in reality, “know” Pribislav at all; but this aspect of the affair escaped him in his recklessness, or he chose to disregard it. So there he stood before Pribislav Hippe, among the bustling crowd that filled the tiled courtyard; and he said to him: “Excuse me, can you lend me a pencil?” + 

And Pribislav looked at him, with his “Kirghiz” eyes above the prominent cheekbones, and spoke, in his pleasantly husky voice, without any surprise, or, at least, without showing any. + 

“With pleasure,” he said. “But you must be sure to give it me back, after the period.” And drew his pencil out of his pocket, a silver pencil-holder with a ring in the end, which one screwed in order to make the red lead-pencil come out. He displayed the simple mechanism, their two heads bent over it together. + 

“Only be careful not to break it,” he added. + 

What made him say that? As if Hans Castorp had been intending to handle it carelessly or keep it after the hour! + 

They looked at each other, and smiled; then, as there remained nothing more to say, they turned, first their shoulders and then their backs, and went. + 

That was all. But never in his life had Hans Castorp felt so supremely content as in this drawing hour, drawing with Pribislav Hippe’s pencil, in the immediate prospect of giving it back into the owner’s hand⁠—which followed as a matter of course out of what had gone before. He took the liberty of sharpening the pencil a little, and cherished three of the red shavings nearly a year, in an inner drawer of his desk⁠—no one seeing them there could have guessed what significance they possessed. The return of the pencil was of the simplest formality, quite after Hans Castorp’s heart⁠—indeed, he prided himself on it no little, in the vainglorious state his intimacy with Hippe produced. + 

“There,” he said. “And thanks very much.” + 

And Pribislav said nothing at all, only hastily tried the screw and stuck the pencil in his pocket. + 

Never again did they speak to each other; but this one time, thanks to the enterprise of Hans Castorp, they had spoken. + 

He wrenched his eyes open, amazed at the depths of the trance in which he had been sunk. “I’ve been dreaming,” he thought. “Yes, that was Pribislav. It’s a long time since I thought of him. I wonder what became of the shavings. My desk is in the attic at Uncle Tienappel’s; they must be there yet, in the little inner back drawer. I never took them out, never thought enough about them to throw them away! That was certainly Pribislav, his very own self. I shouldn’t have thought I could remember him so clearly. How remarkably like her he looked⁠—like this girl up here! Is that why I feel interested in her? Or was that why I felt so interested in him? What rubbish! Anyhow, I must be stirring, and pretty fast, too.” But he lay another moment, musing and recalling, before he got up. “Then thank ye kindly, and God be with ye,” he said⁠—the tears came to his eyes as he smiled. And with that he would have been off, but instead sat suddenly down again with his hat and stick in his hand, being forced to the realization that his knees would not support him. “Hullo,” he thought, “this won’t do. I am supposed to be back in the dining-room punctually at eleven, for the lecture. Taking walks up here is very beautiful⁠—but appears to have its difficult side. Well, well, I can’t stop here. I must have got stiff from lying; I shall be better as I move about.” He tried again to get on his legs and, by dint of great effort, succeeded. + 

But the return home was lamentable indeed, after the high spirits of his setting forth. He had repeatedly to rest by the way, feeling the colour recede from his face, and cold sweat break out on his brow; the wild beating of his heart took away his breath. Thus painfully he fought his way down the winding path and reached the bottom in the neighbourhood of the Kurhaus. But here it became clear that his own powers would never take him over the stretch between him and the Berghof; and accordingly, as there was no tram and he saw no carriages for hire, he hailed a driver going toward the Dorf with a load of empty boxes and asked permission to climb into his wagon. Back to back with the man, his legs hanging down out of the end, swaying and nodding with fatigue and the jolting of the vehicle, regarded with surprise and sympathy by the passersby, he got as far as the railway crossing, where he dismounted and paid for his ride, whether much money or little he did not heed, and hurried headlong up the drive. + 

“Depêchez-vous, monsieur,” said to him the French concierge. “La conférence de M. Krokowski vient de commencer.” Hans Castorp tossed hat and stick on the stand and squeezed himself with much precaution, tongue between his teeth, through the partly open glass door into the dining-room, where the society of the cure sat in rows on their chairs, and on the right-hand narrow side of the room, behind a covered table adorned with a water-bottle, Dr. Krokowski, in a frock-coat, stood and delivered his lecture. + 

Analysis + 

Luckily there was a vacant seat in the corner, near the door. He slipped into it and assumed an air of having been here from the beginning. The audience, hanging rapt on Dr. Krokowski’s lips, paid him no heed⁠—which was as well, for he looked rather ghastly. His face white as a sheet, his coat spotted with blood⁠—he might have been a murderer stealing from his crime. The lady in front of him did, indeed, turn her head as he sat down, and measured him with narrow eyes. With a sense of exasperation he recognized Madame Chauchat. Deuce take it⁠—was he never to have a moment’s peace? He had thought that, having arrived at his goal, he could sit here quietly and rest a little; and now he had to have her under his nose. In other circumstances he might conceivably have found her nearness rather pleasant than otherwise. But now, worn out and harassed as he felt, what was it to him? It could only make new demands on his heart and keep him from drawing a long breath during the whole lecture. With Pribislav’s very eyes she had looked at him, and at the spots of blood on his coat; her look had been rather bold and ruthless too, as a woman’s would be who let doors bang behind her. How badly she held herself! Not like the ladies of Hans Castorp’s social sphere, who sat erect at their tables, turned their heads towards their lords and masters, and spoke with mincing correctness. Frau Chauchat sat all relaxed, with drooping shoulders and round back; she even thrust her head forward until the vertebra at the base of the neck showed prominently above the rounded décollétage of her white blouse. Pribislav had held his head like that. But he had been a model pupil and full of honours (which was not the reason why Hans Castorp had borrowed his pencil), whereas it was abundantly clear that Frau Chauchat’s bad carriage, her door-slamming, and the directness of her gaze all had to do with her physical condition; yes, were even expressive of that want of restraint in which young Herr Albin rejoiced, which was not honourable at all, yet possessed boundless advantages all its own. + 

Hans Castorp’s thoughts, as he sat and looked at Frau Chauchat’s flaccid back, began to blur; they ceased to be thoughts at all and began to be a reverie, into which Dr. Krokowski’s drawling baritone, with the soft-sounding r, came as from afar. But the stillness of the room, the profound attention that rapt all the rest of the audience, had the effect of rousing him too. He looked about. Near him sat the thin-haired pianist, with bent head and folded arms, listening with his mouth open. Somewhat farther on was Fräulein Engelhart, avid-eyed, with a dull red spot on each cheek; Hans Castorp saw the same signal flame on the faces of other ladies⁠—on Frau Salomon’s, and Frau Magnus’s, the same who was wife to the brewer and lost flesh persistently. Frau Stöhr sat somewhat farther back, an expression of ignorant credulity painted on her face, truly painful to behold; while the ivory-complexioned Levi, leaning back in her chair with half-closed eyes, her hands lying open in her lap, would have looked like a corpse had not her breast risen and fallen with such profound and rhythmical breaths as to remind Hans Castorp of a mechanical waxwork he had once seen. Many of the guests had their hands curved behind their ears; some even held the hand in the air halfway thither, as though arrested midway in the gesture by the strength of their concentration. Lawyer Paravant, a sunburnt man who looked to have had the strength of a bull, even flicked his ear with his forefinger to make it hear better, then turned it again to catch the words that flowed from Dr. Krokowski’s lips. + 

And what was Dr. Krokowski saying? What was his line of thought? Hans Castorp summoned his wits to discover, not immediately succeeding, however, since he had not heard the beginning and lost still more while musing on Frau Chauchat’s flabby back. It was about a power, the power which⁠—in short, it was about the power of love. Yes, of course; the subject was already given out in the general title of the whole course, and, moreover, this was Dr. Krokowski’s special field; of what else should he be talking? It was a bit odd, to be sure, listening to a lecture on such a theme, when previously Hans Castorp’s courses had dealt only with such matters as geared transmission in shipbuilding. No, really, how did one go about to discuss a subject of this delicate and private nature, in broad daylight, before a mixed audience? Dr. Krokowski did it by adopting a mingled terminology, partly poetic and partly erudite; ruthlessly scientific, yet with a vibrating, singsong delivery, which impressed young Hans Castorp as being unsuitable, but may have been the reason why the ladies looked flushed and the gentlemen flicked their ears to make them hear better. In particular the speaker employed the word “love” in a somewhat ambiguous sense, so that you were never quite sure where you were with it, or whether he had reference to its sacred or its passionate and fleshly aspect⁠—and this doubt gave one a slightly seasick feeling. Never in all his life had Hans Castorp heard the word uttered so many times on end as he was hearing it now. When he reflected, it seemed to him he had never taken it in his own mouth, nor ever heard it from a stranger’s. That might not be the case, but whether it were or no, the word did not seem to him to repay such frequent repetition. The slippery monosyllable, with its lingual and labial, and the bleating vowel between⁠—it came to sound positively offensive; it suggested watered milk, or anything else that was pale and insipid; the more so considering the meat for strong men Dr. Krokowski was in fact serving up. For it was plain that when one set about it like that, one could go pretty far without shocking anybody. He was not content to allude, with exquisite tact, to certain matters which are known to everybody, but which most people are content to pass over in silence. He demolished illusions, he was ruthlessly enlightened, he relentlessly destroyed all faith in the dignity of silver hairs and the innocence of the sucking babe. And he wore, with the frock-coat, his negligee collar, sandals, and grey woollen socks, and, thus attired, made an impression profoundly otherworldly, though at the same time not a little startling to young Hans Castorp. He supported his statements with a wealth of illustration and anecdote from the books and loose notes on the table before him; several times he even quoted poetry. And he discussed certain startling manifestations of the power of love, certain extraordinary, painful, uncanny variations, which the majestic phenomenon at times displayed. It was, he said, the most unstable, the most unreliable of man’s instincts, the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion. In the which there was nothing that should cause surprise. For this mighty force did not consist of a single impulse, it was of its nature complex; it was built up out of components which, however legitimate they might be in composition, were, taken each by itself, sheer perversity. But⁠—continued Dr. Krokowski⁠—since we refuse, and rightly, to deduce the perversity of the whole from the perversity of its parts, we are driven to claim, for the component perversities, some part at least, though perhaps not all, of the justification which attaches to their united product. We were driven by sheer force of logic to this conclusion; Dr. Krokowski implored his hearers, having arrived at it, to hold it fast. Now there were psychical correctives, forces working in the other direction, instincts tending to conformability and regularity⁠—he would almost have liked to characterize them as bourgeois; and these influences had the effect of merging the perverse components into a valid and irreproachable whole: a frequent and gratifying result, which, Dr. Krokowski almost contemptuously added, was, as such, of no further concern to the thinker and the physician. But on the other hand, there were cases where this result was not obtained, could not and should not be obtained; and who, Dr. Krokowski asked, would dare to say that these cases did not, psychically considered, form a higher, more exclusive type? For in these cases the two opposing groups of instincts⁠—the compulsive force of love, and the sum of the impulses urging in the other direction, among which he would particularly mention shame and disgust⁠—both exhibited an extraordinary and abnormal height and intensity when measured by the ordinary bourgeois standards; and the conflict between them which took place in the abysses of the soul prevented the erring instinct from attaining to that safe, sheltered, and civilized state which alone could resolve its difficulties in the prescribed harmonies of the love-life as experienced by the average human being. This conflict between the powers of love and chastity⁠—for that was what it really amounted to⁠—what was its issue? It ended, apparently, in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure. Her confused and tumultuous claims were never allowed to rise to consciousness or to come to proof in anything like their entire strength or multiformity. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory; for the claims of love could not be crippled or enforced by any such means. The love thus suppressed was not dead; it lived, it laboured after fulfilment in the darkest and secretest depths of the being. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge⁠—if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable. But what then was this form, this mask, in which suppressed, unchartered love would reappear? + 

Dr. Krokowski asked the question, and looked along the listening rows as though in all seriousness expecting an answer. But he had to say it himself, who had said so much else already. No one knew save him, but it was plain that he did. Indeed, with his ardent eyes, his black beard setting off the waxen pallor of his face, his monkish sandals and grey woollen socks, he seemed to symbolize in his own person that conflict between passion and chastity which was his theme. At least so thought Hans Castorp, as with the others he waited in the greatest suspense to hear in what form love driven below the surface would reappear. The ladies barely breathed. Lawyer Paravant rattled his ear anew, that the critical moment might find it open and receptive. And Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.” + 

So now they knew⁠—though very probably not all of them were capable of an opinion on what they heard. A sigh passed through the assemblage, and Lawyer Paravant weightily nodded approbation as Krokowski proceeded to develop his theme. Hans Castorp for his part sat with bowed head, trying to reflect on what had been said and test his own understanding of it. But he was unpractised in such exercises, and rendered still further incapable of mental exertion by the unhappy effect of the walk he had taken. His thoughts were soon drawn off again by the sight of Frau Chauchat’s back, and the arm appertaining, which was lifting and bending itself, close before Hans Castorp’s eyes, so that the hand could hold the braids of hair. + 

It made him uncomfortable to have the hand so close beneath his eye, to be forced to look at it whether he wished or no, to study it in all its human blemishes and imperfections, as though under a magnifying-glass. No, there was nothing aristocratic about this stubby schoolgirl hand, with the badly cut nails. He was even not quite sure that the ends of the fingers were perfectly clean; and the skin round the nails was distinctly bitten. Hans Castorp made a face; but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat’s back, as he vaguely recalled what Dr. Krokowski had been saying, about counteracting influences of a bourgeois kind, which set themselves up against the power of love.⁠—The arm, in its gentle upward curve, was better than the hand; it was scarcely clothed, for the material of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, being the lightest gauze, which had the effect of lending the arm a sort of shadowed radiance, making it prettier than it might otherwise have been. It was at once both full and slender⁠—in all probability cool to the touch. No, so far as the arm went, the idea about counteracting bourgeois influences did not apply. + 

Hans Castorp mused, his gaze still bent on Frau Chauchat’s arm. The way women dressed! They showed their necks and bosoms, they transfigured their arms by veiling them in “illusion”; they did so, the world over, to arouse our desire. O God, how beautiful life was! And it was just such accepted commonplaces as this that made it beautiful⁠—for it was a commonplace that women dressed themselves alluringly, it was so well known and recognized a fact that we never consciously realized it, but merely enjoyed it without a thought. And yet he had an inward conviction that we ought to think about it, ought to realize what a blessed, what a well-nigh miraculous arrangement it was. For of course it all had a certain end and aim; it was by a definite design that women were permitted to array themselves with irresistible allure: it was for the sake of posterity, for the perpetuation of the species. Of course. But suppose a woman were inwardly diseased, unfit for motherhood⁠—what then? What was the sense of her wearing gauze sleeves and attracting male attention to her physical parts if these were actually unsound? Obviously there was no sense; it ought to be considered immoral, and forbidden as such. For a man to take an interest in a woman inwardly diseased had no more sense than⁠—well, than the interest Hans Castorp had once taken in Pribislav Hippe. The comparison was a stupid one; it roused memories better forgotten; he had not meant to make it, it came into his head unbidden. But at this point his musings broke off, largely because Dr. Krokowski had raised his voice and so drawn attention once more upon himself. He was standing there behind his table, with his arms outstretched and his head on one side⁠—almost, despite the frock-coat, he looked like Christ on the cross. + 

It seemed that at the end of his lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psychoanalysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. “Come unto me,” he was saying, though not in those words, “come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden.” And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief. Then he let fall his arms, raised his head, gathered up his notes and went out by the corridor door, with his head in the air, and the bundle of papers held schoolmaster fashion, in his left hand, against his shoulder. + 

His audience rose, pushed back its chairs, and slowly began to move towards the same door, as though converging upon him from all sides, without volition, hesitatingly, yet with one accord, like the throng after the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp stood in the stream without moving, his hand on the back of his chair. I am only a guest up here, he thought. Thank God I am healthy, that business has nothing to do with me; I shan’t even be here for the next lecture. He watched Frau Chauchat going out, gliding along with her head thrust forward. Did she have herself psychoanalysed, he wondered. And his heart began to thump. He did not notice Joachim, coming toward him among the chairs, and started when his cousin spoke. + 

“You got here at the last minute,” Joachim said. “Did you go very far? How was it?” + 

“Oh, very nice,” Hans Castorp answered. “Yes, I went rather a long way. But I must confess, it did me less good than I thought it would. I won’t repeat it for the present.” + 

Joachim did not ask how he liked the lecture; neither did Hans Castorp express an opinion. By common consent they let the subject rest, both then and thereafter. + 

Doubts and Considerations + 

Tuesday was the last day of our hero’s week up here, and accordingly he found his weekly bill in his room on his return from the morning walk. It was a clear and businesslike document, in a green envelope, with a picture of the Berghof building at the top, and extracts from the prospectus carried in a narrow column down the left-hand side of the sheet. “Psychoanalytic treatment, by the most modern methods” was called attention to by means of spaced type. The items, set down in a calligraphic hand, came to one hundred and eighty francs almost exactly: eight francs a day for his chamber, twelve for board and medical attendance, entrance fee twenty, disinfection of room ten, while small charges for laundry, beer, and the late dinner of the first evening made up the sum. + 

Hans Castorp went over the bill with Joachim and found naught to object to. “Of course I made no use of the medical attendance,” he said, “but that was my own affair. It is included in the price of pension, and I couldn’t expect them to make any deduction; how could they? As regards the disinfection, they must show a neat profit there, they never could have used ten francs’ worth of H2CO to smoke the American woman out. But on the whole I must say I find it cheap rather than dear, considering what they offer.” And before second breakfast they went down to the management in order that Hans Castorp might acquit himself of his debt. + 

The management was on the ground-floor. You reached it after passing the hall, the garderobe, the kitchens and domestic offices; you could not miss the door, it had a porcelain shield. Hans Castorp took an interest in this glimpse into the business side of the enterprise. There was a neat little office, with a typist busy at her machine and three clerks bending over desks. In an adjoining office a man who looked like a head or director was working at a desk in the middle of the room; he flung a cool and calculating glance at the clients over the top of his glasses. Their affair was dispatched at the cashier’s window, a note changed, money received, the bill receipted; the cousins preserving throughout these transactions the solemn, discreet, almost overawed bearing which the young German’s respect for authority leads him to assume in the presence of pens, ink, and paper, or anything else which bears to his mind an official stamp. But on the way to breakfast, and later in the course of the day, they talked about the direction of the Berghof sanatorium, and Joachim, in his character as inmate, answered his cousin’s questions. + 

Hofrat Behrens was not⁠—though he gave the impression of being⁠—owner and proprietor of the establishment. Above and behind him stood invisible powers, which to a certain extent manifested their existence in the office they had just visited. They consisted of a supervisory head and a stock company⁠—in which it was not a bad thing to hold shares, according to Joachim, since the members of it divided a fat dividend each year. The Hofrat was a dependent, he was merely an agent, a functionary, an associate of higher powers; the first and highest, of course, and the soul of the enterprise, with a well-defined influence upon it and upon the management itself⁠—though of course as directing physician he was relieved of all preoccupation with the business side. He was a native of northwestern Germany, and it was common knowledge that when he took the position, years ago, he had done so contrary to his previous intention and plans. He had come here on account of his wife⁠—whose remains had long reposed in the village churchyard, that picturesque churchyard of Dorf Davos, which lay high up on the right-hand slope, nearer the entrance of the valley. She had been a charming person, to judge from her likenesses, though too large-eyed and asthenic-looking. Photographs of her stood about everywhere in the Hofrat’s house; even oil portraits by his own amateur hand hung on the walls. Two children, a son and a daughter, had been born; then they had brought her up here, the fragile body already fever-smitten; a few months had seen the completion of the wasting-away process. Behrens, they said, had adored her. He was brought so low by the blow that he got very odd and melancholy; people saw him gesturing, sniggering, and talking to himself, on the street. He did not go back to his original place, but remained where he was⁠—in part, no doubt, because he could not tear himself away from her grave, but also for the less sentimental reason that he was himself in poor health and, in his own professional opinion, actually belonged here. He had settled down as one of the physicians who are companions in suffering to the patients in their care; who do not stand above disease, fighting her in the armour of personal security, but who themselves bear her mark⁠—an odd, but by no means isolated, case, and one which has its good as well as its bad side. Sympathy between doctor and patient is surely desirable, and a case might be made out for the view that only he who suffers can be the guide and healer of the suffering. And yet⁠—can true spiritual mastery over a power be won by him who is counted among her slaves? Can he free others who himself is not free? The ailing physician remains a paradox to the average mind, a questionable phenomenon. May not his scientific knowledge tend to be clouded and confused by his own participation, rather than enriched and morally reinforced? He cannot face disease in clear-eyed hostility to her; he is a prejudiced party, his position is equivocal. With all due reserve it must be asked whether a man who himself belongs among the ailing can give himself to the cure or care of others as can a man who is himself entirely sound. + 

Hans Castorp expressed some of these doubts and speculations, as he and Joachim gossiped about the Berghof and its professional head. But Joachim answered that nobody knew whether the Hofrat was still a patient⁠—he was probably long since cured. It was ages ago that he had first begun to practise here; independently at first, and early winning a name for himself as an extraordinarily gifted auscultator and skilful surgeon. Then the Berghof had secured him; it would soon be ten years that he had been in intimate association with it. His private residence was in the end of the northwest wing of the building (Dr. Krokowski’s was not far off), and that lady of the lofty lineage, the nursing sister and directress of the establishment, of whom Settembrini had made such utter fun, and whom thus far Hans Castorp had scarcely seen, presided over the small household. The Hofrat was otherwise alone, for his son was at the university and his daughter already married, to a lawyer in one of the French cantons. Young Behrens sometimes visited his father in the holidays; he had done so once during Joachim’s time up here. The ladies, he related, had been quite thrilled; their temperatures had gone up, petty jealousies had led to bickering and quarrels in the rest-hall and an increase of visits to Dr. Krokowski’s private office. + 

The assistant had his own office hours, in a special room, which, together with the large examination-rooms, the laboratory, the operating-rooms and X-ray studio, was in the well-lighted basement of the building. We call it the basement, for the stone steps leading down to it from the ground-floor created the impression that it was such⁠—an erroneous impression, for not only was the ground-floor somewhat elevated, but the entire building stood on a sidehill, part way up the mountain, and these “basement” rooms faced the front, with a view of the gardens and valley, a circumstance negatived to some extent by the fact of the steps leading down to them. One descended, as one supposed, from the ground-floor, only to find oneself at the bottom still on it, or practically so. Hans Castorp amused himself with this illusion when he accompanied his cousin one afternoon down to the “bathing-master,” that Joachim might get himself weighed. A clinical brilliance and spotlessness reigned in this sphere. Everything was as white as white; the doors gleamed with white enamel; the one leading to Dr. Krokowski’s receiving-room, with the doctor’s visiting-card tacked on it, was reached by two more steps down from the corridor, which gave the room behind it an air of being more spacious and withdrawn than the rest. This door was at the end of the corridor, on your right as you came downstairs. Hans Castorp kept his eye on it as he walked up and down waiting for his cousin. He saw a lady come out, a recent arrival, whose name he did not know: a small, dainty person, with curls on her forehead, and gold earrings. She bent over as she mounted the stairs, and held up her frock with one beringed hand, while with the other she pressed her tiny handkerchief to her lips and, all stooped as she was, stared up over it into nothing, with great blue, distracted eyes. She hurried with small tripping steps, her petticoat rustling, to the stairs, paused suddenly as though something had occurred to her, then went on tripping upward, and disappeared, still bending over and holding her handkerchief to her mouth. + 

Behind her, when she opened the office door, it had been much darker than in the white corridor. Obviously the brilliant lighting of these lower regions did hot extend so far; Hans Castorp remarked that a shadowed dusk, a profound twilight, prevailed in Dr. Krokowski’s private sanctum. + 

Table-Talk + 

Young Hans Castorp noticed that the ancestral tremor brought on by his ill-advised walk continued to trouble him⁠—he found it rather an embarrassment when in the dining-room. Almost as a regular thing now, his head would begin shaking at table; he found this impossible to prevent and hard to dissemble. He tried various devices to disguise the weakness, for he could not continually support his chin on his collar; he would keep his head in action, turning it to the right and left in conversation, or bear hard against the table with the left forearm when he carried a spoonful of soup to his mouth, and support his head with his hand. In the pauses he even rested his elbow on the table, this although it was in his own eyes a piece of ill breeding, which would not pass in any society save the lax abnormal one where he now found himself. But the weakness was burdensome too and went far to spoil the meal hours for him, which he had otherwise continued to find diverting and full of interesting episode. + 

But the truth was⁠—and Hans Castorp was entirely aware of it⁠—that the absurd manifestation against which he struggled was not solely physical in its origin, not wholly to be accounted for by the air up here and the efforts his system made to adjust itself. Rather was it the outward expression of his inner stimulation, and bore directly upon those very episodes and diversions. + 

Madame Chauchat almost invariably came late to meals. Until she came, Hans Castorp could not sit and keep his feet still, but must wait in suspense for the crashing of the glass door; he knew it would make him start and that his face would feel cold all over, and this was what regularly happened. At first he had jerked round his head infuriated and followed the offender with angry eyes to her seat at the “good” Russian table. He may even have muttered some abusive epithet between his teeth, some outraged cry of protest. But now he only bent over his plate, bit his lips, or deliberately turned his head away. It seemed to him that anger was no longer in place; he even had an obscure feeling that he was partly responsible, that he shared the blame with her before the others. In short, it would be no longer so true to say he was ashamed of Frau Chauchat as that he was ashamed for her⁠—a feeling he might well have spared himself, for not a soul in the room troubled either over Frau Chauchat’s misconduct or Hans Castorp’s sensitiveness to it⁠—with the possible exception of the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, on his right. + 

This poor creature had perceived that, thanks to his sensibility in the matter of slamming doors, a certain emotional attitude toward the Russian lady was come to subsist in her young neighbour’s mind. Further, that the grounds of the attitude were of little moment compared to the fact of its existence; and, finally, that his assumed indifference⁠—very poorly assumed, for Hans Castorp had neither talent nor training as an actor⁠—did not mean a decrease of interest, but on the contrary indicated that the affair was passing into a higher phase. Fräulein Engelhart was for her own person quite without hopes or pretensions. She therefore launched out into extravagant enthusiasm over Frau Chauchat⁠—about which quite the most extraordinary thing was that Hans Castorp saw perfectly how she was egging him on⁠—not all at once, perhaps, but in the course of time⁠—saw through it and even felt disgusted at it, yet without being the less willingly led on by her and made a fool of. + 

“Slam⁠—bang!” the old spinster said. “That was she. No need to look up to tell who just came in. Of course, there she goes⁠—like a kitten to a saucer of milk⁠—how pretty it is! I wish we might change places, so you could look at her as much as you liked. Naturally you don’t care to keep turning your head⁠—that would flatter her far too much. She is greeting her table⁠—you really ought to look, it is so refreshing to see her! When she smiles and talks as she is doing now, a dimple comes in one cheek, but not always, only when she likes. What a love of a woman! A spoilt child, that is why she is so heedless. Creatures like that one has to love, whether one will or no; they vex you with their heedlessness, but that is only one reason the more for loving them; it makes you so happy to have to care for them in spite of yourself.” + 

She whispered on, behind her hand, for his ear alone; the flush that mantled on her downy old cheek bespoke a rising temperature, and the suggestiveness of her talk pierced Hans Castorp to the very marrow. It did him good to hear someone else confirm his view that Madame Chauchat was an enchanting creature. He was a young man of not very independent judgments, and glad to be encouraged in certain feelings he had, upon which both reason and conscience united to frown. + 

But Fräulein Engelhart, however much she would have liked to, could tell him practically nothing about Frau Chauchat. She knew no more than the whole sanatorium knew, and his conversations with her bore little practical fruit. She did not even know the lady to speak to, nor could she boast a single common acquaintance. Her only title to importance was that she lived in Königsberg, not very far from the Russian border; also that she knew a few scraps of Russian. These were but meagre distinctions; yet Hans Castorp was prepared to see in them something resembling an extensive personal connection with Frau Chauchat. + 

“I see that she wears no ring, no wedding-ring,” he said. “Why is that? She is a married woman, I think you told me?” + 

The schoolmistress was quite perturbed; she seemed to feel driven into a corner and sought for words to talk herself out again, so very responsible did she feel for Frau Chauchat. + 

“You must not attach importance to that,” she finally said. “I’m positive she is married. There is no doubt of it. Of course I know some foreigners do use the Madame when they are getting a little on in years, for the sake of the greater respect people pay a married woman. But it is not the case here. Everyone knows she really has a husband, somewhere in Russia. Her maiden name was not French but Russian, something in anow or ukov⁠—I did know it, but I have forgotten. I will ask if you like; there must be several people here who know it. No, she wears no ring, I have noticed it myself. Dear me, perhaps she finds it makes her hand look too broad. Or she thinks it is too bourgeois and domestic to wear a plain gold wedding-ring. She might as well carry a key basket. No, she is built on broader lines than that⁠—Russian women all have something free and large about them. And then, a wedding-ring seems so prosaic, it is almost repellent! It is a symbol of possession; it is always saying ‘Hands off’; it turns every woman into a nun. I should not be at all surprised if that is what Frau Chauchat thinks. A charming woman like her, in the bloom of youth⁠—why should she, every time she gives a man her hand to kiss, tell him straightway that she is bound in wedlock?” + 

“Good Lord,” thought Hans Castorp, “how she does run on!” He looked into her face, quite alarmed. But she countered his gaze with her embarrassed, half-frightened one. They were both silent awhile and sought to recover themselves. Hans Castorp ate his luncheon and supported his chin. + 

At length he said: “And her husband? He doesn’t trouble himself about her? Does he never visit her up here? Do you know what he does?” + 

“Official. Russian government official, in some distant province, Daghestan, you know, out beyond the Caucasus, he was ordered there. No, as I tell you, no one has ever seen him up here. And this time she has been here going on three months.” + 

“She was here before, then?” + 

“This is the third time. And between times she goes to other places⁠—other sanatoriums. But it is she who sometimes visits him; not often, once in the year for a little while. One may say they live separated, and she visits him now and again.” + 

“Well, of course, she is ill⁠—” + 

“Yes, of course⁠—but not so ill. Not so ill as to have to live all her life in sanatoriums and apart from her husband. There must be other reasons for that. Everyone up here thinks there must be other reasons. Perhaps she does not like to live out there in Daghestan, the other side of the Caucasus; it would not be strange⁠—such a wild, remote place! But there must be something about the man too, if she can’t bear to be with him. He has a French name, but after all he is a Russian official, and that is a very rough type, I do assure you. I once saw one of them, with an iron-grey beard and a red face⁠—they are all frightfully corrupt too, and drink quantities of vodka, you know. They will eat a little something, for the look of the thing, a mushroom mariné, some caviar, and then drink out of all measure and call it a light lunch.” + 

“You are putting everything off on him,” Hans Castorp said. “But we can’t know if the responsibility is not hers, of their not living together. One ought to be just. When I look at her and see the unmannerly way she behaves about the door⁠—I assure you she’s no angel; excuse me for saying so. I wouldn’t trust her across the street. But you are so partial. You are blinded by prejudice in her favour.” + 

This was the line he sometimes took. With a cunning otherwise foreign to his nature he would make out that the schoolmistress’s ravings over Madame Chauchat were not what he very well knew them to be, but an independent phenomenon, of a quaint and amusing kind; about which he, Hans Castorp, made free to tease the old spinster, feeling his own withers unwrung. He risked nothing by this attitude, being confident that his accomplice would agree to anything he said, no matter how wide of the mark. + 

“Good morning,” he greeted her, “I hope you slept well and dreamed of your charmer? Mistress Mary, quite contrary⁠—or whatever her name is! Upon my word, one has only to speak of her to make you blush! You have completely lost your head over her⁠—you can’t deny it.” + 

And the schoolmistress, who really had blushed and tucked her head down over her cup, would mumble out of the left-hand corner of her mouth: “Shame on you, Herr Castorp! It really is too bad of you to embarrass me like this. Everyone can see we are talking about her and that you have said something to make me get red.” + 

It was an extraordinary game the two of them were playing; each perfectly aware that they lied and double-lied, each knowing that Hans Castorp teased the schoolmistress only in order to be able to talk about Frau Chauchat. He took a morbid and extravagant pleasure in thus trifling with Fräulein Engelhart, and she on her side reciprocated; first out of a natural instinct to be the go-between in a love-affair, secondly because to oblige Hans Castorp she had actually contrived to fall victim to Frau Chauchat’s charms; and finally because she felt a pathetic joy in having him tease her and make her blush. He well knew, and she well knew, all this about each other and themselves; each knew that the other knew and that the whole situation was equivocal and almost questionable. Equivocal and questionable situations were, in general, repugnant to Hans Castorp’s taste, and the present one was no exception. He felt disgusted, yet for all that he went on fishing in these troubled waters, quieting his conscience with the assurance that he was only up here on a visit and would soon be leaving. He pronounced upon the young woman’s charms with the air of a connoisseur; said she was “sloppy,” that she looked younger and prettier full face than profile; that her eyes were too far apart; that she carried herself in a way that left much to be desired; that her arms, on the other hand, were pretty and soft-looking. He felt his head shaking as he talked; he tried to suppress the trembling, and realized not only that the schoolmistress must see his efforts, but, with profound disgust, that her head was actually shaking too! But he went on⁠—he had purposely called Frau Chauchat Mistress Mary, in order that he might put the question of her name; so now he said: “I suppose her name is not Mary at all; do you know what it is? I mean her given name. You must know it, being as much smitten as you are!” + 

The schoolmistress reflected. “Wait half a minute,” she said. “I knew it, once. Was it Tatiana? No⁠—nor Natascha. Natascha Chauchat? No, that was not it. Wait, I have it⁠—it was Avdotia. Or at least something very like that. It was not Katienka or Ninotschka, of that I am certain. I can’t quite get it, for the moment. But I can surely recall it if you would like to know.” + 

And next day she actually did know the name, and uttered it the moment the glass door slammed. Frau Chauchat’s name was Clavdia. + 

Hans Castorp did not grasp it at first. He had to have her repeat the name, even to spell it, before he understood. Then he pronounced it twice or thrice, turning his bloodshot eyes in Frau Chauchat’s direction, in order, as it were, to try if it suited. + 

“Clavdia,” he said. “Yes, that is probably it; it fits her quite well.” He could not hide his pleasure in the degree of intimacy thus achieved, and from now on referred always to Frau Chauchat as Clavdia. “Your Clavdia appears to be making bread pills. That’s not very elegant, I should think.” + 

“It depends on who does it,” the schoolmistress would answer. “Clavdia it becomes.” + 

Yes, unquestionably the mealtimes in the hall with the seven tables had great charm for Hans Castorp. He hated to have one come to an end, and his consolation was that soon, in two or three hours, he would be back again. While he was sitting there, it was as though he had never risen. And for the time in between? It was nothing. A short turn as far as the watercourse or the Platz, a little rest on his balcony: no great burden, no serious interruption. Not as though he had to look forward to some interest or effort, which would not have been so easy to overleap in spirit. Effort was not the rule in the well-regulated Berghof life. Hans Castorp, when he rose from one meal, could straightway by anticipation begin to rejoice in the next⁠—if, indeed, rejoicing is not too facile, too pleasant and unequivocal a word for the sentiments with which he looked forward to another meeting with the afflicted fair one. The reader, on the other hand, may very likely find such adjectives the only ones suitable to describe Hans Castorp’s personality or emotions. But we suggest that a young man with a well-regulated conscience and sense of fitness could not, whatever else he did, simply “rejoice in” Frau Chauchat’s proximity. In fact, we⁠—who must surely know⁠—are willing to assert that he himself would have repudiated any such expression if it had been suggested to him. + 

It is a small detail, yet worthy of mention, that he was growing to have a contempt for certain ways of expressing himself. He went about with that dry flush on his face and hummed continually under his breath⁠—being in a state of mind when music particularly appeals. He hummed a ditty heard he knew not where⁠—in some evening company or charity concert⁠—sung by some thread of a soprano voice; it turned up now in his memory, a soft nothing, that went: + 

“One word from thy sweet lips + 

Can strangely thrill me.” + 

He was about to go on: + 

“Within my heart it slips + 

And raptures fill me⁠—” + 

but broke off instead, with a disdainful shrug. “Idiotic!” he said, suddenly finding the tender ditty altogether tasteless, wishy-washy, and sentimental. He put it from him with manly sobriety, almost with regret. It was the sort of thing to satisfy a young man who had “given his heart,” as we say, given it wholly, legitimately, and with quite definite intentions, to some healthy little goose in the flat-land and thus might be justified in abandoning himself to his orthodox and gratifying sensations, with all the consequences they entailed. But for him and for his relations with Madame Chauchat (we are not responsible for the word “relations”; it was the word Hans Castorp used, not we), such songs had nothing to do with them. “Silly!” he said sententiously, and put his nose in the air. But after pronouncing this aesthetic judgment he lay silent in his deck-chair, not thinking of anything more suitable to sing in its place. + 

One thing there was which pleased him: when he lay listening to the beating of his heart⁠—his corporeal organ⁠—so plainly audible in the ordered silence of the rest period, throbbing loud and peremptorily, as it had done almost ever since he came, the sound no longer annoyed him. For now he need not feel that it so beat of its own accord, without sense or reason or any reference to his non-corporeal part. He could say, without stretching the truth, that such a connection now existed, or was easily induced: he was aware that he felt an emotion to correspond with the action of his heart. He needed only to think of Madame Chauchat⁠—and he did think of her⁠—and lo, he felt within himself the emotion proper to the heartbeats. + 

Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-Ride in the Twilight + 

The weather was vile. In this respect Hans Castorp had no luck during the brief term of his visit. It did not snow, but rained all day long, a hateful downpour; thick mist wrapped the valley, while electric storms⁠—an absurd and uncalled-for phenomenon, considering it was so cold that the heat had been turned on⁠—rolled and reverberated disagreeably through the valley. + 

“Too bad,” Joachim said. “I thought we might take our luncheons and climb up to the Schatzalp, or something like that. But it seems it is not to happen. Let us hope the last week will be better.” + 

But Hans Castorp answered: “Let be. I am not so anxious to undertake anything for the moment. My first excursion was no great success. I find it does me more good just to take the day as it comes, without too much variation. I leave that sort of thing to people who have been up here for years. What do I want of variety in my three weeks’ time?” + 

He did, indeed, find his time well taken up, just as he was. Whatever his hopes, they would come to fruition⁠—or else they would not⁠—here on the spot and not on any Schatzalp. Time did not hang heavy on his hands⁠—rather he began to feel the end of his stay approach all too near. The second week was passing; soon two-thirds of his holiday would be gone; the third week would no sooner begin than it would be time to think of packing. The refreshment of his sense of time was long since a thing of the past; the days rushed on⁠—yes, in the mass they rushed on, though at the same time each single day stretched out long and longer to hold the crowded, secret hopes and fears that filled it to overflowing. Ah, time is a riddling thing, and hard it is to expound its essence! + 

Must we put plainer name to those inward experiences which at once both weighted and gave wings to Hans Castorp’s days? We all know them; their emotional inanity ran true to type. They would have taken no different course even had their origin been such as to make applicable the silly song on which he had pronounced his severe aesthetic judgment. + 

Impossible that Madame Chauchat should know nothing of the threads that were weaving between her and a certain table. Indeed, Hans Castorp definitely, wilfully purposed that she should know something, or even a good deal. We say wilfully because his eyes were open, he was aware that reason and good sense were against it. But when a man is in Hans Castorp’s state⁠—or the state he was beginning to be in⁠—he longs, above all, to have her of whom he dreams aware that he dreams, let reason and common sense say what they like to the contrary. Thus are we made. + 

So, after it had happened twice or thrice that Madame Chauchat, impelled by chance or magnetic attraction, had turned and looked in the direction of Hans Castorp’s table and met each time his eyes fixed upon her, she turned the fourth time with intent⁠—and met them again. On the fifth occasion she did not catch him in flagrante; he was not at his post. Yet he straightway felt her eyes upon him, turned, and gazed so ardently that she smiled and looked away. Rapture⁠—and misgiving⁠—filled him at sight of that smile. Did she take him for a child? Very well, she should see. He cast about for means to refine upon the position. On the sixth occasion, when he felt, he divined, an inner voice whispered him, that she was looking, he pretended to be absorbed in disgusted contemplation of a pimply dame who had stopped to talk with the great-aunt. He stuck to his guns for a space of two or three minutes, until he was certain the “Kirghiz” eyes had been withdrawn⁠—a marvellous piece of playacting, which Frau Chauchat not only might, but was expressly intended to see through, to the end that she be impressed with Hans Castorp’s subtlety and self-control. Then came the following episode. Frau Chauchat, between courses, turned carelessly about and surveyed the dining-room. Hans Castorp was on guard; their glances met, she peering at him with a vaguely mocking look on her face, he with a determination that made him clench his teeth. And as they looked, her serviette slipped down from her lap and was about to fall to the floor. She reached after it nervously and he felt the motion in all his limbs, so that he half rose from his chair and was about to spring wildly to her aid across eight yards of space and an intervening table⁠—as though some dire catastrophe must ensue if the serviette were to touch the floor. She possessed herself of it just in time; then, still stooping, holding it by the corner, and frowning in evident vexation at the contretemps, for which she seemed to hold him responsible, she looked back once more and saw him with lifted brows, sitting there poised for a spring! Again she smiled and turned away. + 

Hans Castorp was in the seventh heaven over this occurrence. True, he had to pay for it: for full two days⁠—that is to say, for the space of ten mealtimes, Madame Chauchat never looked his way. She even intermitted her habit of pausing on her entrance, to survey the room and, as it were, present herself to it. That was hard to bear; yet, since it undoubtedly happened on his account, it preserved the relation between them, if only on its negative side. That was something. + 

He saw how right Joachim had been in saying that it was hard to get acquainted here, except with one’s table companions. For one brief hour after the evening meal social relations of a sort did obtain. But they often shrank to twenty minutes’ length; and always Madame Chauchat spent the time, whether longer or shorter, with her own uncle, in the small salon. Her friends were the hollow-chested man, the whimsical girl with the fuzzy hair, the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the youth with the drooping shoulders⁠—the “good” Russian table had, it seemed, preempted the room for its own use. Furthermore, Joachim was always urging an early withdrawal. He said it was in order to spend full time in the evening cure⁠—but there were perhaps other disciplinary reasons left unspecified, which his cousin surmised and respected. We have reproached Hans Castorp with being “willful”; but certainly, whatever the goal toward which his wishes led, it was not that of social intercourse with Madame Chauchat. He concurred, generally speaking, in the circumstances that militated against it. The relation between him and the young Russian, a tense though tenuous bond, the product of his assiduous glances, was of an extra-social sort. It entailed, and could entail, no obligations. It could subsist, in his mind, along with a degree of distaste for any social approach. It was one thing for our young friend to call “Clavdia” to account for the beatings of his heart; but quite another for him, the grandson of Hans Lorenz Castorp, to be shaken in the smallest degree in the sure inward conviction that this door-slamming, finger-gnawing, bread-pill-making foreigner⁠—who carried herself so badly, who lived apart from her husband, and without a ring on her finger careered from one resort to another⁠—that this foreigner was indubitably not a person for him to cultivate; not, that is, over and above the secret relation we have indicated. A deep gulf divided their two existences; he felt, he knew, that he was not up to defending her in the face of any recognized social authority. Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was. It was this which he neither could, nor wished to, shake off. Strangely enough, he first became vividly conscious of his conviction on a day when he heard Frau Chauchat speaking in his native tongue. She stood in the dining-room after a meal, her hands in the pockets of her sweater, and charmingly struggled to converse in German with another patient, probably a rest-hall acquaintance. Hans Castorp felt an unwonted thrill⁠—never before had he been so proud of his mother-tongue⁠—yet at the same time experienced a temptation to offer up his pride on the altar of quite a different feeling⁠—the rapture which filled him at the sound of her pretty stammerings and manglings of his speech. + 

In a word, Hans Castorp envisaged in this opening affair between him and the heedless creature who was a member of the Berghof society no more than a holiday adventure. Before the tribunal of reason, conscience, and common sense it could make no claims to be heard; principally, of course, because when all was said and done, Frau Chauchat was an ailing woman, feeble, fevered, and tainted within; her physical condition had much to do with the questionable life she led, as also with Hans Castorp’s instinctive reservations. No, it simply did not occur to him to seek her society; while as for the rest⁠—well, however the thing turned out, it would be over in one way or another inside ten days, when he would enter upon his apprenticeship at Tunder and Wilms’s. + 

For the moment, however, he had begun to live in and for the emotions roused in him by the pretty patient: the up and down of suspense, fulfilment or disappointment, characteristic of such a state. He came to regard these feelings as the real meaning and content of his stay; his mood depended wholly upon their event. All the circumstances of life up here favoured their development. For the inviolably daily programme brought the two constantly together. True, Frau Chauchat’s chamber was on a different storey from his own, and she performed her cure, so the schoolmistress said, in the general rest-hall on the roof (the same in which Captain Miklosich had lately turned off the light). But there were the five mealtimes; and besides them, innumerable occasions in the daily goings and comings when not only might they meet, but it was practically unavoidable they should. And that, Hans Castorp thought, was all to the good. So was the fact that he had little to do between one occasion and the next, except think about them. He found, indeed, something almost breathless about being thus, as it were, immured with opportunity. + 

Which did not prevent him from employing all manner of devices to improve the position. His charmer came regularly late to meals; he did the same, with intent to waylay her. He dallied over his toilet, was not ready when Joachim knocked, and let his cousin go on before⁠—he would catch up with him. He would wait until the intuition proper to his state warned him of the right moment; then he would hurry down, not by his own stair, but by the one at the end of the corridor, which would take him past a certain door⁠—number seven⁠—in the first storey. Every moment of the way, every step of the stair, offered a chance; any instant the door might open⁠—and in practice it often did. Out she would slip, noiselessly, the door would slam behind her, she would glide to the stairs, she would pass down ahead of him, with her hand up to her braids of hair⁠—or else he would be in front of her, feel her gaze in his back, and experience a thrill as from an ant crawling down it. His bearing, of course, was that of a person unaware of her presence, leading a free and independent existence of his own: he would bury his hands in his pockets, walk with a swagger, cough an entirely unnecessary cough, and strike himself on the chest⁠—anything to manifest his utter unconcern. + 

On two occasions he refined yet further. Already seated at the table, he felt himself with both hands, and said with a fine show of irritation: “There, I’ve forgotten my handkerchief. That means I must trot back again to fetch it.” And went back, to the end that he and she might meet on the way, since that afforded a keener throb than when she merely walked in front of or behind him. The first time he executed this manoeuvre, she measured him with her eyes from a distance, swept him from head to foot, quite bold and unblushing. Then approaching nearer, turned away indifferently and passed him by. So that he got but little out of the démarche. The second time she stared him in the face without flinching, almost forbiddingly, even turning her head as they crossed, to follow him with her look⁠—it went through our poor young friend like a knife. We need not pity him, for was it not all his own doing? But the encounter was gripping at the moment and even more afterwards⁠—for only in retrospect was he clear as to what had actually happened. He had never seen Frau Chauchat’s face so close, so clear in all its details. He could have counted the tiny hairs that stood up from the braid she wore wreathed round her head⁠—they were reddish-blond, with a metallic sheen. No more than a hands-breadth or so of space had been between his face and hers, whose outline and features, peculiar though they were, had been familiar to him as long as he could remember, and spoke to his very soul as nothing else could in all the world. It was an unusual face, and full of character (for only the unusual seems to us to have character); its mystery and strangeness spoke of the unknown north, and it teased the curiosity because its proportions and characteristics were somehow not very easy to determine. Its keynote, probably, was the high, bony structure of the prominent cheekbones; they seemed to compress the eyes⁠—which were unusually far apart and unusually level with the face⁠—and squeeze them into a slightly oblique position; while at the same time they appeared responsible for the soft concavity of the cheek, and this, in turn, to result in the full curve of the slightly pouting lips. Then there were the eyes themselves: the narrow “Kirghiz” eyes, whose shape was yet to Hans Castorp a simple enchantment and whose colour was the grey-blue or blue-grey of distant mountains; they had the trick of sidewise, unseeing glance, which could sometimes melt them into the very hue of mystery and darkness⁠—these eyes of Clavdia, which had gazed so forbiddingly into his very face, and which so awfully resembled Pribislav Hippe’s in shape, expression, and colour that they fairly frightened him. Resembled was not the word: they were the same eyes. The breadth, too, of the upper part of the face, the flattened nose, everything, even to the flush in the white skin, the healthy colour of the cheek⁠—which in Frau Chauchat’s case, as in so many others, merely counterfeited health and was a superficial effect of the open-air cure⁠—everything was precisely Pribislav, and no differently would he have looked at Hans Castorp were they to meet again as of old in the school courtyard. + 

It had been staggering in the extreme. Hans Castorp thrilled at the encounter, yet experienced a mounting uneasiness like that he felt when he realized how narrow was the proximity that enclosed him and the fair Russian. That the long-forgotten Pribislav Hippe should appear to him in the guise of Frau Chauchat and look at him with those “Kirghiz” eyes⁠—this was to be immured, not with opportunity, but with the inevitable, the unescapable, to such an extent as to fill him with conflicting emotions. It was a situation rich in hope, yet heavy with dread⁠—it gave our young friend a feeling of helplessness, and set in motion a vague instinct to cast about, to grope and feel for help or counsel. One after another he mentally summoned up various people, the thought of whom might serve him as some sort of mental support. + 

There was the good, the upright Joachim, firm as a rock⁠—yet whose eyes in these past months had come to hold such a tragic shadow, and who had never used to shrug his shoulders, as he did so often now. Joachim, with the “Blue Peter” in his pocket, as Frau Stöhr called the receptacle. When Hans Castorp thought of her hard, crabbed face it made him shiver. Yes, there was Joachim⁠—who kept constantly at Hofrat Behrens to let him get away and go down to the longed-for service in the “plain”⁠—the “flat-land,” as the healthy, normal world was called up here, with a faint yet perceptible nuance of contempt. Joachim served the cure single-mindedly, to the end that he might arrive sooner at his goal and save some of the time which “those up here” so wantonly flung away; served it unquestioningly for the sake of speedy recovery⁠—but also, Hans Castorp detected, for the sake of the cure itself, which, after all, was a service, like another; and was not duty duty, wherever performed? Joachim invariably went upstairs after only a quarter-hour in the drawing-rooms; and this military precision of his was a prop to the civilian laxity of his cousin, who would otherwise be likely to loiter unprofitably below, with his eye on the company in the small salon. But Hans Castorp was convinced there was another and private reason why Joachim withdrew so early; he had known it since the time he saw his cousin’s face take on the mottled pallor, and his mouth assume the pathetic twist. He perfectly understood. For Marusja was almost always there in the evening⁠—laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her charming hand, the handkerchief with the orange scent, and the swelling bosom, tainted within⁠—Hans Castorp comprehended that it was her presence which drove Joachim away, precisely because it so strongly, so fearfully drew him toward her. Was Joachim too “immured”⁠—and even worse off than himself, in that he had five times a day to sit at the same table with Marusja and her orange-scented handkerchief? However that might be, it was clear that Joachim was preoccupied with his own troubles; the thought of him could afford his cousin no mental support. That he took refuge in daily flight was a credit to him; but that he had to flee was anything but reassuring to Hans Castorp, who even began to feel that Joachim’s good example of faithful service of the cure and the initiation which he owed to his cousin’s experience might have also their bad side. + 

Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed had begun to take on, in his eyes, a character of sanctity. When, from the point of view of “those up here,” he considered life as lived down in the flat-land, it seemed somehow queer and unnatural. He had grown skilled in the handling of his rugs and the art of making a proper bundle, a sort of mummy, of himself, when lying on his balcony on cold days. He was almost as skilful as Joachim⁠—and yet, down below, there was no soul who knew aught of such an art or the practice of it! How strange, he thought; yet at the same moment wondered at himself for finding it strange⁠—and there surged up again that uneasy sensation of groping for support. + 

He thought of Hofrat Behrens and his professional advice, bestowed “sine pecunia,” that he should, while he was up here, order his life like the other patients, even to the taking of his temperature. He thought of Settembrini, and of how he had laughed at that same advice, and quoted something out of The Magic Flute. Did thinking of either of these two afford him any moral support? Hofrat Behrens was a white-haired man, old enough to be Hans Castorp’s father. He was the head of the establishment, the highest authority. And it was of fatherly authority that the young man now felt an uneasy need. But no, it would not do: he could not think with childlike confidingness of the Hofrat. The physician had buried his wife up here, and been brought so low by grief as almost to lose his mind; then he had stopped on, to be near her grave and because he himself was somewhat infected. Was he sound again? Was he single-mindedly bent on making his patients whole, so they could go back to service in the world below? His cheeks had a purple hue, he looked fevered. That might be only the effect of the air up here; Hans Castorp, without fever, so far as he could judge without a thermometer, felt the same dry heat in his face, day in, day out. Of course, when one heard the Hofrat talk, one might easily conclude he had fever. There was something not quite right about it; it all sounded very jovial and lively, but on the whole forced, particularly when one thought of the purple cheeks and the watery eyes, which seemed to be still weeping for his wife. Hans Castorp recalled what Settembrini had said about the Hofrat’s vices and chronic depression⁠—that might have been malicious; it might have been sheer windiness. But he did not find it sustained or fortified him to think of Hofrat Behrens. + 

Then there was Settembrini himself, of course⁠—the chronic oppositionist, the windbag, the “homo humanus,” as he styled himself. Hans Castorp thought him well over, with his gift of the gab, his florid harangue on the combination of dullness and disease, and how he, Hans Castorp, had been taken to task for calling it a “dilemma for the human intelligence.” What about him? Would the thought of him be anyway efficacious? Hans Castorp recalled how several times, in the extraordinarily vivid dreams that visited his sleep in this place, he had taken umbrage at the dry and subtle smile curling the Italian’s lip beneath the flowing moustache; how he had railed at him for a hand-organ man, and tried to shove him away because he was a disturbing influence. But that was in his dreams⁠—the waking Hans Castorp was no such matter, but a much less untrammelled person; not disinclined, either, on the whole, to try out the influence upon himself of this novel human type, with its critical animus and acumen, despite the fact that he found the Italian both carping and garrulous. After all, Settembrini had called himself a pedagogue; obviously he was anxious to exercise influence; and Hans Castorp, for his part, fairly yearned to be influenced⁠—though of course, not to an extent which should cause him to pack his trunk and leave before his time, as Settembrini had in all seriousness proposed. + 

“Placet experiri,” he thought to himself, with a smile. So much Latin he had, without calling himself a homo humanus. The upshot was that he kept his eye on Settembrini, listened keenly and critically to what he had to say when they met on their prescribed walks to the bench on the mountainside, or down to the Platz, or wherever and whenever opportunity offered. Other occasions there were, too: for instance, at the end of a meal Settembrini would rise from table before anyone else and saunter across among the seven tables, in his check trousers, a toothpick between his lips, to where the cousins sat. He did this in defiance of law and custom, standing there in a graceful attitude, with his legs crossed, talking and gesticulating with the toothpick. Or he would draw up a chair and sit down at the corner of the table, between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress, or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson, and look on while they ate their pudding, which he seemed to have forgone. + 

“May I beg for admission into this charmed circle?” he would say, shaking hands with the cousins, and comprehending the rest of the table in a sweeping bow. “My brewer over there⁠—not to mention the despairing gaze of the breweress!⁠—But, really, this Herr Magnus! Just now he has been delivering a discourse on folk-psychology. Shall I tell you what he said? ‘The Fatherland, it is true, is one enormous barracks. But all the same it’s got a lot of solid capacity, it’s genuine. I wouldn’t change it for the fine manners of the rest of them. What good are fine manners to me if I’m cheated right and left?’ And more of the same kind. I am at the end of my patience. And opposite me I have a poor creature, with churchyard roses blooming in her cheeks, an old maid from Siebenbürgen, who never stops talking about her brother-in-law, a man we none of us either know or wish to know. I could stand it no longer, I shook their dust from my feet, I bolted.” + 

“You raised your flag and took to your heels,” Frau Stöhr stated. + 

“Pre‑cisely,” shouted Settembrini. “I fled with my flag. Ah, what an apt phrase! I see I have come to the right place; nobody else here knows how to coin phrases like that.⁠—May I be permitted to inquire after the state of your health, Frau Stöhr?” + 

It was frightful to see Frau Stöhr preen herself. + 

“Good land!” she said. “It is always the same, you know yourself: two steps forward and three back. When you have been sitting here five months, along comes the old man and tucks on another six. It is like the torment of Tantalus: you shove and shove, and think you are getting to the top⁠—” + 

“Ah, how delightful of you, to give poor old Tantalus a new job, and let him roll the stone uphill for a change! I call that true benevolence.⁠—But what are these mysterious reports I have been hearing of you, Frau Stöhr? There are tales going about⁠—tales about doubles, astral bodies, and the like. Up to now I have lent them no credence⁠—but this latest story puzzles me, I confess.” + 

“I know you are poking fun at me.” + 

“Not for an instant. I beg you to set my mind at rest about this dark side of your life; after that it will be time to jest. Last night, between half past nine and ten, I was taking a little exercise in the garden; I looked up at the row of balconies; there was your light gleaming through the dark; you were performing your cure, led by the dictates of duty and reason. ‘Ah,’ thought I, ‘there lies our charming invalid, obeying the rules of the house, for the sake of an early return to the arms of her waiting husband.’⁠—And now what do I hear? That you were seen at that very hour at the Kurhaus, in the cinematógrafo” (Herr Settembrini gave the word the Italian pronunciation, with the accent on the fourth syllable) “and afterwards in the café, enjoying punch and kisses, and⁠—” + 

Frau Stöhr wriggled and giggled into her serviette, nudged Joachim and the silent Dr. Blumenkohl in the ribs, winked with coy confidingness, and altogether gave a perfect exhibition of fatuous complacency. She was in the habit of leaving the light burning on her balcony and stealing off to seek distraction in the quarter below. Her husband, meanwhile, in Cannstadt, awaited her return. She was not the only patient who practised this duplicity. + 

“And,” went on Settembrini, “that you were enjoying those kisses in the company of⁠—whom, do you think? In the company of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. They say he wears a corset⁠—but that is little to the point. I conjure you, madame, to tell me! Have you a double? Was it your earthly part which lay there alone on your balcony, while your spirit revelled below, with Captain Miklosich and his kisses?” + 

Frau Stöhr wreathed and bridled as though she were being tickled. + 

“One asks oneself, had it not been better the other way about,” Settembrini went on; “you enjoying the kisses by yourself, and the rest-cure with Captain Miklosich⁠—” + 

“Tehee!” tittered Frau Stöhr. + 

“Have the ladies and gentlemen heard the latest?” the Italian went on, without pausing for breath. “Somebody has been flown away with⁠—by the devil. Or, to speak literally, by his mama⁠—a very determined lady, I quite took to her. It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat at Mademoiselle Kleefeld’s table. You see, his place is empty. It will soon be filled up again, I am not worried about that⁠—but Anton is off, on the wings of the wind, in the twinkling of an eye, rapt away before he knew where he was. Sixteen years old, and had been up here a year and a half, with six months to go. But how did it happen? Who knows? Perhaps somebody dropped a little word to Madame his mother; anyhow, she got wind of his goings-on, in Baccho et ceteris. She appears unannounced on the scene, some three heads taller than I am, white-haired and exceeding wroth; fetches Herr Anton a couple of boxes on the ear, takes him by the collar, and puts him on the train. ‘If he is going to the dogs,’ she says, ‘he can do it just as well down below.’ And off they go.” + 

Everybody within earshot laughed; Herr Settembrini had such a droll way of telling a story. Despite his contemptuous attitude toward the society of the place, he always knew everything that went on. He knew the name and circumstances of each patient. He knew that such and such a person had been operated on for rib resection; had it on the best authority that from the autumn onward no one with a temperature of more than 101.3° would be admitted into the establishment. He told them how last night the little dog belonging to Madame Capatsoulias from Mitylene stepped on the button of the electric signal on his mistress’s night-table and occasioned much commotion and running hither and yon⁠—particularly because Madame Capatsoulias had been found not alone, but in the society of Assessor Düstmund from Friedrichshagen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl had to laugh at that. Pretty Marusja well-nigh choked in her orange-scented handkerchief, and Frau Stöhr yelled with laughter, holding her breast with both hands. + 

But to the cousins Ludovico Settembrini talked of himself and his early life; whether on the walks they took together, or during the evening in the salon, or perhaps, in the dining-room itself, after a meal, when most of the patients had left and the three sat together at their end of the table, while the waitresses cleared away and Hans Castorp smoked his Maria Mancini, which in the third week had regained a little of its savour. He was critical of what he heard, and often he felt put off; yet he listened receptively to the Italian’s talk, for it opened to his understanding a world utterly new and strange. + 

Settembrini spoke of his grandfather, a Milanese lawyer, but even more a patriot; with something of the political agitator, and orator and journalist to boot. He too, like his grandson, had always been in the opposition; though he had been able to perform his role upon a larger stage than had Ludovico. The latter remarked with some bitterness that his own activities had been confined to heckling and castigating the follies and frailties of the guests at the International Sanatorium Berghof, and to protesting against them in the name of the free and joyous human spirit. But his grandfather had had his finger in the forming of governments; he had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which had dismembered his native land and then held it in the heavy bond of servitude; he had been a zealous member of certain secret societies that had spread over Italy⁠—a carbonaro, Settembrini explained, suddenly dropping his voice, as though it might still be dangerous to utter the word. In fact, from his grandson’s narrative, the two hearers got a picture of a dark and tempest-tossed figure, a ringleader, political agitator, and conspirator; despite all their pains, they did not quite succeed in hiding a feeling of mistrust, even repulsion. True, the circumstances had been extraordinary. What they heard had happened long ago, almost a hundred years. It was history; and they were familiar in theory⁠—particularly from ancient history⁠—with the traditional figure of the tyrant-hater and liberator, such as they now heard of⁠—though they had never dreamed of being brought into actual human contact with him, like this! Settembrini’s grandfather, so they were told, united with his conspiratorial zeal a profound love for his native land, which it was his dream to see free and united; indeed, it was out of this very combination, as a natural consequence, that his revolutionary activities flowed⁠—and how strange this mingling of rebellion and patriotism seemed to the cousins, in whose minds an abiding sense of order was on an equal footing with their love of country! But they privately admitted, none the less, that at that time, and in that situation, it might have been conceivably possible that rebellion should go paired with civic virtue, and law-abidingness lie down with lazy indifference to the public weal. + 

But Grandfather Giuseppe had been not only an Italian patriot. He had been fellow citizen and brother-in-arms to any people struggling for its liberties. Thus after the shipwreck of a certain plot hatched in Turin for the overthrow of the military and civil government, a plot in which he had been deeply involved, he had escaped by a hair’s breadth the clutches of Metternich’s hirelings, and spent the time of his exile fighting and bleeding, first in Spain for the cause of constitutionalism, then in Greece for the independence of the Hellenic peoples. It was in Greece that Settembrini’s father had seen the light⁠—which probably accounted for his being a humanist and lover of classical antiquity. His mother had been of German stock; Settembrini had married her in Switzerland and taken her about with him in his further adventurous career. He had been allowed, after ten years of exile, to return to Milan, where he had practised his profession, without for a moment ceasing to labour, with voice and pen, in verse and prose, for the establishment of a united republic, and to draw up subversive programmes characterized by dictatorial ardour, in which were promulgated in the clearest style the unification of the liberated people and the attainment of general felicity. One detail mentioned by the grandson made a profound impression upon Hans Castorp: Grandfather Giuseppe, to the day of his death, wore black⁠—in token, he said, of his mourning for the state of the fatherland, languishing in misery and servitude. Hans Castorp, at this piece of information, thought of his own grandfather, as he had once or twice before during Settembrini’s narrative. He too, for as long as his grandson had known him, wore black clothes. But for how different a reason! Hans Lorenz Castorp had worn the quaint old fashion to indicate his oneness with a bygone time and his essential lack of sympathy with the present; worn it up to the end of his days, when he had returned in death to his true and adequate presentment⁠—with the starched ruff. Certainly these were two strikingly different kinds of grandfather! Hans Castorp pondered, his eyes fixed in a stare, cautiously shaking his head in a way that might as well be taken for a sign of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as for the opposite. He honourably refrained from judging what he did not understand, but simply made mental note of the contrast and let it go at that. He could see the narrow head of old Hans Lorenz, as it bent musing over the pale gold rim of the christening basin, that symbol of the passing and the abiding, of continuity through change. He had his mouth open; Hans Castorp knew the words “great-great-great” were about to issue from it, the sombre syllables which always reminded him of places where one walked with bent head and reverent gait. And then he saw Giuseppe Settembrini, with the tricolour on his arm, waving his sabre and breathing a vow to Heaven with dark gaze flung aloft, as he stormed the heights of despotism at the head of a liberty-loving host. Well, he thought, each of them had his fine and splendid side⁠—he made the greater effort to be fair, because he knew himself to be partisan, on personal or partly personal grounds. For Grandfather Settembrini had fought to obtain political rights; whereas the other grandfather⁠—or his ancestors⁠—had originally had all the rights, and the scoundrels had taken them away from him, in the course of the centuries, by violence or pettifoggery. So both grandfathers had worn mourning, the one in the north and the one in the south, and both in the same idea; namely, to put a great gulf between them and the evil present. But whereas the one had assumed it in token of his pious reverence for the past and the dead, to whom he felt himself with his whole being to belong, the other had worn it as a sign of rebellion, in the name of progress, and in a spirit of hostility toward the past. Yes, these were two different worlds. As Herr Settembrini talked, and Hans Castorp stood, as it were, between them and cast his critical eye upon one and upon the other, they called back to his conscious mind a scene from his own past life. He saw himself rowing on a lake in Holstein, one late summer evening; the sun was down, the almost full moon rising above the bushes that bordered the lake. He rowed alone and slowly over the quiet waters, gazing to right and left at a scene fantastic as any dream. In the west it was still broad day, with a fixed and glassy air; but in the east he looked into a moonlit landscape, wreathed in the magic of rising mists and equally convincing to his bewildered sense. The strange combination lasted some brief quarter-hour before the balance finally settled in favour of night and the moon; all that time Hans Castorp’s dazzled eyes went shifting in lively amazement from one scene to the other: from day to night and back again to day. The picture returned to him now. + 

At the same time the thought crossed his mind that Lawyer Settembrini could scarcely have been much of a jurist, considering his other occupations and the extended sphere of his activities. His grandson asseverated, however, and Hans Castorp found it credible, that the grandfather had been from early childhood down to the last day of his life inspired by the fundamental principle of justice. Our hero, all heavy-headed as he was and organically preoccupied by the six-course Berghof meal he had just eaten, made an effort to understand what Settembrini meant when he called this principle “the source and fount of liberty and progress.” Progress, up to now, had had to do, in Hans Castorp’s mind, with such things as the nineteenth-century development of cranes and lifting-tackle. He was accordingly gratified to learn that Grandfather Settembrini had not underestimated the importance of such matters. Of course, his own grandfather hadn’t either. The Italian paid a tribute to the native land of his two listeners, for the inventions of gunpowder⁠—whereby the armour of feudalism had been thrown on the scrapheap⁠—and the printing-press, which had made possible the democratic propagation of ideas, and the propagation of democratic ideas, which were one and the same. For these good gifts he praised Germany; praised her for her past, but awarded his own country the palm, because she had been the first to unfurl the banner of freedom, culture, and enlightenment, at a time when all other lands were wrapped in the darkness of superstition and slavery. Yet in paying due honour, as upon their first meeting, at the bench by the watercourse, to commerce and technology (Hans Castorp’s own field), Settembrini apparently did so not for the sake of these forces themselves, but purely with reference to their significance for the ethical development of mankind. For such a significance, he declared, he joyfully ascribed to them. Technical progress, he said, gradually subjugated nature, by developing roads and telegraphs, minimizing climatic differences; and by the means of communication which it created proved itself the most reliable agent in the task of drawing together the peoples of the earth, of making them acquainted with each other, of building bridges to compromise, of destroying prejudice; of, actually, bringing about the universal brotherhood of man. Humanity had sprung from the depths of fear, darkness, and hatred; but it was emerging, it was moving onward and upward, toward a goal of fellow-feeling and enlightenment, of goodness and joyousness; and upon this path, he said, the industrial arts were the vehicle conducive to the greatest progress. But all this made a confused impression on Hans Castorp. Herr Settembrini seemed to bring together in a single breath categories which in the young man’s mind had heretofore been as the poles asunder⁠—for example, technology and morals! Positively, he made the statement that Christ had been the first to proclaim the principle of equality and union, that the printing-press had propagated the doctrine, and that finally the French Revolution had elevated it into a law! All which our poor young friend found very muddling, he scarce knew why⁠—though the feeling was definite enough in all conscience, and though Herr Settembrini had couched his thought in the clearest and roundest of periods. Once, the Italian went on, once only in his life, and that in his early manhood, had his grandfather known what it was to feel profound joy. That was at the time of the Paris July Revolution. He had gone about proclaiming to all and sundry that some day men would place those three days alongside the six days of creation, and reverence them alike. Hans Castorp felt utterly dumbfounded⁠—involuntarily he slapped the table with his hand. To compare those three summer days of the year 1830 when the Parisians had taken unto themselves a new constitution, to the six in which God had divided the land from the water and created the lights in the firmament of heaven, as well as flowers, trees, birds, and fishes, and all other living things⁠—that seemed to him to be going too far. He talked it over later with Cousin Joachim, and gave clear expression to his opinion that it really was pretty thick, that he, Hans Castorp, for his part, found it positively offensive. + 

But still open-minded⁠—at least in the sense that he enjoyed the experiment he was making⁠—he restrained the objections which his sense of fitness would have raised against the Settembrinian scheme of things. Restrained them on the theory that what seemed sedition to him might to another seem dauntless courage; and what he called bad taste might have been, in that far-off time and circumstance, but a display of the noble excesses of a high-hearted nature⁠—for instance, when Grandfather Settembrini called the barricades “the people’s throne,” and talked about “dedicating the burgher’s pike on the altar of humanity.” + 

Hans Castorp knew⁠—without putting it into so many words⁠—why he lent an ear to Herr Settembrini. Partly it was out of a sense of duty; though also out of that holiday mood of taking everything as it came, rejecting nothing, in the knowledge that in another day or so he would spread his wings and fly back to the wonted order of things. Yes, he knew it was largely the promptings of conscience to which he hearkened; to be precise, the promptings of a conscience not altogether easy⁠—as he sat listening to the Italian, one leg crossed over the other, drawing at his Maria Mancini; or when the three of them climbed the hill from the English quarter. + 

Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress. One might call the first the Asiatic, the second the European principle; for Europe was the theatre of rebellion, the sphere of intellectual discrimination and transforming activity, whereas the East embodied the conception of quiesence and immobility. There was no doubt as to which of the two would finally triumph: it would be the power of enlightenment, the power that made for rational advance and development. For human progress snatched up ever more peoples with it on its brilliant course; it conquered more and more territory in Europe itself and was already pressing Asia-wards. Much still remained to be done, sublime exertions were still demanded from those spirits who had received the light. Then only the day would come when thrones would crash and outworn religions crumble, in those remaining countries of Europe which had not already enjoyed the blessings of eighteenth-century enlightenment, nor yet of an upheaval like 1789. But the day would come, Settembrini said, with his suave smile; it would come, he repeated, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles; and dawn would break over Europe, the dawn of universal brotherhood, in the name of justice, science, and human reason. It would bring in its train a new Holy Alliance, the alliance of the democratic peoples of Europe, in opposition to that other Holy Alliance, the thrice-infamous organ of princes and cabinets, which Grandfather Giuseppe had personally regarded as his deadly foe; in a word, it would bring in its train the republic of the world. But before that could happen, the Asiatic principle must be met and crushed in its very stronghold and vital centre; that was to say, in Vienna. Austria must be crushed, crushed and dismembered, first to take vengeance for the past, and second to lead in the new law of justice with truth on earth. + 

Hans Castorp did not care for this last drift in Herr Settembrini’s sonorous flow of words. He mistrusted it; it sounded too much like a personal or national animus. As for Joachim Ziemssen, whenever the Italian fell into this vein, he scowled and turned away his head, or sought to create a diversion by saying it was time for the rest-cure. Neither did Hans Castorp feel obliged to listen when the conversation took these devious paths; they clearly fell outside the limits within which his conscience prompted him to profit by Herr Settembrini’s words. Yet conscience still urged him to continue in the effort; so clearly that often, as opportunity arose, he would even invite the Italian to discourse on the subject of his ideas. + 

Those ideas, ideals, and efforts of the aspiring will were, Settembrini said, traditional in his family. He inherited them. Grandfather, son, and grandson, each in his turn, had dedicated to them their entire lives and all their spiritual energy. The father in his own way had done so no less than Grandfather Giuseppe. True, he had not been a political agitator or active combatant in the cause of freedom, but a quiet and sensitive scholar, a humanist sitting at his writing-desk. But what, after all, was humanism if not love of humankind, and by that token also political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degrade our conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity; whereas the Middle Ages, in striking contrast, had been sunk not only in superstitious hostility to the human spirit, but also in a shameful formlessness. From the very beginning he had defended the right of the human being to his earthly interests, to liberty of thought and joy in life, and insisted that we could safely leave heaven to take care of itself. Humanism⁠—had not Prometheus been the earliest humanist, and was he not identical with the Satan hymned by Carducci? Ah, if the cousins had only heard that arch-enemy of the Church, at Bologna, pouring the vials of his sarcasm upon the Christian sentimentalism of the Romanticismo! Upon Manzoni’s Inni Sacri! Upon the shadows-and-moonlight poetry of the romantic movement, which he had compared to “Luna, Heaven’s pallid nun”! Per Bacco, this was a joy to listen to! And they ought to have heard Carducci interpret Dante, celebrating him as the citizen of a great city-state, who had spoken out against asceticism and the negation of life, and on the side of the world-transforming and reforming deed! It was not the sickly and mystagogic figure of Beatrice which the poet had celebrated under the name of “donna gentil e pietosa”; rather it had been his wife, who represented in the poem the principle of worldly knowledge and practical workaday life. + 

Thus Hans Castorp came to hear something about Dante, and certainly from the lips of authority. He was not too much inclined to believe implicitly all Settembrini said; he considered him too much of a windbag for that. Still it was an interesting conception, this of Dante as the wide-awake citizen of a great metropolis. And now Settembrini went on to speak of himself, and to explain how the tendencies of his immediate forbears, the political from his grandfather, the humanistic from his father, had united in his own person to produce the writer and independent man of letters. For literature was after all nothing else than the combination of humanism and politics; a conjunction the more immediate in that humanism itself was politics and politics humanism. Hans Castorp did his best at this point to listen and comprehend, in the hope of finally learning wherein had consisted the crass ignorance of Magnus the brewer, and finding out what else literature actually was, above and beyond “beautiful characters.” Settembrini asked his audience whether they had ever heard of Brunetto, Brunetto Latini, a Florentine notary, who about the year 1250 had written a book on the subject of the virtues and the vices. He it was who had sharpened the wits of the Florentines, taught them the art of language, and how to guide their state according to the rules of politics. + 

“There you have it, gentlemen, there you have it!” Settembrini cried with ardour, and enlarged upon the cult of the “word,” the art of eloquence, which he called the triumph of the human genius. For the word was the glory of mankind, it alone imparted dignity to life. Not only was humanism bound up with the word, and with literature, but so also was humanity itself, man’s ancient dignity and manly self-respect (“You heard, didn’t you,” Hans Castorp said later to his cousin, “you heard him say that literature is a question of beautiful words? I spotted it directly”), from which it followed that politics too is bound up with the word. Or, rather, it followed directly from the union, the unity that subsisted between humanity and literature, for the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed. + 

“Two hundred years ago,” Settembrini said, “you had a poet in your country, a magnificent old chatterbox who set great store in good handwriting because he thought it must induce a good style. He should have gone a step further and said that a good style would lead to good deeds,” Settembrini added. For writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word. This word? Ah, it was already familiar to their ears; yet he would wager the cousins had never before rightly grasped its meaning and its majesty: the word was⁠—civilization! And as Settembrini brought it out, he flung his small, yellow-skinned right hand in the air, as though proposing a toast. + 

Well, all that young Hans Castorp found worth listening to; not precisely overwhelming, of a value largely experimental, but still worth listening to. He said as much to Joachim Ziemssen later; but Joachim had his thermometer in his mouth and could not reply to his cousin; nor had he afterwards leisure, when, on taking it out, he read the figure and entered it in his notebook. But Hans Castorp good-naturedly took cognizance of Settembrini’s point of view and tested by it his own inner experiences; from which self-examination it principally appeared that the waking man has an advantage over the sleeping and dreaming one. For whereas the sleeping Hans Castorp had more than once upbraided the organ-grinder to his face and done his utmost to drive him away because he felt him a disturbing influence, the waking one lent him an attentive ear and made an honest effort to minimize the opposition which his mentor’s ideas and conceptions persistently aroused in him. For it cannot be denied that there was such opposition; some of it such as he must always have felt from the very beginning, the rest arising from the particular situation and his partly vicarious, partly secret and personal experiences among “those up here.” + 

What a creature is man, how widely his conscience betrays him! How easy it is for him to think he hears, even in the voice of duty, a licence to passion! Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini out of a sense of duty and fairness, in the idea of hearing both sides; with the best of intentions he tested the latter’s views on the subject of the republic, reason and the bello stile. He was entirely receptive. And all the while he was finding it more and more permissible to give his thoughts and dreams free rein in another and quite opposite direction. Indeed, to give expression to all that we suspect or divine, we think it not unlikely that Hans Castorp hearkened to Herr Settembrini’s discourse in order to get from his own conscience an indulgence which otherwise might not have been forthcoming. But what⁠—or who⁠—was it that drew down the other side of the scales, when weighed over against patriotism, belles-lettres, and the dignity of man? It was⁠—Clavdia Chauchat, “Kirghiz”-eyed, “relaxed,” and tainted within; when he thought of her (though “thinking” is far too tame a word to characterize the impulse that turned all his being in her direction), it was as though he were sitting again in his boat on the lake in Holstein, looking with dazzled eyes from the glassy daylight of the western shore to the mist and moonbeams that wrapped the eastern heavens. + 

The Thermometer + 

Hans Castorp’s week here ran from Tuesday to Tuesday, for on a Tuesday he had arrived. Two or three days before, he had gone down to the office and paid his second weekly bill, a modest account of a round one hundred and sixty francs, modest and cheap enough, even without taking into consideration the nature of some of the advantages of a stay up here⁠—advantages priceless in themselves, though for that very reason they could not be included in the bill⁠—and even without counting extras like the fortnightly concert and Dr. Krokowski’s lectures, which might conceivably have been included. The sum of one hundred and sixty francs represented simply and solely the actual hospitality extended by the Berghof to Hans Castorp: his comfortable lodgment and his five stupendous meals. + 

“It isn’t much, it is rather cheap than otherwise,” remarked the guest to the old inhabitant. “You cannot complain of being overcharged up here. You need around six hundred and fifty francs a month for board and lodging, treatment included. Let us assume that you spend another thirty francs for tips, if you are decent and like to have friendly faces about you. That makes six hundred and eighty. Good. Of course I know there are fixed fees and other sorts of small expenses: toilet articles, tobacco, drives, and excursions, now and then a bill for shoes or clothing. Very good. But all that won’t bring it up to a thousand francs, say what you like. Not eight hundred even. That isn’t ten thousand francs a year. Certainly not more. That is what it costs you.” + 

“Mental arithmetic very fair,” Joachim said. “I never knew you were such a shot at doing sums in your head. And how broad-minded of you to calculate it by the year like that! You’ve learned something since you’ve been up here. But your figure is too high. I don’t smoke, and I certainly don’t expect to buy any suits while I am here, thank you.” + 

“Then it would be lower still,” Hans Castorp answered, rather confused. Why, indeed, he should have included tobacco and a new wardrobe in his calculation of Joachim’s expenses is a puzzle. But for the rest, his brilliant display of arithmetic had simply been so much dust thrown in his cousin’s eyes; for here, as elsewhere, his mental processes were rather slow than fast, and the truth is that a previous calculation with pencil and paper underlay his present facility. One night on his balcony (for he even took the evening cure out of doors now, like the rest) a sudden thought had struck him and he had got out of his comfortable chair to fetch pencil and paper. As the result of some simple figuring, he concluded that his cousin⁠—or, speaking generally, a patient at the Berghof⁠—would need twelve thousand francs a year to cover the sum total of his expenses. Thus he amused himself by establishing the fact that he, Hans Castorp, could amply afford to live up here, if he chose, being a man of eighteen or nineteen thousand francs yearly income. + 

He had, as we have said, paid his second weekly bill three days before, and accordingly found himself in the middle of the third and last week of his appointed stay. The coming Sunday, as he remarked to himself and to his cousin, would see the performance of another of the fortnightly concerts, and the Monday another lecture by Dr. Krokowski; then, on Tuesday or Wednesday, he would be off, and Joachim would be left up here alone⁠—poor Joachim, for whom Rhadamanthus would prescribe God knew how many more months! Already there came a shade over his gentle black eyes whenever Hans Castorp’s swiftly approaching departure was spoken of. Where, in Heaven’s name, had the holiday gone? It had rushed past, it had flown⁠—and left one wondering how. For, after all, three weeks, twenty-one days, is a considerable stretch of time, too long, at least, for one to see the end at the beginning. And now, on a sudden, there remained of it no more than a miserable three or four days, nothing worth mentioning. They would, it was true, comprehend the lecture and the concert, those two recurrent variations in the weekly programme, and, thus weighted, might move a little more slowly. But on the other hand, they would be taken up with packing and leave-taking. Three weeks up here was as good as nothing at all; they had all told him so in the beginning. The smallest unit of time was the month, Settembrini had said; and as Hans Castorp’s stay was less than that, it amounted to nothing; it was a “weekend visit,” as Hofrat Behrens put it. Had the swift flight of time up here anything to do with the uniformly accelerated rate of organic combustion? At any rate, here was a consoling thought for Joachim during his five remaining months⁠—in case he really got off with five. But Hans Castorp felt that during these three weeks they ought to have paid more attention, to have kept better watch, as Joachim did in his daily measurings, during which the seven minutes seemed like a quite considerable stretch of time. Hans Castorp grieved for his cousin, reading in his eyes his pain at the approaching parting. He felt the strongest possible sympathy at the thought of the poor chap’s having to stop on up here when he himself was down in the flat-land, helping bring the nations together through the development of commerce and communications. His own regret was at times so lively as to burn in his breast and cause him to doubt whether he would have the heart, when the time came, to leave Joachim alone; and this vicarious suffering was probably the reason why he himself referred less and less to his impending departure. It was Joachim who came back to it; for Hans Castorp, moved by native tact and delicacy, seemed to wish to forget it up to the last moment. + 

“At least.” Joachim said more than once in these days, “let us hope it has done you good to be up here, and that you will feel the benefit when you are at home again.” + 

“I’ll remember you to everybody,” Hans Castorp responded, “and say you are coming back in five months at the outside. Done me good? If it has done me good to be up here? I should like to think so; some improvement must surely have taken place, even in this short time. I have received a great many new impressions, new in every sense of the word; very stimulating, but a good deal of strain too, physically and mentally. I have not at all the feeling of having really got acclimatized⁠—which would certainly be the first necessary step toward improvement. Maria, thank goodness, is her old self; for several days now, I have been able to get the aroma. But my handkerchief still becomes red from time to time when I use it⁠—and this damned heat in my face, and these idiotic palpitations, I shall apparently have them up to the last minute. No, it seems I can’t talk about being acclimatized⁠—how could I, either, in so short a time? It would take longer than this to overcome the change of atmosphere and adjust oneself perfectly to the unusual conditions, so that a real recovery could begin and I should commence to put on flesh. It is too bad. It was certainly a mistake not to have given myself more time⁠—for of course I could have had it. I have the feeling that once I am at home again I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had! That shows you how tired I sometimes feel. And now, to cap the climax, I get this catarrh⁠—” + 

It looked, in fact, as though Hans Castorp would return home in possession of a first-class cold. He had caught it, probably, in the rest-cure, and, again probably, in the evening rest-cure⁠—which for almost a week now he had been taking in the balcony, despite the long spell of cold, wet weather. He was aware that weather of this kind was not recognized as bad; such a conception hardly existed up here, where the most inclement conceivable went unheeded and had no terrors for anyone. With the easy adaptability of youth, which suits itself to any environment, Hans Castorp had begun to imitate this indifference. It might rain in bucketfuls, but the air was not supposed to be the more damp for that⁠—nor was it, in all probability, for the dry heat in the face persisted, as though after drinking wine, or sitting in an overheated room. And however cold it got, the radiators were never heated unless it snowed, so it was of no avail to take refuge in one’s chamber, since it was quite as comfortable on the balcony, when one lay in one’s excellent chair, wrapped in a paletot and two good camel’s-hair rugs put on according to the ritual. As comfortable? It was incomparably more so. It was, in Hans Castorp’s reasoned judgment, a state of life which more appealed to him than any in all his previous experience, so far as he could remember. He did not propose to be shaken in this view for any carbonaro or quill-driver in existence, no matter how many malicious and equivocal jokes he made on the subject of the “horizontal.” Especially he liked it in the evening, when with his little lamp on the stand beside him and his long-lost and now restored Maria alight between his lips he enjoyed the ineffable excellencies of his reclining-chair. True, his nose felt frozen, and the hands that held his book⁠—he was still reading Ocean Steamships⁠—were red and cramped from the cold. He looked through the arch of his loggia over the darkening valley, jewelled with clustered or scattering lights, and listened to the music that drifted up nearly every evening for almost an hour. There was a concert below, and he could hear, pleasantly subdued by the distance, familiar operatic selections, snatches from Carmen, Il Trovatore, Freischütz; or well-built, facile waltzes, marches so spirited that he could not help keeping time with his head, and gay mazurkas. Mazurka? No, Marusja was her name, Marusja of the little ruby. And in the next loggia, behind the thick wall of milky glass, lay Joachim, with whom Hans Castorp exchanged a word now and then, low-toned, out of consideration for the other horizontallers. Joachim was as well off in his loggia as Hans Castorp in his, though, being entirely unmusical, he could not take the same pleasure in the concerts. Too bad! He was probably studying his Russian primer instead. But Hans Castorp let Ocean Steamships fall on the coverlet and gave himself up to the music; he contemplated with such inward gratification the translucent depth of a musical invention full of individuality and charm that he thought with nothing but hostility of Settembrini and the irritating things he had said about music⁠—that it was politically suspect was the worst, and little better than the remark of Grandfather Giuseppe about the July Revolution and the six days of creation. + 

Joachim, though he could not partake of Hans Castorp’s pleasure in the music, nor the pungent gratification purveyed by Maria, lay as snugly ensconced as his cousin. The day was at an end. For the time everything was at an end; there would be no more emotional alarums, no more strain on the heart-muscles. But equally there was the assurance that tomorrow it would begin all over again, all the favouring probabilities afforded by propinquity and the household regimen. And this pleasing combination of snugness and confident hope, together with the music and the restored charms of Maria, made the evening cure a state almost amounting to beatification for young Hans Castorp. + 

All which had not prevented the guest and novice from catching a magnificent cold, either in the evening rest-cure or elsewhere. He felt the onset of catarrh, with oppression in the frontal sinus, and inflamed uvula; he could not breathe easily through the passage provided by nature; the air struck cold and painfully as it struggled through, and caused constant coughing. His voice took on overnight the tonal quality of a hollow bass the worse for strong drink. According to him, he had not closed an eye, his parched throat making him start up every five minutes from his pillow. + 

“Very vexatious,” Joachim said, “and most unfortunate. Colds, you know, are not the thing at all, up here; they are not reçus. The authorities don’t admit their existence; the official attitude is that the dryness of the air entirely prevents them. If you were a patient, you would certainly fall foul of Behrens, if you went to him and said you had a cold. But it is a little different with a guest⁠—you have a right to have a cold if you want to. It would be good if we could check the catarrh. There are things to do, down below, but here⁠—I doubt if anyone would take enough interest in it. It is not advisable to fall ill up here; you aren’t taken any notice of. It’s an old story⁠—but you are coming to hear it at the end. When I was new up here, there was a lady who complained of her ear for a whole week and told everybody how she suffered. Behrens finally looked at it. ‘Make yourself quite easy, madame,’ he said; ‘it is not tubercular.’ That was an end of the matter! Well, we must see what can be done. I will speak to the bathing-master early tomorrow morning, when he comes to my room. Then it will go through the regular channels, and perhaps something will come of it.” + 

Thus Joachim and the regular channels proved reliable. On Friday, after Hans Castorp returned from the morning round, there was a knock at his door, and he was vouchsafed the pleasure of personal acquaintance with Fräulein von Mylendonk⁠—Frau Director, as she was called. Up to now he had seen this over-occupied person only from a distance, crossing the corridor from one patient’s room to another, or when she had popped up for a moment in the dining-room and he had been aware of her raucous voice. But now he himself was the object of her visit. His catarrh had fetched her. She knocked a short, bony knock, entered almost before he had said come in, and then, upon the threshold, bent round to make sure of the number of the room. + 

“Thirty-four,” she croaked briskly. “Right. Well, young ’un, on me dit, que vous avez pris froid. Wy, kaschetsja, prostudilisj, Lei è raffreddato, I hear you have caught a cold. What language do you speak? Oh, I see, you are young Ziemssen’s guest. I am due in the operating-room. Somebody there to be chloroformed, and he has just been eating bean salad. I have to have my eyes everywhere. Well, young ’un, so you have a cold?” + 

Hans Castorp was taken aback by this mode of address, in the mouth of a dame of ancient lineage. In her rapid speech she slurred over her words, all the time restlessly moving her head about with a circular action, the nose sniffingly in the air⁠—the motion of a caged beast of prey. Her freckled right hand, loosely closed with the thumb uppermost, she held in front of her and waved it to and fro on the wrist, as though to say: “Come, make haste, don’t attend to what I say, but say what you have to and let me be off!” She was in the forties, of stunted growth, without form or comeliness, clad in a belted pinaforish garment of clinical white, with a garnet cross on her breast. Sparse, reddish hair showed beneath the white coif of her profession; her eyes were a watery blue, with inflamed lids, and one of them, as a finishing touch, had a stye in a well-advanced stage of development in the corner. Their glance was unsteady and flickering. Her nose was turned up, her mouth like a frog’s, and furnished to boot with a wry and protruding lower lip, which she used like a shovel to get her words out. Hans Castorp looked at her, and all the modest and confiding friendliness native to him spoke in his eyes. + 

“What sort of cold is it, eh?” repeated the Directress. She seemed to try to concentrate her gaze and make it penetrate; but it slipped aside. “We don’t care for such colds. Are you subject to them? Your cousin has been too, hasn’t he? How old are you? Twenty-four? Yes, it’s the age. And so you come up here and get a cold? There ought not to be any talk about colds up here; that sort of twaddle belongs down below.” It was fearsome to see how she shovelled out this word with her lower lip. “You have a beautiful bronchial catarrh, that is plain”⁠—again she made that curious effort to pierce him with her gaze, and again she could not hold it steady. “But catarrhs are not caused by cold; they come from an infection, which one takes from being in a receptive state. So the question is, are we dealing with a harmless infection or with something more serious? Everything else is twaddle. It is possible that your receptivity inclines to the harmless kind,” she went on, and looked at him with her overripe stye, he knew not how. “Here, I will give you a simple antiseptic⁠—it may do you good,” and she took a small packet out of the leather bag that hung from her girdle. It was formamint. “But you look flushed⁠—as though you had fever.” She never stopped trying to fix him with her gaze, and always the eyes glided off to one side. “Have you measured?” + 

He answered in the negative. + 

“Why not?” she asked, and her protruding lower lip hung in the air after she spoke. + 

He made no answer. The poor youth was still young; he had never got over his schoolboy shyness. He sat, so to speak, on his bench, did not know the answer and took refuge in dumbness. + 

“Perhaps you never do take your temperature?” + 

“Oh, yes, Frau Director, when I have fever.” + 

“My dear child, one takes it in the first instance to see whether one has fever. According to you, you have none now?” + 

“I can’t tell, Frau Director. I cannot really tell the difference. Ever since I came up here, I have been a little hot and shivery.” + 

“Aha! And where is your thermometer?” + 

“I haven’t one with me, Frau Director. Why should I, I am not ill; I am only up here on a visit.” + 

“Tommyrot! Did you send for me because you weren’t ill?” + 

“No,” he laughed politely, “it was because I caught a little⁠—” + 

“Cold. We’ve often seen such colds. Here, young ’un,” she said, and rummaged again in her bag. She brought out two longish leather cases, one red and one black, and put them on the table. “This one is three francs fifty, the other five. The five-franc one is better, of course. It will last you a lifetime if you take care of it.” + 

Smiling he took up the red case and opened it. The glass instrument lay like a jewel within, fitted neatly into its red velvet groove. The degrees were marked by red strokes, the tenths by black ones; the figures were in red and the tapering end was full of glittering quicksilver. The column stood below blood-heat. + 

Hans Castorp knew what was due to himself and his upbringing. “I will take this one,” he said, not even looking at the other. “The one at five francs. May I⁠—” + 

“Then that’s settled,” croaked the Directress. “I see you don’t niggle over important purchases. No hurry, it will come on the bill. Give him to me. We’ll drive him right down”⁠—She took the thermometer out of his hand and plunged it several times through the air, until the mercury stood below 95°. “He’ll soon climb up again!” she said. “Here is your new acquisition. You know how we do it up here? Straight under the tongue, seven minutes, four times a day, and shut the lips well over it. Well, young ’un, I must get on. Good luck!” And she was out at the door. + 

Hans Castorp bowed her out, then stood by the table, staring from the door through which she had disappeared to the instrument she had left behind. “So that,” he thought, “was Directress von Mylendonk. Settembrini doesn’t care for her, and certainly she has her unpleasant side. The stye isn’t pretty⁠—but of course she does not have it all the time. But why does she call me ‘young ’un,’ like that? Rather rude and familiar, seems to me. So she has sold me a thermometer⁠—I suppose she always has one or two in her pocket. They are to be had everywhere here, Joachim said, even in shops where you would least expect it. But I didn’t need to take the trouble to buy it; it just fell into my lap.” He took the article out of its case, looked at it, and walked restlessly up and down the room. His heart beat strong and rapidly. He looked toward the open balcony door, and considered seeking counsel of Joachim, but thought better of it and paused again by the table. He cleared his throat by way of testing his voice; then he coughed. + 

“Yes,” he said. “I must see if I have the fever that goes with the cold.” Quickly he put the thermometer in his mouth, the mercury beneath the tongue, so that the instrument stuck slantingly upwards from his lips. He closed them firmly, that no air might get in. Then he looked at his wristwatch. It was six minutes after the half-hour. And he began to wait for the seven minutes to pass. + 

“Not a second too long,” he thought, “and not one too short. They can depend on me, in both directions. They needn’t give me a ‘silent sister,’ like that Ottilie Kneifer Settembrini told us of.” He walked about, pressing down the thermometer with his tongue. + 

The time crept on; the term seemed unending. When he looked at his watch, two and a half minutes had passed⁠—and he had feared the seven minutes were already more than up. He did a thousand things: picked up objects about the room and set them down again, walked out on the balcony⁠—taking care that his cousin should not notice his presence⁠—and looked at the landscape of this high valley, now so familiar to him in all its phases; with its horns, its crests and walls, with the projecting wing of the “Brembühl,” the ridge of which sloped steeply down to the valley, its flanks covered with rugged undergrowth, with its formations on the right side of the valley, whose names were no less familiar than the others, and the Alteinwand, which from this point appeared to close in the valley on the south. He looked down on the garden beds and paths, the grotto and the silver fir; he listened to the murmur that rose from the rest-hall; and he returned to his room, settling the thermometer under his tongue. Then, with a motion of the arm which drew away the sleeve from his wrist, he brought the forearm before his eyes and found that by dint of pushing and shoving, pulling and hauling, he had managed to get rid of full six minutes. The last one he spent standing in the middle of the room⁠—but then, unfortunately, he let his thoughts wander and fell into a “doze,” so that the sixty seconds flew by on the wings of the wind; and, when he looked again, the eighth minute was already past its first quarter. “It doesn’t really matter, so far as the result is concerned,” he thought, and tearing the instrument out of his mouth, he stared at it in confusion. + 

He was not immediately the wiser. The gleam of the quicksilver fell with the reflection of the glass case where the light struck it, and he could not tell whether the mercury had ascended the whole length of the column, or whether it was not there at all. He brought the instrument close to his eyes, turned it hither and thither⁠—all to no purpose. But at last a lucky turn gave him a clearer view; he hastily arrested his hand and brought his intelligence to bear. Mercurius, in fact, had climbed up again, just as the Frau Directress said. The column was perceptibly lengthened; it stood several of the black strokes above normal. Hans Castorp had 99.6°. + 

Ninety-nine and six tenths degrees in broad daylight, between ten and half past in the morning. That was too much; it was “temperature.” It was fever consequent on an infection, for which his system had been eager. The question was now, what kind of infection? 99.6°⁠—why, Joachim had no more, nor anyone else up here, except the moribund and bedridden. Not Fräulein Kleefeld with her pneumothorax, nor⁠—nor Madame Chauchat. Naturally, in his case it was not the same kind, certainly not; he had what would have been called at home a feverish cold. But the distinction was not such a simple one to make. Hans Castorp doubted whether the fever had only come on when the cold did, and he regretted not having consulted a thermometer at the outset, when the Hofrat suggested it. He could see now that this had been very reasonable advice; Settembrini had been wrong to sneer at it as he had⁠—Settembrini, with his republic and his bello stile. Hans Castorp loathed and contemned the republic and the bello stile as he stood there consulting his thermometer; he kept on losing the mark and turning the instrument this way and that to find it again. Yes, it registered 99.6° and this in the early part of the day! + 

He was thoroughly upset. He walked the length of the room twice or thrice, the thermometer held horizontally in his hand, so as not to jiggle it and make it read differently. Then he carefully deposited it on the wash-hand-stand, and went with his overcoat and rugs into the balcony. Sitting down, he threw the covers about him, with practised hand, first from one side, then from the other, and lay still, waiting until it should be time for Joachim to fetch him for second breakfast. Now and then he smiled⁠—it was precisely as though he smiled at somebody. And now and then his breast heaved as he caught his breath and was seized with his bronchial cough. + 

Joachim found him still lying when he entered at eleven o’clock at sound of the gong for second breakfast. + 

“Well?” he asked in surprise, coming up to his cousin’s chair. + 

Hans Castorp sat awhile without answering, looking in front of him. Then he said: “Well, the latest is that I have some fever.” + 

“What do you mean?” Joachim asked. “Do you feel feverish?” + 

Again Hans Castorp let him wait a little for the answer, then delivered himself airily as follows: “Feverish, my dear fellow, I have felt for a long time⁠—all the time I have been up here, in fact. But at the moment it is not a matter of subjective emotion, but of fact. I have taken my temperature.” + 

“You’ve taken your temperature? What with?” Joachim cried, startled. + 

“With a thermometer, naturally,” answered Hans Castorp, not without a caustic tinge to his voice. “Frau Director sold me one. Why she should call me ‘young ’un’ I can’t imagine. It is distinctly not comme il faut. But she lost no time in selling me an excellent thermometer; if you would like to convince yourself, you can; it is there on the wash-hand-stand. It is only slight fever.” + 

Joachim turned on his heel and went into the bedroom. When he came back, he said hesitatingly: “Yes, it is 99.5½°.” + 

“Then it has gone down a little,” his cousin responded hastily. “It was six.” + 

“But you can’t call that slight fever,” Joachim said. “Certainly not for the forenoon. This is a pretty how-d’ye-do!” And he stood by his cousin’s side as one stands before a how-d’ye-do, arms akimbo and head dropped. “You’ll have to go to bed.” + 

Hans Castorp had his answer ready. “I can’t see,” he remarked, “why I should go to bed with a temperature of 99.6° when the rest of you, who haven’t any less, can run about as you like.” + 

“But that is different,” Joachim said. “Your fever is acute and harmless, the result of a cold.” + 

“In the first place,” said Hans Castorp, speaking with dignity and dividing his remarks into categories, “I cannot comprehend why, with a harmless fever⁠—assuming for the moment, that there is such a thing⁠—one must keep one’s bed, while with one that is not harmless you needn’t. And secondly, I tell you the fever has not made me hotter than I was before. My position is that 99.6° is 99.6°. If you can run about with it, so can I.” + 

“But I had to lie for four weeks when I first came,” objected Joachim, “and they only let me get up when it was clear that the fever persisted even after I had lain in bed.” + 

Hans Castorp smiled. “Well, and⁠—?” he asked. “I thought it was different with you. It seems to me you are contradicting yourself; first you say our cases are different; then you say they are alike. That seems sheer twaddle to me.” + 

Joachim made a right-about turn. When he turned round again, his suntanned visage showed an even darker shade. + 

“No,” he said, “I am not saying they are alike; you’re getting muddled. I only mean that you’ve a very nasty cold. I can hear it in your voice, and you ought to go to bed, to cut it short, if you mean to go home next week. But if you don’t want to⁠—I mean go to bed⁠—why, don’t. I am not prescribing for you. Anyhow, let’s go to breakfast. Make haste, we are late already.” + 

“Right-oh!” said Hans Castorp, and flung off his covers. He went into his room to run the brush over his hair, and Joachim looked again at the thermometer on the washhand-stand. Hans Castorp watched him. They went down, silently, and took their places in the dining-room, which, as always at this hour, shimmered white with milk. + 

The dwarf waitress brought Hans Castorp his Kulmbacher beer, as usual, but he put on a long face and waved it away. He would drink no beer today; he would drink nothing at all, or at most a swallow of water. The attention of his tablemates was attracted: they wanted to know the cause of his caprice. Hans Castorp said carelessly that he had a little fever⁠—really minimal: 99.6°. + 

Then how altogether ludicrous it was to see them! They shook their fingers at him, they winked maliciously, they put their heads on one side, crooked their forefingers beside their ears and waggled them in a pantomime suggestive of their delight at having found him out, who had played the innocent so long. + 

“Aha,” said the schoolmistress, the flush mounting in her ancient cheek, “what sort of scandal is this?” + 

And “Aha, aha!” went Frau Stöhr too, holding her stumpy finger next her stumpy nose. “So our respected guest has some temperament too! Foxy-loxy is in the same boat with the rest of us after all!” + 

Even the great-aunt, when the news travelled up to her end of the table, gave him a meaningful glance and smile; pretty Marusja, who had barely looked at him up to now, leaned over and stared, with her round brown eyes, her handkerchief to her lips⁠—and shook her finger too. Frau Stöhr whispered the news to Dr. Blumenkohl, who could hardly do otherwise than join in the game, though without looking at Hans Castorp. Only Miss Robinson sat as she always did and took no share in what was going on. Joachim kept his eyes on the tablecloth. + 

It flattered Hans Castorp’s vanity to be taken so much notice of; but he felt that modesty required him to disclaim their attentions. “No, no,” he said. “You are all mistaken, my fever is the most harmless thing in the world; I simply have a cold, my eyes run, and my chest is stopped up. I have coughed half the night; it is thoroughly unpleasant of course.”⁠—But they would not listen; they laughed and flapped their hands at him. + 

“Yes, of course, we know all about it⁠—we know these colds; they are all gammon⁠—you can’t fool us!” and with one accord they challenged Hans Castorp to an examination on the spot. The news excited them. Throughout the meal their table was the liveliest among the seven. Frau Stöhr became almost hysterical. Her peevish face looked scarlet above her neck-ruche, and tiny purple veins showed in the cheeks. She began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough. It was a solid satisfaction, when you felt a tickling come in your chest, deep down, and grow and grow, to reach down after it, and get at it, so to say. Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn’t stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths; then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge. Another one was the joy of scratching your chilblains in the spring, when they itched so gorgeously; you took a furious pleasure in scratching till the blood came; and if you happened to look in the glass you would be astonished to see the ghastly face you made. + 

The coarse creature regaled the table with these repulsive details throughout the brief but hearty meal. When it was over, the cousins walked down to the Platz; Joachim seemed preoccupied; Hans Castorp was in an agony of snuffles and cleared his rasping throat continually. + 

On the way home Joachim said: “I’ll make you a suggestion. Tomorrow, after midday meal, I have my regular monthly examination. It is not the general; Behrens just auscultates a little and has Krokowski make some notes. You might come along and ask them to listen to you a bit. It is too absurd⁠—if you were at home, you would send for Heidekind, and up here, with two specialists in the house, you run about and don’t know where you are, nor how serious it is, and if it would not be better for you to go to bed.” + 

“Very good,” said Hans Castorp. “It’s as you say, of course. I can do that. And it will be interesting to see an examination.” + 

Thus it was settled between them, and it fell out that as they arrived before the sanatorium, they met the Hofrat himself, and took the occasion to put their request at once. + 

Behrens came out of the vestibule, tall and stooped, a bowler hat on the back of his head, a cigar in his mouth; purple-cheeked, watery-eyed, in the full flow of his professional activities. He had just come from the operating-room, so he said, and was on his way to private practice in the village. + 

“Morning, gentlemen, morning,” he said. “Always on the jump, eh? How’s everything in the big world? I’ve just come from an unequal duel with saw and scalpel⁠—great thing, you know, resection of ribs. Fifty percent of the cases used to be left on the table. Nowadays we have it down finer than that; but even so it’s a good plan to get the mortis causa fixed up beforehand. The chap today knew how to take the joke⁠—put up a good fight for a minute or so.⁠—Crazy thing, a human thorax that’s all gone; pulpy, you know, nothing to catch hold of⁠—slight confusion of ideas, so to speak. Well, well⁠—and how are your constitutionalities? Sanctified metabolisms functioning OK, doing their duty in the sight of the Lord? The walks go better in company, Ziemssen, old fellow, what? Hello, what are you crying about, Mr. Tripper?” He suddenly turned on Hans Castorp. “It’s against the rules to cry in public⁠—they might all start!” + 

“It’s only my cold, Herr Hofrat,” answered Hans Castorp. “I don’t know how I did it, but I’ve a simply priceless catarrh. It’s right down on my chest, and I cough a good deal too.” + 

“Indeed!” Behrens remarked. “You ought to consult a reliable physician.” + 

Both cousins laughed, and Joachim answered, heels together: “We were just going to, Herr Hofrat. I have my examination tomorrow, and we wanted to ask if you would be so kind as to look my cousin over as well. The question is whether he will be well enough to travel on Tuesday.” + 

“A.Y.S.,” said Behrens. “At your service. With all the pleasure in life. Ought to have done it long ago. Once you are up here, why not? But one doesn’t like to seem forth-putting. Very good then, tomorrow at two⁠—directly after grub.” + 

“I have a little fever too.” Hans Castorp further observed. + 

“You don’t say!” Behrens cried out. “I suppose you think you are telling me news? Do you think I’ve no eyes in my head?” He pointed with his great index finger to his goggling, bloodshot, watery eyes. “Well, and how much?” + 

Hans Castorp modestly mentioned the figure. + 

“Forenoon, eh? H’m, that’s not so bad. Not bad at all, for a beginner⁠—shows talent. Very good then, the two of you, tomorrow at two. Very much honoured. Well, so long⁠—enjoy yourselves!” He paddled away downhill, his knees bent, leaving a long streamer of cigar smoke behind him. + 

“Well, that came out just as you wanted it to,” Hans Castorp said. “We couldn’t have struck it luckier, and now I am in for it. He won’t be able to do much, of course⁠—he may prescribe some sort of pectoral syrup or some cough lozenges. However, it is good to have a little encouragement when you feel the way I do. But for heaven’s sake what makes him rattle on so? It struck me as funny at first, but in the long run I can’t say I like it. ‘Sanctified metabolism’⁠—what sort of gibberish is that? If I understand what he means by metabolism, it is nothing but physiology, and to talk about its being sanctified⁠—irreverent, I call it. I don’t enjoy seeing him smoke, either; it distresses me, because I know it is not good for him and gives him melancholia. Settembrini said his joviality is forced, and one must admit that Settembrini has his own views and knows whereof he speaks. I probably ought to have more opinions of my own, as he says, and not take everything as it comes, the way I do. But sometimes one starts out with having an opinion and feeling righteous indignation and all that, and then something comes up that has nothing to do with judgments and criticism, and then it is all up with your severity, and you feel disgusted with the republic and the bello stile⁠—” + 

He rambled on incoherently, not clear himself as to what he wanted to say. His cousin merely gave him a side glance, then turned away with an au revoir, and each betook him to his own balcony. + 

“How much?” asked Joachim softly, after a while⁠—as though he had seen Hans Castorp consult his thermometer. + 

And the latter answered indifferently: “Nothing new.” + 

He had in fact, directly he entered, taken up his new acquisition from the washhand-stand and plunged it repeatedly through the air, to obliterate the morning’s record. Then he went into the balcony with the glass cigar in his mouth, like an old hand. But contrary to some rather exaggerated expectations, Mercurius climbed no further than before⁠—though Hans Castorp kept the instrument under his tongue eight minutes for good measure. But after all, 99.6° was unquestionably fever, even though no higher than the earlier record. In the afternoon the gleaming column mounted up as far as 99.7°, but declined to 99.5° by evening, when the patient was weary with the excitement of the day. Next morning it showed 99.6°, climbing during the morning to the same level as before. And so arrived the hour for the main meal of the day, bringing the examination in its wake. + 

Hans Castorp later recalled that Madame Chauchat was wearing that day a golden-yellow sweater, with large buttons and embroidered pockets. It was a new sweater, at least new to Hans Castorp, and when she made her entrance, tardily as usual, she had paused an instant and, in the way he knew so well, presented herself to the room. Then she had glided to her place at the table, slipped softly into it, and begun to eat and chatter to her tablemates. All this was as it happened every day, five times a day; Hans Castorp observed it as usual, or perhaps even more poignantly than usual, looking over at the “good” Russian table past Settembrini’s back, as he sat at the crosswise table between. He saw the turn of her head in conversation, the rounded neck, the stooping back. Frau Chauchat, for her part, never once turned round during the whole meal. But when the sweet had been handed, and the great clock on the wall above the “bad” Russian table struck two, it actually happened, to Hans Castorp’s amazement and mystification, that precisely as the hour struck, one, two, the fair patient turned her head and a little twisted her body and looked over her shoulder quite openly and pointedly at Hans Castorp’s table. And not only at his table. No, she looked at himself, unmistakably and personally, with a smile about the closed lips and the narrow, Pribislav eyes, as though to say: “Well, it is time: are you going?” And the eyes said “thou,” for that is the language of the eyes, even when the tongue uses a more formal address. This episode shook and bewildered Hans Castorp to the depths of his being. He hardly trusted his senses, and at first gazed enraptured in Frau Chauchat’s face, then, lifting his eyes, stared into vacancy over the top of her head. Was it possible she knew he was to be examined at two o’clock? It looked like it; but that was as impossible as that she should be aware of the thought that had visited his mind in the last minute; namely, that he might as well send word to the Hofrat, through Joachim, that his cold was better, and he considered an examination superfluous. This idea had presented itself to him in an advantageous light, but now withered away under that searching smile, transmuted into a hideous sense of futility. The second after, Joachim had laid his rolled-up serviette beside his plate, signalled to his cousin by raising his eyebrows, and with a bow to the company risen from the table. Whereat Hans Castorp, inwardly reeling, though outwardly firm in step and bearing, rose too, and feeling that look and smile upon his back, followed Cousin Joachim out of the room. + 

Since the previous morning they had not spoken of what lay before them, and silently now they moved down the corridor together. Joachim hastened his steps, for it was already past the appointed hour, and Hofrat Behrens laid stress on punctuality. They passed the door of the office and went down the clean linoleum-covered stairs to the “basement.” Joachim knocked at the door facing them; it bore a porcelain shield with the word Consulting-room. + 

“Come in,” called Behrens, stressing the first word. He was standing in the middle of the room, in his white smock, holding the black stethoscope in his hand and tapping his thigh with it. + 

“Tempo, tempo,” said he, directing his goggling gaze to the clock on the wall. “Un poco piu presto, signori! We are not here simply and solely for the honourable gentlemen’s convenience.” + 

Dr. Krokowski was sitting at the double-barrelled writing-table by the window. He wore his usual black alpaca shirt, setting off the pallor of his face; his elbows rested on the table, in one hand a pen, the other fingering his beard; while before him lay various papers, probably the documents in reference to the patients to be examined. He looked at the cousins as they entered, but it was with the idle glance of a person who is present only in an auxiliary capacity. + 

“Well, give us your report card,” the Hofrat answered to Joachim’s apologies, and took the fever chart out of his hand. He looked it over, while the patient made haste to lay off his upper garments down to the waist and hang them on the rack by the door. No one troubled about Hans Castorp. He looked on awhile standing, then let himself down in a little old-fashioned easy-chair with bob-tassels on the arms, beside a small table with a carafe on it. Bookcases lined the walls, full of pamphlets and broad-backed medical works. Other furniture there was none, except an adjustable chaise-longue covered with oilcloth. It had a paper serviette spread over the pillow. + 

“Point seven, point nine, point eight,” Behrens said running through the weekly card, whereon were entered the results of Joachim’s five daily “measurings.” “Still a little too much lighted up, my dear Ziemssen. Can’t exactly say you’ve got more robust just lately”⁠—by the lately he meant during the past four weeks.⁠—“Not free from infection,” he said. “Well, that doesn’t happen between one day and the next; we’re not magicians.” + 

Joachim nodded and shrugged his bare shoulders. He refrained from saying that he had been up here since a good deal longer than yesterday. + 

“How about the stitches in the right hilum, where it always sounded so sharp? Better? eh? Well, come along, let me thump you about a bit.” And the auscultation began. + 

The Hofrat stood leaning backwards, feet wide apart, his stethoscope under his arm, and tapped from the wrist, using the powerful middle finger of his right hand as a hammer, and the left as a support. He tapped first high up on Joachim’s shoulder-blade at the side of the back, above and below⁠—the well-trained Joachim lifting his arm to let himself be tapped under the armpit. Then the process was repeated on the left side; then the Hofrat commanded: “Turn!” and began tapping the chest; first next the collarbone, then above and below the breast, right and left. When he had tapped to his satisfaction, he began to listen, setting his stethoscope on Joachim’s chest and back, and putting his ear to the earpiece. Then Joachim had to breathe deeply and cough⁠—which seemed to strain him, for he got out of breath, and tears came in his eyes. And everything that the Hofrat heard he announced in curt, technical phrases to his assistant over at the writing-table, in such a way that Hans Castorp was forcibly reminded of the proceedings at the tailor’s when a very correctly groomed gentleman measures you for a suit, laying the tape about your trunk and limbs and calling off the figures in the order hallowed by tradition for the assistant to take them down in his book. “Faint,” “diminished,” dictated Hofrat Behrens. “Vesicular,” and then again “vesicular” (that was good, apparently). “Rough,” he said, and made a face. “Very rough.” “Rhonchi.” And Dr. Krokowski entered it all in his book, just like the tailor’s assistant. + 

Hans Castorp followed the proceedings with his head on one side, absorbed in contemplation of his cousin’s torso. The ribs⁠—thank Heaven, he had them all!⁠—rose under the taut skin as he took deep inhalations, and the stomach fell away. Hans Castorp studied that youthful figure, slender, yellowish-bronze, with a black fell along the breastbone and the powerful arms. On one wrist Joachim wore a gold chain-bracelet. “Those are the arms of an athlete,” thought Hans Castorp. “I never made much of gymnastics, but he always liked them, and that is partly the reason why he wanted to be a soldier. He has always been more inclined than I to the things of the body⁠—or inclined in a different way. I’ve always been a civilian and cared more about warm baths and good eating and drinking, whereas he has gone in for manly exertion. And now his body has come into the foreground in another sense and made itself important and independent of the rest of him⁠—namely, through illness. He is all ‘lit up’ within and can’t get rid of the infection and become healthy, poor Joachim, no matter how much he wants to get down to the valley and be a soldier. And yet look how he is developed, like a picture in a book, a regular Apollo Belvedere, except for the hair. But the disease makes him ailing within and fevered without; disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body”⁠—his own thought startled him, and he looked quickly at Joachim with a questioning glance, that travelled from the bared body up to the large, gentle black eyes. Tears stood out in them, from the effort of the forced breathing and coughing and they gazed into space with a pathetic expression as the examination went on. + 

But at last Hofrat Behrens had come to an end. “Very good, Ziemssen,” he said. “Everything in order, so far as possible. Next time” (that would be in four weeks) “it is bound to show further improvement.” + 

“And Herr Hofrat, how much longer do you think⁠—” + 

“So you are going to pester me again? How do you expect to give your lads the devil down below, in the lit-up state you are in? I told you the other day to call it half a year; you can reckon from then if you like, but you must regard it as minimal. Have a little ordinary politeness! It’s a decent enough life up here, after all; it’s not a convict prison, nor a Siberian penal settlement! Or perhaps you think it is? Very good, Ziemssen, be off with you! Next! Step lively!” He stretched out his arm and handed the stethoscope to Dr. Krokowski, who got up and began some supernumerary tapping on Joachim’s person. + 

Hans Castorp had sprung up. With his eyes fixed on the Hofrat, standing there with his legs apart and his mouth open, lost in thought, the young man began in all haste to make ready, with the result that he defeated his own purpose and fumbled in getting out of his shirt. But finally he stood there, blond, white-skinned, and narrow-chested, before Hofrat Behrens. Compared with Joachim, he looked distinctly the civilian type. + 

The Hofrat, still lost in thought, let him stand. Dr. Krokowski had finished and sat down, and Joachim was dressing before Behrens finally decided to take notice. + 

“Oh-ho!” he said, “so that’s you, is it?” He gripped Hans Castorp on the upper arm with his mighty hand, pushed him away, and looked at him sharply⁠—not in the face, as one man looks at another, but at his body; turned him round, as one would turn an inanimate object, and looked at his back. “H’m,” he said. “Well, we shall see.” And began tapping as before. + 

He tapped all over, as he had with Joachim, and several times went back and tapped again. For some while, for purposes of comparison, he tapped by turns on the left-hand side near the collarbone, and then somewhat lower down. + 

“Hear that?” he asked Dr. Krokowski. And the other, sitting at the table five paces off, nodded to signify that he did. He sunk his head on his chest with a serious mien, and the points of his whiskers stuck out. + 

“Breathe deep! Cough!” commanded the Hofrat, who had taken up the stethoscope again; and Hans Castorp worked hard for eight or ten minutes, while the Hofrat listened. He uttered no word, simply set the instrument here or there and listened with particular care at the places he had tapped so long. Then he stuck the stethoscope under his arm, put his hands on his back, and looked at the floor between himself and Hans Castorp. + 

“Yes, Castorp,” he said⁠—this was the first time he had called the young man simply by his last name⁠—“the thing works out praeter propter as I thought it would. I had my suspicions⁠—I can tell you now⁠—from the first day I had the undeserved honour of making your acquaintance; I made a pretty shrewd guess that you were one of us and that you would find it out, like many another who has come up here on a lark and gone about with his nose in the air, only to discover, one fine day, that it would be as well for him⁠—and not only as well, mark that⁠—to make a more extended stay, quite without reference to the beauties of the scenery.” + 

Hans Castorp had flushed; Joachim, in act to button his braces, paused as he stood, and listened. + 

“You have such a kind, sympathetic cousin over there,” went on the Hofrat, motioning with his head in Joachim’s direction and balancing himself on his heels. “Very soon, we hope, we will be able to say that he has been ill; but even when he gets that far, it will still be true that he has been ill⁠—and the fact⁠—a priori, as the philosophers say⁠—casts a certain light upon yourself, my dear Castorp.” + 

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

“Tut! You won’t disown him, will you? Even a step-cousin is a blood relation. On which side?” + 

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

“And your mother⁠—she’s pretty jolly?” + 

“No, she is dead. She died when I was little.” + 

“And of what?” + 

“Of a blood-clot, Herr Hofrat.” + 

“A blood-clot, eh? Well, that’s a long time ago. And your father?” + 

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

“Both of them, eh? Good. So much for your ancestors. Now about yourself⁠—you have always been rather chlorotic, haven’t you? But you didn’t tire easily at physical or mental work. Or did you⁠—what? A good deal of palpitation? Only of late? Good. And a strong inclination to catarrhal and bronchial trouble?⁠—Did you know you have been infected before now?” + 

“I?” + 

“Yes, you⁠—I have you personally in mind. Can you hear any difference?” The Hofrat tapped by turns on Hans Castorp’s left side, first above and then lower down. + 

“It sounds rather duller there,” said Hans Castorp. + 

“Capital. You ought to be a specialist. Well, that is a dullness, and such dullnesses are caused by the old places, where fibrosis has supervened. Scars, you know. You are an old patient, Castorp, but we won’t lay it up against anybody that you weren’t found out. The early diagnosis is very difficult⁠—particularly for my colleagues down below; I won’t say we have better ears⁠—though the regular practice does do something. But the air helps us, helps us hear, if you understand what I mean, this thin, dry air up here.” + 

“Certainly, of course,” Hans Castorp said. + 

“Very good, Castorp. And now listen, young man, to my words of wisdom. If that were all the trouble with you, if it was a case of nothing but the dullness and the scars on your bagpipe in there, I should send you back to your lares and penates and not trouble my head further about you. But as things stand, and according to what we find, and since you are already up here⁠—well, there is no use in your going down, for you’d only have to come up again.” + 

Hans Castorp felt the blood rush back to his heart; it hammered violently; and Joachim still stood with his hands on his back buttons, his eyes on the floor. + 

“For besides the dullness,” said the Hofrat, “you have on the upper left side a rough breathing that is almost bronchial and undoubtedly comes from a fresh place. I won’t call it a focus of softening, but it is certainly a moist spot, and if you go down below and begin to carry on, why, you’ll have the whole lobe at the devil before you can say Jack Robinson.” + 

Hans Castorp stood motionless. His mouth twitched fearfully, and the hammering of his heart against his ribs was plain to see. He looked across at Joachim, but could not meet his cousin’s eye; then again in the Hofrat’s face, with its blue cheeks, blue, goggling eyes, and little, crooked moustache. + 

“For independent confirmation,” Behrens continued, “we have your temperature of 99.6° at ten o’clock in the morning, which corresponds pretty well to the indications given by the auscultation.” + 

“I thought,” Hans Castorp said, “that the fever came from my cold.” + 

“And the cold,” rejoined the Hofrat, “where does that come from? Listen, Castorp, let me tell you something, and mark my words⁠—for so far as I can tell, you’ve all the cerebral convolutions a body needs. Now: our air up here is good for the disease⁠—I mean good against the disease, you understand⁠—you think so, don’t you? Well, it is true. But also it is good for the disease; it begins by speeding it up, in that it revolutionizes the whole body; it brings the latent weakness to the surface and makes it break out. Your catarrh, fortunately for you, is a breaking-out of that kind. I can’t tell if you were febrile down below; but it is certainly my opinion that you have been from your first day up here, and not merely since you had your catarrh.” + 

“Yes,” Hans Castorp said, “I think so too.” + 

“You were probably fuddled right from the start, in my opinion,” the Hofrat confirmed him. “Those were the soluble toxins thrown off by the bacteria; they act like an intoxicant upon the central nervous system and give you a hectic flush. Now, Castorp, we’ll stick you into bed and see if a couple of weeks’ rest will sober you up. What follows will follow. We’ll take a handsome X-ray of you⁠—you’ll enjoy seeing what goes on in your own inside. But I tell you straightaway, a case like yours doesn’t get well from one day to the next: it isn’t a question of the miracle cures you read about in advertisements. I thought when I first clapped eyes on you that you would be a better patient than your cousin, with more talent for illness than our brigadier-general here, who wants to clear out directly he has a couple of points less fever. As if ‘lie down’ isn’t just as good a word of command as ‘stand up’! It is the citizen’s first duty to be calm, and impatience never did any good to anyone. Now, Castorp, watch out you don’t disappoint me and give the lie to my knowledge of human nature! Get along now, into the caboose with you⁠—march!” + 

With that Hofrat Behrens closed the interview and sat down at the writing-table; this man of many occupations began to fill in his time with writing until the advent of the next patient. But Dr. Krokowski arose from his place and strode up to Hans Castorp. With his head tipped back sideways, and one hand on the young man’s shoulder, smiling so heartily that the yellowish teeth showed in his beard, he shook him warmly by the hand. + 