The Magic Mountain (57 page)

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

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

“Ah, so you are even witty,” she answered him, with a short laugh. She straightened up, and surrendered the pencil. It is a question by what means he was witty, since it was plain there was not a drop of blood in his head. “Well, away with you, go and draw, draw yourself out!” And wittily in her turn, she seemed to drive him away. “But you have not drawn yet, you must draw too,” he said, without managing the
m
in must, and drew a step backwards, invitingly.

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

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

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

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

“Very much,” he said, surveying her once more and then casting down his eyes. “Would you like to dance?” he added.

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

“Who told you so?”

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

“Was it Hofrat Behrens?”

“
Peut-être en me faisant voir ces tableaux.”

“
C’est à dire: en faisant ton portrait!”

“
Pourquoi pas? Tu l’as trouvé réussi
,
mon portrait?”

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

“
Ah
,
tu le crois?”

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

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

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

“When?”

“To-morrow.
Après dîner.”

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

“Far away.”

“To Daghestan?”

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

“Are you cured, then?”

CHAPTER VI

WHAT is time? A mystery, a figment—and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of Space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing’s “brought about” by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement—for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite—apparently in the hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more so than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit in time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less, to zero? Is it possible, in eternity, to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe—how do these fare? Are they consistent with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adopt? Again we ask, and again echo answers. Hans Castorp revolved these queries and their like in his brain. We know that from the very first day of his arrival up here his mind had been much disposed to such sleeveless speculation. Later, perhaps, a certain sinister but strong desire of his, since gratified, had sharpened it the more and confirmed it in its general tendency to question and to carp. He put these queries to himself, he put them to good cousin Joachim, he put them to the valley at large, lying there, as it had these months on end, deep in snow; though from none of these quarters could he expect anything like an answer, from which the least would be hard to say. For himself, it was precisely because he did not know the answers that he put the questions. For Joachim, it was hardly possible to get him even to consider them, he having, as Hans Castorp had said, in French, on a certain evening, nothing else in his head but the idea of being a soldier down below. Joachim wrestled with these hopes of his, that now seemed almost within his grasp, now receded into the distance and mocked him there; the struggle grew daily more embittered, he even threatened to end it once for all by a single bold bid for liberty. Yes, the good, the patient, the upright Joachim, so affected to discipline and the service, had been attacked by fits of rebellion, he even questioned the authority of the “Gaffky scale”: the method employed in the laboratory—the lab, as one called it—to ascertain the degree of a patient’s infection. Whether only a few isolated bacilli, or a whole host of them, were found in the sputum analysed, determined his “Gaffky number,” upon which everything depended. It infallibly reflected the chances of recovery with which the patient had to reckon; the number of months or years he must still remain could with ease be deduced from it, beginning with the six months that Hofrat Behrens called a “week-end,” and ending with the “life sentence,” which, taken literally, often enough meant very little indeed. Joachim, then, inveighed against the Gaffky scale, openly giving notice that he questioned its authority—or perhaps not
quite
openly, he did not say so to the authorities, but expressed his views to his cousin, and even in the dining-room. “I’m fed up with it, I won’t be made a fool of any longer,” he said, the blood mounting to his bronzed face. “Two weeks ago I had Gaffky two, a mere nothing, my prospects were the best. And to-day I am regularly infested—number nine, if you please. No talk of getting away. How the devil can a man know where he is? Up on the Schatzalp there is a man, a Greek peasant, an agent had him sent here from Arcadia, he has galloping consumption, there isn’t the dimmest hope for him. He may die any day— and yet they’ve never found even the ghost of a bacillus in his sputum. On the other hand, that Belgian captain that was discharged cured the other day, he was simply alive with them, Gaffky ten—and only the very tiniest cavity. The devil fly away with Gaffky! I’m done, I’m going home, if it kills me!” Thus Joachim; and all his company were pained to see the gentle, serious youth so overwrought. Hans Castorp, when he heard the threat, could scarcely refrain from quoting a certain opinion he had heard expressed in French, by a third party. But he was silent. Was he to set himself up to his cousin for a model of patience, as did Frau Stöhr, who actually admonished Joachim not to be blasphemous, but to humble his pride, and take pattern by her, Caroline Stöhr, and the faithfulness and firm resolve which made her hold out up here, instead of returning to queen it in her Cannstadt home—to the end that when she did go back it would be as a sound and healthy wife to the arms of her impatient husband? No, such language was not for Hans Castorp—since Carnival he had had a bad conscience towards his cousin. Conscience told him Joachim must surely be aware of a certain matter never referred to between them; must see in it something very like disloyalty and desertion—taken in connexion with a pair of brown eyes we know, an unwarranted tendency to laughter, and an orange-scented handkerchief, to whose influence Joachim was daily five times exposed, yet gave no ground to evil, but steadfastly fixed his eyes upon his plate. Yes, even the silent hostility which Joachim opposed to his cousin’s problems and speculations on the subject of time, Hans Castorp felt as an expression of the military decorum which reproached himself. While as for the valley, that snowed-in winter valley, when Hans Castorp, lying in his excellent chair, directed upon it his inquiring metaphysical gaze, it was silent too. Its peaked summits, its domes and crests and brown-green-reddish forests stood there silent, and mortal time flowed over and about them: sometimes luminous against a deep-blue sky, sometimes shrouded in vapours, sometimes glowing rosy in the parting sun, sometimes glittering with hard, diamondlike brilliance in the magic moonlight— but always, always in snow, for six long, incredible, though scurrying months. All the guests declared they could not bear to look any more at the snow, they were sick of it; they had had their fill in the summer-time, and now these masses and heaps and slopes and cushions of snow, day in and day out, were more than they could stand, their spirits sank under the weight of it. And they took to coloured glasses, green, yellow, and red, to save their eyes, but still more their feelings.