He tore the thermometer out of his mouth, violently as never before save when the Oberin had sold him the toy and he had first used it. He looked at it with the same avid curiosity now as then. Ah, Mercurius had indeed bounded upwards: he stood at 100.5°, almost .6°.
Hans Castorp threw off his covers, sprang up and strode to the corridor door and back. Then he lay down again, called softly to Joachim, and asked him what he measured. “I’m not measuring any more,” replied his cousin.
“Well, I’ve some temperament,” Hans Castorp said, emulating Frau Stöhr; Joachim, behind the glass pane, answered never a word.
He said no more, on that day or the following; made no effort to find out his cousin’s plans—which would, indeed, be driven to declare themselves in no long time, by his either taking certain steps or refraining from them. They did so—by the latter. Hans Castorp seemed to hold with that quietism in whose view all action was an insult to God, who prefers to act by Himself. At all events, the young man’s activity during these days confined itself to a visit to Behrens; a consultation of which Joachim was aware, the result of which he could have accurately predicted beforehand. His cousin had explained that he took the liberty of placing more reliance upon the Hofrat’s oft-repeated exhortations to stop up here long enough to perfect his cure than he did upon an ill-considered verdict pronounced in the heat of the moment. His temperature was 100.5°, one could not regard himself as discharged in form; and unless the Hofrat’s recent statement was to be regarded in the light of an expulsion, to which he, the speaker, was not aware he had laid himself open, he wished to say that upon mature consideration he had decided to remain and await the event of a complete cure. To all which the Hofrat had merely responded: “
Bon! We
rry good—no offence intended, none taken,” or words to that effect. That was talking like a sensible man; hadn’t he seen first off that Hans Castorp had more talent as a patient than that fire-eater his cousin? And so on.
All of this corresponded pretty accurately to Joachim’s guess. He said nothing, only noting in silence that Hans Castorp made no move to join in his preparations for departure. But the good Joachim was busy enough, in all conscience, with his own affairs. He had no more time to concern himself with his cousin’s fate or further sojourn. Within his own bosom the tempest raged. It was as well he no longer took his temperature—he had, so he said, let his instrument fall, and broken it—for the thermometer might have given contrary counsel: so fearfully wrought up was he, now darkly glowing, now pale with joyful agitation. He could no longer lie still in the cure; Hans Castorp heard how he went up and down all day in his room, throughout those hours, four times each day, when all over House Berghof the horizontal obtained. A year and a half it had been. And now at last, at last, he was off for the flat-land, for home and his regiment! Even though with only half a discharge. It was no trifling event—Hans Castorp’s heart went out to his cousin as he heard his restless pacing. Eighteen months, the wheel full circle and halfway round again, he had lived up here, deep, deep into the life of the place, the inviolable ebb and flow of it, for seven times seventy days; and now he would go down to live among strangers and the uninitiate. What difficulties would he not have, to acclimatize himself? Would it be surprising if Joachim’s agitation consisted only in part of joyful emotion, and also in part of dread—if it was not also the pang of parting with all this familiar life that made him stride thus up and down his room? We leave Marusja out of account.
But joy weighed down the scale. The good Joachim’s heart overflowed at his lips. He spoke always of himself, he made no reference to Hans Castorp’s future. He said how fresh and new the world would seem, himself, all life, and every day, every hour of the time. Once more he would rejoice in real, solid time, the long, vital years of youth. He spoke of his mother, Hans Castorp’s step-aunt Ziemssen, who had the same gentle black eyes as her son. She had never visited him up here in all this time; put off like him from month to month, from half-year to half-year, she had delayed for the entire term of his stay in the mountains. He spoke of the oath of fidelity to the colours, which he would soon be taking—spoke ardently, with a smile on his face. It was a solemn ceremony: in the presence of the standard he would be sworn to it, literally, to the standard—” You don’t say! Seriously?” Hans Castorp asked. “To the flag-pole? To that scrap of bunting?” Even so! It was symbolic; in the artillery they were sworn to the gun. What fanatical customs, the civilian remarked; extravagantly emotional he found them. Joachim nodded, full of pride and joy.
He spent his time in preparations; settled his last account with the management, and days ahead of time began to pack. He packed his summer and winter clothing, and had the sleeping-bag and camel’s-hair rugs sewed up in sacking by one of the servants. They might be useful at manœuvres. He began to make his farewells; paid visits to Naphta and Settembrini—alone, for his cousin did not offer to go with him, nor did he ask what Settembrini had said to Joachim’s imminent departure and to Hans Castorp’s imminent stopping-behind. Whether Settembrini had remarked “Yes, yes,” or “I see, I see,” or both, or merely “
Poveretto!”
To Hans Castorp it was evidently all one. Came the eve of departure. Joachim performed for the last time each act of the daily round: each meal, each rest period, each walk; he took leave of the physicians and the Oberin. The morning dawned. He came to table with cold hands and burning eyes; he had not closed them all night. He ate scarce a mouthful; and when the dwarf waitress came to say that his trunks had been strapped, he started up from his chair to take leave of his table-mates. Frau Stöhr wept, the easy, brineless tears of the simpleminded; and after, behind Joachim’s back, shook her head at the schoolmistress and turned her hand about in the air, with the fingers spread out, thus expressing a cheap and common scepticism on the score of Joachim’s competence to depart, and his future welfare. Hans Castorp saw her do it, as he drank out his cup standing, in act to follow his cousin. Then came the business of tipping, and receiving the management’s official farewell in the vestibule. The usual group of spectators stood about: Frau Iltis with her “steriletto,” the ivory Levi, the inordinate Popoff and his wife. They waved their handkerchiefs as the wagon went down the drive with the brake on. Joachim had been presented with roses. He wore a hat, Hans Castorp none.
The morning was glorious, with the first sunshine after days of gloom. The Schiahorn, the Green Towers, the round top of the Dorfberg stood out unchangeable and unmistakable against the blue; Joachim’s eyes rested on them. Hans Castorp said it was almost a pity the weather had turned so fine on the last day. There was a sort of spite about it; partings were always easier if some inhospitable impression was left at the end. To which Joachim: he didn’t need anything to make it easier, and this was excellent weather for manœuvres, he could do with it down below. They said little else. Things being as they were between them, and the situation for them both, there was indeed not much to say. The lame porter sat on the box with the driver.
Erect and bouncing on the hard cushions, they laid the watercourse behind them, the narrow-gauge track; drove along the irregularly built-up street beside the latter, and drew up in the paved square before the station of the Dorf, that was little more than a shell. Hans Castorp with a thrill recalled first impressions. Since his arrival, thirteen months before, in the twilight, he had not seen the station. “Here was where I arrived,” he remarked superfluously, to Joachim, who only said: “So you did,” and paid the coachman.
The nimble lame man attended to tickets and luggage. They stood together on the platform by the miniature train, in one of whose grey-upholstered compartments Joachim kept a place with his overcoat, travelling-rug and roses. “Well, get along, and take your fanatical oath,” Hans Castorp told his cousin, and Joachim answered: “I mean to.” What else was there to say? Last greetings to exchange, greetings to those down below, to those up here. Hans Castorp drew patterns on the asphalt with his cane. “Take your places!” shouted the guard. Hans Castorp started; looked at Joachim, Joachim at him. They put out their hands. Hans Castorp was vaguely smiling; the other’s eyes looked sad, beseeching. “Hans!” he said—yes, incredible and painful as the thing was, it happened: he had called his cousin by his first name. Not with the thou, not “old fellow,” or “man,” by which forms they had addressed each other their lives long. No, in defiance of all reserve, almost gushingly, he called his cousin by his first name. “Hans!” he said, and pressed his hand imploringly—and the latter noted that the excitement of the journey, the sleepless night, the emotion, made Joachim’s head tremble on his neck, as his own did when he “took stock”—”Hans,” he said earnestly, “come down soon!” He swung himself up. The door banged, the train whistled, the carriages shunted together. The little engine puffed and pulled off, the train glided after. The traveller waved his hat from the window, the other, on the platform, his hand. Desolately he stood, after that, a long time, alone. Then slowly he retraced the path that more than a year ago he had first traversed with Joachim.
An Attack
,
and a Repulse
THE WHEEL revolved. The hand on time’s clock moved forward. Orchis and aquilegia were out of bloom, and the mountain pink. The deep-blue, star-shaped gentian and the autumn crocus, pale and poisonous, appeared again among the damp grass, and a reddish hue overspread the forests. The autumn equinox was past. All Souls’ was in sight—and, for practised time-consumers, probably also the Advent season, the solstice, and Christmas. But for the moment there were lovely October days, a succession of them, like that on which the cousins had viewed the Hofrat’s paintings. Since Joachim’s departure Hans Castorp sat no more at Frau Stöhr’s table, the one with Dr. Blumenkohl’s empty place, at which the gay Marusja had been wont to smother her irresponsible mirth in her orange-scented pocket-handkerchief. New guests, strangers, sat there now. Our friend, two months deep in his second year, had been given a new place by the management at a near-by table, diagonally to his old one, between that and the “good” Russian table. In short, Settembrini’s table. Yes, Hans Castorp sat in the humanist’s vacated seat, again at the end, facing the “doctor’s place,” which at each of the seven tables was left free for the Hofrat and his famulus to use when they could. At the upper end, next the place of the medical presiding officer, the hump-backed Mexican sat, perched on many cushions; the amateur photographer, whose facial expression was that of a deaf person, because he possessed no language with which to communicate his thoughts. Beside him sat the ancient maiden lady from Siebenbürgen. She, as Herr Settembrini had said, claimed the interest of all and sundry for her brother-in-law, a man of whom nobody knew anything, or wished to know. Regularly at certain hours of the day this lady was to be seen at the balustrade of her loggia with a little Tula-silver-handled cane across the nape of her neck—it served also as a support on her walks—expanding her flat chest by means of deep-breathing exercises. Opposite her sat a Czech, whom everybody called Herr Wenzel, as his family name was impossible to pronounce. Herr Settembrini, indeed, did once essay to utter the involved succession of consonants; less in good faith than by way of testing gaily the elegant helplessness of his Latinity in face of that matted and tangled growth of sound. Although plump as a mole, with an appetite amazing even up here, the Czech had for four years been asseverating that there was no hope for him. Of an evening, he would strum the songs of his native land upon a beribboned mandolin; or talk about his sugar-beet plantation, and the pretty girls who worked it. On Hans Castorp’s either side sat the wedded pair from Halle, Magnus the brewer and his wife, about whom melancholy hung as a cloud, because they had no tolerance for certain important products of metabolism: he sugar, she albumen. Their spirits, particularly the sallow Frau Magnus’s, were proof against any ray of cheer; forlornity exhaled from her like damp from a cellar; even more than Frau Stöhr she represented that unedifying union of dullness and disease, which had offended Hans Castorp’s soul—under correction from Herr Settembrini. Herr Magnus was livelier and chattier, though only in a vein intolerable to the Italian’s literary sense. He was inclined to choler too, and often clashed with Herr Wenzel on political and other grounds. The nationalistic aspirations of the Czech exasperated him; again, the latter declared himself in favour of prohibition, and made moral remarks about the brewing industry, while Herr Magnus, very red in the face, defended from the hygienic viewpoint the unexceptionableness of the drink with which his interests were bound up. At such moments as these, Herr Settembrini’s light and humorous touch had often preserved the amenities; but Hans Castorp, in his place, found his authority little able to cope with the situation.
With only two of his table-mates had he personal relations: Anton Karlowitsch Ferge from St. Petersburg, that good-natured sufferer, was one, on his left. He had things to tell, under his bushy, red-brown moustaches, about the manufacture of rubber shoes; about distant regions in the polar circle, about perpetual winter at the North Cape. Hans Castorp and he sometimes made their daily round together. The other, who joined them as occasion offered, and who sat next the hump-backed Mexican, at the far end of the table, was the man from Mannheim, with the thin hair and poor teeth—Ferdinand Wehsal by name, and merchant by calling—whose eyes had rested with such dismal longing upon Frau Chauchat’s pleasing person, and who since that carnival night had sought Hans Castorp’s company.
He did so with meek persistence, with a deprecating devotion which was even repugnant to Hans Castorp, understanding as he did its involved origins; but to which he felt himself humanly bound to respond. Blandly, then, and aware that even a lifting of the brows would suffice to make the poor-spirited creature cringe and shrink away, he suffered Wehsal’s fawning presence, and the latter lost no chance to make himself agreeable. He suffered the man to carry his overcoat as they went on their walks together, and Wehsal did this devotedly; suffered even the conversation of the Mannheimer, which was depressing to a degree. Wehsal had an itch to raise questions like this: would there be any sense in making a declaration of love to a woman whom one adored, but who made absolutely no response—a declaration, in other words, of hopeless love? What did his companion think? For his part, he thought well of the idea, he thought there would be boundless happiness in the experience. Even if the act of confession aroused nothing but disgust, and involved great humiliation, still it insured a moment of intimate contact with the beloved object. The confidence drew her into the circle of his passion, and if after that all was indeed over, yet the loss was paid for by the despairing bliss of the moment; for the avowal was an act of force, the more satisfying the greater the resistance it encountered. At this point a darkening of Hans Castorp’s brows made Wehsal desist, though it had more reference to the presence of the good-natured Ferge, with his shrinking from the higher flights of conversation, than to any moral censorship on the part of our hero. Unwilling to make him out as either better or worse than he really was, we feel bound to mention that the wretched Wehsal, one evening when they were alone, prayed him, with pallid lips, for the love of God to tell him what had taken place after the
mardi gras f
estivities, and Hans Castorp had good-naturedly complied, without, as the reader may imagine, introducing any wanton or flippant element into his recital. Still, there seems every reason, on our part and on his, not to go into it very much, and we will only add that thereafter Wehsal carried his friend’s overcoat with even more self-abnegation than before.
So much of our Hans’s table-mates. The seat at his right was vacant, was only occupied for a few days by a guest, such as he himself had once been, a visiting relative from below, an envoy, one might say—no other than Hans’s uncle James Tienappel.
It was uncanny, to have suddenly sitting next him a delegate and ambassador from home, exhaling from the very weave of his English suit of clothes the atmosphere of that old life in the “upper” world so far below. But it was bound to come. For a long time Hans Castorp had silently reckoned with the possibility of an advance from the flat-land, and even been fairly sure what personal shape it would take. It was, in fact, not difficult to guess who would come, for Peter, the seafaring man, was almost out of the question, while as for Great-uncle Tienappel himself, it was no less true than ever that wild horses could not drag him to a spot from the atmospheric pressure of which he had everything to fear. No, James was the man to be sent with a commission from home to search out the truant—and his advent had been expected even earlier. After Joachim had returned alone, and told the family circle what the state of things was, the visit had been due and overdue, and thus Hans Castorp was not in the slightest degree nonplussed when, scarcely two weeks after his cousin left, the concierge handed him a telegram. He opened it with foreknowledge of its contents, and read the announcement of James Tienappel’s impending arrival. He had business in Switzerland, and would take the occasion to make Hans a visit on his heights. He would be here the day after to-morrow.
“Good,” thought Hans Castorp. “Excellent,” he thought. And added to himself something like “Don’t mention it!” “If you only knew!” he silently apostrophized the oncoming one. In a word, he took the approaching visit with utter composure; announced it to Hofrat Behrens and the management, engaged a room—Joachim’s, it being still vacant—and on the next day but one, at the hour of his own arrival, towards eight o’clock—it was already dark—drove in the same uncomfortable vehicle in which he had seen Joachim off, down to station “Dorf, ” to meet the envoy from the flat-land, who had come to spy out the land.
Crimson-faced, bare-headed, overcoatless, he stood at the edge of the platform as the train rolled in, beneath his relative’s carriage window, and told him to come on out, for he was here. Consul Tienappel—he was Vice-Consul, having obligingly relieved his father of that office too—stepped out, wrapped in his winter overcoat, and half frozen, for the October evening was chill, indeed was nearly cold enough for frost, toward morning it would probably freeze; stepped out of his compartment in lively surprise, which he expressed after the elegant, somewhat rarefied manner of the gentlemanly north-west German; greeted his nephew-cousin with repeated and emphatically uttered exclamations of satisfaction at his appearance; saw himself relieved by the lame concierge of all care for his luggage, and climbed with Hans Castorp up on the high, hard seat of the cabriolet, in the square outside. They drove under a heaven thick with stars, and Hans Castorp, his head tipped back, with pointing forefinger expounded to his uncle-cousin the starry field, named planets by name and showed off this or that constellation. The other, more observant of his companion than of the cosmos, said to himself that it was perhaps conceivable, it was at least not actually lunatic, to begin a conversation by talking about the stars, but there were other subjects that lay closer to hand. Since when, he asked, had Hans Castorp known so much about matters up aloft; and the young man replied that his knowledge was the fruit of long lying in the evening rest-cure, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. What? He lay out in a balcony at night? Oh, yes. The Consul would too. He would have nothing else to do.
“Certainly, of course,” James Tienappel acquiesced, rather intimidated. His fosterbrother spoke on, equably, monotonously. He sat without hat or overcoat, in the air, fresh to frostiness, of the autumn evening. “I suppose you aren’t cold?” James asked him, shivering in his inch-thick ulster. He talked fast and rather indistinctly, his teeth showing a tendency to chatter. “We don’t feel the cold,” Hans Castorp said, with tranquil brevity.
The Consul could not look at him enough as they sat and drove. Hans Castorp asked after relatives and friends at home. James conveyed various greetings, including Joachim’s, who was already with the colours, and radiant with pride and joy. Hans Castorp received them with a quiet word of thanks, without asking more particular questions about his home. Disquieted by an indefinite something, either emanating from his nephew, or caused by his own unsettlement after the long journey, James looked about him, not able to descry much of the landscape; he drew in a deep breath of the strange air, exhaled it, and pronounced it magnificent. Of course, the other answered, not for nothing was it famous far and wide. It had great properties. It accelerated oxidization, yet at the same time one put on flesh. It was capable of healing certain diseases which were latent in every human being, though its first effects were strongly favourable to these, and by dint of a general organic compulsion, upwards and outwards, made them come to the surface, brought them, as it were, to a triumphant outburst.—Beg pardon—triumphant?—Yes; had he never felt that an outbreak of disease had something jolly about it, an outburst of physical gratification? “Certainly, of course,” the uncle hastened to say, with his lower jaw under imperfect control. And then announced that he could stop eight days—a week, that was; seven days—or perhaps six. He said he found Hans Castorp looking very fit indeed, thanks to a stay that had been so much longer than anyone anticipated, and this being the case he supposed his nephew would travel down with him when he left.
“Oh, no, I don’t quite intend to play the fool like that,” Hans Castorp said. Uncle James talked like a valley man. Let him stop up here a bit, look about him and get used to things, he would change his tune. The thing was to achieve an absolute cure, and to that end Behrens had just lately socked him another six months. “Are you crazy?” the uncle asked. He addressed his relative as “young man,” and asked if he was crazy. A holiday that would soon have lasted a year and a quarter, and now another half a year on top of that! Who, deuce take it, had all that time to waste? Hans Castorp laid back his head, and laughed, a quiet, brief chuckle. Time! Uncle James would have to alter his ideas about time, in the first place, before he could talk. Tienappel said he would have a serious conversation to-morrow with the Hofrat, on Hans’s affair. “By all means,” advised the nephew. “You’ll like him. An interesting character, brusque to a degree, yet melancholy.” He pointed up to the lights on the Schatzalp, and casually mentioned that they had to bring down their corpses by bobsleigh in the winter.
The gentlemen supped together in the restaurant, after Hans Castorp had conducted his relative to his room and given him a chance to get a wash-up. It had been fumigated with H2CO, he explained, quite as thoroughly as though the late tenant had not gone off without leave, but in quite a different way—an exit instead of an exodus. The uncle inquired what he meant. “Jargon,” said Hans Castorp. “A way we have in the service. Joachim deserted—deserted to the colours—funny, but it can be done. But make haste, or we shall get nothing hot to eat.” In the warm, well-lighted restaurant they sat down facing each other at the raised table in the window. The dwarf waitress served them nimbly, and James ordered a bottle of burgundy, which was presented lying in a basket. They touched glasses, and the grateful glow ran through their veins. The younger talked of life up here, of the events the changing seasons brought in their course, of various personalities among the patients, of the pneumothorax, the functioning of which he explained at length, describing the ghastly nature of the pleura-shock, and citing the case of the good-natured Herr Ferge, with the threecoloured fainting-fits, the hallucinatory stench, and the diabolic laughing-fit when they felt over the pleura. He paid for the meal. James ate and drank heartily, as was his custom—with an appetite still further sharpened by his journey and the change of air. But he intermitted the process several times, sat with his mouth full of food and forgot to chew, holding his knife and fork at an obtuse angle above his plate and regarding Hans Castorp with a fixed stare. He seemed unaware that he did this, nor did the other give sign of remarking it. Consul Tienappel’s temples, covered with thin blond hair, showed swollen veins.