The Magic Mountain Part 15

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

Settembrini listened, and nodded; nodded after Hans Castorp had come to an end, for the present, of his p.r.o.nouncement and fallen silent.

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

Hans Castorp seemed to be only half listening. He went on staring into the incandescent brilliance of his white room, as into far s.p.a.ce.

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

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

Settembrini bowed. "You mean," he interrupted, "that the early and repeated contact with death developed in you a tendency which made you sensitive to the harshness and crudity, let us say the cynicism, of our everyday, worldly existence." "Precisely!" cried Hans Castorp, in honest enthusiasm. "You have expressed it to a T, Herr Settembrini. Contact with death! I was sure that you, as a literary man-" Settembrini put out his hand, laid his head on one side, and closed his eyes. It was a mild and beautiful gesture, a plea for silence and further hearing. He held it some seconds, even after Hans Castorp had ceased to speak and was waiting in suspense for what was to come. But at length he opened his black eyes, organ-grinder eyes, and spoke: "Permit me. Permit me, Engineer, to say to you, and to bring it home to you, that the only sane, n.o.ble-and I will expressly add, the only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and with the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life. It is the very opposite of sane, n.o.ble, reasonable, or religious to divorce it in any way from life, or to play it off against it. The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage, as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis. Severed from life, it becomes a spectre, a distortion, and worse. For death, as an independent power, is a l.u.s.tful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the spirit of man is p.r.o.ne."

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

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

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

"Why, certainly, Herr Settembrini"-Hans Castorp hastened to abandon his forced and even peevish att.i.tude, stop drumming on the bed-cover, and turn to his guest with friendliness, even with contrition. "It is uncommonly kind of you-I must ask myself if I really-that is, if there is anything-"

"Sine pecunia, of course," quoted Herr Settembrini, as he rose. "I can't let myself be outdone!" They both laughed. The outer door opened, next moment the inner one as well. It was Joachim, returned from "society." When he saw the Italian he flushed, as Hans Castorp had done; the deep bronze of his face deepened by another shade. "Oh, you have company," he said. "How nice for you! I was detained, they made me make one of a table of bridge. They call it bridge," he said, shaking his head, "as they do outside, but it was really something else entirely. I won five marks-" "Only so it doesn't become a vice with you," Hans Castorp laughed. "Ahem! Herr Settembrini has beguiled the time for me-no, that is not the proper expression, though it may be all right for your mock bridge. Herr Settembrini has filled the time for me, and given it content, whereas when mock bridge breaks out in our midst, a respectable man feels he has to fight his way through. And yet to have the privilege of listening to Herr Settembrini, to get the benefit of his good counsel, I could almost wish to keep my fever, and stop up here with you indefinitely. They would have to give me a 'silent sister' to measure with."

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

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

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

The night was the harder half of the day, for Hans Castorp woke often, and lay not seldom hours awake; either because his slightly abnormal temperature kept him stimulated, or because his horizontal manner of life, detracted from the power, or the desire, to sleep. To make up for their briefness, his hours of slumber were animated by extremely lively and varied dreams, which he could ponder on awaking. And if the hours of the day were shortened by their frequent division into small sections, it was the blurred monotony of the marching hours of the night which operated with the like effect. Then as dawn came on, he found it diverting to watch the gradual grey, the slow emergence of the room and the objects in it, as though by the drawing of veils; to see day kindling outside, with smouldering or with lively glow; and it was always a surprise when the moment came round again and the thump of the bathing-master on his door announced to Hans Castorp that the daily programme was again in force. He had brought no calendar with him on his holiday, and did not always find himself sure of the date. Now and then he asked his cousin; who, in turn, was not always quite sure either. True, the Sundays, particularly the fortnightly one with the concert-it was the second Hans Castorp had spent in this situation-gave him a fixed point. So much was certain, that by little and little they had now got well on in September, close on to the middle. Since he went to bed, the cold and cloudy weather had given place to a succession of wonderful midsummer days. Every morning Joachim appeared arrayed in white flannel trousers, to greet his cousin, and Hans Castorp felt a pang of regret, in which both heart and youthful muscles joined, at the loss of all this splendid weather. He murmured that it was "a shame," but added to console himself that even if he were up and about he would hardly know how to take advantage of it, since it seemed it did not answer for him to exert himself much. And the wide-open balcony door did afford him some share of the warm s.h.i.+mmer outside. But toward the end of his prescribed term of lying, the weather veered again. It grew misty and cold overnight, the valley was hid by gusts of wet snow, and the dry heat of the radiator filled the room. Such was the day on which Hans Castorp reminded the doctor, on his morning round, that the three weeks were out, and asked leave to get up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a good shot. Hans Castorp's face changed in spite of himself; he tried to react, saying: "Well, well! You don't say so!" but the words sounded strained. He was incapable of treating lightly the existence of this fellow-countryman of Frau Chauchat, much as he wished to appear to do so, and came back to it again and again, his lips twitching. A young man? Young and good-looking, according to all accounts, the schoolmistress answered; she could not say from her own observation. Was he ill? Only a light case, at most. "Let us hope," Hans Castorp remarked with scorn, "that he displays more linen than the other two, at the 'bad' Russian table." Fraulein Engelhart, on punishment intent, said she could vouch for that. He gave in, and admitted that it was a matter for concern. He earnestly charged her to find out all she could about this young man who came and went between the Platz and Frau Chauchat's room. A few days later she brought him, not information about the young Russian, but a fresh and startling piece of news. She knew that Clavdia Chauchat was having her portrait painted, and asked Hans Castorp if he knew it too. If not, he might be a.s.sured she had it on the best authority. She had been sitting for some time, to a person here in the house, and the person was-the Hofrat! Yes, Herr Hofrat Behrens, no less, and he received her for the purpose almost daily in his private dwelling. This intelligence affected Hans Castorp even more than the other. He made several forced jokes about it. Why, certainly, the Hofrat was known to occupy himself with oil-painting. Why not? It wasn't a crime, anybody was free to paint. And the sittings took place in the widower's own house-he hoped, at least, that Fraulein von Mylendonk was present! The schoolmistress objected that the Directress was probably too busy. No busier than the doctor ought to be, Hans Castorp severely rejoined. The remark sounded final; but he was far from letting the subject drop. He exhausted himself in questions: about the picture, what size it was, and whether it was a head or a knee-length; about the hours of the sitting-but Fraulein Engelhart could not gratify him with these particulars, and had to put him off until she could make further inquiry.

Hans Castorp measured 99.7 as a result of this communication. The visits Frau Chauchat received upset him far less than these she made. Her personal and private life-quite aside from what went on in it-had begun to be a source of anguish and unrest; how much keener, then, were his feelings when he heard such questionable things about the way she spent her time! Speaking generally, it was altogether possible that her relations with the Russian visitor had a disinterested and harmless character. But Hans Castorp had been for some time now inclined to reject harmless and disinterested explanations as being in the nature of "twaddle"; nor could he regard in any other light this oil-painting, considered as a bond of interest between a widower with a robust vocabulary and a narrow-eyed, soft-stepping young female. The taste displayed by the Hofrat in his choice of a model was too like Hans Castorp's own for him to put great faith in the disinterested character of the affair, and the thought of the Hofrat's purple cheeks and bloodshot, goggling eyes only strengthened his scepticism. An observation which he made in these days, of his own accord and quite by chance, had a different effect upon him, though here again what he saw confirmed his own taste. There sat, at the same table with Frau Salomon and the greedy schoolboy with the gla.s.ses, at the cousins' left, near the side door, a patient who was, so Hans Castorp had heard, a native of Mannheim. He was some thirty years old; his hair was thin, his teeth poor, and he had a self-depreciating manner of speech. He it was who played the piano evenings, usually the wedding march from Midsummer Night's Dream. He was said to be very religious-as "those up here" naturally often were. Every Sunday he went to service down in the Platz, and in the rest-cure he read devotional books with a chalice or palm branch on the front cover. This man's eyes, so Hans Castorp one day observed, travelled the same road as his own: they hung upon Madame Chauchat's lissom person with timid, doglike devotion. Once Hans Castorp had remarked this, he could not forbear corroborating it again and again. He saw him stand, of an evening, in the card-room, among the other guests, quite lost in gazing at the lovely, contaminate creature on the sofa in the small salon, in talk with the whimsical, fuzzy-haired Tamara, Dr. Blumenkohl, and the hollow-chested, stooping young men who were her table-mates. He saw him turn away, then twist his head, with a piteous expression of the upper lip, and roll his eyes back over his shoulder in her direction. He saw him colour and not look up, but then gaze avidly as with a crash the gla.s.s door fell to, and Frau Chauchat slipped to her place. And more than once he saw how the poor soul would place himself, after the meal, between the "good" Russian table and the exit, in order that she might pa.s.s close by him; she gave him neither glance nor thought, while he devoured her at close range with eyes full of sadness to their very depths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She spoke again: "Mine was for a quarter to four. What is it then-it is nearly four. Some people just entered, did they not?"

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

"It is disagreeable," she said, nervously touching her hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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