The Magic Mountain (3 page)

Hans Castorp came near bursting out again. “What! You lie out on your balcony at night, in the damp?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“Yes, that is the rule. From eight to ten. But come and see your room now, and get a wash.”

They entered the lift—it was an electric one, worked by the Frenchman. As they went up, Hans Castorp wiped his eyes.

“I’m perfectly worn out with laughing,” he said, and breathed through his mouth. “You’ve told me such a lot of crazy stuff—that about the psycho-analysis was the last straw. I suppose I am a bit relaxed from the journey. And my feet are cold—are yours? But my face burns so, it is really unpleasant. Do we eat now? I feel hungry. Is the food decent up here?”

They went noiselessly along the coco matting of the narrow corridor, which was lighted by electric lights in white glass shades set in the ceiling. The walls gleamed with hard white enamel paint. They had a glimpse of a nursing sister in a white cap, and eyeglasses on a cord that ran behind her ear. She had the look of a Protestant sister—that is to say, one working without a real vocation and burdened with restlessness and ennui. As they went along the corridor, Hans Castorp saw, beside two of the white-enamelled, numbered doors, certain curious, swollen-looking, balloonshaped vessels with short necks. He did not think, at the moment, to ask what they were.

“Here you are,” said Joachim. “I am next you on the right. The other side you have a Russian couple, rather loud and offensive, but it couldn’t be helped. Well, how do you like it?”

There were two doors, an outer and an inner, with clothes-hooks in the space between. Joachim had turned on the ceiling light, and in its vibrating brilliance the room looked restful and cheery, with practical white furniture, white washable walls, clean linoleum, and white linen curtains gaily embroidered in modern taste. The door stood open; one saw the lights of the valley and heard distant dance-music. The good Joachim had put a vase of flowers on the chest of drawers—a few bluebells and some yarrow, which he had found himself among the second crop of grass on the slopes. “Awfully decent of you,” said Hans Castorp. “What a nice room! I can spend a couple of weeks here with pleasure.”

“An American woman died here day before yesterday,” said Joachim. “Behrens told me directly that she would be out before you came, and you might have the room. Her fiancé was with her, an English officer of marines, but he didn’t behave very well. He kept coming out in the corridor to cry, just like a little boy. He rubbed cold cream on his cheeks, because he was close-shaven and the tears smarted. Night before last she had two first-class haemorrhages, and that was the finish. But she has been gone since yesterday morning, and after they took her away of course they fumigated the room thoroughly with formalin, which is the proper thing to use in such cases.”

Hans Castorp took in this information with a sprightly, yet half-distraught air. He was standing with his sleeves pushed back before the roomy wash-hand-basin, the taps of which shone in the electric light, and gave hardly a glance at the white metal bed with its fresh coverlet.

“Fumigated it, eh? That’s ripping,” he said loquaciously and rather absurdly, as he washed and dried his hands. “Methyl aldehyde; yes, that’s too much for the bacteria, no matter how strong they are. H2CO. But it’s a powerful stench. Of course, perfect sanitation is absolutely essential.” He spoke with more of a Hamburg accent than his cousin, who had broken himself of it since his student days. Hans Castorp continued volubly. “But what I was about to say was, probably the officer of marines used a safety-razor; one makes oneself sore with those things easier than with a wellsharpened blade—at least, that is my experience, and I use them both by turns. Well, and salt water would naturally make a tender skin smart, so he got in the way, in the service, of rubbing in cold cream. I don’t see anything strange about that…” He rattled on: said that he had two hundred Maria Mancinis (his cigar) in his trunk, the customs officers had been very courteous; and gave his cousin greetings from various people at home. “Don’t they heat the rooms here?” he broke off to inquire, and ran to put his hands on the radiator.

“No, they keep us pretty cool,” answered Joachim. “The weather would have to be different from this before they put on the heat in August.”

“August, August!” said Hans Castorp. “But I am cold, abominably cold; I mean in my body, for my face burns shockingly—just feel it!”

This demand was entirely foreign to the young man’s nature—so much so that he himself was disagreeably impressed as he heard himself make it. Joachim did not take up the offer, but merely said: “That is the air—it doesn’t mean anything; Behrens himself is purple in the face all day long. Some people never get used to it. Come along now, do, or we shan’t get anything to eat.”

Outside they saw the nursing sister again, peering short-sightedly and inquisitively after them. But in the first storey Hans Castorp suddenly stopped, rooted to the spot by a perfectly ghastly sound coming from a little distance off round a bend in the corridor. It was not a loud sound, but so distinctly horrible that Hans Castorp made a wry face and looked wide-eyed at his cousin. It was coughing, obviously, a man coughing; but coughing like to no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, and compared with which any other had been a magnificent and healthy manifestation of life: a coughing that had no conviction and gave no relief, that did not even come out in paroxysms, but was just a feeble, dreadful welling up of the juices of organic dissolution.

“Yes,” said Joachim. “That’s a bad case. An Austrian aristocrat, you know, very elegant. He’s a born horseman—a gentleman rider. And now he’s come to this. But he still gets about.”

As they went, Hans Castorp discoursed earnestly upon the gentleman rider’s cough. “You must realize,” he said, “that I’ve never heard anything like it before. It is entirely new to me, and naturally it makes a great impression. There are different kinds of cough, dry and loose, and people always say the loose one is better than the other, the barking kind. When I had croup, in my youth” (he actually said “in my youth”!), “I bayed like a wolf, and I can still remember how glad everybody was when it got looser. But a cough like this—I didn’t know there was such a cough! It isn’t a human cough at all. It isn’t dry and yet isn’t loose either—that is very far from being the right word for it. It is just as if one could look right into him when he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous—”

“Oh,” said Joachim, “I hear it every day, you don’t need to describe it to me.” But Hans Castorp could not get over the coughing he had heard. He kept repeating that he could see right into the gentleman rider’s vitals; when they reached the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited glitter.

IT was charming in the restaurant, elegantly appointed and well lighted. The room lay to the right of the hall, opposite the salons, and was, Joachim explained, used chiefly by new arrivals, and by guests eating out of the usual meal hours or entertaining company. But it also served for birthday feasts, farewell parties, even to celebrate a favourable report after a general examination. There were lively times here in the restaurant on occasion, Joachim said, and champagne flowed freely. Now, no one was here but a solitary lady of some thirty years, reading a book and humming; she kept tapping the table-cloth lightly with the middle finger of her left hand. After the young people had taken their places, she changed hers, in order to sit with her back to them. Joachim explained in a low voice that she suffered from shyness as from a disease, and ate all her meals in the restaurant, with a book. It was said that she had entered her first tuberculosis sanatorium as a young girl, and had never lived in the world since.

 ”So compared with her, you are only a novice, with your five months; and still will be when you have a year on your back,” said Hans Castorp to his cousin; whereat Joachim, with his newly acquired shoulder-shrug, took up the menu.

They had sat down at the raised table in the window, the pleasantest spot in the room, facing each other against the cream-coloured hangings, their faces lighted by the red-shaded table-lamp. Hans Castorp clasped his freshly washed hands and rubbed them together in agreeable anticipation—a habit of his when he sat down to table, perhaps because his ancestors had said grace before meat. They were served by a friendly maid in black frock and white apron. She had a pleasant, throaty voice, and her broad face was indisputably healthy-coloured. To his great amusement, Hans Castorp learned that the waitresses here were called “dining-room girls.” They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose, and Hans Castorp sent it back to have it warmed. The food was excellent: asparagus soup, stuffed tomatoes, a roast with vegetables, an exceedingly well-prepared sweet, cheese, and fruit. Hans Castorp ate heartily, though his appetite did not turn out quite so stout as he had thought. But he always ate a good deal, out of pure self-respect, even when he was not hungry.

Joachim paid scant honour to the meal. He was tired of the cooking, he said; they all were, up here, and it was customary to grumble at the food. If one had to sit up here for ever and a day—! But, on the other hand, he partook of the wine with gusto, not to say abandon; and repeatedly, though with careful avoidance of emotional language, expressed his joy at having somebody here with whom one could have a little rational conversation.

“Yes, it’s first-rate you’ve come,” he said, and his gentle voice betrayed some feeling. “I must say it is really an event for me—it is certainly a change, anyhow, a break in the everlasting monotony.” “But time must go fast, living up here,” was Hans Castorp’s view.

“Fast and slow, as you take it,” answered Joachim. “It doesn’t do at all, I tell you. You can’t call it time—and you can’t call it living either!” he said with a shake of the head, and fell to his glass again.

Hans Castorp drank too, though his face was like fire. Yet he was still cold, and felt a curious restlessness in his limbs, at once pleasurable and troubling. His words fell over each other, he often misspoke and passed it over with a deprecating wave. Joachim too was in a lively humour, and their conversation continued in a still freer and more convivial vein after the humming, tapping lady had got up suddenly and left the room. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, nodded, shrugged their shoulders, talked with their mouths full. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg, and brought the conversation round to the proposed regulation of the Elbe.

“Epoch-making,” said Hans Castorp. “Epoch-making for the development of our shipping. Can’t be over-estimated. We’ve budgeted fifty millions for immediate expenditure and you may be sure we know what we’re about.”

But notwithstanding all the importance he attached to the projected improvement, he jumped away from the theme and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life “up here” and about the guests—which the latter straightway did, being only too pleased to be able to unbosom himself. He had to repeat the story of the corpses sent down by bob-sleigh, and vouch for its truth. Hans Castorp being taken by another fit of laughing, his cousin laughed too, with hearty enjoyment, and told other funny things to add fuel to their merriment. There was a lady sitting at his table, named Frau Stöhr, the wife of a Cannstadt musician; a rather serious case, she was, and the most ignorant creature he had ever seen. She said diseased for deceased, quite seriously, and she called Krokowski the Asst. And you had to take it all in without cracking a smile. She was a regular gossip—most people were, up here—and published it broadcast that another lady, a certain Frau Iltis, carried a “steriletto” on her person. “That is exactly what she called it, isn’t that priceless?” They lolled in their chairs, they flung themselves back and laughed so hard that they shook; and they began to hiccup at nearly the same time.

Now and then Joachim’s face would cloud over and he would remember his lot.

“Yes, we sit here and laugh,” he said, with a long face, his words interrupted by the heaving of his diaphragm, “we sit here and laugh, but there’s no telling when I shall get away. When Behrens says half a year, you can make up your mind it will be more. It
is
hard, isn’t it?—you just tell me if you don’t think it is pretty hard on me. I had already been accepted, I could have taken my exams next month. And now I have to drool about with a thermometer stuck in my mouth, and count the howlers of this ignorant Frau Stöhr, and watch the time slipping away. A year is so important at our age. Down below, one goes through so many changes, and makes so much progress, in a single year of life. And I have to stagnate up here—yes, just stagnate like a filthy puddle; it isn’t too crass a comparison.”

Strange to say, Hans Castorp’s only reply to all this was a query as to whether it was possible to get porter up here; when Joachim looked at him, in some astonishment, he perceived that his cousin was overcome with sleep, that in fact he was actually nodding.

“But you are going to sleep!” said Joachim. “Come along, it is time we both went to bed.”

” ‘You can’t call it time,’ ” quoth Hans Castorp, thick-tongued. He went with his cousin, rather bent and stiff in the knees, like a man bowed to the earth with fatigue. However, in the dimly lighted corridor he pulled himself sharply together on hearing his cousin say: “There’s Krokowski sitting there. I think I’ll just have to present you, as briefly as possible.”

Dr. Krokowski sat in the bright light at the fire-place of one of the reception-rooms, close to the folding doors. He was reading a paper, and got up as the young people approached.

Joachim, in military position, heels together, said: “Herr Doctor, may I present my cousin Castorp from Hamburg? He has just arrived.”

Dr. Krokowski greeted the new inmate with a jovial and robust heartiness, as who should say that with him all formality was superfluous, and only jocund mutual confidence in place. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered and fleshy, much shorter than either of the youths before him, so that he had to tip back his head to look them in the face. He was unusually pale, of a translucent, yes, phosphorescent pallor, that was further accentuated by the dark ardour of his eyes, the blackness of his brows, and his rather long, full whisker, which ended in two points and already showed some white threads. He had on a black double-breasted, somewhat worn sack suit; black, open-worked sandal-like shoes over grey woollen socks, and a soft turndown collar, such as Hans Castorp had previously seen worn only by a photographer in Danzig, which did, in fact, lend a certain stamp of the studio to Dr. Krokowski’s appearance. Smiling warmly and showing his yellow teeth in his beard, he shook the young man by the hand, and said in a baritone voice, with rather a foreign drawl: “Welcome to our midst, Herr Castorp! May you get quickly acclimatized and feel yourself at home among us! Do you come as a patient, may I ask?”