The Magic Mountain (31 page)

“How much?” asked Joachim softly, after a while—as though he had seen Hans
Castorp consult his thermometer.
And the latter answered indifferently: “Nothing new.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, give us your report card,” the Hofrat answered to Joachim’s apologies, and took the fever chart out of his hand. He looked it over, while the patient made haste to lay off his upper garments down to the waist and hang them on the rack by the door. No one troubled about Hans Castorp. He looked on awhile standing, then let himself down in a little old-fashioned easy-chair with bob-tassels on the arms, beside a small table with a carafe on it. Bookcases lined the walls, full of pamphlets and broadbacked medical works. Other furniture there was none, except an adjustable chaiselongue covered with oilcloth. It had a paper serviette spread over the pillow. “Point 7, point 9, point 8,” Behrens said running through the weekly card, whereon were entered the results of Joachim’s five daily “measurings.” “Still a little too much lighted up, my dear Ziemssen. Can’t exactly say you’ve got more robust just lately”— by the lately he meant during the past four weeks.—”Not free from infection,” he said. “Well, that doesn’t happen between one day and the next; we’re not magicians.” Joachim nodded and shrugged his bare shoulders. He refrained from saying that he had been up here since a good deal longer than yesterday.

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

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

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

But at last Hofrat Behrens had come to an end. “Very good, Ziemssen,” he said.
“Everything in order, so far as possible. Next time” (that would be in four weeks) “it is bound to show further improvement.”
“And Herr Hofrat, how much longer do you think—”

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

Hans Castorp had sprung up. With his eyes fixed on the Hofrat, standing there with his legs apart and his mouth open, lost in thought, the young man began in all haste to make ready, with the result that he defeated his own purpose and fumbled in getting out of his shirt. But finally he stood there, blond, white-skinned, and narrow-chested, before Hofrat Behrens. Compared with Joachim, he looked distinctly the civilian type. The Hofrat, still lost in thought, let him stand. Dr. Krokowski had finished and sat down, and Joachim was dressing before Behrens finally decided to take notice. “Oh-ho!” he said, “so that’s you, is it?” He gripped Hans Castorp on the upper arm with his mighty hand, pushed him away, and looked at him sharply—not in the face, as one man looks at another, but at his body; turned him round, as one would turn an inanimate object, and looked at his back. “H’m,” he said. “Well, we shall see.” And began tapping as before.

He tapped all over, as he had with Joachim, and several times went back and tapped

again. For some while, for purposes of comparison, he tapped by turns on the lefthand side near the collar-bone, and then somewhat lower down.

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

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

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

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

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

“Tut! You won’t disown him, will you? Even a step-cousin is a blood relation. On which side?”
“The mother’s, Herr Hofrat. He is the son of a step—”
“And your mother—she’s pretty jolly?”
“No, she is dead. She died when I was little.”
“And of what?”
“Of a blood-clot, Herr Hofrat.”
“A blood-clot, eh? Well, that’s a long time ago. And your father?”

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

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

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