The Magic Mountain (70 page)

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.