The Magic Mountain (13 page)

“When do we lie down again?” he asked, as they left the house. “It’s the best thing up here, so far as I can see. I wish I were back again in my comfortable chair. Do we take a long walk?”

“NO,” answered Joachim. “I am not allowed to go far. At this period I always go down below, through the village as far as the Platz if I have time. There are shops and people, and one can buy what one needs. Don’t worry, we rest for an hour again before dinner, and then after it until four o’clock.”

They went down the drive in the sunshine, crossed the watercourse and the narrow track, having before their eyes the mountain heights of the western side of the valley: the Little Schiahorn, the Green Tower, and the Dorfberg—Joachim mentioned their names. The little walled cemetery of Davos-Dorf lay up there, at some height; Joachim pointed it out with his stick. They reached the high road that led along the terraced slope a storey higher than the valley floor.

It was rather a misnomer to speak of the village, since scarcely anything but the word remained. The resort had swallowed it up, extending further and further toward the entrance of the valley, until that part of the settlement which was called the “Dorf” passed imperceptibly into the “Platz.” Hotels and pensions, amply equipped with covered verandahs, balconies, and reclining-halls, lay on both sides of their way, also private houses with rooms to let. Here and there were new buildings, but also open spaces, which preserved a view toward the valley meadows.

Hans Castorp, craving his familiar and wonted indulgence, had once more lighted a cigar; and, thanks probably to the beer that had gone before, he succeeded now and then in getting a whiff of the longed-for aroma—to his inexpressible satisfaction. But only now and then, but only faintly; the anxious receptivity of his attitude was a strain on the nerves, and the hateful leathery taste distinctly prevailed. Unable to reconcile himself to his impotence, he struggled awhile to regain the enjoyment which either escaped him wholly, or else mocked him by its brief presence; finally, worn out and disgusted, he flung the cigar away. Despite his benumbed condition he felt it incumbent upon him to be polite, to make conversation, and to this end he sought to recall those brilliant ideas he had previously had, on the subject of time. Alas, they had fled, the whole “complex” of them, and left not a trace behind: on the subject of time not one single idea, however insignificant, found lodgment in his head. He began, therefore, to talk of ordinary matters, of the concerns of the body—what he said sounded odd enough in his mouth.

“When do you measure again?” he asked. “After eating? Yes, that’s a good time. When the organism is in full activity, it must show itself. Behrens must have been joking when he told me to take my temperature—Settembrini laughed like anything at the idea; there’s really no sense in it, I haven’t even a thermometer.”

“Well,” Joachim said, “that is the least of your difficulties. You can get one anywhere—they sell them in almost every shop.”

“Why should I? No, the lying-down is very much the thing. I’ll gladly do it; but measuring would be rather too much for a guest; I’ll leave that to the rest of you. If I only knew,” Hans Castorp went on, and laid his hands like a lover on his heart, “if I only knew why I have palpitations the whole time—it is very disquieting; I keep thinking about it. For, you see, a person ordinarily has palpitation of the heart when he is frightened, or when he is looking forward to some great joy. But when the heart palpitates all by itself, without any reason, senselessly, of its own accord, so to speak, I feel that’s uncanny, you understand, as if the body was going its own gait without any reference to the soul, like a dead body, only it is not really dead—there isn’t any such thing, of course—but leading a very active existence all on its own account, growing hair and nails and doing a lively business in the physical and chemical line, so I’ve been told—”

“What kind of talk is that?” Joachim said, with serious reproach. ” ‘Doing a lively business’!” And perhaps he recalled the reproaches he had called down on his own head earlier in the day.

“It’s a fact—it
is
very lively! Why do you object to that?” Hans Castorp asked. “But I only happened to mention it. I only meant to say that it is disturbing and unpleasant to have the body act as though it had no connexion with the soul, and put on such airs—by which I mean these senseless palpitations. You keep trying to find an explanation for them, an emotion to account for them, a feeling of joy or pain, which would, so to speak, justify them. At least, it is that way with me—but I can only speak for myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Joachim said, sighing. “It is the same thing, I suppose, as when you have fever—there are pretty lively goings-on in the system then too, to talk the way you do; it may easily be that one involuntarily tries to find an emotion which would explain, or even half-way explain the goings-on. But we are talking such unpleasant stuff,” he said, his voice trembling a little, and he broke off; whereupon Hans Castorp shrugged his shoulders—with the very gesture, indeed, which had, the evening before, displeased him in his cousin.

They walked awhile in silence, until Joachim asked: “Well, how do you like the people up here? I mean the ones at our table.”

Hans Castorp put on a judicial air. “Dear me,” he said, “I don’t find them so very interesting. Some of the people at the other tables look more so, but that may be only seeming. Frau Stöhr ought to have her hair shampooed, it is so greasy. And that Mazurka—or whatever her name is—seemed rather silly to me. She keeps giggling and stuffing her handkerchief in her mouth.” Joachim laughed loudly at the twist his cousin had given the name.

” ‘Mazurka’ is capital,” he said. “Her name is Marusja, with your kind permission—it is the same as Marie. Yes, she really is too undisciplined, and after all, she has every reason to be serious,” he said, “for her case is by no means light.” “Who would have thought it?” said Hans Castorp. “She looks so very fit. Chest trouble is the last thing one would accuse her of.” He tried to catch his cousin’s eye, and saw that Joachim’s sunburnt face had gone all spotted, as a tanned complexion will when the blood leaves it with suddenness; his mouth too was pitifully drawn, and wore an expression that sent an indefinable chill of fear over Hans Castorp and made him hasten to change the subject. He hurriedly inquired about others of their tablemates and tried to forget Marusja and the look on Joachim’s face—an effort in which he presently succeeded.

The Englishwoman with the rose tea was Miss Robinson. The seamstress was not a seamstress but a schoolmistress at a
lycée
in Königsberg—which accounted for the precision of her speech. Her name was Fräulein Engelhart. As for the name of the lively little old lady, Joachim, as long as he had been up here, did not know it. All he knew was that she was great-aunt to the young lady who ate yogurt, and lived with her permanently in the sanatorium. The worst case at their table was Dr. Blumenkohl, Leo Blumenkohl, from Odessa, the young man with the moustaches and the absorbed and care-worn air. He had been here years.

They were now walking on the city pavement, the main street, obviously, of an international centre. They met the guests of the cure, strolling about, young people for the most part: gallants in “sporting,” without their hats; white-skirted ladies, also hatless. One heard Russian and English. Shops with gay show-windows were on either side of the road, and Hans Castorp, his curiosity struggling with intense weariness, forced himself to look into them, and stood a long time before a shop that purveyed fashionable male wear, to decide whether its display was really up to the mark.

They reached a rotunda with covered galleries, where a band was giving a concert. This was the Kurhaus. Tennis was being played on several courts by long-legged, clean-shaven youths in accurately pressed flannels and rubber-soled shoes, their arms bared to the elbow, and sunburnt girls in white frocks, who ran and flung themselves high in the sunny air in their efforts to strike the white ball. The well-kept courts looked as though coated with flour. The cousins sat down on an empty bench to watch and criticize the game. “You don’t play here?” Hans Castorp asked.

“I am not allowed,” Joachim answered. “We have to lie—nothing but lie. Settembrini says we live horizontally—he calls us horizontallers; that’s one of his rotten jokes. Those are healthy people, there—or else they are breaking the rules. But they don’t play very seriously anyhow—it’s more for the sake of the costume. As far as breaking the rules goes, there are more forbidden things besides tennis that get played here—poker, and
petits-chevaux
, in this and that hotel. At our place there is a notice about it; it is supposed to be the most harmful thing one can do. Even so, there are people who slip out after the evening visit and come down here to gamble. That prince who gave Behrens his title always did it, they say.”

Hans Castorp barely attended. His mouth was open, for he could not have breathed through his nose without sniffing; he felt with dull discomfort that his heart was hammering out of time with the music; and with this combined sense of discord and disorder he was about to doze off when Joachim suggested that they go home. They returned almost in silence. Hans Castorp stumbled once or twice on the level street and grinned ruefully as he shook his head. The lame man took them up in the lift to their own storey. They parted, with a brief “See you later” at the door of number thirty-four; Hans Castorp piloted himself through his room to the balcony, where he dropped just as he was upon his deck-chair and, without once shifting to a more comfortable posture, sank into a dull half-slumber, broken by the rapid beating of his unquiet heart.

HOW long it lasted he could not have told. When the moment arrived, the gong sounded. But it was not the gong for the meal, it was only the dressing-bell, as Hans Castorp knew, and so he still lay, until the metallic drone rose and died away a second time. When Joachim came to fetch him, Hans Castorp wanted to change, but this Joachim would not allow. He hated and despised unpunctuality. Would he be likely, he asked, to get on, and get strong enough for the service, if he was too feeble to observe the hours for meals? Wherein he was, of course, quite right, and Hans Castorp could only say that he was not ill at all, but only utterly and entirely sleepy. He confined himself to washing his hands; and then for the third time they went down together to the dining-hall.

The guests streamed in through both entrances, they even came through the open verandah door. Soon they all sat at their several tables as though they had never risen. Such at least was Hans Castorp’s impression—a dreamy and irrational impression, of course, but one which his muddled brain could not for an instant get rid of, in which it even took a certain satisfaction, so that several times in the course of the meal he sought to call it up again and was always perfectly successful in reproducing the illusion. The gay old lady continued to talk in her semifluid tongue at the care-worn Dr. Blumenkohl, diagonally opposite; her lean niece actually at last ate something else than yogurt; namely, the thick cream of barley soup, which was handed round in soup-plates by the waitresses. Of this she took a few spoonfuls and left the rest. Pretty Marusja giggled, then stuffed her dainty handkerchief in her mouth—it gave out a scent of oranges. Miss Robinson read the same letters, in the same round script, which she had read at breakfast. Obviously she knew not a word of German, nor wished to do so. Joachim,
preux chevalier,
said something to her in English, which she answered in a monosyllable without ceasing to chew, and relapsed again into silence. Frau Stöhr, sitting there in her woollen blouse, gave the table to know she had been examined that forenoon; she went into particulars, affectedly drawing back her upper lip from the rodent-like teeth. There were rhonchi to be heard in the upper right side, and under the left shoulder-blade the breathing was still very limited; the “old man” said she would have to stop another five months. It sounded very common to hear her refer thus to Herr Hofrat Behrens. She displayed, moreover, a feeling of injury because the “old man” was not sitting at her table to-day, where he should by rights be sitting if he had taken them “
à la tournée
“—by which she presumably meant in turn—instead of going to the next table again. (There, in fact, he really was sitting, his great hands folded before his place.) But of course that was Frau Salomon’s table, the fat Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, who came
décolletée
to table even on week-days, a sight which the “old man” liked to see, though for her part—Frau Stöhr’s—she never could understand why, since he could see all he wanted of Frau Salomon at every examination. She related, in an excited whisper, that last night, in the general rest-hall up under the roof, somebody had put out the light, for purposes which she designated as “transparent.” The “old man” had seen it, and stormed so you could hear it all over the place. He had not discovered the culprit, of course, but it didn’t take a university education to guess that it was Captain Miklosich from Bucharest, for whom, when in the society of ladies, it could never be dark enough: a man without any and all refinement—though he did wear a corset—and, by nature, simply a beast of prey—a perfect beast of prey, repeated Frau Stöhr, in a stifled whisper, beads of perspiration on her brow and upper lip. The relations between him and Frau ConsulGeneral Wurmbrandt from Vienna were known throughout Dorf and Platz—it was idle any longer to speak of them as clandestine. Not merely did the captain go into the Frau Consul-General’s bedroom while she was still in bed, and remain there throughout her toilet; last Thursday he had not
left
the Wurmbrandt’s room until four in the morning; that they knew from the nurse who was taking care of young Franz in number nineteen—his pneumothorax operation had gone wrong. She had, in her embarrassment, mistaken her own door, and burst suddenly into the room of Herr Paravant, a Dortmund lawyer. Lastly Frau Stöhr held forth for some time on the merits of a “cosmic” establishment down in the village, where she bought her mouthwash. Joachim gazed stonily downwards at his plate.