The Magic Mountain (33 page)

He said he had not.

“And why not?” she asked, letting her protruding lower lip dangle in the air.

He had no reply. The good fellow was still young enough that he could respond with the silence of a schoolboy who doesn’t know the answer and so just sits there mutely on his bench.

“Don’t you ever measure it?”

“Oh certainly, Nurse Mylendonk. When I have a fever.”

“Man alive, the point of taking one’s temperature is to find out
if
one has a fever. And you are of the opinion that you have none, is that it?”

“I don’t really know, Nurse Mylendonk. It’s hard to tell the difference. I’ve been both a little chilled and flushed since my arrival up here.”

“Aha! And where is your thermometer?”

“I don’t have one here with me, Nurse Mylendonk. Why should I? I’m here just as a visitor. I’m healthy.”

“Twiddle-twaddle! Did you call me because you’re healthy?”

“No,” he said with a polite laugh, “but because I’ve caught a little—”

“Cold. We’ve seen colds like that here often enough. Here—” she said and rummaged in her bag again, pulling out two longish leather cases, one black, one red, which she also laid on the table now. “This one costs three francs fifty, and this one five francs. You’ll do better to take the one for five, of course. It will last a lifetime if you take proper care of it.”

He picked up the red case with a smile and opened it. The glass instrument lay bedded like a precious gem in its red velvet cushion, the indentation exactly matched to its form. The full degrees were marked in red, the tenths in black. The numbers were red; the lower, tapered end was filled with lustrous, glistening mercury. The column stood at a cool low-point, well below normal animal warmth.

Hans Castorp knew what he owed himself and his social station. “I’ll take this one,” he said, without giving the other so much as a glance. “The one for five francs. May I use it now?”

“That settles that!” the head nurse squawked. “Never be niggardly when it comes to important procurements. No hurry—it will be on your bill. Give it to me, we need to shrink him down to nothing, all the way down—like this.” And she took the thermometer out of his hand, thrusting it at the air several times and driving the mercury down even further, below ninety-five degrees. “He’ll climb back up, wander right up the column, old Mercury will,” she said. “Here is your purchase. You do know, don’t you, how we do things up here? We put it under our pretty tongue, for seven minutes, four times a day, and keep our lips nicely tucked around it. Adieu! Good man alive, my best wishes for good results.” And she was out of the room.

Hans Castorp bowed as she left and stood now beside the table, staring at the door through which she had vanished—and at the apparatus she had left behind. “So that was Head Nurse von Mylendonk,” he thought. “Settembrini doesn’t like her, and there is something disagreeable about her, it’s true. The sty is not pretty, although I don’t suppose she always has one. But why does she keep saying ‘man alive,’ as if she were addressing me? It’s so odd, so slangy. And now she’s sold me a thermometer—always has a couple in her bag. They’re for sale here everywhere, in all the shops, even those you wouldn’t expect to carry them. Joachim said so. But I didn’t have to go to the trouble, it simply fell right into my lap.”

He took the instrument from its case, examined it and walked restlessly with it back and forth in the room a few times. His heart was beating fast and strong. He looked out through the open door to the balcony, then moved in the direction of the hall door, with the idea of looking in on Joachim, but then gave that up and stood there again beside the table. He now cleared his throat to see just how hollow his voice sounded. He then coughed. “Yes, I do need to see if I have a little fever with my cold,” he said and quickly stuck the thermometer in his mouth, the mercury tip under his tongue, the glass tube jutting up at an angle from one corner, his lips tucked tightly around it to keep air out. Then he looked at his wristwatch—it was 9:36. And he began to wait for seven minutes to pass.

“Not one second too many,” he thought, “or too few. You can depend on me, whether up or down. They won’t need to exchange mine for a silent sister, like that girl Settembrini was talking about . . . Ottilie Kneifer.” And he walked around the room, keeping the thermometer clamped tightly under his tongue.

Time crept by—seven minutes seemed endless. Only two and a half had passed when he looked at his watch again, worried that he might have missed the precise moment. He did a thousand things, picked up objects, put them back down, walked out onto the balcony, but not so that his cousin could notice, looked at the landscape of this Alpine valley, his eyes now more than familiar with its shapes and forms—its peaks, ridges, and cliffs; in the background on his left, though somewhat closer, was the jutting Brämenbühl, whose crest fell abruptly toward town and whose flank was thickly covered with coarse grasses; there were the mountain formations on his right, whose names he also knew by now; and then to the south was the Alteinwand, which from here looked as if it closed off the valley. He looked down at the paths and flowerbeds of the level gardens, the grotto, the silver fir, listened to whispers drifting up from the lounging area, where people were taking their rest cure—and turned back into the room, where he tried to correct the way the instrument sat in his mouth. Stretching his arm to free his wrist from its sleeve, he brought his forearm up to his eyes. With much trouble and effort—as if he were shoving, pushing, kicking them—he had got rid of six minutes. But now, standing there in the middle of the room, he fell to daydreaming and let his thoughts wander, and the one remaining minute scurried away on little cat’s feet, until another motion of his arm told him that the minute had secretly escaped and that it was a little late now. Almost a third of the next had passed before he grabbed the thermometer from his mouth, telling himself that it did not really matter, would not alter the results, could not hurt anything—and he stared down at it now with confusion in his eyes.

He was not immediately the wiser. The sheen of the mercury blended with the refraction of the light in the elliptical glass tube; the column seemed now to reach clear to the top, now not to be present at all. He held the instrument close to his eyes, turned it back and forth—and could make out nothing. Finally, after a lucky turn, the image became clear; he held it tightly and hastily applied his intellect to the task. And indeed Mercury had stretched himself, very robustly. The column had risen rather high, it stood several tenths above the limit of normal body temperature. Hans Castorp had a temperature of 99.7 degrees.

Between nine-thirty and ten, in the middle of the morning, his body temperature was 99.7 degrees—that was too high, it was a fever, the result of an infection to which he had been susceptible. And now the question was: what sort of infection? At 99.7 degrees—Joachim’s wasn’t any higher than that, nor was anyone else’s, who wasn’t bedridden, terribly ill, or moribund. Not young Kleefeld with her pneumothorax . . . nor Madame Chauchat. In his case, of course, it surely wasn’t anything like that—just the usual fever that went with the sniffles, people would have said down below. But there was no way to differentiate it precisely, to keep the kinds of fever apart. Hans Castorp doubted that the fever had only appeared just now in conjunction with his cold; and he truly regretted not having consulted Mercury before this, right at the beginning, when the director had suggested it to him. It had been very sensible advice, that was apparent now, and Settembrini had been wrong to throw his head back and laugh so scornfully—Settembrini with his republic and his beautiful style. Hans Castorp despised the Italian’s republic and his beautiful style; but he also went on examining the thermometer reading, which he lost several times in the glare, and then recovered after twisting and turning the instrument. It still said 99.7 degrees—and in the middle of the morning.

He was terribly agitated. He paced the room a few times, still holding the thermometer—horizontally, so as to not disturb the reading by some vertical shake. He then laid it as carefully as possible on the rim of his washstand and decided for now to put on his overcoat and finish his rest cure. He sat down, flung his blankets around him—just as he had learned, from both sides, from below, one after the other, with a skilled hand now—and lay still as he waited for the hour of second breakfast and Joachim’s arrival. Now and then he smiled, and it was as if he were smiling at someone. Now and then his chest gave an uneasy heave, and then he would have to cough his bronchial cough.

When the eleven o’clock gong sounded, Joachim came by to fetch him for second breakfast and found him still lying there.

“Well?” he asked, stepping up beside the lounge chair.

Hans Castorp stared straight ahead in silence for a while. Then by way of reply, he said, “Yes, the latest is that I have a little temperature.”

“What do you mean?” Joachim asked. “Do you feel feverish?”

Hans Castorp again waited awhile before answering, but then at last he said with a certain lethargy, “I’ve felt feverish for a long time now, my friend—almost the whole time. It’s no longer a matter of a subjective feeling now, but of precise evidence. I measured it.”

“You took your temperature? With what?” Joachim cried, stunned. “With a thermometer, of course,” Hans Castorp replied, not without a mixture of severity and scorn. “The head nurse sold me one. Why she keeps saying ‘man alive,’ I really don’t know. It’s very slangy. But she did sell me a first-rate thermometer with utmost dispatch, and if you want to check for yourself what it read, you’ll find it in there on my washstand. It’s only slightly elevated.”

Joachim did an about-face and walked back into the room. When he returned, he said tentatively, “Yes, it reads ninety-nine point six.”

“Then it’s gone down a little,” Hans Castorp responded quickly. “It was point seven.”

“You can’t really call that just slightly elevated, not in the middle of the morning,” Joachim said. “Now isn’t this a nice mess,” he said, standing beside his recumbent cousin the way one stands beside a nice mess, his hands on his hips, his head lowered. “You need to be in bed.”

Hans Castorp had his answer at the ready. “I don’t see,” he said, “why I should go to bed with ninety-nine point seven, when you and a lot of other people with temperatures that are no lower are running about just as you please here.”

“But that’s a totally different matter,” Joachim said. “Yours is acute, but harmless. It’s the fever that goes with a cold.”

“First,” Hans Castorp replied, dividing his response into a first and second, “I don’t understand why someone with a harmless fever—we’ll assume there is such a thing—with a harmless fever, then, has to stay in bed, but not in the opposite case. And second, I’m telling you that my cold has not made me hotter than I already was. My position remains,” he concluded, “that ninety-nine point seven is ninety-nine point seven. And if you can run around with that, so can I.”

“But I had to lie in bed for four weeks when I first arrived,” Joachim objected. “And they let me get up again only when it became clear that my temperature wasn’t going away with bed rest.”

Hans Castorp smiled. “So what?” he asked. “I thought yours was an entirely different problem, was it not? It seems to me you’re getting tangled up in contradictions. First you differentiate the two cases, then equate them. That’s just twiddle-twaddle.”

Joachim turned on his heels, and when he turned back to his cousin his tanned face was visibly a shade darker. “No,” he said, “I am not equating them—you’re the muddlehead. I’m simply saying that you’ve caught a wretched cold—I can hear it in your voice—and you should go to bed, so that you can be over it sooner, especially since you want to go home next week. But if you don’t want to—I mean, if you don’t want to lie in bed, then you don’t have to. I’m not going to make rules for you. At any rate, we have to go to breakfast now. Come on, we’re late.”

“Fine, let’s go!” Hans Castorp said, tossing his blankets aside. He went back into the room to run a brush through his hair; as he did, Joachim took another look at the thermometer on the washstand—and Hans Castorp watched him from a distance. They left, not saying a word, and took their places in the dining hall, which, as always at this hour, glistened white from all the milk.

When the dwarf brought Hans Castorp his Kulmbach beer, he refused it with some seriousness. He would rather not drink beer today—wanted nothing at all, thanks, at most a little water. This caused a general stir. What was this? What innovations were these? Why no beer?—He had a slight temperature, Hans Castorp remarked casually—ninety-nine point seven, insignificant.

And now they wagged their forefingers, cautioning him—it was all very curious. They began to tease him, laying heads to one side, winking, and putting fingers up to their ears, as if these were racy, risqué revelations about someone who had played the innocent until now. “Now, now, my friend,” the teacher said, laughing as she chided him, her downy cheeks turning red. “What pretty goings-on—sowing his oats. Just wait and see.”

“My, my, my,” Frau Stöhr said, admonishing him with a stubby red finger waved in the vicinity of her nose. “So Mr. Visitor has a little temp himself. Look at you—what a fine fellow you turn out to be, quite the gay blade.”

And when the news reached the great-aunt at the other end of the table, even she made a sly joke of chiding him; pretty Marusya, who had paid him barely any attention before now, bent forward to look at him, her orange-scented handkerchief pressed to her lips, and reprimanded him with her brown, round eyes. And Dr. Blumenkohl, too, who heard of it now from Frau Stöhr, could not help joining in the general reaction—not that he looked directly at Hans Castorp. Only Miss Robinson, closed off to the world as always, appeared indifferent. Joachim behaved with perfect propriety and kept his eyes lowered.

Hans Castorp, flattered by so much teasing, felt that modesty required him to demur. “No, no,” he said, “you’re mistaken, my case is the most harmless imaginable. I have the sniffles. As you can see: my eyes are watery, my chest is congested, I coughed half the night away—that’s quite unpleasant enough.”