The Magic Mountain (45 page)

The third day, the morning of the third day, brought with it gentle release. It was a splendid autumn morning, sunny and fresh, with silver-gray webs spun over the meadows. The sun and the waning moon both stood rather high in the pure blue. The cousins had arisen earlier than usual in order to honor the morning by extending their constitutional a little beyond its normal limits and continuing along the forest path beyond the bench beside the water trough. Joachim, whose temperature had likewise shown a welcome decline, had seconded this invigorating change of schedule and had not disagreed with Hans Castorp’s suggestion. “We’re recovered patients,” he had said, “rid of fever and toxins, practically ripe for the flatlands. Why shouldn’t we buck like colts?” And so, planting their walking sticks firmly, they strolled off bareheaded—because since taking vows, Hans Castorp had, for God’s sake, complied with the local custom of not wearing a hat, despite his strong feelings at the beginning about how the practice contradicted his own civilized style of life. They had not yet covered the initial steep rise of the reddish path and were only at about the point where the novice had first encountered the pneumothoracic crew, when they caught sight of Frau Chauchat climbing very slowly some distance ahead—Frau Chauchat in white, in a white sweater, white flannel skirt, and even white shoes, her reddish hair glistening in the morning sunlight. More precisely, Hans Castorp had recognized her. Joachim was not aware of the situation until he felt the unpleasant sensation of being tugged or pulled along, the result of his companion’s having suddenly picked up the pace and moving ahead swiftly, after first having checked his step abruptly, almost coming to a halt. Joachim did not like being hurried, found it annoying and intolerable; he was soon short of breath, and he coughed. But Hans Castorp, with his eye on his goal and his lungs apparently working superbly, did not let that bother him much. And once Joachim became aware of the actual situation, he merely scowled, said not a word, and kept pace with his cousin—he certainly could not allow him to march ahead alone.

Young Hans Castorp felt invigorated by the beautiful morning. In his depressed mood, his inner energies had quietly recovered some strength, too, and his mind was illumined with the clear certainty that the moment had come to break the spell that had been cast over him. And so he stepped on ahead, pulling a gasping and generally reluctant Joachim with him, and by the time they reached the point where the path leveled out and turned off to the right, they had almost pulled even with Frau Chauchat. Hans Castorp now slowed the pace again so that he would not look too outlandish from his exertions when carrying out his plan. And just beyond the dogleg in the path, between slope above and drop-off below, among rusty-hued pines with sunlight filtering through the branches, it happened—everything worked out marvelously. Hans Castorp, walking on Joachim’s left, caught up with his adorable patient and began to pass her on the right with manly strides. At the moment when he was just even with her, he made a hatless bow and whispered, “Good morning,” in a low voice of reverent greeting (but why “reverent,” really?)—and heard her respond in kind, wishing him good morning in his own language; her eyes smiling, she acknowledged him with a friendly, not particularly surprised nod. And it was all so different, so totally and blissfully different from that glance at his boots—it was a stroke of good fortune, a turn for the better, indeed for the best, an unparalleled event almost beyond comprehension. It was the longed-for release.

On winged heels, blinded by irrational joy, the proud owner of a greeting, a word, a smile, Hans Castorp hurried forward at the side of maltreated Joachim, who went on staring in silence down the steep hill. It had been a prank, a rather brash one, and in Joachim’s eyes there was probably a trace of treachery and malice about it—Hans Castorp was well aware of that. It was not exactly the same as asking a total stranger for a pencil—indeed, it would have been almost rude to pass stiffly by a lady with whom one had been living for months under the same roof and not salute her. And had not Clavdia recently engaged them in a conversation in the waiting room? And so Joachim had to keep his peace. But Hans Castorp understood quite well the other reason why Joachim, with his love of honor, had turned his head away and was walking along in silence, whereas he himself was utterly, trace-kicking happy at his successful prank. No man in the flatlands could have been happier if he had “given his heart” legitimately, cheerfully, and with a promising view to the future to some healthy little goose, and had found success. No, such a man could not be
nearly
as happy as he over the bit of success he had pilfered and secured in one lucky stroke.

After a while, then, he pounded his cousin on the shoulder and said, “Say there, what’s wrong? The weather’s so beautiful. We’ll have to go down to the Kurhaus in Platz later, there’ll probably be a concert. Just think. Maybe they’ll play that aria from
Carmen
’. ‘Through every long and lonely hour, in prison there I kept your flower.’ What’s gnawing at your craw?”

“Nothing,” Joachim said. “But you look so flushed that I’m afraid we’ve seen the end of your lowered temperature.”

And it was the end. Hans Castorp’s humiliating depression had been vanquished by the greetings he had exchanged with Clavdia Chauchat, and strictly speaking, the real basis of his present satisfaction was his awareness that it had been overcome. Yes, it turned out Joachim was right: Mercury was climbing again! Home from his walk, Hans Castorp consulted him—and he promptly climbed to 100.4 degrees.

Although some of Herr Settembrini’s innuendoes had annoyed Hans Castorp, there was no reason he should have been amazed by them—nor did he have any right to accuse the humanist of pedagogic spying. A blind man would have noticed how things stood with him; he had done nothing to keep it secret. Out of a certain generosity and noble simplicity of spirit, he was a man who tended to wear his heart on his sleeve, which at least distinguished him—to his advantage, if you like—from the love-sick Mannheimer with thinning hair and furtive ways. We would remind our readers that, as a rule, inherent in the condition in which Hans Castorp found himself is an urge, a compulsion, to reveal oneself, a need to be open and to confess, a blind prejudice in one’s own favor, and a rage to fill the world with oneself—and the less common sense, reason, and hope apparently involved, the more dismaying it is for those of us of a more sober temperament. It is hard to say how such people actually first come to betray themselves; they cannot, it seems, do or refrain from doing anything that does not betray them—particularly (as a certain gentleman who had no trouble forming opinions remarked) in the company of people who have only two things in their heads: the first being their temperature, the second their temperature. By the latter he meant, for instance, the question of who Frau Wurmbrandt from Vienna, the general consul’s wife, had decided would have to pay damages for her loss of fickle Captain Miklosich: the fully mended Swedish bruiser, or Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund, or—a third possibility—both at once. Because it was certain and general knowledge that the bond linking the prosecutor and Frau Salomon from Amsterdam had, after several months, been broken by mutual agreement and that Frau Salomon, obeying the impulse of her years, had turned to a lad of a more tender age, thick-lipped Gänser from Hermine Kleefeld’s table, and had now taken him under her wing—or, as Frau Stöhr put it in her own rather picturesque legalese, had “procured.” And so the prosecutor now had a free hand either to do battle over Frau Wurmbrandt, or to come to an understanding with the Swede.

These were the kinds of suits pending among the residents of the Berghof, especially among its feverish youth; and apparently one major factor in all of them was the passageway along the balconies—where one slipped past glass partitions and kept to the railing. These proceedings, then, occupied people’s minds, they were an essential component of the local ambiance—and even in saying that, we have not really expressed what was going on. Hans Castorp, in particular, had the funny feeling that in this locale a basic fact of life—which is granted sufficient importance everywhere in the world, whether spoken of in earnest or jest—acquired an accent, a value, a pattern of meaning so serious, and by its very seriousness so new, that this basic fact was cast in an entirely new light, which, if not absolutely appalling, was at least appalling in its newness. Simply mentioning such things causes our own expression to change, and we notice that, although thus far we may have spoken of such questionable liaisons in a light and jocular tone, we did it for the same mysterious reasons people usually speak of them in that fashion—not that it in any way proves the subject to be a matter of levity and jest. And in the environs where we now find ourselves, such would be the case even less than elsewhere. Hans Castorp had believed his was a typical understanding of this fact of life, which normally serves as a favorite topic of jokes, and he may have been right in his belief. But he now realized that he had understood it very inadequately down in the flatlands, had actually been in a state of innocent ignorance. His personal experiences here—the nature of which we have attempted to indicate on several occasions—had forced him at certain moments to cry, “My God!” But they also enabled him to perceive, understand, and internalize the ever-intensifying accent on shock and indescribable adventure that people up here, both generally and individually, attributed to the matter. Not that people did not joke about it here as well. But to a far greater extent than down below, there was something inappropriate about the jokes, something to do with chattering teeth and shortness of breath, something that marked such jokes all too clearly as transparent disguises for the anguish hidden beneath them, or rather for the anguish impossible to hide. Hans Castorp recalled how Joachim’s face had turned blotchy and pale the one and only time he had tried to tease him in an innocent, flatland sort of way, by bringing the conversation around to Marusya’s physical attributes. He recalled the cool pallor on his own face the evening he had freed Frau Chauchat from the setting sun; and how, on various occasions before and since, he had seen that same pallor on many another face, usually on two at once—for instance on Frau Salomon’s and young Gänser’s of late, ever since what Frau Stöhr had described in her colorful way had indeed come to pass. We repeat, he recalled all this and realized not only that it would have been difficult not to “betray” oneself under such circumstances, but also that the attempt would hardly have been worthwhile. In other words, if Hans Castorp saw no compelling reason to restrain his feelings and make a secret of his condition, that was probably due not merely to generosity of spirit and guilelessness, but also to a certain encouragement he breathed from the atmosphere all around him.

Had it not been for the difficulty of making acquaintances here, a difficulty to which Joachim had immediately called his attention but the primary cause of which could be traced to the fact that the cousins were, so to speak, a couple or miniature clique within the sanatorium’s society and that soldierly Joachim, who was interested solely in regaining his health quickly, was fundamentally opposed to any closer contact or association with his fellow patients—had it not been for that difficulty, then, Hans Castorp would have had, and taken advantage of, many more opportunities to make his feelings known in his generous and guileless way. All the same, Joachim discovered him one evening at the usual social gathering in the company of Hermine Kleefeld, her tablemates Gänser and Rasmussen, and, as a fifth, the lad with the monocle and saltcellar fingernail; with his eyes glittering undeniably brighter than usual and with emotion in his voice, Hans Castorp had delivered an extemporaneous oration on Frau Chauchat’s peculiar and exotic facial features, while his audience exchanged glances, nudged one another, and tittered.

It was all very painful for Joachim; but the person who was the source of their amusement seemed insensitive to this revelation of his inner state. Perhaps he thought that if he had left it hidden and ignored, it would never have come into its own. He could be sure of meeting with general sympathy and was willing to accept the schadenfreude that might come with it. Not just people at his own table, but by now those at neighboring tables as well, took delight in watching him blanch and blush when the glass door banged shut at the start of each meal; and indeed he even found some gratification in attracting their attention, since it brought with it a certain external acknowledgment and confirmation of his intoxicated state, which somehow tended both to advance his cause and to encourage his own vague, irrational hopes—and it all made him very happy. It came to the point where people literally gathered to watch the infatuated young man—on the terrace after dinner or on Sunday afternoon when all the guests thronged the concierge’s desk to pick up their mail, which on that one day was not delivered to their rooms. It was generally known that he was tipsy as hell, a man in a highly lambent state, who did not care who noticed. And so Frau Stöhr,Fräulein Engelhart, young Kleefeld, her girlfriend with the face of a tapir, the incurable Herr Albin, the young man with the saltcellar fingernail, and various other sanatorium residents would stand there with mouths pulled down at the corners and snort through their noses as they watched him gaze in one particular direction—a forlorn and passionate smile on his lips, the same flush on his cheeks that had appeared his first evening here, the same glint in his eyes that had been enkindled by the Austrian horseman’s cough.

Given this state of affairs, it was actually a good thing that Herr Settembrini would sometimes approach Hans Castorp and start up a conversation, asking him how he was feeling; but it is doubtful whether the younger man knew what thanks he owed him for this humane broad-mindedness. It might happen, for instance, in the lobby on a Sunday afternoon. . . . The guests were pressing around the concierge’s desk, hands stretched out for their mail. Joachim was up front with them. His cousin held back, busy watching it all in the state described above, trying to catch Clavdia Chauchat’s eye. She was standing nearby with her tablemates, waiting for the crowd at the desk to thin out. It was an hour when all the patients mingled, an hour of opportunities, and for precisely that reason an hour that young Hans Castorp loved and longed for. The week before, he had been so close to Madame Chauchat at the desk that she had bumped against him just the least bit and with a cursory turn of her head had said, “
Pardon.
”