The Magic Mountain (29 page)

It looked, in fact, as though Hans Castorp would return home in possession of a first-class cold. He had caught it, probably, in the rest-cure, and, again probably, in the evening rest-cure—which for almost a week now he had been taking in the balcony, despite the long spell of cold, wet weather. He was aware that weather of this kind was not recognized as bad; such a conception hardly existed up here, where the most inclement conceivable went unheeded and had no terrors for anyone. With the easy adaptability of youth, which suits itself to any environment, Hans Castorp had begun to imitate this indifference. It might rain in bucketfuls, but the air was not supposed to be the more damp for that—nor was it, in all probability, for the dry heat in the face persisted, as though after drinking wine, or sitting in an overheated room. And however cold it got, the radiators were never heated unless it snowed, so it was of no avail to take refuge in one’s chamber, since it was quite as comfortable on the balcony, when one lay in one’s excellent chair, wrapped in a paletot and two good camel’s-hair rugs put on according to the ritual. As comfortable? It was incomparably more so. It was, in Hans Castorp’s reasoned judgment, a state of life which more appealed to him than any in all his previous experience, so far as he could remember. He did not propose to be shaken in this view for any
carbonaro
or quill-driver in existence, no matter how many malicious and equivocal jokes he made on the subject of the “horizontal.” Especially he liked it in the evening, when with his little lamp on the stand beside him and his long-lost and now restored Maria alight between his lips he enjoyed the ineffable excellencies of his reclining-chair. True, his nose felt frozen, and the hands that held his book—he was still reading
Ocean Steamships—
were red and cramped from the cold. He looked through the arch of his loggia over the darkening valley, jewelled with clustered or scattering lights, and listened to the music that drifted up nearly every evening for almost an hour. There was a concert below, and he could hear, pleasantly subdued by the distance, familiar operatic selections, snatches from
Carmen
,
Il Trovatore
,
Freischütz;
or well-built, facile waltzes, marches so spirited that he could not help keeping time with his head, and gay mazurkas. Mazurka? No, Marusja was her name, Marusja of the little ruby. And in the next loggia, behind the thick wall of milky glass, lay Joachim, with whom Hans Castorp exchanged a word now and then, low-toned, out of consideration for the other horizontallers. Joachim was as well off in his loggia as Hans Castorp in his, though, being entirely unmusical, he could not take the same pleasure in the concerts. Too bad! He was probably studying his Russian primer instead. But Hans Castorp let
Ocean Steam
ships
fall on the coverlet and gave himself up to the music; he contemplated with such inward gratification the translucent depth of a musical invention full of individuality and charm that he thought with nothing but hostility of Settembrini and the irritating things he had said about music—that it was politically suspect was the worst, and little better than the remark of Grandfather Giuseppe about the July Revolution and the six days of creation.

Joachim, though he could not partake of Hans Castorp’s pleasure in the music, nor the pungent gratification purveyed by Maria, lay as snugly ensconced as his cousin. The day was at an end. For the time everything was at an end; there would be no more emotional alarums, no more strain on the heart-muscles. But equally there was the assurance that to-morrow it would begin all over again, all the favouring probabilities afforded by propinquity and the household regimen. And this pleasing combination of snugness and confident hope, together with the music and the restored charms of Maria, made the evening cure a state almost amounting to beatification for young Hans Castorp.

All which had not prevented the guest and novice from catching a magnificent cold, either in the evening rest-cure or elsewhere. He felt the onset of catarrh, with oppression in the frontal sinus, and inflamed uvula; he could not breathe easily through the passage provided by nature; the air struck cold and painfully as it struggled through, and caused constant coughing. His voice took on overnight the tonal quality of a hollow bass the worse for strong drink. According to him, he had not closed an eye, his parched throat making him start up every five minutes from his pillow.

“Very vexatious,” Joachim said, “and most unfortunate. Colds, you know, are not the thing at all, up here; they are not
reçus
. The authorities don’t admit their existence; the official attitude is that the dryness of the air entirely prevents them. If you were a patient, you would certainly fall foul of Behrens, if you went to him and said you had a cold. But it is a little different with a guest,—you have a right to have a cold if you want to. It would be good if we could check the catarrh. There are things to do, down below, but here—I doubt if anyone would take enough interest in it. It is not advisable to fall ill up here; you aren’t taken any notice of. It’s an old story—but you are coming to hear it at the end. When I was new up here, there was a lady who complained of her ear for a whole week and told everybody how she suffered. Behrens finally looked at it. ‘Make yourself quite easy, madame,’ he said; ‘it is not tubercular.’ That was an end of the matter! Well, we must see what can be done. I will speak to the bathing-master early to-morrow morning, when he comes to my room. Then it will go through the regular channels, and perhaps something will come of it.” Thus Joachim and the regular channels proved reliable. On Friday, after Hans Castorp returned from the morning round, there was a knock at his door, and he was vouchsafed the pleasure of personal acquaintance with Fräulein von Mylendonk— Frau Director, as she was called. Up to now he had seen this over-occupied person only from a distance, crossing the corridor from one patient’s room to another, or when she had popped up for a moment in the dining-room and he had been aware of her raucous voice. But now he himself was the object of her visit. His catarrh had fetched her. She knocked a short, bony knock, entered almost before he had said come in, and then, upon the threshold, bent round to make sure of the number of the room. “Thirty-four,” she croaked briskly. “Right. Well, young ‘un,
on me dit
,
que vous
avez pris froid
.
Wy
,
kaschetsja
,
prostudilisj
,
Lei è raffreddato
, I hear you have caught a cold. What language do you speak? Oh, I see, you are young Ziemssen’s guest. I am due in the operating-room. Somebody there to be chloroformed, and he has just been eating bean salad. I have to have my eyes everywhere. Well, young ‘un, so you have a cold?”

Hans Castorp was taken aback by this mode of address, in the mouth of a dame of ancient lineage. In her rapid speech she slurred over her words, all the time restlessly moving her head about with a circular action, the nose sniffingly in the air—the motion of a caged beast of prey. Her freckled right hand, loosely closed with the thumb uppermost, she held in front of her and waved it to and fro on the wrist, as though to say: “Come, make haste, don’t attend to what I say, but say what you have to and let me be off!” She was in the forties, of stunted growth, without form or comeliness, clad in a belted pinaforish garment of clinical white, with a garnet cross on her breast. Sparse, reddish hair showed beneath the white coif of her profession; her eyes were a waterly blue, with inflamed lids, and one of them, as a finishing touch, had a stye in a well-advanced stage of development in the corner. Their glance was unsteady and flickering. Her nose was turned up, her mouth like a frog’s, and furnished to boot with a wry and protruding lower lip, which she used like a shovel to get her words out. Hans Castorp looked at her, and all the modest and confiding friendliness native to him spoke in his eyes.

“What sort of cold is it, eh?” repeated the Directress. She seemed to try to concentrate her gaze and make it penetrate; but it slipped aside. “We don’t care for such colds. Are you subject to them? Your cousin has been too, hasn’t he? How old are you? Twenty-four? Yes, it’s the age. And so you come up here and get a cold? There ought not to be any talk about colds up here; that sort of twaddle belongs down below.” It was fearsome to see how she shovelled out this word with her lower lip. “You have a beautiful bronchial catarrh, that is plain”—again she made that curious effort to pierce him with her gaze, and again she could not hold it steady. “But catarrhs are not caused by cold; they come from an infection, which one takes from being in a receptive state. So the question is, are we dealing with a harmless infection or with something more serious? Everything else is twaddle. It is possible that your receptivity inclines to the harmless kind,” she went on, and looked at him with her over-ripe stye, he knew not how. “Here, I will give you a simple antiseptic—it may do you good,” and she took a small packet out of the leather bag that hung from her girdle. It was formamint. “But you look flushed—as though you had fever.” She never stopped trying to fix him with her gaze, and always the eyes glided off to one side. “Have you measured?” He answered in the negative.

“Why not?” she asked, and her protruding lower lip hung in the air after she spoke.
He made no answer. The poor youth was still young; he had never got over his schoolboy shyness. He sat, so to speak, on his bench, did not know the answer and took refuge in dumbness.
“Perhaps you never do take your temperature?”
“Oh, yes, Frau Director, when I have fever.”

“My dear child, one takes it in the first instance to see whether one has fever. According to you, you have none now?”

“I can’t tell, Frau Director. I cannot really tell the difference. Ever since I came up
here, I have been a little hot and shivery.”
“Aha! And where is your thermometer?”
“I haven’t one with me, Frau Director. Why should I, I am not ill; I am only up here
on a visit.”
“Rubbish! Did you send for me because you weren’t ill?”
“No,” he laughed politely, “it was because I caught a little—”

“Cold. We’ve often seen such colds. Here, young ‘un,” she said, and rummaged again in her bag. She brought out two longish leather cases, one red and one black, and put them on the table. “This one is three francs fifty, the other five. The five-franc one is better, of course. It will last you a lifetime if you take care of it.”

Smiling he took up the red case and opened it. The glass instrument lay like a jewel within, fitted neatly into its red velvet groove. The degrees were marked by red strokes, the tenths by black ones; the figures were in red and the tapering end was full of glittering quicksilver. The column stood below blood-heat.

Hans Castorp knew what was due to himself and his upbringing. “I will take this one,” he said, not even looking at the other. “The one at five francs. May I—” “Then that’s settled,” croaked the Directress. “I see you don’t niggle over important purchases. No hurry, it will come on the bill. Give him to me. We’ll drive him right down”—She took the thermometer out of his hand and plunged it several times through the air, until the mercury stood below 95°. “He’ll soon climb up again!” she said. “Here is your new acquisition. You know how we do it up here? Straight under the tongue, seven minutes, four times a day, and shut the lips well over it. Well, young ‘un, I must get on. Good luck!” And she was out at the door.

Hans Castorp bowed her out, then stood by the table, staring from the door through which she had disappeared to the instrument she had left behind. “So that,” he thought, “was Directress von Mylendonk. Settembrini doesn’t care for her, and certainly she has her unpleasant side. The stye isn’t pretty—but of course she does not have it all the time. But why does she call me ‘young ‘un,’ like that? Rather rude and familiar, seems to me. So she has sold me a thermometer—I suppose she always has one or two in her pocket. They are to be had everywhere here, Joachim said, even in shops where you would least expect it. But I didn’t need to take the trouble to buy it; it just fell into my lap.” He took the article out of its case, looked at it, and walked restlessly up and down the room. His heart beat strong and rapidly. He looked toward the open balcony door, and considered seeking counsel of Joachim, but thought better of it and paused again by the table. He cleared his throat by way of testing his voice; then he coughed.

“Yes,” he said. “I must see if I have the fever that goes with the cold.” Quickly he put the thermometer in his mouth, the mercury beneath the tongue, so that the instrument stuck slantingly upwards from his lips. He closed them firmly, that no air might get in. Then he looked at his wrist-watch. It was six minutes after the half-hour. And he began to wait for the seven minutes to pass.

“Not a second too long,” he thought, “and not one too short. They can depend on me, in both directions. They needn’t give me a ‘silent sister,’ like that Ottilie Kneifer Settembrini told us of.” He walked about, pressing down the thermometer with his tongue.

The time crept on; the term seemed unending. When he looked at his watch, two and a half minutes had passed—and he had feared the seven minutes were already more than up. He did a thousand things: picked up objects about the room and set them down again, walked out on the balcony—taking care that his cousin should not notice his presence—and looked at the landscape of this high valley, now so familiar to him in all its phases; with its horns, its crests and walls, with the projecting wing of the “Brembühl,” the ridge of which sloped steeply down to the valley, its flanks covered with rugged undergrowth, with its formations on the right side of the valley, whose names were no less familiar than the others, and the Alteinwand, which from this point appeared to close in the valley on the south. He looked down on the garden beds and paths, the grotto and the silver fir; he listened to the murmur that rose from the rest-hall; and he returned to his room, settling the thermometer under his tongue. Then, with a motion of the arm which drew away the sleeve from his wrist, he brought the forearm before his eyes and found that by dint of pushing and shoving, pulling and hauling, he had managed to get rid of full six minutes. The last one he spent standing in the middle of the room—but then, unfortunately, he let his thoughts wander and fell into a “doze,” so that the sixty seconds flew by on the wings of the wind; and, when he looked again, the eighth minute was already past its first quarter. “It doesn’t really matter, so far as the result is concerned,” he thought, and tearing the instrument out of his mouth, he stared at it in confusion.