Transported by that word, look, and smile, half blinded by his senseless joy, Hans Castorp trod on winged feet, hurrying the misused Joachim with him, who uttered not a word, and gazed away down the steep. It had been a manoeuvre of a rather unscrupulous sort; in Joachim’s eyes, as Hans Castorp well knew, it looked very like treachery. Yet it was not the same thing as borrowing a lead-pencil of a perfect stranger; one might even say it would have been ill-bred to pass by a lady with whom one had been for months under the same roof and not salute her. They had even been in conversation with her, that time in the waiting-room. That was why Joachim could say nothing; but Hans Castorp well knew another reason that made his honour-loving cousin walk on in silence with averted head, while he himself was so supremely happy, so glad all over, at the success of his manoeuvre. Never a man down in the flat-land who had “given his heart” to some healthy, commonplace little goose, been successful in his suit, and experienced all the orthodox and anticipatory gratifications proper to his state, never could such a man be blissfuller, no, not half so blissful, as Hans Castorp now over this momentary joy which he had snatched.—And so, after a while, he clapped his cousin heartily on the shoulder and said: “Hullo, what’s the matter with you? Isn’t it magnificent today? Let’s go down to the Kurhaus afterwards, there will probably be music. Perhaps they’ll play that thing from Carmen.—What’s the matter? Has anything got under your skin?”
“No,” Joachim answered. “But you look so hot, I’m afraid your curve has gone up again.”
It had. The greeting he had exchanged with Clavdia Chauchat had overcome the mortifying depression; it was at bottom the consciousness of this which had lain at the root of Hans Castorp’s gratification. Yes, yes, Joachim was right, Mercurius was mounting again: when Hans Castorp consulted him, on their return from their walk, he had climbed up to 100.4°.
Encyclopaedic
If certain insinuations on Herr Settembrini’s part had angered Hans Castorp, the annoyance was quite unjustified, as also his feeling that the schoolmaster had been spying on him. A blind man must have seen how it stood with the youth; he himself did nothing to conceal his state, being prevented by a certain native and lofty simplicity. He inclined rather to wear his heart upon his sleeve, in contrast—if you like, favourable contrast—to the devotee from Mannheim, with his thin hair and furtive mien. But in general we would emphasize the fact that people in Hans Castorp’s state regularly feel a craving for self-revelation, an impulse to confess themselves, a blind preoccupation with self, and a thirst to possess the world of their own emotions, which is the more offensive to the sober onlooker, the less sense, reasonableness, or hope there lies in the whole affair.
How people in this state go about to betray themselves is hard to define; but it seems they can neither do nor leave undone anything which would not have that effect—doubly so, then, in a society like that of the Berghof, where, as the critically minded Herr Settembrini once expressed it, people were possessed of two ideas, and only two: temperature—and then again temperature. By the second temperature he meant preoccupation with such questions as, for instance, with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt from Vienna consoled herself for the defection of Captain Miklosich—whether with the Swedish minion, or Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund, or both. Everybody knew that the bond between the lawyer and Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, after subsisting for several months, had been broken by common consent, and that Frau Salomon had followed the leanings of her time of life and taken up with callow youth. The thick-lipped Gänser from Hermine Kleefeld’s table was for the present under her wing; she had taken him “to have and to hold,” as Frau Stöhr, in legal parlance, yet not without perspicuity, had put it—and thus Lawyer Paravant was free either to quarrel or to compound with the Swede over the favours of the Frau Consul-General, as seemed to him advisable.
These affairs then—in which, of course, the passage along the balconies, at the end of the glass partitions, played a considerable role—were rife in Berghof society, particularly among the fevered youth. They occupied people’s minds, they were a salient feature of life up here—and even in saying thus much we are far from having precisely defined the position with regard to them. Hans Castorp, on this subject, received a singular impression: it was that a certain fundamental fact of life, which is conceded the world over to be of great importance, and is the fertile theme of constant allusion, both in jest and earnest, that this fundamental fact of life bore up here an entirely altered emphasis. It was weighty with a new weight; it had an accent, a value, and a significance which were utterly novel—and which set the fact itself in a light to make it look much more alarming than it had been before. Thus far, whenever we have
