“Sit down, sit down. No formalities with a simple man like me. Out of place too, you being my patients, both of you. Not necessary. No objection to the status quo,” and he remained standing before them, holding the cigar between the index and middle fingers of his great right hand.
“How’s your cabbage-leaf, Castorp? Let me see, I’m a connoisseur. That’s a good ash—what sort of brown beauty have you there?”
“Maria Mancini, Postre de Banquett, Bremen, Herr Hofrat. Costs little or nothing, nineteen pfennigs in plain colours—but a bouquet you don’t often come across at the price. Sumatra-Havana wrapper, as you see. I am very wedded to them. It is a medium mixture, very fragrant, but cool on the tongue. Suits it to leave the ash long, I don’t knock it off more than a couple of times. She has her whims, of course, has Maria; but the inspection must be very thorough, for she doesn’t vary much, and draws perfectly even. May I offer you one?”
“Thanks, we can exchange.” And they drew out their cases.
“There’s a thoroughbred for you,” the Hofrat said, as he displayed his brand. “Temperament, you know, juicy, got some guts to it. St. Felix, Brazil—I’ve always stuck to this sort. Regular ‘begone, dull care,’ burns like brandy, has something fulminating toward the end. But you need to exercise a little caution—can’t light one from the other, you know—more than a fellow can stand. However, better one good mouthful than any amount of nibbles.”
They twirled their respective offerings between their fingers, felt connoisseur-like the slender shapes that possessed, or so one might think, some organic quality of life, with their ribs formed by the diagonal parallel edges of the raised, here and there porous wrapper, the exposed veins that seemed to pulsate, the small inequalities of the skin, the play of light on planes and edges.
Hans Castorp expressed it: “A cigar like that is alive—it breathes. Fact. Once, at home, I had the idea of keeping Maria in an airtight tin box, to protect her from damp. Would you believe it, she died! Inside of a week she perished—nothing but leathery corpses left.”
They exchanged experiences upon the best way to keep cigars—particularly imported ones. The Hofrat loved them, he would have smoked nothing but heavy Havanas, but they did not suit him. He told Hans Castorp about two little Henry Clays he had once taken to his heart, in an evening company, which had come within an ace of putting him under the sod.
“I smoked them with my coffee,” he said, “and thought no more of it. But after a while it struck me to wonder how I felt—and I discovered it was like nothing on earth. I don’t know how I got home—and once there, well, this time, my son, I said to myself, you’re a goner. Feet and legs like ice, you know, reeking with cold sweat, white as a tablecloth, heart going all ways for Sunday—sometimes just a thread of a pulse, sometimes pounding like a trip-hammer. Cerebration phenomenal. I made sure I was going to toddle off—that is the very expression that occurred to me, because at the time I was feeling as jolly as a sand-boy. Not that I wasn’t in a funk as well, because I was—I was just one large blue funk all over. Still, funk and felicity aren’t mutually exclusive, everybody knows that. Take a chap who’s going to have a girl for the first time in his life; he is in a funk too, and so is she, and yet both of them are simply dissolving with felicity. I was nearly dissolving too—my bosom swelled with pride, and there I was, on the point of toddling off; but the Mylendonk got hold of me and persuaded me it was a poor idea. She gave me a camphor injection, applied ice-compresses and friction—and here I am, saved for humanity.”
The Hofrat’s large, goggling blue eyes watered as he told this story. Hans Castorp, seated in his capacity of patient, looked up at him with an expression that betrayed mental activity.
“You paint sometimes, don’t you, Herr Hofrat?” he asked suddenly.
The Hofrat pretended to stagger backwards. “What the deuce! What do you take me for, youngster?”
“I beg your pardon. I happened to hear somebody say so, and it just crossed my mind.”
“Well, then, I won’t trouble to lie about it. We’re all poor creatures. I admit such a thing has happened. Anch’ io sono pittore, as the Spaniard used to say.”
“Landscape?” Hans Castorp asked him succinctly, with the air of a connoisseur, circumstances betraying him to this tone.
“As much as you like,” the Hofrat answered, swaggering out of sheer self-consciousness. “Landscape, still life, animals—chap like me shrinks from nothing.”
“No portraits?”
“I’ve even thrown in a portrait or so. Want to give me an order?”
“Ha ha! No, but it would be very kind of you to show us your pictures some time—we should enjoy it.”
Joachim looked blankly at his cousin, but then hastened to add his assurances that it would be very kind indeed of the Hofrat.
Behrens was enchanted at the flattery. He grew red with pleasure, his tears seemed this time actually on the point of falling.
“With the greatest pleasure,” he cried. “On the spot if you like. Come on, come along with me, I’ll
