Leila Gerngross had no private nursing, she was under the immediate supervision of Fräulein von Mylendonk and the physicians. Sister Berta too went in and out of her room, and it was she who gave the young people news of the result of their attention. The little one, in her hopeless and circumscribed state, was as pleased as a child with the strangers’ greeting. The pot stood at her bedside, she caressed it with eyes and hands, saw that it was kept watered, and even in her severest fits of coughing rested her tortured gaze upon it. Likewise the parents, retired Major Gerngross and wife, were touched and pleased; and since it was impossible, for them, as complete strangers, to guess the givers, Fräulein Schildknecht could not—she confessed it—refrain from revealing the cousins’ identity. She transmitted the desire of the whole family that they should come and receive the thanks due their gift; and thus, on the next day but one, the deaconess ushered the two on tiptoe into Leila’s apartment.
The dying girl was indeed a charming blond creature, with eyes of true forget-me-not blue. Despite great loss of blood, and the effort to breathe with an utterly insufficient remnant of sound lung-tissue, she looked fragile indeed, yet not too distressing. She thanked them, and talked a little, in a pleasant, though toneless voice, while a faint rosy glow overspread her cheeks and lingered there. Hans Castorp suitably explained and excused his seeming intrusion, speaking in a low, moved voice, with delicate reverence. He did not lack much—the impulse was present in him—of falling upon his knees by the bedside; and he clasped the patient’s hot little hand long and closely in his, despite its being not moist but actually wet, for the child’s sweat secretion was so great, she perspired so much, that the flesh must have been shrivelled, if the transudation had not been counteracted by copious draughts of lemonade, a carafe of which stood on the bedside table. The parents, afflicted as they were, sustained the brief colloquy with courteous inquiries as to the state of the cousins’ health, and other conversational devices. The Major was a broad-shouldered man, with a low forehead and bristling moustaches, a tower of strength; his organic innocence of his little daughter’s phthisical tendency was plain to any eye. It was rather the mother who was responsible for the inherited taint; she was small, and of a distinctly consumptive type, and her conscience seemed burdened with the knowledge of her fatal bequest. Leila, after ten minutes’ talk, gave signs of fatigue, or rather of over-excitement; the flush deepened in her cheek, and her forget-me-not eyes glittering disquietingly. The cousins, on a sign from the nurse, made their adieux; and then the poor mother followed them into the corridor, and broke out into self-reproachings, which affected Hans Castorp very painfully. From her, from her alone it came, she said remorsefully, again and again. Her husband had nothing whatever to do with it. Even she, she assured them, had been only temporarily affected, only a slight and superficial case, when she was quite a young girl. She had outgrown it entirely, had been sure that she was quite cured. For she had wished to marry, she had so longed to marry and live, and she had done it: healed and sound she had wedded her dear husband, himself as sound as a berry, who on his side had no notion at all of such things. But sound and strong as he was, that had not helped: the dreadful, hidden, and forgotten thing had come to light in the child, it would end by destroying her; she, the mother, had escaped and was entering into a healthy old age, but the poor, lovely darling would die, the physicians gave them no hope—and she, she alone was to blame, with her buried past.
The young people sought to console her, to say something about the possibility of a turn for the better. But the Major’s wife only sobbed and thanked them for all they had done, for the gift of the plant, and the diversion and pleasure their visit had brought her child. She lay there, poor little one, lonely and suffering upon her bed, while other young creatures were glad of life, and could dance with fine young men to their heart’s desire—and even the disease could not kill the desire to dance. They had brought her a ray of sunshine—my God, it would be the last. The hortensia had been like homage at a ball, the brief chat with the two fine young cavaliers a tiny affaire de cœur; she, the mother, had seen it.
All this impressed Hans Castorp rather painfully—and she had pronounced the French badly too, which irritated him beyond words. He was no fine cavalier, he had visited little Leila only as a protest against the ruling spirit of egotism in the place, and in a physicianly and priestly capacity. He was rather put out over the turn the affair had taken,
