Incited by Frau Stöhr, who joined them at the exit, they paid a visit to the café at the Kurhaus, Karen clapping her hands in delighted gratitude. Here too there was music, a small, red-uniformed orchestra, conducted by a Bohemian or Hungarian first violin, who stood apart from the others, among the dancing couples, and belaboured his instrument with frantic wreathings of his body. Life here was mondaine: strange drinks were handed at the tables. The cousins ordered orangeade for the refreshment of their charge and themselves, while Frau Stöhr took a brandy and sugar. The room was hot and dusty. At this hour, she said, the café life was not yet in full swing, the dancing became much livelier as the evening advanced, and numerous patients from the sanatoria, as well as dissipated folk from the hotels and the Kurhaus, many more than were here as yet, came later to join the fun. More than one serious case had here danced himself into eternity, tipping up the beaker of life to drain the last drop, and in dulci jubilo suffering his final haemorrhage. The dulci jubilo became, on her unlettered lips, something extraordinary. The first word she pronounced dolce, with some reminiscence of her musical husband’s Italian vocabulary; but the second suggested jubilee, or an attempt to yodel, or goodness alone knew what. The cousins both devoted themselves assiduously to the straws in their glasses, when this Latin was given out—but Frau Stöhr took no offence. She began, drawing back her lips and showing her rodent-like teeth, to drop hints and make insinuations on the subject of the relations of the three young people. As far as poor Karen was concerned, it was all pretty obvious, and, as Frau Stöhr said, she could not but enjoy being chaperoned, on her little outings, by such fine cavaliers. But the other side was not so easy to come at. However, ignorance and stupidity notwithstanding, the creature’s feminine intuition helped her to a glimpse, even though a partial and vulgarized one, of the truth. For she saw, and even teasingly aimed at the fact, that Hans Castorp was the cavalier, and young Ziemssen merely in attendance; further—for she was aware of the state of Hans Castorp’s feeling toward Madame Chauchat—that he was playing the gallant to poor little Karstedt because he did not know how to approach the other. It was a simple guess, lacking profundity and not actually covering all the facts of the case—in short, it was only too worthy of Frau Stöhr, and when she came out with it, flat-footed, he did not even answer, save by a faint smile and an impenetrable stare. So much was true, after all, that poor Karen did afford him a substitute, an intangible yet real support, as did the rest of his charitable activities. But at the same time they were an end in themselves too. The inward satisfaction he experienced whenever he fed the afflicted Frau Mallinckrodt her broth, or suffered Herr Ferge to tell him once more the tale of the infernal pleura-shock, or saw poor Karen clapping her ravaged and mortifying hands in grateful joy, was perhaps of a vicarious and relative kind; yet it was none the less pure and immediate. It was rooted in a tradition diametrically opposed to the one Herr Settembrini, as pedagogue, represented—yet seemed to him, young Hans Castorp, for all that, not unworthy of having applied to it the placet experiri.
The little house where Karen Karstedt lived lay near the railway track and the watercourse, on the way to the Dorf, quite conveniently for the cousins to fetch her after breakfast for the morning walk. Going thence toward the village, to arrive upon the main street, one had before one the little Schiahorn, and on its right three peaks which were called the Green Towers, but were now covered like the rest with snow that gleamed blindingly in the sun. Still further to the right came the round summit of the Dorfberg, and a quarter of the way up its slope was visible the cemetery of the Dorf, surrounded by a wall, obviously commanding a fine view, very likely of the distant lake, and thus suggesting itself naturally as the goal of a promenade. Thither they went, one lovely morning—indeed, all the days now were lovely; with a hot sun, a sparkling frost, a deep-blue, windless air, and a scene that glittered whitely all abroad. The cousins, one of them brick-red in the face, the other bronzed, walked without overcoats, which would have been intolerable in this sunshine: young Ziemssen in sports clothes, with “arctics,” Hans Castorp in arctics as well, but with long trousers, not feeling worldly enough to don short ones. This was the new year, between the beginning and middle of February—yes, the last figure in the date had changed since Hans Castorp came up here, it was written now with the next higher digit. The minute-hand on time’s clock had moved one space further on: not one of the large spaces, not one which measured the centuries or the decades; it was only the year that had been shoved forward by one figure; though Hans Castorp had been up here not a whole year yet, but scarcely more than half a one, it had jerked itself on, as does the minute-hand of certain large clocks, which only register by five minutes at a time; and was now pointing motionless, awaiting the moment to move forward again. But the hand that marked the months would have to move on for ten spaces more, only two more, in fact, than it had moved since he came up here; for February did not count, being once begun—as money changed counts as money spent.
To the graveyard then, on the slope of the Dorfberg, the three wended their way—we tell it to complete the tale of their excursions. It was Hans Castorp’s
