He did not stir, or open his eyes; on his knees with bowed head, his hands holding the silver pencil outstretched before him, he remained, swaying and quivering.
She said: “Tu es en effet un galant qui sait solliciter d’une manière profonde, à l’allemande.” And she set the paper cap on his head.
“Adieu, mon prince Carnaval! Vous aurez une mauvaise ligne de fièvre ce soir, je vous le prédis.”
She slipped from her chair, and glided over the carpet to the door, where she paused an instant, framed in the doorway; half turned toward him, with one bare arm lifted high, her hand upon the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly: “N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon.”
And went out.
Chapter VI
Changes
What is time? A mystery, a figment—and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing’s “brought about” by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement—for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite—apparently in the hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more so than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit in time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less, to zero? Is it possible, in eternity, to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe—how do these fare? Are they consistent with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adopt? Again we ask, and again echo answers.
Hans Castorp revolved these queries and their like in his brain. We know that from the very first day of his arrival up here his mind had been much disposed to such sleeveless speculation. Later, perhaps, a certain sinister but strong desire of his, since gratified, had sharpened it the more and confirmed it in its general tendency to question and to carp. He put these queries to himself, he put them to good cousin Joachim, he put them to the valley at large, lying there, as it had these months on end, deep in snow; though from none of these quarters could he expect anything like an answer, from which the least would be hard to say. For himself, it was precisely because he did not know the answers that he put the questions. For Joachim, it was hardly possible to get him even to consider them, he having, as Hans Castorp had said, in French, on a certain evening, nothing else in his head but the idea of being a soldier down below. Joachim wrestled with these hopes of his, that now seemed almost within his grasp, now receded into the distance and mocked him there; the struggle grew daily more embittered, he even threatened to end it once for all by a single bold bid for liberty. Yes, the good, the patient, the upright Joachim, so affected to discipline and the service, had been attacked by fits of rebellion, he even questioned the authority of the “Gaffky scale”: the method employed in the laboratory—the lab, as one called it—to ascertain the degree of a patient’s infection. Whether only a few isolated bacilli, or a whole host of them, were found in the sputum analysed, determined his “Gaffky number,” upon which everything depended. It infallibly reflected the chances of recovery with which the patient had to reckon; the number of months or years he must still remain could with ease be deduced from it, beginning with the six months that Hofrat Behrens called a “weekend,” and ending with the “life sentence,” which, taken literally, often enough meant very little indeed. Joachim, then, inveighed against the Gaffky scale, openly giving notice that he questioned its authority—or perhaps not quite openly, he did not say so to the authorities, but expressed his views to his cousin, and even in the dining-room. “I’m fed up with it, I won’t be made a fool of any longer,” he said, the blood mounting to his bronzed face. “Two weeks ago I had Gaffky two, a mere nothing, my prospects were the best. And today I am regularly infested—number nine, if you please. No talk of getting away. How the devil can a man know where he is? Up on the Schatzalp there is a man, a Greek peasant, an agent had
