The Magic Mountain

him sent here from Arcadia, he has galloping consumption, there isn’t the dimmest hope for him. He may die any day⁠—and yet they’ve never found even the ghost of a bacillus in his sputum. On the other hand, that Belgian captain that was discharged cured the other day, he was simply alive with them, Gaffky ten⁠—and only the very tiniest cavity. The devil fly away with Gaffky! I’m done, I’m going home, if it kills me!” Thus Joachim; and all his company were pained to see the gentle, serious youth so overwrought. Hans Castorp, when he heard the threat, could scarcely refrain from quoting a certain opinion he had heard expressed in French, by a third party. But he was silent. Was he to set himself up to his cousin for a model of patience, as did Frau Stöhr, who actually admonished Joachim not to be blasphemous, but to humble his pride, and take pattern by her, Caroline Stöhr, and the faithfulness and firm resolve which made her hold out up here, instead of returning to queen it in her Cannstadt home⁠—to the end that when she did go back it would be as a sound and healthy wife to the arms of her impatient husband? No, such language was not for Hans Castorp⁠—since Carnival he had had a bad conscience towards his cousin. Conscience told him Joachim must surely be aware of a certain matter never referred to between them; must see in it something very like disloyalty and desertion⁠—taken in connection with a pair of brown eyes we know, an unwarranted tendency to laughter, and an orange-scented handkerchief, to whose influence Joachim was daily five times exposed, yet gave no ground to evil, but steadfastly fixed his eyes upon his plate. Yes, even the silent hostility which Joachim opposed to his cousin’s problems and speculations on the subject of time, Hans Castorp felt as an expression of the military decorum which reproached himself. While as for the valley, that snowed-in winter valley, when Hans Castorp, lying in his excellent chair, directed upon it his inquiring metaphysical gaze, it was silent too. Its peaked summits, its domes and crests and brown-green-reddish forests stood there silent, and mortal time flowed over and about them: sometimes luminous against a deep-blue sky, sometimes shrouded in vapours, sometimes glowing rosy in the parting sun, sometimes glittering with hard, diamondlike brilliance in the magic moonlight⁠—but always, always in snow, for six long, incredible, though scurrying months. All the guests declared they could not bear to look any more at the snow, they were sick of it; they had had their fill in the summertime, and now these masses and heaps and slopes and cushions of snow, day in and day out, were more than they could stand, their spirits sank under the weight of it. And they took to coloured glasses, green, yellow, and red, to save their eyes, but still more their feelings.

Mountain and valley, then, had been lying in deep snow for six months; nay, seven, for as we talk, time strides on⁠—not only present time, taken up with the tale we are telling, but also past time, the bygone time of Hans Castorp and the companions of his destiny, up among the snows⁠—time strides on, and brings changes with it. The prophecy which so glibly, so much to Herr Settembrini’s disgust, Hans Castorp had made on the eve of Carnival, was in a fair way to be fulfilled. True, the solstice was not immediately at hand; yet Easter had passed over the valley, April advanced, with Whitsuntide in plain view; spring, with the melting of the snows, would soon be here. Not all the snow would melt: on the heights to the south, and on the north in the rocky ravines of the Rhätikon, some would still remain, and through the summer months more was sure to fall, though it would scarcely lie. Yet the year revolved, and promised changes in its course; for since that night of Carnival when Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil of Frau Chauchat and afterwards returned it to her again, receiving in its stead a remembrance which he carried about with him in his pocket, since that night six weeks had passed, twice as many as made up the original term of Hans Castorp’s sojourn among those up here.

Yes, six weeks had gone by, since that evening when Hans Castorp made the acquaintance of Clavdia Chauchat, and then returned so much later to his chamber than the duty-loving Joachim to his. Six weeks since the day after, bringing her departure, her departure for the present, her temporary departure, for Daghestan, far away eastwards beyond the Caucasus. That her absence would be only temporary, that she intended to return, that she would or must return, at some date yet unspecified, of this Hans Castorp possessed direct and verbal assurances, given, not during that reported conversation in the French tongue, but in a later interval, wordless to our ears, during which we have elected to intermit the flow of our story along the stream of time, and let time flow on pure and free of any content whatever. Yes, such consolatory promises must have been vouchsafed our young man before he returned to number thirty-four; for he had had no word with Frau Chauchat on the day following, had not seen her indeed, save twice at some distance: once when the glass door slammed, and she had slipped for the last time to her place at table, clad in her blue cloth skirt and white sweater. The young man’s heart had been in his throat⁠—only the sharp regard Fräulein Engelhart bent upon him had hindered him from burying his face in his hands. The other time had been at three o’clock, when he stood at a corridor window giving on the drive, a witness to her departure.

It took place just as other such which Hans Castorp had witnessed during his stay up here. The sleigh or carriage