The Magic Mountain

halted before the door, coachman and porter strapped fast the trunks, while friends gathered about to say goodbye to the departing one, who, cured or not, and whether for life or death, was off for the flat-land. Others besides friends gathered round as well, curious onlookers, who cut the rest-cure for the sake of the diversion thus afforded. There would be a frock-coated official representing the management, perhaps even the physicians themselves; then out came the gracious recipient of the attentions paid by this little world to a departing guest; generally with a beaming face, and a bearing which the excitement of the moment rendered far more animated than usual. Today it was Frau Chauchat who issued from the portal, in company with her concave fellow-countryman, Herr Buligin, who was to accompany her for part of the way. She wore a long, shaggy, fur-trimmed travelling-cloak, and a large hat; she was all smiles, her arms were full of flowers, she too seemed possessed by the pleasurable excitement due to the prospect of change, if to nothing else, which was common to all those who left, whatever the circumstances of their leaving, and whether with the consent of the physicans, or in sheer desperation and at their own risk. Her cheeks were flushed, and she chattered without stopping, probably in Russian, while the rug was being arranged over her knees. People presented farewell bouquets, the great-aunt gave a box of Russian sweetmeats. Numerous other guests besides Frau Chauchat’s Russian companions and tablemates, stood there to see her off; among them Dr. Krokowski, showing his yellow teeth through his beard in a hearty smile, the schoolmistress, and the man from Mannheim, who gazed gloomily and furtively from a distance, and whose eyes found out Hans Castorp as he stood at his corridor window looking down upon the scene. Hofrat Behrens did not show himself⁠—he had probably ere now taken private leave of the traveller. The horses started up, amid farewells and hand-wavings from the bystanders; and then, as Frau Chauchat sank smilingly back against the cushions of the sleigh, her eyes swept the façade of the Berghof, and rested for the fraction of a second upon Hans Castorp’s face. In pallid haste he sought his loggia, thence to get a last glimpse of the sleigh as it went jingling down the drive toward the Dorf. Then he flung himself into his chair, and drew out his keepsake, his treasure, that consisted, this time, not of a few reddish-brown shavings, but a thin glass plate, which must be held toward the light to see anything on it. It was Clavdia’s X-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh.

How often had he looked at it, how often pressed it to his lips, in the time which since then had passed and brought its changes with it⁠—such changes as, for instance, getting used to life up here without Clavdia Chauchat, getting used, that is, to her remoteness in space! Yet after all, this adaptation took place more rapidly than one might have thought possible; for was not time up here at the Berghof arranged and organized to the end that one should get very rapidly used to things, even if the getting used consisted chiefly in getting used to not getting used? No longer might he expect that rattle and crash at the beginning of each of the five mighty Berghof meals. Somewhere else, in some far-off clime, Clavdia was letting doors slam behind her, somewhere else she was expressing herself by that act, as intimately bound up with her very being and its state of disease as time is bound up with the motion of bodies in space. Perhaps, indeed, her whole disease consisted in that, and in nothing else.⁠—But though lost to view, she was none the less invisibly present to Hans Castorp; she was the genius of the place, whom, in an evil hour, an hour unattuned to any simple little ditty of the flat-land, yet one of passing sweetness, he had known and possessed, whose shadowy presentment he now wore next his months-long-labouring heart.

At that hour his twitching lips had stammered and babbled, in his own and foreign tongues, for the most part without his own volition, the maddest things: pleas, prayers, proposals, frantic projects, to which all consent was denied, and rightly: as, that he might be permitted to accompany the genius beyond the Caucasus; that he might follow after it; that he might await it at the next spot which its free and untrammelled spirit should select as a domicile; and thereafter never be parted from it more⁠—these and other such rash, irresponsible utterances. No, all that our simple young adventurer carried away from that hour was his ghostly treasure trove, and the possibility, perhaps the probability, of Frau Chauchat’s return for a fourth sojourn at the Berghof⁠—sooner or later, as the state of her health might decree. But whether sooner or later⁠—as she had said again at parting⁠—Hans Castorp would by that time be “long since far away.” It was a prophecy whose slighting note would have been harder to bear had he not known that prophecies are sometimes made in order that they may not come to pass⁠—as a spell, indeed, against their fulfilment. Prophecies of this kind mock the future: saying to it how it should shape itself, to the end that it shall shame to be so shaped. The genius, in the course of the conversation we have repeated, and elsewhere, called Hans Castorp a “joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide,” which might in some sense be considered a translation of the Settembrinian epithet “life’s delicate child”; and the question thus was, which constitutes of the mingled essence of his being would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other. The genius, though, had failed to take into