Hofrat Behrens raised shoulders and arms, and let the latter fall with a clap against his sides. At latest, he said, Frau Salomon would be back in the autumn—and for good and all. We shall be able to test the truth of his prophecy, for we are destined to spend yet much earthly time at this pleasure resort. But the Salomon case was far from being the only one of its kind. Time brought about many changes. Time always did—but more gradually, in the rule, not so strikingly. There were gaps at the tables, all seven of them, at the “good” as well as at the “bad” Russian table, and at those that stood transversely to the room. Not that this alone would have given an exact or fair picture of the situation; for there were always arrivals, as well as leave-takings, the bedrooms might be full—though there one dealt with patients whose condition had finally put an end to their exercising any choice in the matter. The gaps in the dining-room were partly due to the exercise of choice; but some of them yawned in a particularly hollow manner—as, for instance, at Dr. Blumenkohl’s place—he being dead. That expression he wore, as of something bad-tasting in the mouth, had grown more and more pronounced. Then he became permanently bedridden, and then he died—no one knew precisely when, his affair being disposed of with the usual tact and delicacy. A gap. Frau Stöhr sat next it—it made her shudder, so she moved over to Joachim Ziemssen’s other side, in the room of Miss Robinson, discharged cured, and opposite the schoolmistress, Hans Castorp’s neighbour, still faithful to her post. The latter was sitting, for the time, alone on her side of the table, for the other three places were free. The student Rasmussen had grown daily thinner and weaker, he was now bedridden, probably moribund. The great-aunt, with her niece and the full-breasted Marusja, had gone a journey—that was the usual way to put it, because everybody knew they would be back again. They would certainly be back by autumn, so you could hardly say they had left. The summer solstice—once Whitsuntide was past—stood immediately before them; and after the longest day in the year they would go downhill with a rush, toward winter. At that rate the great-aunt and Marusja were as good as back again—which was as it should be, for the lively Marusja was very far from being cured, and the schoolmistress knew positively that the brown-eyed one had tuberculous ulcers on her swelling bosom, which had more than once already necessitated an operation. Hans Castorp, as Fräulein Engelhart said this, gave a hasty glance at Joachim bending sedulously over his plate a face gone all mottled.
The lively great-aunt had given her tablemates a farewell supper in the restaurant, to which were bidden the cousins, Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Engelhart—a proper banquet, with caviar, champagne, and liqueurs. Joachim had been very silent, in fact had spoken only once or twice, and then hardly above a whisper; so that the old lady, in a burst of good feeling, had sought to cheer him up, even going so far as to set aside accepted forms and address him with the “thou.” “Never mind, Väterchen, cheer up, eat, drink, and be merry, we’ll be coming back again,” she said. “Let’s all eat, drink, and be merry, and begone, dull care! God will send the autumn in His own good time, before we know it—so why be sad?” Next morning she presented half the dining-room with gay boxes of confits and left, with her two charges, on their little outing.
And Joachim? Did he find things easier, for that? Or did he suffer an agony of inward emptiness in view of the vacant places at table? Had his unwonted irritability, his threats of taking un-sanctified leave, anything to do with Marusja’s departure? Or, on the other hand, that he had after all not left, but lent an ear to the Hofrat’s gospel of the melting snows—was that fact any way connected with the circumstance that the full-bosomed Marusja was not gone for good but only on a journey, and would be back again in five of the smallest time-units known to House Berghof? Ah, yes, they were both true, this and the other, as Hans Castorp was well aware, without ever having exchanged a syllable with Joachim on the subject—which he was as careful to refrain from doing as his cousin was, on his side, to avoid mention of another person also lately gone off for a little trip.
In the meantime,
