In reality it was something besides all these that had given the shade of vexation to Joachim’s voice and made him mention the recent botanical lecture with contempt. Hans Castorp did not know this—or rather, he did not know that Joachim knew it; as for himself, he knew it well enough, did this venturesome spirit, this delicate nursling of life, this schoolmaster’s plague! In a word, Joachim had caught his cousin at his tricks again, had found him out in another species of disloyalty, not so unlike the one he had been guilty of on the evening of carnival, only possessed of a still keener point in the circumstance that of this one he made a practice. In the rhythmic monotony of time’s flow, in the well-nigh minute articulation of the normal day—that day which was ever, even unto confusion and distraction, the same day, an abiding eternity, so that it was hard to say how it ever managed to bring forth any change—in the inviolable, unbreachable regimen, we say, of that normal day, Dr. Krokowski’s routine of visits took him, as of yore, through all the rooms, or rather through all the balconies, from chair to reclining-chair, between half past three and four in the afternoon. How often had the normal day of the Berghof renewed itself, since the far-off time when Hans Castorp lay and grumbled within himself because Dr. Krokowski described an arc about him and left him on one side! The guest of that day had long become the comrade—Dr. Krokowski often thus addressed him when he made his rounds; and if, as Hans Castorp said to Joachim, the military associations of the word, with the exotic pronunciation of the r, sounded singularly inappropriate in his mouth, yet the word itself did not go so badly with his robust and hearty, confidence-inviting manner. But that again, in its turn, was belied by his blackness and pallor, so that some aura of the questionable always hung about the man.
“Well, comrade, and how goes it?” the doctor said, as, coming from the barbarian Russians, he approached the head end of Hans Castorp’s reclining-chair. The patient, hands folded on his chest, smiled daily at the blithe address, smiled with a friendly, albeit rather harassed mien, watching the doctor’s yellow teeth, that were visible through his beard. “Slept right well, did you?” Dr. Krokowski would go on. “Curve going down? Up, eh? Never mind, it will be all right before you come to get married. Good day to you.” And he would go on into Joachim’s balcony. For these afternoon rounds were merely a coup d’œil, no more.
But once in a way he would stop rather longer, standing there broad-shouldered and sturdy, ever with his manly smile, chatting with the comrade of this and that: the weather, the various departures and new arrivals, the mood the patient was in, whether good or bad; sometimes about his personal affairs, origin and prospects—before he uttered the formula: “Good day to you” and passed on. Hans Castorp would shift his hands to behind his head, and reply to all he was asked, smiling in his turn. He experienced a penetrating sense of uncanniness, yes, but he answered. They spoke in low tones, so that Joachim, despite the fact that the glass partition only half separated them, could not make out what they said—indeed, made not the slightest effort to do so. He heard his cousin get up from his chair and go indoors, probably to show the doctor his curve; and the conversation seemed to be further prolonged inside the chamber, to judge from the length of time before the Assistant appeared, this time from the inside, through his room.
What did the comrades talk about? Joachim never put the question. But if one of us were to do so, an answer in general terms might be forthcoming, as that there is much matter for an exchange of views, between two comrades and fellow-men when they possess ideas in common, and one of them has arrived at the point of conceiving the material universe in the light of a downfall of the spirit, a morbid growth upon it, while the other, as physician, is wont to treat of the secondary character of organic disease. Yes, there was, we should say, much to talk about, much to say on the subject of the material as the dishonourable decay of the immaterial, of life as the impudicity of substance, or disease as an impure manifestation of life. With the current lectures for background, the conversation might swing from the subject of love as a force making for disease, from the supersensory nature of the indications, to “old” and “fresh” infected areas, to soluble toxins and love potions, to the illumination of the unconscious, to the blessings of psychoanalysis, the transference of symptoms—in short, how can we know what all they talked about, Dr. Krokowski and young Castorp, when all these are merely guesses and suppositions thrown out in response to a hypothetic question!
In any case, they talked no longer; it had lasted only a few weeks. Of late the Assistant spent no more time with this particular patient than with the others, but confined himself chiefly to the “Well, comrade?” and “Good day to you,” on his rounds. But now Joachim had made another discovery, he had fathomed the duplicity of his cousin—without, be it said, any faintest intention of so doing, without having bent his military honour to the office of spy. It happened
