The morning was glorious, with the first sunshine after days of gloom. The Schiahorn, the Green Towers, the round top of the Dorfberg stood out unchangeable and unmistakable against the blue; Joachim’s eyes rested on them. Hans Castorp said it was almost a pity the weather had turned so fine on the last day. There was a sort of spite about it; partings were always easier if some inhospitable impression was left at the end. To which Joachim: he didn’t need anything to make it easier, and this was excellent weather for manoeuvres, he could do with it down below. They said little else. Things being as they were between them, and the situation for them both, there was indeed not much to say. The lame porter sat on the box with the driver. Erect and bouncing on the hard cushions, they laid the watercourse behind them, the narrow-gauge track; drove along the irregularly built-up street beside the latter, and drew up in the paved square before the station of the Dorf, that was little more than a shell. Hans Castorp with a thrill recalled first impressions. Since his arrival, thirteen months before, in the twilight, he had not seen the station. “Here was where I arrived,” he remarked superfluously, to Joachim, who only said: “So you did,” and paid the coachman.
The nimble lame man attended to tickets and luggage. They stood together on the platform by the miniature train, in one of whose grey-upholstered compartments Joachim kept a place with his overcoat, travelling-rug and roses. “Well, get along, and take your fanatical oath,” Hans Castorp told his cousin, and Joachim answered: “I mean to.” What else was there to say? Last greetings to exchange, greetings to those down below, to those up here. Hans Castorp drew patterns on the asphalt with his cane. “Take your places!” shouted the guard. Hans Castorp started; looked at Joachim, Joachim at him. They put out their hands. Hans Castorp was vaguely smiling; the other’s eyes looked sad, beseeching. “Hans!” he said—yes, incredible and painful as the thing was, it happened: he had called his cousin by his first name. Not with the “thou,” not “old fellow,” or “man,” by which forms they had addressed each other their lives long. No, in defiance of all reserve, almost gushingly, he called his cousin by his first name. “Hans!” he said, and pressed his hand imploringly—and the latter noted that the excitement of the journey, the sleepless night, the emotion, made Joachim’s head tremble on his neck, as his own did when he “took stock”—“Hans,” he said earnestly, “come down soon!” He swung himself up. The door banged, the train whistled, the carriages shunted together. The little engine puffed and pulled off, the train glided after. The traveller waved his hat from the window, the other, on the platform, his hand. Desolately he stood, after that, a long time, alone. Then slowly he retraced the path that more than a year ago he had first traversed with Joachim.
An Attack, and a Repulse
The wheel revolved. The hand on time’s clock moved forward. Orchis and aquilegia were out of bloom, and the mountain pink. The deep-blue, star-shaped gentian and the autumn crocus, pale and poisonous, appeared again among the damp grass, and a reddish hue overspread the forests. The autumn equinox was past. All Souls’ was in sight—and, for practised time-consumers, probably also the Advent season, the solstice, and Christmas. But for the moment there were lovely October days, a succession of them, like that on which the cousins had viewed the Hofrat’s paintings.
Since Joachim’s departure Hans Castorp sat no more at Frau Stöhr’s table, the one with Dr. Blumenkohl’s empty place, at which the gay Marusja had been wont to smother her irresponsible mirth in her orange-scented pocket-handkerchief. New guests, strangers, sat there now. Our friend, two months deep in his second year, had been given a new place by the management at a nearby table, diagonally to his old one, between that and the “good” Russian table. In short, Settembrini’s table. Yes, Hans Castorp sat in the humanist’s vacated seat, again at the end, facing the “doctor’s place,” which at each of the seven tables was left free for the Hofrat and his famulus to use when they could.
At the upper end, next the place of the medical presiding officer, the humpbacked Mexican sat, perched on many cushions; the amateur photographer, whose facial expression was that of a deaf person, because he possessed no language with which to communicate his thoughts. Beside him sat the ancient maiden lady from Siebenbürgen. She, as Herr Settembrini had said, claimed the interest of all and sundry for her brother-in-law, a man of whom nobody knew anything, or wished to know. Regularly at certain hours of the day this lady was to be seen at the balustrade of her loggia with a little Tula-silver-handled cane across the nape of her neck—it served also as a support on her walks—expanding her flat chest by means of deep-breathing exercises. Opposite her sat a Czech, whom everybody called Herr Wenzel, as his family name was impossible to pronounce. Herr Settembrini, indeed, did once essay to utter the involved succession of consonants; less in good faith than by way of testing gaily the elegant helplessness of his Latinity in face of that matted and tangled growth of sound. Although plump as a mole, with an appetite amazing even up here, the Czech had for four years been asseverating that there was no hope for him. Of an evening, he would strum the songs of his native land upon a beribboned mandolin; or
