“Good,” thought Hans Castorp. “Excellent,” he thought. And added to himself something like “Don’t mention it!” “If you only knew!” he silently apostrophized the oncoming one. In a word, he took the approaching visit with utter composure; announced it to Hofrat Behrens and the management, engaged a room—Joachim’s, it being still vacant—and on the next day but one, at the hour of his own arrival, towards eight o’clock—it was already dark—drove in the same uncomfortable vehicle in which he had seen Joachim off, down to station Dorf, to meet the envoy from the flat-land, who had come to spy out the land.
Crimson-faced, bareheaded, overcoatless, he stood at the edge of the platform as the train rolled in, beneath his relative’s carriage window, and told him to come on out, for he was here. Consul Tienappel—he was Vice-Consul, having obligingly relieved his father of that office too—stepped out, wrapped in his winter overcoat, and half frozen, for the October evening was chill, indeed was nearly cold enough for frost, toward morning it would probably freeze; stepped out of his compartment in lively surprise, which he expressed after the elegant, somewhat rarefied manner of the gentlemanly northwest German; greeted his nephew-cousin with repeated and emphatically uttered exclamations of satisfaction at his appearance; saw himself relieved by the lame concierge of all care for his luggage, and climbed with Hans Castorp up on the high, hard seat of the cabriolet, in the square outside. They drove under a heaven thick with stars, and Hans Castorp, his head tipped back, with pointing forefinger expounded to his uncle-cousin the starry field, named planets by name and showed off this or that constellation. The other, more observant of his companion than of the cosmos, said to himself that it was perhaps conceivable, it was at least not actually lunatic, to begin a conversation by talking about the stars, but there were other subjects that lay closer to hand. Since when, he asked, had Hans Castorp known so much about matters up aloft; and the young man replied that his knowledge was the fruit of long lying in the evening rest-cure, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. What? He lay out in a balcony at night? Oh, yes. The Consul would too. He would have nothing else to do.
“Certainly, of course,” James Tienappel acquiesced, rather intimidated. His foster-brother spoke on, equably, monotonously. He sat without hat or overcoat, in the air, fresh to frostiness, of the autumn evening. “I suppose you aren’t cold?” James asked him, shivering in his inch-thick ulster. He talked fast and rather indistinctly, his teeth showing a tendency to chatter. “We don’t feel the cold,” Hans Castorp said, with tranquil brevity.
The Consul could not look at him enough as they sat and drove. Hans Castorp asked after relatives and friends at home. James conveyed various greetings, including Joachim’s, who was already with the colours, and radiant with pride and joy. Hans Castorp received them with a quiet word of thanks, without asking more particular questions about his home. Disquieted by an indefinite something, either emanating from his nephew, or caused by his own unsettlement after the long journey, James looked about him, not able to descry much of the landscape; he drew in a deep breath of the strange air, exhaled it, and pronounced it magnificent. Of course, the other answered, not for nothing was it famous far and wide. It had great properties. It accelerated oxidization, yet at the same time one put on flesh. It was capable of healing certain diseases which were latent in every human being, though its first effects were strongly favourable to these, and by dint of a general organic compulsion, upwards and outwards, made them come to the surface, brought them, as it were, to a triumphant outburst.—Beg pardon—triumphant?—Yes; had he never felt that an outbreak of disease had something jolly about it, an outburst of physical gratification?
“Certainly, of course,” the uncle hastened to say, with his lower jaw under imperfect control. And then announced that he could stop eight days—a week, that was; seven days—or perhaps six. He said he found Hans Castorp looking very fit indeed, thanks to a stay that had been so much longer than anyone anticipated, and this being the case he supposed his nephew would travel down with him when he left.
“Oh, no, I don’t quite intend to play the fool like that,” Hans Castorp said. Uncle James talked like a valley man. Let him stop up here a bit, look about him and get used to things, he would change his tune. The thing was to achieve an absolute cure, and to that end Behrens had just lately socked him another six months. “Are you crazy?” the uncle asked. He addressed his relative as “young man,” and asked if he was crazy. A holiday that would soon have lasted a year and a quarter, and now another half a year on top of that! Who, deuce take it, had all that time to waste? Hans Castorp laid back his head, and laughed, a quiet, brief chuckle. Time! Uncle James would have to alter his ideas about time, in the first place, before he could talk. Tienappel said he would have a serious conversation tomorrow with the Hofrat, on Hans’s affair. “By all means,” advised the nephew. “You’ll like him. An interesting character, brusque to a degree, yet melancholy.” He pointed up to the lights on the Schatzalp, and casually mentioned that they had to bring down their corpses by bobsleigh in the winter.
The gentlemen supped together in the restaurant, after Hans Castorp had conducted his relative to his room and given him a chance to get a wash-up. It had been fumigated with H2CO, he explained, quite as thoroughly as though the late tenant had not gone off without leave, but in quite a different way—an exit instead
