Some of the patients studied Esperanto, and knew enough to converse a little in that artificial jargon at their meals. Hans Castorp listened gloomily, but admitted to himself that there were other things even worse. A group of English who had been here for a short time, introduced a parlour game which consisted in the question, asked by the first player of his neighbour: “Have you ever seen the Devil with a nightcap on?” To which the person asked must reply: “No, I’ve never seen the Devil with a nightcap on,” and then repeat the question in his turn, and so on. It was insufferable. Yet Hans Castorp found the patience-players even worse. They were to be seen all over the house, at every hour of the day, laying out their cards; a passion for that diversion having assumed such proportions at the Berghof as to turn the place into a den of vice. Hans Castorp had the more ground for horror, in that he himself fell a temporary victim to the plague—was, indeed, one of the severest cases. It was the patience called “elevens” that proved his undoing, the game in which the cards are laid out in three rows of three deep, and any two cards that together make eleven covered anew as they come uppermost, as well as the three face-cards, until by good luck the pack is dealt out. It seems inconceivable that such a simple procedure could prove fascinating to the point of bewitchment—yet so it was. Hans Castorp, like so many others, experienced it—always with drawn and frowning brows, for this particular form of debauch is never a merry one. He was given over to the whims of the card-goblins, ensnared by the fitful and fickle favour of fortune, which sometimes let the face-cards and elevens pile up so that the game was over before the third tier was laid, when the fleeting triumph would stimulate the nerves to new efforts. But next time perhaps, the ninth and last card would fall without any possibility of covering anything, or else the game, having aroused flattering hopes, would obstinately stick at the last moment. Everywhere, at all hours of the day, he played patience—and at night under the stars, and in the morning in his pyjamas; played at table, played almost in his sleep. He shuddered, but he played. Thus one day Herr Settembrini found him—and disturbed him, as even from the beginning it had been his mission to do.
“Accidente!” said he. “What, Engineer, you are playing cards?”
“Not precisely playing cards,” Hans Castorp told him. “I am just laying them out, to have a tussle with abstract chance. The tricks it plays intrigue me, it is as inconsistent as the wind. It fawns on you, and then suddenly puts up its back and won’t budge. This morning, directly I got up, it came three times running, once in two rows, which is a record. But will you believe it, this is the thirty-third time I have played it without once going even halfway through?”
Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often he had looked in the course of the years, with melancholy black eyes.
“At all events, you are preoccupied,” he said. “It does not look as though I could find here the consolation I seek, nor balsam for my inward wound.”
“Wound?” echoed Hans Castorp, laying afresh.
“The world situation puzzles me,” the Freemason sighed. “The Balkan Federation will go through, Engineer, all the information I receive points that way. Russia is working feverishly for it. And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which must fall before any of the Russian programme can be realized. You understand my scruples. Austria, as of course you are aware, I hate with all my strength. But shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent? Yet on the other hand, diplomatic collaboration, to however small an extent, between my own country and Austria, I should regard as dishonourable. These are conscientious scruples which—”
“Seven and four,” said Hans Castorp. “Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out. You have brought me luck, Herr Settembrini.”
The Italian was silent. Hans Castorp felt the black eyes, the eyes of reason and morality, bent in sorrow upon him. He played on for a while; then, resting his cheek in his hand, looked up at his mentor with the innocent, impenitent air of a naughty child.
“Your eyes,” the master said, “vainly seek to hide the fact that you are conscious of your state.”
“Placet experiri,” Hans Castorp was so pert as to reply to him. Herr Settembrini left; and the abandoned one sat long, at his table in the middle of his white room, his chin supported on his hand, and brooded; shuddering in the very core of him at the cross-purposes everything in the world had got into, at the grinning and grimacing of the demons and ape-headed gods into whose hands it had fallen, at
