An apocalyptic, evil name, calculated to give rise to mysterious fears. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and his heart with the flat of his hand. He was frightened. It seemed to him “all this” could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall; snatch life beyond the “dead point” and put an end to the “small potatoes” in one terrible Last Day. He longed to flee—as we have seen already. It was fortunate, then, that the heads had their unchanging eyes upon him, that they knew how to read his face, and were ready to tide him over the hard place with new and fruitful diversions.
They had declared, the heads, in the accents of a corps-student, that they were on track of the actual causes of the instability of Hans Castorp’s heating economy. And those causes, according to their scientific pronouncement, were so easy to come at that a veritable cure and legitimate dismissal to the flat-land had leaped into the foreground. The young man’s heart throbbed stormily with manifold emotions, when he stretched out his arm for the bloodletting. Going slightly pale, and blinking, he expressed his admiration for the splendid ruby colour of his lifeblood, as it mounted in the glass container. The Hofrat himself, assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, performed the slight but portentous operation. Then passed several days, occupied in Hans Castorp’s mind with the question how this blood of his, this part of himself, would behave out of his control and under the eye of science.
At first, the Hofrat said one could not expect it to grow straight off. Later, he said it was unfortunate nothing had grown, as yet. But there came a day when he approached Hans Castorp at breakfast, where he sat at the upper end of the “good” Russian table, in the place once occupied by his great brother-in-blood, and whimsically congratulated him on the fact that the coccus was definitely established in one of the cultures they had prepared. It was now a question of probabilities: whether the symptoms of infection were to be referred to the insignificant amount of tubercle bacillus, or to the streptococci, which, also, were only present in small quantity. He, Behrens, must think it over. They were not finished with the cultures yet. He showed them to Hans Castorp in the “lab”: a red, coagulate blood, in which tiny grey points were discernible. Those were the cocci. But any ass might have cocci, and tubercular bacilli too. If not for the symptoms of infection, they were not worth noticing.
Outside his body, under the eyes of science, Hans Castorp’s blood went on bearing witness. The morning came when the Hofrat in his sprightly phraseology announced that not only on the first culture, but on all the others as well, cocci had subsequently grown, in large quantities. It was not yet certain that they were all streptococci, but it was more than probable that they were the cause of the existing infection—or such part of it as had not been due to the previously existing and perhaps not quite conquered tubercular infection. And the conclusion the Hofrat drew was—a streptovaccine! The prognosis was extraordinarily favourable, there was not the slightest risk about the procedure, so in any case it could do no harm to try it. As the serum was prepared from Hans Castorp’s own blood, the inoculation with it could introduce into his system no deterrent not already present there. At worst, the experiment would have a negative result—which could hardly be called unfavourable, since even without it the patient must stop on in any case!
Hans Castorp could not go quite that far. He submitted to the treatment, though he found it absurd, contemptible. This inoculation of himself with part of himself seemed a singularly cheerless procedure, an incestuous abomination, a self-to-self which could have nothing but a fruitless, hopeless result. Such was his ignorant and hypochondriac judgment, right only as to the unfruitfulness of the result, but there wholly. The diversion lasted for weeks. Sometimes it seemed to do harm—which was of course not the case—sometimes good, which, it followed, must equally not be the case. The result was negative—without being explicitly so called and announced. The whole undertaking died a natural death, and Hans Castorp went on playing patience—and gazing into the eye of the demon, whose unbridled sway he foresaw would come to an end of horror.
Fullness of Harmony
What new acquisition of House Berghof was it which at length released our long-standing friend from his patience-playing mania, and flung him into the arms of another passion, nobler, though at bottom no less strange? We are about to relate, being ourselves much taken by the mysterious object, and eager to communicate our enthusiasm.
The excellent management, in its sleepless concern for the happiness of its guests, had considered matters, there in the bowels of the earth, had resolved, and acted. It acquired, at a cost which we need not go into, but which must surely have been considerable, a new device for the entertainment of the patients, and added it to those already installed in the largest of the reception-rooms of House Berghof. Was it some clever artifice, of the same nature as the stereopticon, the kaleidoscope, or the cinematographic cylinder? Yes—and yet, again, no, far from it. It was not an optical toy which the guests discovered one evening in the salon, and greeted with applause, some of them flinging their hands above their heads, others stooping over and clapping in their laps. It was an acoustical instrument. Moreover, the simple devices above-mentioned were not to be compared with it—they were outclassed, outvalued, outshone. This was no childish peepshow, like those of which all the guests were sick and tired, at
