Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable “Go,” and then the word “Slanting” and then something about Hans Castorp’s room. The whole seemed to be a direction to go slanting through Hans Castorp’s room, that was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door.
They all jumped. Was it a surprise? Was Dr. Krokowski standing without, come to break up the forbidden session? They looked up guiltily, expecting the betrayed one to enter. But then came a crashing knock on the middle of the table, as if to testify that the first knock too had come from the inside and not the outside of the room.
They accused Herr Albin of perpetrating this rather contemptible jest, but he denied it on his honour; and even without his word they all felt fairly certain no one of their circle was guilty. Was it Holger, then? They looked at Elly, suddenly struck by her silence. She was leaning back in her chair, with drooping wrists and fingertips poised on the table-edge, her head bent on one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, her little mouth drawn down so that it looked even smaller, with a tiny smile that had something both silly and sly about it, and gazing into space with vacant, childlike blue eyes. They called to her, but she gave no sign of consciousness. And suddenly the night-table light went out.
Went out? Frau Stöhr, beside herself, made great outcry, for she had heard the switch turned. The light, then, had not gone out, but been put out, by a hand—a hand which one characterized afar off in calling it a “strange” hand. Was it Holger’s? Up to then he had been so mild, so tractable, so poetic—but now he seemed to degenerate into clownish practical jokes. Who knew that a hand which could so roundly thump doors and tables, and knavishly turn off lights, might not next catch hold of someone’s throat? They called for matches, for pocket torches. Fräulein Levi shrieked out that someone had pulled her front hair. Frau Stöhr made no bones of calling aloud on God in her distress: “O Lord, forgive me this once!” she moaned, and whimpered for mercy instead of justice, well knowing she had tempted hell. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who hit on the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light; the room was brilliantly illuminated straightway. They now established that the lamp on the night-table had not gone out by chance, but been turned off, and only needed to have the switch turned back in order to burn again. But while this was happening, Hans Castorp made on his own account a most singular discovery, which might be regarded as a personal attention on the part of the dark powers here manifesting themselves with such childish perversity. A light object lay in his lap; he discovered it to be the “souvenir” which had once so surprised his uncle when he lifted it from his nephew’s table: the glass diapositive of Clavdia Chauchat’s X-ray portrait. Quite uncontestably he, Hans Castorp, had not carried it into the room.
He put it into his pocket, unobservably. The others were busied about Ellen Brand, who remained sitting in her place in the same state, staring vacantly, with that curious simpering expression. Herr Albin blew in her face and imitated the upward sweeping motion of Dr. Krokowski, upon which she roused, and incontinently wept a little. They caressed and comforted her, kissed her on the forehead and sent her to bed. Fräulein Levi said she was willing to sleep with Frau Stöhr, for that abject creature confessed she was too frightened to go to bed alone. Hans Castorp, with his retrieved property in his breast pocket, had no objection to finishing off the evening with a cognac in Herr Albin’s room. He had discovered, in fact, that this sort of thing affected neither the heart nor the spirits so much as the nerves of the stomach—a retroactive effect, like seasickness, which sometimes troubles the traveller with qualms hours after he has set foot on shore.
His curiosity was for the time quenched. Holger’s poem had not been so bad; but the anticipated futility and vulgarity of the scene as a whole had been so unmistakable that he felt quite willing to let it go at these few vagrant sparks of hellfire. Herr Settembrini, to whom he related his experiences, strengthened this conviction with all his force. “That,” he cried out, “was all that was lacking. Oh, misery, misery!” And cursorily dismissed little Elly as a thorough-paced impostor.
His pupil said neither yea nor nay to that. He shrugged his shoulders, and expressed the view that we did not seem to be altogether sure what constituted actuality, nor yet, in consequence, what imposture. Perhaps the boundary line was not constant. Perhaps there were transitional stages between the two, grades of actuality within nature; nature being as she was, mute, not susceptible of valuation, and thus defying distinctions which in any case, it seemed to him, had a strongly moralizing flavour. What did Herr Settembrini think about “delusions”; which were a mixture of actuality and dream, perhaps less strange in nature than to our crude, everyday processes of thought? The mystery of life was literally bottomless. What wonder, then, if sometimes illusions arose—and so on and so forth, in our hero’s genial, confiding, loose and flowing style.
Herr Settembrini duly gave him a dressing-down, and did produce a temporary reaction of the conscience, even something like a promise to steer clear in the future of such abominations. “Have
