Dr. Krokowski signed for the resumption of the sitting. He led Elly back to her martyrdom and seated her, stroking her hair. The others closed the circle. All went as before. Hans Castorp suggested that he be released from his post of first control, but Dr. Krokowski refused. He said he laid great stress on excluding, by immediate contact, every possibility of misleading manipulation on the part of the medium. So Hans Castorp took up again his strange position vis-à-vis to Elly; the white light gave place to rosy twilight, the music began again, the pumping motions; this time it was Hans Castorp who announced “trance.” The scandalous lying-in proceeded.
With what distressful difficulty! It seemed unwilling to take its course—how could it? Madness! What maternity was this, what delivery, of what should she be delivered? “Help, help,” the child moaned, and her spasms seemed about to pass over into that dangerous and unavailing stage obstetricians call eclampsia. She called at intervals on the doctor, that he should put his hands on her. He did so, speaking to her encouragingly. The magnetic effect, if such it was, strengthened her to further efforts.
Thus passed the second hour, while the guitar was strummed or the gramophone gave out the contents of the album of light music into the twilight to which they had again accustomed their vision. Then came an episode, introduced by Hans Castorp. He supplied a stimulus by expressing an idea, a wish; a wish he had cherished from the beginning, and might perhaps have profitably expressed before now. Elly was lying with her face on their joined hands, in “deep trance.” Herr Wenzel was just changing or reversing the record when our friend summoned his resolution and said he had a suggestion to make, of no great importance, yet perhaps—possibly—of some avail. He had—that is, the house possessed among its volumes of records—a certain song, from Gounod’s Faust, “Valentine’s Prayer, baritone with orchestral accompaniment, very appealing. He, the speaker, thought they might try the record.
“Why that particular one?” the doctor asked out of the darkness.
“A question of mood. Matter of feeling,” the young man responded. The mood of the piece in question was peculiar to itself, quite special—he suggested they should try it. Just possible, not out of the question, that its mood and atmosphere might shorten their labours.
“Is the record here?” the doctor inquired.
No, but Hans Castorp could fetch it at once.
“What are you thinking of?” Krokowski promptly repelled the idea. What? Hans Castorp thought he might go and come again and take up his business where he had left it off? There spoke the voice of utter inexperience. Oh, no, it was impossible. It would upset everything, they would have to begin all over. Scientific exactitude forbade them to think of any such arbitrary going in and out. The door was locked. He, the doctor, had the key in his pocket. In short, if the record was not now in the room—
He was still talking when the Czech threw in, from the gramophone: “The record is here.”
“Here?” Hans Castorp asked.
“Yes, here it is, Faust, ‘Valentine’s Prayer.’ ” It had been stuck by mistake in the album of light music, not in the green album of arias, where it belonged; quite by chance—or mismanagement or carelessness, in any case luckily—it had partaken of the general topsy-turvyness, and here it was, needing only to be put on.
What had Hans Castorp to say to that? Nothing. It was the doctor who remarked: “So much the better,” and some of the others chimed in. The needle scraped, the lid was put down. The male voice began to choral accompaniment: “Now the parting hour has come.”
No one spoke. They listened. Elly, as the music resumed, renewed her efforts. She started up convulsively, pumped, carried the slippery hands to her brow. The record went on, came to the middle part, with skipping rhythm, the part about war and danger, gallant, god-fearing, French. After that the finale, in full volume, the orchestrally supported refrain of the beginning.
“O Lord of heaven, hear me pray …”
Hans Castorp had work with Elly. She raised herself, drew in a straggling breath, sighed a long, long, outward sigh, sank down and was still. He bent over her in concern, and as he did so, he heard Frau Stöhr say, in a high, whining pipe: “Ziemssen!”
He did not look up. A bitter taste came in his mouth. He heard another voice, a deep, cold voice, saying: “I’ve seen him a long time.”
The record had run off, with a last accord of horns. But no one stopped the machine. The needle went on scratching in the silence, as the disk whirred round. Then Hans Castorp raised his head, and his eyes went, without searching, the right way.
There was one more person in the room than before. There in the background, where the red rays lost themselves in gloom, so that the eye scarcely reached thither, between writing-desk and screen, in the doctor’s consulting-chair, where in the intermission Elly had been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last days, with hollow, shadowy cheeks, warrior’s beard and full, curling lips. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other. On his wasted face, shaded though it was by his head-covering, was plainly seen the stamp of suffering, the expression of gravity and austerity which had beautified it. Two folds stood on his brow, between the eyes, that lay deep in their bony cavities; but there was no change in the mildness of the great dark orbs, whose quiet,
