“No, really, I understood everything you said,” protested Hans Castorp. “The ‘silent sister’ is a mercury thermometer without figures—you see, I got it all.”
But he went up in the lift with Joachim and several other patients as well, for the conviviality was over for the evening; the guests were separating to seek the halls and loggias for the evening cure. Hans Castorp went into his cousin’s room. The corridor floor, with its strip of narrow coco matting, billowed beneath his feet, but this, apart from its singularity, was not unpleasant. He sat down in Joachim’s great flowered armchair—there was one just like it in his own room—and lighted his Maria Mancini. It tasted like glue, like coal, like anything but what it should taste like. Still he smoked on, as he watched Joachim making ready for his cure, putting on his house jacket, then an old overcoat, then, armed with his night-lamp and Russian primer, going into the balcony. He turned on the light, lay down with his thermometer in his mouth, and began, with astonishing dexterity, to wrap himself in the two camel’s-hair rugs that were spread out over his chair. Hans Castorp looked on with honest admiration for his skill. He flung the covers over him, one after the other: first from the left side, all their length up to his shoulders, then from the feet up, then from the right side, so that he formed, when finished, a neat compact parcel, out of which stuck only his head, shoulders, and arms.
“How well you do that!” Hans Castorp said.
“That’s the practice I’ve had,” Joachim answered, holding the thermometer between his teeth in order to speak. “You’ll learn. Tomorrow we must certainly get you a pair of rugs. You can use them afterwards at home, and up here they are indispensable, particularly as you have no sleeping-sack.”
“I shan’t lie out on the balcony at night,” Hans Castorp declared. “I can tell you that at once. It would seem perfectly weird to me. Everything has its limits. I must draw the line somewhere, since I’m really only up here on a visit. I will sit here awhile and smoke my cigar in the regular way. It tastes vile, but I know it’s good, and that will have to do me for today. It is close on nine—it isn’t even quite nine yet, more’s the pity—but when it is half past, that is late enough for a man to go to bed at least halfway decently.”
A shiver ran over him, then several, one after the other. Hans Castorp sprang up and ran to the thermometer on the wall, as if to catch it in flagrante. According to the mercury, there were fifty degrees of heat in the room. He clutched the radiator; it was cold and dead. He murmured something incoherent, to the effect that it was a scandal to have no heating, even if it was August. It wasn’t a question of the name of the month, but of the temperature that obtained, which was such that actually he was as cold as a dog. Yet his face burned. He sat down, stood up again, and with a murmured request for permission fetched Joachim’s coverlet and spread it out over himself as he sat in the chair. And thus he remained, hot and cold by turns, torturing himself with his nauseous cigar. He was overcome by a wave of wretchedness; it seemed to him he had never in his life before felt quite so miserable.
“I feel simply wretched,” he muttered. And suddenly he was moved by an extraordinary and extravagant thrill of joy and suspense, of which he was so conscious that he sat motionless waiting for it to come again. It did not—only the misery remained. He stood up at last, flung Joachim’s coverlet on the bed, and got something out that sounded like a good night: “Don’t freeze to death; call me again in the morning,” his lips hardly shaping the words; then he staggered along the corridor to his own room.
He sang to himself as he undressed—certainly not from excess of spirits. Mechanically, without the care which was their due, he went through all the motions that made up the ritual of his nightly toilet; poured
