He had thought to fall asleep at once, but he was wrong. His eyelids, which he had scarcely been able to hold up, now declined to close; they twitched rebelliously open whenever he shut them. He told himself that it was not his regular bedtime; that during the day he had probably rested too much. Someone seemed to be beating a carpet out of doors—which was not very probable, and proved not to be the case, for it was the beating of his own heart he heard, quite outside of himself and away in the night, exactly as though someone were beating a carpet with a wicker beater.
It had not yet grown entirely dark in the room; the light from the little lamps in the loggias, Joachim’s and the Russian pair’s, fell through the open balcony door. As Hans Castorp lay there on his back blinking, he recalled an impression amongst the host received that day, an observation he had made, and then, with shrinking and delicacy, sought to forget. It was the look on Joachim’s face when they spoke of Marusja and her physical characteristics—an oddly pathetic facial distortion, and a spotted pallor on the sun-browned cheeks. Hans Castorp saw and understood what it meant, saw and understood in a manner so new, so sympathetic, so intimate, that the carpet-beater outside redoubled the swiftness and severity of its blows and almost drowned out the sound of the evening serenade down in the Platz—for there was a concert again in the same hotel as before, and they were playing a symmetrically constructed, insipid melody that came up through the darkness. Hans Castorp whistled a bar of it in a whisper—one can whistle in a whisper—and beat time with his cold feet under the plumeau.
That was, of course, the right way not to go to sleep, and now he felt not the slightest inclination. Since he had understood in that new, penetrating sense why Joachim had changed colour, the whole world seemed altered to him, he felt pierced for the second time by that feeling of extravagant joy and suspense. And he waited for, expected something, without asking himself what. But when he heard his neighbours to right and left conclude their evening cure and reenter their rooms to exchange the horizontal without for the horizontal within, he gave utterance to the conviction that at least this evening the barbaric pair would keep the peace.
“I can surely go to sleep without being disturbed; they will behave themselves,” he said. But they did not, nor had Hans Castorp been sincere in his conviction that they would. For his part, to tell the truth, he would not have understood it if they had. Notwithstanding which, he indulged in soundless expressions of utter astonishment as he listened.
“Unheard of,” he whispered. “It’s incredible—who would have believed it?” And between such exclamations joined again in the insipid music that swelled insistently up from the Platz.
Later he went to sleep. But with sleep returned the involved dreams, even more involved than those of the first night—out of which he often started up in fright, or pursuing some confused fancy. He seemed to see Hofrat Behrens walking down the garden path, with bent knees and arms hanging stiffly in front of him, adapting his long and somehow solitary-looking stride to the time of distant march-music. As he paused before Hans Castorp, the latter saw that he was wearing a pair of glasses with thick, round lenses. He was uttering all sorts of nonsense. “A civilian, of course,” he said, and without saying by your leave, drew down Hans Castorp’s eyelid with the first and middle fingers of his huge hand. “Respectable civilian, as I saw at once. But not without talent, not at all without talent for a heightened degree of oxidization. Wouldn’t grudge us a year, he wouldn’t, just one little short year of service up here. Well, hullo-ullo! gentlemen, on with the exercise,” he shouted, and putting his two enormous first fingers in his mouth, emitted a whistle of such peculiarly pleasing quality that from opposite directions Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress, much smaller than life-size, came flying through the air and perched themselves right and left on the Hofrat’s shoulders, just as they sat right and left of Hans Castorp in the dining-room. And the Hofrat skipped away, wiping his eyes behind his glasses with a table-napkin—but whether it was tears or sweat he wiped could not be told.
Then it seemed to the dreamer that he was in the school courtyard, where for so many years through he had spent his recesses, and was in the act of borrowing a lead-pencil from Madame Chauchat, who seemed to be there too. She gave him a halflength red pencil in a silver holder, and warned him in an agreeable, husky voice to be sure to return it to her after the hour. And as she looked at him—with her narrow, blue-grey eyes above the broad cheekbones—he tore himself by violence away from his dream, for now he had it fast and meant to hold it, of what and whom she so vividly reminded him. Hastily he fixed this occurrence in his mind, to have it fast for the morrow. Then sleep and dream once more overpowered him, and he saw himself in the act of flight from Dr. Krokowski, who had lain in wait for him to undertake some psychoanalysis. He fled from the doctor, but his feet were leaden; past the glass partitions, along the balconies, into the garden; in his extremity he tried to climb the red-brown flagstaff—and woke perspiring at the moment when the pursuer seized him by his trouser-leg.
Hardly
