“A fine mixed-up state of affairs,” said Hans Castorp. In overcoat and galoshes he went with his cousin down to the village, to buy himself blankets for the out-of-doors cure, since it was plain his plaid would not suffice. For the moment he even weighed the thought of purchasing a fur sack as well, but gave it up, indeed, felt a certain revulsion from the idea.
“No, no,” he said, “we’ll stop at the covers. I’ll have use for them down below, and everybody has covers; there’s nothing strange or exciting about them. But a fur sack is altogether too special—if I buy one, it is as if I were going to settle down here, as if I belonged, understand what I mean? No, for the present we’ll let it go at that; it would absolutely not be worth while to buy a sack for the few weeks I’m up here.”
Joachim agreed, and they acquired two camel’s-hair rugs like his own, in a fine and well-stocked shop in the English quarter. They were in natural colour, long, broad, and delightfully soft, and were to be sent at once to the International Sanatorium Berghof, Room 34: Hans Castorp looked forward to using them that very afternoon.
This, of course, was after second breakfast, for otherwise the daily programme left no time sufficient to go down into the Platz. It was raining now, and the snow in the streets had turned to a slush that spattered as they walked. They overtook Settembrini on the road, climbing up to the sanatorium under an umbrella, bareheaded. The Italian looked sallow; his mood was obviously elegiac. In well-chosen, clearly enunciated phrases he complained of the cold and damp from which he suffered so bitterly. If they would only heat the building! But the ruling powers, in their penuriousness, had the fire go out directly it stopped snowing—an idiotic rule, an insult to human intelligence. Hans Castorp objected that presumably a moderate temperature was part of the regimen of the cure; it would certainly not do to coddle the patients. But Settembrini answered with embittered scorn. Oh, of course, the regimen of the cure! Those august and inviolate rules! Hans Castorp was right in referring to them, as he did, with bated breath. Yet it was rather striking (of course only in the pleasantest sense) that the rules most honoured in the observance were precisely those which chimed with the financial interest of the proprietors of the establishment; whereas, on the other hand, to those less favourable they were inclined to shut an eye. The cousins laughed, and Settembrini began to speak of his deceased father, who had been brought to his mind in connection with the talk about heated rooms.
“My father,” he said slowly, in tones replete with filial piety, “my father was a most delicately organized man, sensitive in body as in soul. How he did love his tiny, warm little study! In winter a temperature of twenty degrees Réaumur must always obtain there, by means of a small red-hot stove. When you entered it from the corridor on a day of cold and damp, or when the cutting tramontana blew, the warmth of it laid itself about you like a shawl, so that for very pleasure your eyes would fill with tears. The little room was stuffed with books and manuscripts, some of them of great value; he stood among them, at his narrow desk, in his blue flannel nightshirt, and devoted himself to the service of letters. He was small and delicately built, a good head shorter than I—imagine!—but with great tufts of grey hair on his temples, and a nose—how long and pointed it was! And what a Romanist, my friends! One of the first of his time, with a rare mastery of our own tongue, and a Latin stylist such as no longer exists—ah, a ‘uomo letterato’ after Boccaccio’s own heart! From far and wide scholars came to converse with him—one from Haparanda, another from Krakow they came to our city of Padua, expressly to pay him homage, and he received them with dignified friendliness. He was a poet of distinction too, composing in his leisure tales in the most elegant Tuscan prose—he was a master of the idioma gentile,” Settembrini said, rolling his native syllables with the utmost relish on his tongue and turning his head from side to side. “He laid out his little garden after Virgil’s own plan—and all that he said was sane and beautiful. But warm, warm he must have it in his little room; otherwise he would tremble with cold, and he could weep with anger if they let him freeze. And now imagine, Engineer, and you, Lieutenant, what I, the son of my father, must suffer in this accursed and barbarous land, where even at summer’s height the body shakes with cold, and the spirit is tortured and debased by the sights it sees.—Oh, it is hard! What types about us! This frantic devil of a Hofrat, Krokowski”—Settembrini pretended to trip over the name—“Krokowski, the father-confessor, who hates me because I’ve too much human dignity to lend myself to his papish practices.—And at my table—what sort of society is that in which I am forced to take my food? At my right sits a brewer from Halle—Magnus by name—with a moustache like a bundle of hay. ‘Don’t talk to me about literature,’ says he. ‘What has it to offer? Anything but beautiful characters? What have I to do with beautiful characters? I am
