“One word from thy sweet lips
Can strangely thrill me.”
He was about to go on:
“Within my heart it slips
And raptures fill me—”
but broke off instead, with a disdainful shrug. “Idiotic!” he said, suddenly finding the tender ditty altogether tasteless, wishy-washy, and sentimental. He put it from him with manly sobriety, almost with regret. It was the sort of thing to satisfy a young man who had “given his heart,” as we say, given it wholly, legitimately, and with quite definite intentions, to some healthy little goose in the flat-land and thus might be justified in abandoning himself to his orthodox and gratifying sensations, with all the consequences they entailed. But for him and for his relations with Madame Chauchat (we are not responsible for the word “relations”; it was the word Hans Castorp used, not we), such songs had nothing to do with them. “Silly!” he said sententiously, and put his nose in the air. But after pronouncing this aesthetic judgment he lay silent in his deck-chair, not thinking of anything more suitable to sing in its place.
One thing there was which pleased him: when he lay listening to the beating of his heart—his corporeal organ—so plainly audible in the ordered silence of the rest period, throbbing loud and peremptorily, as it had done almost ever since he came, the sound no longer annoyed him. For now he need not feel that it so beat of its own accord, without sense or reason or any reference to his non-corporeal part. He could say, without stretching the truth, that such a connection now existed, or was easily induced: he was aware that he felt an emotion to correspond with the action of his heart. He needed only to think of Madame Chauchat—and he did think of her—and lo, he felt within himself the emotion proper to the heartbeats.
Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-Ride in the Twilight
The weather was vile. In this respect Hans Castorp had no luck during the brief term of his visit. It did not snow, but rained all day long, a hateful downpour; thick mist wrapped the valley, while electric storms—an absurd and uncalled-for phenomenon, considering it was so cold that the heat had been turned on—rolled and reverberated disagreeably through the valley.
“Too bad,” Joachim said. “I thought we might take our luncheons and climb up to the Schatzalp, or something like that. But it seems it is not to happen. Let us hope the last week will be better.”
But Hans Castorp answered: “Let be. I am not so anxious to undertake anything for the moment. My first excursion was no great success. I find it does me more good just to take the day as it comes, without too much variation. I leave that sort of thing to people who have been up here for years. What do I want of variety in my three weeks’ time?”
He did, indeed, find his time well taken up, just as he was. Whatever his hopes, they would come to fruition—or else they would not—here on the spot and not on any Schatzalp. Time did not hang heavy on his hands—rather he began to feel the end of his stay approach all too near. The second week was passing; soon two-thirds of his holiday would be gone; the third week would no sooner begin than it would be time to think of packing. The refreshment of his sense of time was long since a thing of the past; the days rushed on—yes, in the mass they rushed on, though at the same time each single day stretched out long and longer to hold the crowded, secret hopes and fears that filled it to overflowing. Ah, time is a riddling thing, and hard it is to expound its essence!
Must we put plainer name to those inward experiences which at once both weighted and gave wings to Hans Castorp’s days? We all know them; their emotional inanity ran true to type. They would have taken no different course even had their origin been such as to make applicable the silly song on which he had pronounced his severe aesthetic judgment.
Impossible that Madame Chauchat should know nothing of the threads that were weaving between her and a certain table. Indeed, Hans Castorp definitely, wilfully purposed that she should know something, or even a good deal. We say wilfully because his eyes were open, he was aware that reason and good sense were against it. But when a man is in Hans Castorp’s state—or the state he was beginning to be in—he longs, above all, to have her of whom he dreams aware that he dreams, let reason and common sense say what they like to the contrary. Thus are we made.
So, after it had happened twice or thrice that Madame Chauchat, impelled by chance or magnetic attraction, had turned and looked in the direction of Hans Castorp’s table and met each time his eyes fixed upon her, she turned the fourth time with intent—and met them again. On the fifth occasion she did not catch him in flagrante; he was not at his post. Yet he straightway felt her eyes upon him, turned, and gazed so ardently that she smiled and looked away. Rapture—and misgiving—filled him at sight of that smile. Did she take him for a child? Very well, she should see. He cast about for means to refine upon the position. On the sixth occasion, when he felt, he divined, an
