Which did not prevent him from employing all manner of devices to improve the position. His charmer came regularly late to meals; he did the same, with intent to waylay her. He dallied over his toilet, was not ready when Joachim knocked, and let his cousin go on before—he would catch up with him. He would wait until the intuition proper to his state warned him of the right moment; then he would hurry down, not by his own stair, but by the one at the end of the corridor, which would take him past a certain door—number seven—in the first storey. Every moment of the way, every step of the stair, offered a chance; any instant the door might open—and in practice it often did. Out she would slip, noiselessly, the door would slam behind her, she would glide to the stairs, she would pass down ahead of him, with her hand up to her braids of hair—or else he would be in front of her, feel her gaze in his back, and experience a thrill as from an ant crawling down it. His bearing, of course, was that of a person unaware of her presence, leading a free and independent existence of his own: he would bury his hands in his pockets, walk with a swagger, cough an entirely unnecessary cough, and strike himself on the chest—anything to manifest his utter unconcern.
On two occasions he refined yet further. Already seated at the table, he felt himself with both hands, and said with a fine show of irritation: “There, I’ve forgotten my handkerchief. That means I must trot back again to fetch it.” And went back, to the end that he and she might meet on the way, since that afforded a keener throb than when she merely walked in front of or behind him. The first time he executed this manoeuvre, she measured him with her eyes from a distance, swept him from head to foot, quite bold and unblushing. Then approaching nearer, turned away indifferently and passed him by. So that he got but little out of the démarche. The second time she stared him in the face without flinching, almost forbiddingly, even turning her head as they crossed, to follow him with her look—it went through our poor young friend like a knife. We need not pity him, for was it not all his own doing? But the encounter was gripping at the moment and even more afterwards—for only in retrospect was he clear as to what had actually happened. He had never seen Frau Chauchat’s face so close, so clear in all its details. He could have counted the tiny hairs that stood up from the braid she wore wreathed round her head—they were reddish-blond, with a metallic sheen. No more than a hands-breadth or so of space had been between his face and hers, whose outline and features, peculiar though they were, had been familiar to him as long as he could remember, and spoke to his very soul as nothing else could in all the world. It was an unusual face, and full of character (for only the unusual seems to us to have character); its mystery and strangeness spoke of the unknown north, and it teased the curiosity because its proportions and characteristics were somehow not very easy to determine. Its keynote, probably, was the high, bony structure of the prominent cheekbones; they seemed to compress the eyes—which were unusually far apart and unusually level with the face—and squeeze them into a slightly oblique position; while at the same time they appeared responsible for the soft concavity of the cheek, and this, in turn, to result in the full curve of the slightly pouting lips. Then there were the eyes themselves: the narrow “Kirghiz” eyes, whose shape was yet to Hans Castorp a simple enchantment and whose colour was the grey-blue or blue-grey of distant mountains; they had the trick of sidewise, unseeing glance, which could sometimes melt them into the very hue of mystery and darkness—these eyes of Clavdia, which had gazed so forbiddingly into his very face, and which so awfully resembled Pribislav Hippe’s in shape, expression, and colour that they fairly frightened him. Resembled was not the word: they were the same eyes. The breadth, too, of the upper part of the face, the flattened nose, everything, even to the flush in the white skin, the healthy colour of the cheek—which in Frau Chauchat’s case, as in so many others, merely counterfeited health and was a superficial effect of the open-air cure—everything was precisely Pribislav, and no differently would he have looked at Hans Castorp were they to meet again as of old in the school courtyard.
It had been staggering in the extreme. Hans Castorp thrilled at the encounter, yet experienced a mounting uneasiness like that he felt when he realized how narrow was the proximity that enclosed him and the fair Russian.
