The Hofrat, still lost in thought, let him stand. Dr. Krokowski had finished and sat down, and Joachim was dressing before Behrens finally decided to take notice.
“Oh-ho!” he said, “so that’s you, is it?” He gripped Hans Castorp on the upper arm with his mighty hand, pushed him away, and looked at him sharply—not in the face, as one man looks at another, but at his body; turned him round, as one would turn an inanimate object, and looked at his back. “H’m,” he said. “Well, we shall see.” And began tapping as before.
He tapped all over, as he had with Joachim, and several times went back and tapped again. For some while, for purposes of comparison, he tapped by turns on the left-hand side near the collarbone, and then somewhat lower down.
“Hear that?” he asked Dr. Krokowski. And the other, sitting at the table five paces off, nodded to signify that he did. He sunk his head on his chest with a serious mien, and the points of his whiskers stuck out.
“Breathe deep! Cough!” commanded the Hofrat, who had taken up the stethoscope again; and Hans Castorp worked hard for eight or ten minutes, while the Hofrat listened. He uttered no word, simply set the instrument here or there and listened with particular care at the places he had tapped so long. Then he stuck the stethoscope under his arm, put his hands on his back, and looked at the floor between himself and Hans Castorp.
“Yes, Castorp,” he said—this was the first time he had called the young man simply by his last name—“the thing works out praeter propter as I thought it would. I had my suspicions—I can tell you now—from the first day I had the undeserved honour of making your acquaintance; I made a pretty shrewd guess that you were one of us and that you would find it out, like many another who has come up here on a lark and gone about with his nose in the air, only to discover, one fine day, that it would be as well for him—and not only as well, mark that—to make a more extended stay, quite without reference to the beauties of the scenery.”
Hans Castorp had flushed; Joachim, in act to button his braces, paused as he stood, and listened.
“You have such a kind, sympathetic cousin over there,” went on the Hofrat, motioning with his head in Joachim’s direction and balancing himself on his heels. “Very soon, we hope, we will be able to say that he has been ill; but even when he gets that far, it will still be true that he has been ill—and the fact—a priori, as the philosophers say—casts a certain light upon yourself, my dear Castorp.”
“But he is only my step-cousin, Herr Hofrat.”
“Tut! You won’t disown him, will you? Even a step-cousin is a blood relation. On which side?”
“The mother’s, Herr Hofrat. He is the son of a step—”
“And your mother—she’s pretty jolly?”
“No, she is dead. She died when I was little.”
“And of what?”
“Of a blood-clot, Herr Hofrat.”
“A blood-clot, eh? Well, that’s a long time ago. And your father?”
“He died of pneumonia,” Hans Castorp said; “and my grandfather too,” he added.
“Both of them, eh? Good. So much for your ancestors. Now about yourself—you have always been rather chlorotic, haven’t you? But you didn’t tire easily at physical or mental work. Or did you—what? A good deal of palpitation? Only of late? Good. And a strong inclination to catarrhal and bronchial trouble?—Did you know you have been infected before now?”
“I?”
“Yes, you—I have you personally in mind. Can you hear any difference?” The Hofrat tapped by turns on Hans Castorp’s left side, first above and then lower down.
“It sounds rather duller there,” said Hans Castorp.
“Capital. You ought to be a specialist. Well, that is a dullness, and such dullnesses are caused by the old places, where fibrosis has supervened. Scars, you know. You are an old patient, Castorp, but we won’t lay it up against anybody that you weren’t found out. The early diagnosis is very difficult—particularly for my colleagues down below; I won’t say we have better ears—though the regular practice does do something. But the air helps us, helps us hear, if you understand what I mean, this thin, dry air up here.”
“Certainly, of course,” Hans Castorp said.
“Very good, Castorp. And now listen, young man, to my words of wisdom. If that were all the trouble with you, if it was a case of nothing but the dullness and the scars on your bagpipe in there, I should send you back to your lares and penates and not trouble my head further about you. But as things stand, and according to what we find, and since you are already up here—well, there is no use in your going down, for you’d only have to come up again.”
Hans Castorp felt the blood rush back to his heart; it hammered violently; and Joachim still stood with his hands on his back buttons, his eyes on the floor.
“For besides the dullness,” said the Hofrat, “you have on the upper left side a rough breathing that is almost bronchial and undoubtedly comes from a fresh place. I won’t call it a focus of softening, but it is certainly a moist spot, and if you go down below and begin to carry on, why, you’ll have the whole lobe at the devil before you can say Jack Robinson.”
Hans Castorp stood motionless. His mouth twitched fearfully, and the hammering of his heart against his ribs was plain to see. He looked across at Joachim, but could not meet his cousin’s eye; then again in the Hofrat’s face, with its blue cheeks, blue, goggling eyes, and little, crooked moustache.
“For independent confirmation,” Behrens continued, “we have your temperature of 99.6° at ten o’clock in the morning, which
