“I thought,” Hans Castorp said, “that the fever came from my cold.”
“And the cold,” rejoined the Hofrat, “where does that come from? Listen, Castorp, let me tell you something, and mark my words—for so far as I can tell, you’ve all the cerebral convolutions a body needs. Now: our air up here is good for the disease—I mean good against the disease, you understand—you think so, don’t you? Well, it is true. But also it is good for the disease; it begins by speeding it up, in that it revolutionizes the whole body; it brings the latent weakness to the surface and makes it break out. Your catarrh, fortunately for you, is a breaking-out of that kind. I can’t tell if you were febrile down below; but it is certainly my opinion that you have been from your first day up here, and not merely since you had your catarrh.”
“Yes,” Hans Castorp said, “I think so too.”
“You were probably fuddled right from the start, in my opinion,” the Hofrat confirmed him. “Those were the soluble toxins thrown off by the bacteria; they act like an intoxicant upon the central nervous system and give you a hectic flush. Now, Castorp, we’ll stick you into bed and see if a couple of weeks’ rest will sober you up. What follows will follow. We’ll take a handsome X-ray of you—you’ll enjoy seeing what goes on in your own inside. But I tell you straightaway, a case like yours doesn’t get well from one day to the next: it isn’t a question of the miracle cures you read about in advertisements. I thought when I first clapped eyes on you that you would be a better patient than your cousin, with more talent for illness than our brigadier-general here, who wants to clear out directly he has a couple of points less fever. As if ‘lie down’ isn’t just as good a word of command as ‘stand up’! It is the citizen’s first duty to be calm, and impatience never did any good to anyone. Now, Castorp, watch out you don’t disappoint me and give the lie to my knowledge of human nature! Get along now, into the caboose with you—march!”
With that Hofrat Behrens closed the interview and sat down at the writing-table; this man of many occupations began to fill in his time with writing until the advent of the next patient. But Dr. Krokowski arose from his place and strode up to Hans Castorp. With his head tipped back sideways, and one hand on the young man’s shoulder, smiling so heartily that the yellowish teeth showed in his beard, he shook him warmly by the hand.
Chapter V
Soup-Everlasting
And now we are confronted by a phenomenon upon which the author himself may well comment, lest the reader do so in his stead. Our account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp’s stay with “those up here”—twenty-one midsummer days, to which his visit, so far as human eye could see, should have been confined—has consumed in the telling an amount of time and space only too well confirming the author’s half-confessed expectations; while our narrative of his next three weeks will scarcely cost as many lines, or even words and minutes, as the earlier three did pages, quires, hours, and working-days. We apprehend that these next three weeks will be over and done with in the twinkling of an eye.
Which is perhaps surprising; yet quite in order, and conformable to the laws that govern the telling of stories and the listening to them. For it is in accordance with these laws that time seems to us just as long, or just as short, that it expands or contracts precisely in the way, and to the extent, that it did for young Hans Castorp, our hero, whom our narrative now finds visited with such an unexpected blow from the hand of fate. It may even be well at this point to prepare the reader for still other surprises, still other phenomena, bearing on the mysterious element of time, which will confront us if we continue in our hero’s company.
For the moment we need only recall the swift flight of time—even of a quite considerable period of time—which we spend in bed when we are ill. All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness—such words as these would better convey the idea. They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow; and it comes over you—but whence or how you do not know, it makes you quite giddy to see the broth coming in—that you are losing a sense of the demarcation of time, that its units are running together, disappearing; and what is being revealed to you as the true content of time is merely a dimensionless present in which they eternally bring you the broth. But in such a connection it would be paradoxical to speak of time as passing slowly; and paradox, with reference to such a hero, we would avoid.
Hans Castorp, then, went to bed on the Saturday afternoon, as it had been ordained by Hofrat Behrens, the highest authority in our little world. There he lay, in his nightshirt with the embroidered monogram on the pocket, his hands clasped at the back of his head, in his cleanly white bed, the deathbed of the American woman and in all probability of many another person; lay there with his confiding blue eyes, somewhat glassy with his cold, directed toward the ceiling, and contemplated the singularity of his fate. This is not to say that, if he had not had a cold, his gaze would have been any clearer or more single-minded. No, just as it was, it accurately mirrored his inner state,
