“Good,” said Joachim. “We can do that for the present. And for the other matters we can wait and see.”
“What other matters?”
“Don’t be so irresponsible! You only came for three weeks, and brought a steamer trunk. You will need underwear and linen, and winter clothes—and more footwear. And anyhow, you will want money sent.”
“If,” said Hans Castorp, “if I need it.”
“Very well, we’ll wait and see. But we ought not”—Joachim paced up and down the room as he spoke, “we ought not to behave like ostriches. I have been up here too long not to know how things go. When Behrens says there is a rough place, almost rhonchi—oh well, of course, we can wait and see.”
There, for the time, the matter rested; and the weekly and fortnightly variations of the normal day set in. Hans Castorp could partake of them even in his present state, if not at first hand, then through the reports Joachim gave when he came and sat by the bedside for fifteen minutes.
His Sunday morning breakfast-tray was adorned with a vase of flowers; and they did not fail to send him his share of the Sunday pastries. After luncheon the sounds of social intercourse floated up from the terrace below, and with tantara and squealing of clarinets the fortnightly concert began. During its progress Joachim entered, and sat down by the open balcony door; his cousin half reclined in his bed, with his head on one side, and his eyes swimming with pious enjoyment as he listened to the mounting harmonies, and bestowed a momentary metaphorical shoulder-shrug upon Settembrini’s twaddle about music being “politically suspect.”
And, as we have said, he had Joachim post him upon the sights and events of the sanatorium life. Had there, he asked, been any toilets made in honour of the day, lace matinées or that sort of thing?—though for lace matinées the weather was too cold. Whether there were people going driving (certain expeditions had in fact been undertaken, among others by the Half-Lung Club, which had gone in a body to Clavadel). On the next day, Monday, he demanded to hear all about Dr. Krokowski’s lecture, when Joachim came from it and looked in upon his cousin on his way to the rest-cure. Joachim did not feel like talking, he appeared disinclined to make a report. He would have let the subject drop, as it had after the previous lecture, had not Hans Castorp persisted, and demanded to hear details.
“I am lying up here,” he said, “paying full pension. I am entitled to have all that is going.” He recalled the Monday of two weeks ago, and his solitary walk, which had done him so little good; and committed himself to the view that it was that walk which had revolutionized his system and brought to the surface the latent infection. “But what a stately and solemn way the people hereabout have of talking,” he said, “I mean the common people; almost like poetry. ‘Then thank ye kindly and God be with ye,’ ” he repeated, giving the words the woodman’s intonation. “I heard that up in the woods, and I shall remember it all my life. You get to associate a thing like that with other memories and impressions, you know, and you never forget it as long as you live.—Well, so Krokowski held forth again on the subject of love, did he? What did he say about it today?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. You know from the other time how he talks.”
“But what did he offer that was new?”
“Nothing different.—Oh, well, the stuff today was pure chemistry,” Joachim unwillingly condescended to enlighten his cousin. It seemed there was a sort of poisoning, an auto-infection of the organisms, so Dr. Krokowski said; it was caused by the disintegration of a substance, of the nature of which we were still ignorant, but which was present everywhere in the body; and the products of this disintegration operated like an intoxicant upon the nerve-centres of the spinal cord, with an effect similar to that of certain poisons, such as morphia, or cocaine, when introduced in the usual way from outside.
“And so you get the hectic flush,” said Hans Castorp. “But that’s all worth hearing. What doesn’t the man know! He must have simply lapped it up. You just wait, one of these days he will discover what that substance is that exists everywhere in the body and sets free the soluble toxins that act like a narcotic on the nervous system; then he will be able to fuddle us all more than ever. Perhaps in the past they were able to do that very thing. When I listen to him, I could almost think there is some truth in the old legends about love potions and the like.—Are you going?”
“Yes,” Joachim said, “I must go lie down. My curve has been rising since yesterday. This affair of yours has had its effect on me.”
That was the Sunday, and the Monday. The evening and the morning made the third day of Hans Castorp’s sojourn in the “caboose.” It was a day without distinction, an ordinary weekday, that Tuesday—but after all, it was the day of his arrival in this place, he had been here a round three weeks, and time pressed; he would have to send a letter home and inform his uncle of the state of affairs, even though cursorily and without reference to their true inwardness. He stuffed his down quilt behind
