“Only so it doesn’t become a vice with you,” Hans Castorp laughed. “Ahem! Herr Settembrini has beguiled the time for me—no, that is not the proper expression, though it may be all right for your mock bridge. Herr Settembrini has filled the time for me, and given it content, whereas when mock bridge breaks out in our midst, a respectable man feels he has to fight his way through. And yet to have the privilege of listening to Herr Settembrini, to get the benefit of his good counsel, I could almost wish to keep my fever, and stop up here with you indefinitely. They would have to give me a ‘silent sister’ to measure with.”
“I repeat, Engineer, you are a wag,” said the Italian. He took leave gracefully and went. Alone with his cousin, Hans Castorp heaved a sigh.
“Oh, what a schoolmaster!” he said. “A humanistic one, of course. He never leaves off setting you right—first by means of anecdote, then by abstractions. And the things one gets to talk about with him, things you would never have thought you could talk about, or even understand! And if I had met him down below,” he added, “I never should have understood.”
At this hour Joachim would remain with him for a while, sacrificing a half or three-quarters of an hour of the evening cure. Sometimes they played chess on Hans Castorp’s magic table; Joachim had brought a set of chessmen from below. Then he would take his wrappings and go into the balcony, thermometer in mouth, and Hans Castorp too took his temperature for the last time, while soft music, near or far, stole up from the dark valley. The cure ended at ten. He heard Joachim, he heard the pair from the “bad” Russian table; he turned on his side and invited slumber.
The night was the harder half of the day, for Hans Castorp woke often, and lay not seldom hours awake; either because his slightly abnormal temperature kept him stimulated, or because his horizontal manner of life, detracted from the power, or the desire, to sleep. To make up for their briefness, his hours of slumber were animated by extremely lively and varied dreams, which he could ponder on awaking. And if the hours of the day were shortened by their frequent division into small sections, it was the blurred monotony of the marching hours of the night which operated with the like effect. Then as dawn came on, he found it diverting to watch the gradual grey, the slow emergence of the room and the objects in it, as though by the drawing of veils; to see day kindling outside, with smouldering or with lively glow; and it was always a surprise when the moment came round again and the thump of the bathing-master on his door announced to Hans Castorp that the daily programme was again in force.
He had brought no calendar with him on his holiday, and did not always find himself sure of the date. Now and then he asked his cousin; who, in turn, was not always quite sure either. True, the Sundays, particularly the fortnightly one with the concert—it was the second Hans Castorp had spent in this situation—gave him a fixed point. So much was certain, that by little and little they had now got well on in September, close on to the middle. Since he went to bed, the cold and cloudy weather had given place to a succession of wonderful midsummer days. Every morning Joachim appeared arrayed in white flannel trousers, to greet his cousin, and Hans Castorp felt a pang of regret, in which both heart and youthful muscles joined, at the loss of all this splendid weather. He murmured that it was “a shame,” but added to console himself that even if he were up and about he would hardly know how to take advantage of it, since it seemed it did not answer for him to exert himself much. And the wide-open balcony door did afford him some share of the warm shimmer outside.
But toward the end of his prescribed term of lying, the weather veered again. It grew misty and cold overnight, the valley was hid by gusts of wet snow, and the dry heat of the radiator filled the room. Such was the day on which Hans Castorp reminded the doctor, on his morning round, that the three weeks were out, and asked leave to get up.
“What the deuce—you don’t say!” said Behrens. “Time’s up, is it? Let’s see: yes, you’re right—good Lord, how fast we grow old! Things haven’t changed much with you, in the meantime. Normal yesterday? Yes, up to six o’clock in the afternoon. Well, Castorp, I won’t grudge you human society any longer. Up with you, man, and get on with your walks—within the prescribed limits, of course. We’ll take a picture of the inside of you—make a note of it,” he said as he went out, jerking his great thumb over his shoulder at Hans Castorp, and looking at the pallid assistant with his bloodshot, watery blue eyes. Hans Castorp left the “caboose.”
In galoshes, with his collar turned up, he accompanied his cousin once more to the bench by the watercourse and back. On the way he raised the question of how long the Hofrat might have let him lie had he not been reminded. And Joachim, looking worried, opened his mouth to emit a single pessimistic syllable, spread out his hands in an expressive gesture, and gave it up.
Sudden Enlightenment
A week passed before Hans Castorp received, through the Directress von Mylendonk, the summons to present himself in the X-ray laboratory. He had not liked to press matters. The Berghof was a busy place, doctors and assistants had their hands full. New guests had recently come in: two Russian students with shocks of hair and black blouses closed
