This intelligence affected Hans Castorp even more than the other. He made several forced jokes about it. Why, certainly, the Hofrat was known to occupy himself with oil-painting. Why not? It wasn’t a crime, anybody was free to paint. And the sittings took place in the widower’s own house—he hoped, at least, that Fräulein von Mylendonk was present! The schoolmistress objected that the Directress was probably too busy. No busier than the doctor ought to be, Hans Castorp severely rejoined. The remark sounded final; but he was far from letting the subject drop. He exhausted himself in questions: about the picture, what size it was, and whether it was a head or a knee-length; about the hours of the sitting—but Fräulein Engelhart could not gratify him with these particulars, and had to put him off until she could make further inquiry.
Hans Castorp measured 99.7° as a result of this communication. The visits Frau Chauchat received upset him far less than these she made. Her personal and private life—quite aside from what went on in it—had begun to be a source of anguish and unrest; how much keener, then, were his feelings when he heard such questionable things about the way she spent her time! Speaking generally, it was altogether possible that her relations with the Russian visitor had a disinterested and harmless character. But Hans Castorp had been for some time now inclined to reject harmless and disinterested explanations as being in the nature of “twaddle”; nor could he regard in any other light this oil-painting, considered as a bond of interest between a widower with a robust vocabulary and a narrow-eyed, soft-stepping young female. The taste displayed by the Hofrat in his choice of a model was too like Hans Castorp’s own for him to put great faith in the disinterested character of the affair, and the thought of the Hofrat’s purple cheeks and bloodshot, goggling eyes only strengthened his scepticism.
An observation which he made in these days, of his own accord and quite by chance, had a different effect upon him, though here again what he saw confirmed his own taste. There sat, at the same table with Frau Salomon and the greedy schoolboy with the glasses, at the cousins’ left, near the side door, a patient who was, so Hans Castorp had heard, a native of Mannheim. He was some thirty years old; his hair was thin, his teeth poor, and he had a self-depreciating manner of speech. He it was who played the piano evenings, usually the wedding march from Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was said to be very religious—as “those up here” naturally often were. Every Sunday he went to service down in the Platz, and in the rest-cure he read devotional books with a chalice or palm branch on the front cover. This man’s eyes, so Hans Castorp one day observed, travelled the same road as his own: they hung upon Madame Chauchat’s lissom person with timid, doglike devotion. Once Hans Castorp had remarked this, he could not forbear corroborating it again and again. He saw him stand, of an evening, in the cardroom, among the other guests, quite lost in gazing at the lovely, contaminate creature on the sofa in the small salon, in talk with the whimsical, fuzzy-haired Tamara, Dr. Blumenkohl, and the hollow-chested, stooping young men who were her tablemates. He saw him turn away, then twist his head, with a piteous expression of the upper lip, and roll his eyes back over his shoulder in her direction. He saw him colour and not look up, but then gaze avidly as with a crash the glass door fell to, and Frau Chauchat slipped to her place. And more than once he saw how the poor soul would place himself, after the meal, between the “good” Russian table and the exit, in order that she might pass close by him; she gave him neither glance nor thought, while he devoured her at close range with eyes full of sadness to their very depths.
This discovery of his affected young Hans Castorp no little, though the plaintive, devouring gaze of the Mannheimer did not trouble his rest like the thought of Clavdia Chauchat’s private relations with Hofrat Behrens, a man so much his superior in age, person, and position. Clavdia took no interest in the Mannheimer—had she done so, it would not have escaped Hans Castorp’s perception; in this case it was not the dart of jealousy he felt pierce his soul. But he did have all the sensations which the drunkenness of passion knows, when it sees its own case duplicated in the outer world, and which form a most fantastic mixture of disgust and fellow-feeling. To explore and lay open all the windings of his emotions would keep us far too long; suffice it to say that his observation of the Mannheimer gave our poor young friend enough to think on and to suffer.
In this wise passed the week before his X-ray examination. He had not known it was so long. But one morning at early breakfast he received the order through the Directress (she had a fresh stye, so this harmless though disfiguring ailment was clearly constitutional) to present himself in the laboratory that afternoon; and behold, when he came
