The Magic Mountain

of his nose, that she had turned with her question; because he was the older inhabitant of course, whom she had known longer by sight; but perhaps for another reason as well, because they two might meet on a conventional footing and carry on an ordinary conversation in articulate words; because nothing wild and deep, mysterious and terrifying, held sway between them. Had it been somebody brown-eyed, with a ruby ring and orange perfume, who sat here waiting with them, it would have been his, Hans Castorp’s, part to lead the conversation and say: “Rather” in the purity and detachment of his sentiments. “Yes, madame, certainly rather unpleasant,” he would have said; and might have taken his handkerchief out of his breast pocket with a flourish, and blown his nose. “Have patience, our case is no better than yours.” How surprised Joachim would have been at his fluency⁠—but without seriously wishing himself in Hans Castorp’s place. No, and Hans Castorp was not jealous of Joachim for being able to talk to Frau Chauchat. He was satisfied that she should have addressed herself to his cousin; it showed that she recognized the situation for what it was.⁠—His heart pounded.

After Joachim’s cavalier treatment of Madame Chauchat⁠—in which Hans Castorp seemed to savour something almost like faint hostility on his cousin’s part toward their fair fellow-patient, a hostility at which he could not help smiling, despite the commotion in his mind⁠—“Clavdia” tried a turn up and down the room. Then, finding the space too confined, she too took up an illustrated paper, and returned to the easy-chair with the rudimentary arms. Hans Castorp looked at her, with his chin in his collar, like his grandfather⁠—it was laughable to see how like the old man he looked. Frau Chauchat had crossed one leg over the other again, and her knee, even the whole slender line of the thigh, showed beneath the blue skirt. She was only of middle height⁠—a thoroughly proper and delightful height, in Hans Castorp’s eyes⁠—but relatively long-legged, and narrow in the hips. She sat leaning forward, with her crossed forearms supported on her knee, her shoulders drooping, and her back rounded, so that the neck-bone stuck out prominently, and nearly the whole spine was marked out under the close-fitting sweater. Her breasts, which were not high and voluptuous like Marusja’s, but small and maidenly, were pressed together from both sides. Hans Castorp recalled, suddenly, that she too was sitting here waiting to be X-rayed. The Hofrat painted her, he reproduced her outward form with oil and colours upon the canvas. And now, in the twilighted room, he would direct upon her the rays which would reveal to him the inside of her body. When this idea occurred to Hans Castorp, he turned away his head and put on a primly detached air; a sort of seemly obscurantism presented itself to him as the only correct attitude in the presence of such a thought.

The waiting together in the little room did not last for long. They evidently gave rather short shrift to Sascha and his mother in there, in their effort to make up for lost time. The technician in his white smock once more appeared, Joachim stood up and tossed his paper back on to the table, and Hans Castorp, not without inward hesitation, followed him to the open door. He was struggling with chivalrous scruples, also with the temptation to put himself, after all, upon conventional terms with Frau Chauchat, to speak to her and offer her precedence⁠—in French, if he could manage. Hastily he sought to muster the words, the sentence structure. But he did not know if such courtesies were practised up here; probably the established order was more powerful than the rules of chivalry. Joachim must know, and as he made no motion to defer to sex, even though Hans Castorp looked at him imploringly, the latter followed his cousin past Frau Chauchat, who merely glanced up from her stooping posture as they went through the door into the laboratory.

He was too much possessed by the events of the last ten minutes, and by what he left behind, for his mind to pass immediately with his body over the threshold of the X-ray laboratory. He saw nothing, or only vaguely, in the artificially lighted room; he still heard Frau Chauchat’s pleasantly veiled voice, with which she had said: “What is it, then?⁠ ⁠… Some people have just gone in⁠ ⁠… It is disagreeable”⁠—the sound of it still shivered sweetly down his back. He saw the shape of her knee under the cloth skirt, saw the bone of her neck, under the short reddish-blond hairs that were not gathered up into the braids⁠—and again the shiver ran down his back. Then he saw Hofrat Behrens, with his back to them, standing before a sort of built-in recess, looking at a black plate which he held at arm’s length toward the dim light in the ceiling. They passed him and went on into the room, followed by the assistant, who made preparations to dispatch their affair. It smelled very odd in here, the air was filled with a sort of stale ozone. The built-in structure, projecting between the two black-hung windows, divided the room into two unequal parts. Hans Castorp could distinguish physical apparatus. Lenses, switchboards, towering measuring-instruments, a box like a camera on a rolling stand, glass diapositives in rows set in the walls. Hard to say whether this was a photographic studio, a darkroom, or an inventor’s workshop and technological witches’ kitchen.

Joachim had begun, without more ado, to lay bare the upper half of his body. The helper, a square-built, rosy-cheeked young native in a white smock, motioned Hans Castorp to do the same. It went fast, and he was next in turn. As Hans Castorp took off his waistcoat, Behrens came out of the smaller recess where he had been standing into the larger one.

“Hallo,” said he. “Here are our Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. If you feel any