library_books Bookstacks

No. 34

Immediately to the right, between the house door and the vestibule, lay the concierge's lodge, and from there a servant of French type, who had been sitting at the telephone reading newspapers, came toward them in the gray livery of the limping man at the station and led them through the well-lit hall, on the left side of which were social rooms. As he passed, Hans Castorp looked in and found them empty. Where the guests were, he asked, and his cousin answered:

"At the rest cure. I had leave today because I wanted to fetch you. Otherwise I also lie out on the balcony after supper."

It lacked little for Hans Castorp to be overcome by laughter anew.

"What, you lie out on the balcony even by night and fog?" he asked in an unsteady voice…

"Yes, that is the rule. From eight to ten. But come now, look at your room and wash your hands."

They took the lift, whose electric mechanism the Frenchman operated. As they glided upward, Hans Castorp dried his eyes.

"I am quite broken and exhausted from laughing," he said, breathing through his mouth. "You have told me so much mad stuff… That business of the dissection of the soul was too much; that should not have come. Besides, I suppose I am also a little worn out from the journey. Do you suffer from cold feet too? At the same time one has such a hot face; it is unpleasant. We shall eat at once, I hope? It seems to me I am hungry. Does one eat decently with you up here?"

They went noiselessly along the coconut runner of the narrow corridor. Bells of milk glass sent a pale light from the ceiling. The walls shimmered white and hard, coated with a lacquer-like oil paint. A nurse appeared somewhere, in a white cap and with a pince-nez on her nose, whose cord she had looped behind her ear. She was evidently of Protestant confession, without true devotion to her calling, curious and troubled and burdened by boredom. At two points in the corridor, on the floor before the white-lacquered numbered doors, stood certain demijohns, large, potbellied vessels with short necks, whose meaning Hans Castorp for the present forgot to ask about.

"Here you are," said Joachim. "Number Thirty-four. I am on the right, and on the left is a Russian married couple - rather slipshod and loud, one has to say, but it could not be helped. Well, what do you say?"

The door was double, with clothes hooks in the hollow space between. Joachim had switched on the ceiling light, and in its trembling clarity the room appeared cheerful and peaceful, with its white, practical furniture, its likewise white, strong, washable wallpapers, its clean linoleum floor covering, and the linen curtains, simply and merrily embroidered in modern taste. The balcony door stood open; one perceived the lights of the valley and heard distant dance music. Good Joachim had put a few flowers in a small vase on the chest of drawers - whatever could be found in the second growth, a little yarrow and a few harebells, picked by himself on the slope.

"Charming of you," said Hans Castorp. "What a nice room! One can live here quite pleasantly for a few weeks."

"An American woman died here the day before yesterday," said Joachim. "Behrens thought at once that she would be done by the time you came, and that you could then have the room. Her fiance was with her, an English naval officer, but he did not behave exactly smartly. Every moment he came out into the corridor to weep, just like a little boy. And then he rubbed his cheeks with cold cream because he was clean-shaven and the tears burned him so there. The evening before last the American woman had two first-rate hemorrhages, and that was the end. But she has been gone since yesterday morning, and then of course they smoked the room out thoroughly, with formalin, you know; that is supposed to be so good for such purposes."

Hans Castorp received this account with animated distraction. Standing before the spacious washstand, whose nickel taps flashed in the electric light, with his sleeves drawn back, he cast only a fleeting glance toward the white metal bedstead, neatly covered.

"Smoked out, that is splendid," he said conversationally and somewhat incoherently, as he washed and dried his hands. "Yes, methylaldehyde, the strongest bacterium cannot stand up to that - H2CO, but it stings the nose, doesn't it? Naturally the strictest cleanliness is a basic condition…" He said "Naturally" with the old-fashioned separated consonant, while his cousin, since becoming a student, had adopted the more common pronunciation, and went on with great fluency: "What I was going to say… The naval officer had probably shaved with a safety razor, I would suppose; one does cut oneself more easily with those things than with a well-stropped blade, that at least is my experience, I use one and the other in alternation… Well, and on irritated skin the salt water naturally hurts; from the service he was probably used to applying cold cream, there is nothing about that which surprises me…" And he chatted on, saying that he had two hundred Maria Mancinis - his cigar - in his trunk, that the inspection had been most agreeable, and conveyed greetings from various people at home. "Isn't there any heating here?" he cried suddenly, and ran to the pipes to lay his hands on them…

"No, we are kept fairly cool here," answered Joachim. "Things have to change considerably before they light the central heating in August."

"August, August!" said Hans Castorp. "But I am freezing! I am abominably cold, that is, in my body, for in the face I am remarkably heated - here, feel how I am burning!"

This demand that someone should feel his face did not suit Hans Castorp's nature at all and embarrassed him himself. Joachim did not respond to it either, but merely said:

"That is the air and means nothing. Behrens himself has blue cheeks all day. Some people never get used to it. Well, go on, or we shall get nothing more to eat."

Outside the nurse appeared again, nearsighted and curious, peering at them. But on the first floor Hans Castorp suddenly stood still, held fast by a perfectly gruesome sound that became audible at a little distance behind a bend in the corridor; a sound not loud, but of so decidedly hideous a kind that Hans Castorp made a grimace and looked at his cousin with widened eyes. It was coughing, evidently - the cough of a man; but a cough that resembled no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, indeed, one beside which every other cough known to him had been a splendid and healthy expression of life: a cough wholly without pleasure or love, which did not come in proper bursts but sounded only like a horribly feeble stirring in the mush of organic dissolution.

"Yes," said Joachim, "things are bad there. An Austrian aristocrat, you know, an elegant man and born to be a gentleman rider. And now this is how it stands with him. But he still walks about."

As they continued on their way, Hans Castorp spoke earnestly about the gentleman rider's cough. "You must consider," he said, "that I have never heard anything of the kind, that it is completely new to me; naturally it makes an impression on me. There are so many kinds of cough, dry and loose, and the loose kind is even more advantageous, as people generally say, and better than barking like that. When I had croup in my youth ('in my youth,' he said), I barked like a wolf, and everyone was glad when it became loose; I can still remember it. But such a cough as this one has not existed before, at least not for me - why, it is no longer a living cough at all. It is not dry, but one cannot call it loose either; that is far from the word. It is precisely as if, while hearing it, one saw inside the person and what it looked like there - all a mash and mud…"

"Well," said Joachim, "I hear it every day; you need not describe it to me."

But Hans Castorp could not at all calm himself about the cough he had heard; he repeatedly declared that one fairly saw inside the gentleman rider while hearing it, and when they entered the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited shine.