library_books Bookstacks

Breakfast

"Morning," said Joachim. "So that was your first night up here. Are you satisfied?"

He was ready to go out, dressed sportily, in stoutly made boots, and carried over his arm his ulster, in whose side pocket the flat bottle showed its outline. He had no hat today either.

"Thank you," Hans Castorp replied, "it will do. I don't want to judge further. I dreamed somewhat confusedly, and then the house has the disadvantage that it is very audible through the walls, which is a little troublesome. Who is the woman in black out there in the garden?"

Joachim knew at once who was meant.

"Oh, that is 'Tous-les-deux,'" he said. "That is what she is generally called here among us, because it is the only thing one ever hears from her. Mexican, you know, cannot speak a word of German and hardly any French either, only a few scraps. She has been here five weeks with her eldest son, a completely hopeless case, who will now go under rather quickly - he has it everywhere already, poisoned through and through, one may well say; toward the end it looks approximately like typhus, Behrens says - hideous for everyone concerned, in any case. Two weeks ago the second son came up because he wanted to see his brother once more - a strikingly handsome fellow, incidentally, like the other one too; both are strikingly handsome fellows, with such fiery eyes, the ladies were quite beside themselves. Well, the younger one had probably already coughed a little down below, but otherwise had been quite lively. And scarcely is he here, what do you think, he gets a temperature - and right away 39.5, highest fever, you understand, takes to his bed, and if he gets up again, Behrens says, then he has more luck than sense. In any case, Behrens says, it was high time he came up… Yes, and since then the mother walks about like that when she is not sitting with them, and when one speaks to her she always says only 'Tous les deux!' because she cannot say more, and at the moment there is no one here who understands Spanish."

"So that is how it is with her," said Hans Castorp. "I wonder whether she will say it to me too if I make her acquaintance? That would be odd - I mean, it would be comic and uncanny at the same time," he said, and his eyes were as they had been yesterday: they seemed to him hot and heavy, as if he had wept for a long time, and they again had that shine in them which the novel cough of the gentleman rider had kindled there. Altogether it seemed to him as if only now had he found the connection with yesterday, as if, so to speak, he were back in the picture, which after his waking had at first not quite been the case. He was ready, incidentally, he declared, trickling a little lavender water onto his handkerchief and dabbing his forehead and the region under his eyes with it. "If it suits you, we can go tous les deux to breakfast," he joked with a feeling of extravagant high spirits, whereupon Joachim looked at him gently and smiled peculiarly at it, melancholically and somewhat mockingly, as it seemed - why, that was his affair.

After Hans Castorp had assured himself that he had smoking materials with him, he took cane, coat, and hat - the latter too, defiantly, for he was far too certain of his form of life and civility to submit so easily, and for a mere three weeks, to foreign and new customs - and so they went, went down the stairs, and in the corridors Joachim pointed to this and that door and named the occupants, German names and names of all sorts of foreign sound, adding brief remarks about their character and the severity of their case.

They also met people who were already returning from breakfast, and when Joachim said good morning to someone, Hans Castorp politely lifted his hat. He was tense and nervous like a young person about to present himself to many strangers and plagued meanwhile by the distinct feeling of having dull eyes and a red face, which incidentally was only partly true, for he was in fact rather pale.

"Before I forget!" he said suddenly with a certain blind zeal. "You may gladly introduce me to the lady in the garden if it happens naturally; I have nothing against that. Let her say 'tous les deux' to me by all means; that does not bother me at all, I am prepared and understand the meaning and shall make the right face for it. But I do not wish to become acquainted with the Russian married couple, do you hear? I expressly do not wish it. They are exceedingly ill-mannered people, and if I am to live next to them for three weeks and it could not be arranged otherwise, I still do not want to know them; that is my good right, and I most decidedly request to be spared it…"

"Fine," said Joachim. "Did they disturb you so much? Yes, they are in a sense barbarians, uncivilized in a word; I told you that in advance. He always comes to meals in a leather jacket - shabby, I tell you; I am always surprised that Behrens does not intervene. And she is not the neatest either, despite her feather hat… Incidentally, you can be quite at ease; they sit far away from us, at the Bad Russian table, for there is also a Good Russian table, where only finer Russians sit - and there is scarcely any possibility that you will come together with them even if you wanted to. It is not easy to make acquaintances here at all, if only because there are so many foreigners among the guests, and I myself know only a few personally, as long as I have been here."

"Which of the two is sick?" asked Hans Castorp. "He or she?"

"He, I believe. Yes, only he," said Joachim, noticeably distracted, while they laid aside their things at the coat stands before the dining hall. And then they entered the bright, shallow-vaulted room, where voices hummed, utensils clattered, and the daughters of the hall hurried about with steaming pots.

Seven tables stood in the dining hall, most of them lengthwise, only two crosswise. They were larger tables, for ten persons each, though the places were not fully occupied everywhere. Only a few steps diagonally into the hall, and Hans Castorp was already at his place: it had been prepared for him at the narrow end of the table that stood in the middle toward the front, between the two crosswise tables. Upright behind his chair, Hans Castorp bowed stiffly and amiably toward the table companions with whom Joachim ceremonially made him acquainted, and whom he scarcely saw, let alone that their names penetrated his consciousness. Only Frau Stöhr's person and name did he grasp, and that she had a red face and greasy ash-blond hair. One could well trust her to make mistakes of education, so stubbornly ignorant was the expression of her face. Then he sat down and approvingly perceived that first breakfast was treated here as a serious meal.

There were pots of jams and honey, bowls of rice pudding and oatmeal porridge, platters with scrambled eggs and cold meat; butter was set out generously, someone lifted the glass dome over a weeping Swiss cheese in order to cut from it, and a bowl with fresh and dried fruit stood besides in the middle of the table. A daughter of the hall in black and white asked Hans Castorp what he wished to drink: cocoa, coffee, or tea. She was small as a child, with an old, long face - a dwarf, as he recognized with a shock. He looked at his cousin, but since the latter only shrugged equably with shoulders and brows, as though to say, "Yes, well, what of it?" he submitted to the facts, asked with particular politeness for tea, since it was a dwarf who was asking him, and began to eat rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar, while his eyes moved over the other dishes, which he longed to taste, and over the guests at the seven tables, Joachim's colleagues and fellow sufferers, all of them inwardly sick and breakfasting as they chattered.

The hall was kept in that modern taste which knows how to give the most matter-of-fact simplicity a certain fantastic admixture. It was not very deep in proportion to its length and was surrounded by a kind of ambulatory in which sideboards stood and which opened toward the inner space with the tables in large arches. The pillars, clad halfway up with wood in sandalwood polish, then smoothly whitened like the upper part of the walls and the ceiling, displayed colored band-stripes, simple and cheerful stencils that continued along the widely spanning ribs of the shallow vault. Several chandeliers, electric, of polished brass, adorned the hall, each consisting of three rings placed one above the other, connected with delicate wickerwork, and around the lowest of which little moons of milk-glass globes went in a circle. There were four glass doors: two on the opposite broad side, leading out to a veranda set before it; a third at the front left, leading directly into the front hall; and then the one through which Hans Castorp had entered from a corridor, since Joachim had led him down a different staircase from the evening before.

On his right he had an insignificant creature in black, with downy complexion and faintly heated cheeks, in whom he saw something like a seamstress or house dressmaker, probably also because she breakfasted exclusively on coffee with buttered rolls and because he had always connected the idea of a house dressmaker with that of coffee and buttered rolls. On his left sat an English miss, likewise already advanced in years, very ugly, with thin, chilled fingers, who was reading roundly written letters from home and drinking a blood-colored tea with them. Beside her came Joachim, and then Frau Stöhr in a Scottish wool blouse. She held her left hand clenched near her cheek while she ate and visibly strove, when speaking, to make a refined expression by drawing her upper lip back from her narrow and long rabbit teeth. A young man with a thin mustache and a facial expression as though he had something bad-tasting in his mouth sat down beside her and breakfasted in complete silence. He came in when Hans Castorp was already seated, lowered his chin once to his chest in greeting as he walked and without looking at anyone, and took his place, by his behavior flatly refusing to be made acquainted with the new guest. Perhaps he was too ill to retain sense and respect for such externals or, in general, any interest in his surroundings. For a moment opposite him sat an extraordinarily thin, light-blond young girl, who emptied a bottle of yogurt onto his plate, spooned up the milk food, and immediately departed again.

The conversation at table was not lively. Joachim chatted formally with Frau Stöhr; he inquired after her condition and learned with correct regret that it left something to be desired. She complained of "limpness." "I am so limp!" she said drawlingly, and coquetted in an uneducated way. She had also already had 37.3 on getting up, and what would it be like in the afternoon. The house dressmaker confessed to the same body temperature, but explained that she, on the contrary, felt excited, inwardly tense and restless, as if something special and decisive stood before her, though that was not the case at all; rather it was a bodily excitement without psychic causes. She was probably not a house dressmaker after all, for she spoke very correctly and almost learnedly. Incidentally Hans Castorp found this excitement, or at least the utterance of it, somehow inappropriate, indeed almost offensive, in such an inconspicuous and minor creature. He asked first the seamstress and then Frau Stöhr how long they had already been up here - the former had been living in the institution for five months, the latter for seven - then assembled his English in order to learn from his neighbor on the right what kind of tea she was drinking - it was rose-hip tea - and whether it tasted good, which she affirmed almost stormily, and then looked into the hall, where people were coming and going: first breakfast was not a strictly communal meal.

He had been a little afraid of alarming impressions, but found himself disappointed: things were quite cheerful here in the hall; one did not have the feeling of being in a place of misery. Tanned young people of both sexes came in trilling, spoke with the daughters of the hall, and fell upon breakfast with robust appetite. More mature persons were there too, married couples, an entire family with children that spoke Russian, also half-grown boys. The women almost all wore close-fitting jackets of wool or silk, so-called sweaters, white or colored, with falling collars and side pockets, and it looked pretty when they stood and chatted with both hands buried in these side pockets. At several tables photographs were being passed around, new, self-made snapshots without doubt; at another, stamps were being exchanged. People spoke of the weather, of how one had slept and how much one had measured in the mouth that morning. Most were merry, probably for no special reason but only because they had no immediate worries and were together in numbers. Some, to be sure, sat at table with head supported in their hands and stared before them. They were allowed to stare, and no attention was paid to them.

Suddenly Hans Castorp started in annoyance and offense. A door had fallen shut; it was the door at the front left, the one that led directly into the hall - someone had let it fall shut, or even thrown it into the latch behind him, and that was a noise Hans Castorp could not bear for the life of him, one he had always hated. Perhaps this hatred rested on upbringing, perhaps on innate idiosyncrasy - enough, he detested door-slamming and could have struck anyone who made himself guilty of it in his hearing. In this case the door was, besides, filled with small panes of glass, and that intensified the shock: it was a crash and jangle. Pfui, thought Hans Castorp furiously, what sort of damned slovenliness is that! Since, incidentally, at the same moment the seamstress addressed him, he had no time to establish who the malefactor had been. Yet folds stood between his blond brows, and his face was painfully distorted while he answered the seamstress.

Joachim asked whether the doctors had already come through. Yes, they had been there the first time, someone answered; they had left the hall almost at the moment when the cousins arrived. Then they would go and not wait, Joachim thought. An opportunity for introduction would surely present itself during the day. But at the door they almost collided with Hofrat Behrens, who came in at a rapid stride, followed by Dr. Krokowski.

"Hopla, careful, gentlemen!" said Behrens. "That might easily have ended badly for the corns on both sides." He spoke strongly Lower Saxon, broadly and chewingly. "So this is you," he said to Hans Castorp, whom Joachim presented with heels drawn together; "well, pleased to meet you." And he gave the young man his hand, which was large as a shovel. He was a bony man, perhaps three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, already quite white on top, with a protruding nape, large, bulging, bloodshot blue eyes in which tears swam, a turned-up nose, and a short-clipped little mustache that was drawn askew, as a result of a one-sided lifting of the upper lip. What Joachim had said of his cheeks proved entirely true: they were blue; and so his head appeared quite colorful against the white surgeon's coat he wore, a belted smock reaching past the knees, which below showed his striped trousers and a pair of colossal feet in yellow and somewhat worn lace-up boots. Dr. Krokowski too was in professional dress, only his smock was black, of a black lustrous fabric, shirt-like, with elastic at the wrists, and it heightened his pallor not a little. He behaved purely as assistant and took no part in the greeting in any way, though a critical tension of his mouth made it plain that he felt his subordinate relation to be curious.

"Cousins?" asked the Hofrat, indicating back and forth between the young men with his hand and looking up from below with his bloodshot blue eyes… "Well, does he want to swear to the calfskin too?" he said to Joachim, pointing his head toward Hans Castorp… "Good Lord, no - what? I saw at once" - and now he spoke directly to Hans Castorp - "that you have something so civilian about you, something comfortable - nothing so saber-rattling as this squad leader here. You would be a better patient than he, I would wager. I see at once in everyone whether he can make a usable patient, for that requires talent, talent is required for everything, and this Myrmidon here has not a bit of talent either. For drilling, I don't know, but for being ill, none at all. Would you believe that he always wants to go away? Always he wants to go away, plagues and pesters me, and cannot wait to be tormented down there. Such beer-zeal! He will not give us even half a little year. And yet it is quite nice here with us - now tell me yourself, Ziemßen, whether it is not quite nice here! Well, your cousin will know how to appreciate us better, will amuse himself. There is no shortage of ladies either - the loveliest ladies we have here. At least from the outside some are quite picturesque. But you should acquire a little more color, listen here, otherwise you will fall behind with the ladies! Green may well be life's golden tree, but as a facial color green is not quite the thing. Totally anemic, naturally," he said, stepping up to Hans Castorp without further ceremony and pulling down one eyelid with index and middle finger. "Of course totally anemic, as I said. You know what? It was not so stupid of you to leave your Hamburg to itself for a while. It is a most praiseworthy institution, this Hamburg; always supplies us a nice contingent with its wet-merry meteorology. But if on this occasion I may give you a nonbinding piece of advice - quite sine pecunia, you know - then while you are here, do everything your cousin does. In your case one can do nothing cleverer than live for a while as if with light tuberculosis pulmonum and put on a little protein. It is curious here with us, you see, about protein metabolism… Although general combustion is increased, the body nevertheless stores protein… Well, and you slept nicely, Ziemßen? Fine, what? So now off with the promenade! But no more than half an hour! And afterward the mercury cigar stuck in the face! Always write it down nicely, Ziemßen! Officially! Conscientiously! Saturday I want to see the curve! Your cousin should start measuring at once too. Measuring can never do any harm. Morning, gentlemen! Good entertainment! Morning… Morning…" And Dr. Krokowski attached himself to him as he sailed onward, swinging his arms, the palms turned wholly backward, while addressing to right and left the question whether people had slept "nicely," which was generally answered in the affirmative.