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Satana Makes Dishonorable Suggestions

Later he lost consciousness. According to his pocket watch it was half past three when conversation behind the left glass wall woke him: Dr. Krokowski, who at this hour made the round without the Hofrat, was speaking Russian there with the ill-mannered married couple, asking, it seemed, after the husband's condition and having his fever chart shown to him. But then he did not continue his way through the balcony loggias, but went around Hans Castorp's compartment by returning to the corridor and entering through the room door at Joachim's. That in this manner a bow was made around him and he was left lying to one side Hans Castorp did, after all, feel as somewhat wounding, although he had no desire whatever for a conversation under four eyes with Dr. Krokowski. Of course, he was simply healthy and did not count - for among these people up here, he thought, matters were such that the one who did not come into consideration and was not asked was the one who had the honor of being healthy, and that vexed young Castorp.

After Dr. Krokowski had lingered with Joachim for two or three minutes, he went on along the balcony, and Hans Castorp heard his cousin say that one might now get up and prepare oneself for the vesper meal. "Good," he said, and stood up. But he was very dizzy from lying so long, and the unrefreshing half-sleep had painfully heated his face anew, while incidentally he tended to shiver - perhaps he had not covered himself warmly enough.

He washed his eyes and hands, arranged his hair and clothes, and met Joachim in the corridor.

"Did you hear that Herr Albin?" he asked as they went down the stairs…

"Of course," said Joachim. "The man ought to be disciplined. Disturbing the whole midday rest with his chatter and agitating the ladies so that he sets them back by weeks. A gross insubordination. But who wants to play informer. And besides, such speeches are welcome entertainment to most of them."

"Do you consider it possible," asked Hans Castorp, "that he will make earnest with his 'smooth business,' as he expresses himself, and apply a foreign body to himself?"

"Ah, yes," Joachim answered, "it is not quite impossible. Things like that occur up here. Two months before I came, a student who had been here a long time hanged himself in the woods over there after a general examination. In my first days there was still much talk of it."

Hans Castorp yawned excitedly.

"Yes, I do not feel well among you," he declared, "I cannot say that I do. I consider it possible that I cannot stay, that I must leave - would you take it very ill of me?"

"Leave? What are you thinking of!" cried Joachim. "Nonsense. When you have only just arrived. How can you judge after the first day!"

"God, is it still the first day? I feel entirely as if I had already been a long - long time among you up here."

"Now do not begin again to speculate about time!" said Joachim. "You made me completely confused this morning."

"No, be easy, I have forgotten everything," replied Hans Castorp. "The whole complex. Now I am not in the least sharp in the head anymore either; that is past… So now there is tea."

"Yes, and then we go again as far as the bench from this morning."

"In God's name. But hopefully we will not meet Settembrini again. I can no longer take part in an educated conversation today; I tell you that in advance."

In the dining hall all beverages were poured that could in any way come into consideration at this hour. Miss Robinson again drank her blood-red rose-hip tea, while the great-niece spooned yogurt. Besides this there were milk, tea, coffee, chocolate, even meat broth, and everywhere the guests, who since the luxurious midday meal had spent two hours lying down, were busily occupied spreading butter on large slices of raisin cake.

Hans Castorp had had tea given him and dipped zwieback into it. He also tried a little marmalade. He examined the raisin cake closely, yet literally trembled at the thought of eating any of it. Once again he sat in his place in the hall with the simple-mindedly colorful vault, the seven tables - for the fourth time. Somewhat later, at seven o'clock, he sat there for the fifth time, and then it was supper that was in question. Into the interval, which was short and void, fell a walk to that bench by the mountain wall, near the water channel - the path was now thickly populated by patients, so that the cousins often had to greet people - and a new rest cure on the balcony, of a fleeting and contentless hour and a half. Hans Castorp shivered violently during it.

For the evening meal he conscientiously changed his clothes and then between Miss Robinson and the teacher ate julienne soup, baked and roasted meat with accompaniments, two pieces of a torte in which everything occurred: macaroon dough, butter cream, chocolate, fruit puree, and marzipan, and very good cheese on pumpernickel. Again he had a bottle of Kulmbach beer given him with it. But when he had emptied his tall glass halfway, he recognized clearly and distinctly that he belonged in bed. There was a roaring in his head, his eyelids were like lead, his heart went like a little kettledrum, and to his torment he imagined that pretty Marusja, who, bent forward, hid her face in the hand with the little ruby, was laughing at him, although he had tried so strenuously to give no occasion for it. As if from a great distance he heard Frau Stöhr tell or assert something that seemed to him such mad stuff that he fell into confused doubt whether he was still hearing correctly or whether Frau Stöhr's utterances perhaps transformed themselves into nonsense in his head. She declared that she knew how to prepare twenty-eight different fish sauces - she had the courage to vouch for it, although her own husband had warned her against speaking of it. "Do not speak of it!" he had said. "No one will believe you, and if one does believe it, one will find it ridiculous!" And yet today she wanted for once to say it and openly confess that there were twenty-eight fish sauces she could make. This seemed dreadful to poor Hans Castorp; he started, put his hand to his forehead, and completely forgot to finish chewing and swallow a bite of pumpernickel with Chester that he had in his mouth. Even when they rose from table, he still had it in his mouth.

They went out through the glass door on the left, that fatal one which always fell shut and which led straight into the front hall. Almost all the guests took this way, for it appeared that at the hour after dinner a kind of sociability took place in the hall and adjoining salons. The majority of the patients stood about chatting in small groups. At two folding tables covered in green people were engaged in play; it was dominoes at one, bridge at the other table, and here only young people were playing, among them Herr Albin and Hermine Kleefeld. Furthermore there were a few entertaining optical objects in the first salon: a stereoscopic peep-box through whose lenses one saw the photographs set up inside it, for example a Venetian gondolier, in rigid and bloodless corporeality; secondly a telescope-shaped kaleidoscope to whose lens one put an eye in order, merely by lightly handling a wheel, to conjure up for oneself many-colored stars and arabesques in magical alternation; finally a rotating drum into which cinematographic film strips were placed and through whose openings, when one looked in from the side, a miller fighting with a chimney sweep, a schoolmaster chastising a boy, a leaping tightrope dancer, and a peasant couple in a Landler dance were to be observed. Hans Castorp, his cold hands on his knees, looked for some time into each of the apparatuses. He also lingered a little at the bridge table, where the incurable Herr Albin handled the cards with hanging corners of the mouth and worldly, dismissive movements. In a corner Dr. Krokowski sat, engaged in fresh and cordial conversation with a semicircle of ladies, to which Frau Stöhr, Frau Iltis, and Fraulein Levi belonged. The occupants of the Good Russian table had withdrawn into the adjoining smaller salon, separated from the game room only by portieres, and there formed an intimate clique. Besides Madame Chauchat there were: a blond-bearded, slack gentleman with concave chest and staring eyeballs; a deeply brunette girl of original and humorous type, with gold earrings and tangled woolly hair; furthermore Dr. Blumenkohl, who had joined them, and two more hanging-shouldered young men. Madame Chauchat wore a blue dress with a white lace collar. She sat, as the center of her group, on the sofa behind the round table, in the background of the little room, her face turned toward the game room. Hans Castorp, who could not look at the ill-bred woman without disapproval, thought to himself: She reminds me of something, but I cannot say of what… A long person of about thirty years and with thinning hair played on the little brown pianoforte three times in succession the wedding march from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and when several ladies asked him to do so, began the melodious piece for the fourth time, after he had looked one after another deep and silently in the eyes.

"Is one permitted to inquire after your condition, Engineer?" asked Settembrini, who, hands in his trouser pockets, had been strolling about among the guests and now stepped before Hans Castorp… He was still wearing his gray, fleecy coat and the light checked trousers. He smiled at his address, and again Hans Castorp felt something like sobering at the sight of this finely and mockingly curled corner of the mouth under the curve of the black mustache. Incidentally, he looked at the Italian rather stupidly, with slack mouth and red-veined eyes.

"Ah, it is you," he said. "The gentleman from the morning walk, whom we met by that bench up there… by the watercourse… Naturally, I recognized you at once. Would you believe," he continued, although he well saw that he ought not to have said it, "that at the first instant back then I took you for a barrel-organ man?… That was of course pure nonsense," he added, seeing that Settembrini's gaze took on a coolly searching expression, "- a frightful stupidity, in a word! It is even completely incomprehensible to me how in all the world I…"

"Do not trouble yourself; it is of no consequence," replied Settembrini, after he had contemplated the young man in silence for another moment. "And how, then, have you spent your day - the first of your stay in this pleasure resort?"

"Thank you very much. Entirely according to regulations," Hans Castorp answered. "Predominantly in the 'horizontal manner,' as you are supposed to like calling it."

Settembrini smiled.

"It may be that I expressed myself so on occasion," he said. "Well, and did you find it entertaining, this way of life?"

"Entertaining and boring, as you like," replied Hans Castorp. "That is sometimes hard to distinguish, you know. I have by no means been bored - there is far too merry a business among you up here for that. One gets to hear and see so much that is new and remarkable… And yet on the other hand it also seems to me as if I had been here not only one day but already for a longer time - downright as if I had already grown older and wiser here, that is how it seems to me."

"Wiser too?" said Settembrini, raising his brows. "Will you permit me the question: How old are you actually?"

But see there, Hans Castorp did not know! At that moment he did not know how old he was, despite violent, indeed desperate efforts to recollect. To gain time, he had the question repeated and then said:

"… I… how old? I am in my twenty-fourth, of course. Soon I shall be twenty-four. Forgive me, I am tired!" he said. "And tiredness is not at all the expression for my condition. Do you know that, when one dreams and knows that one is dreaming and tries to wake and cannot wake up? That is exactly how I feel. I absolutely must have fever; I can explain it to myself in no other way. Would you believe that my feet are cold up to the knees? If one may say so, for the knees of course are no longer the feet - excuse me, I am confused in the highest degree, and in the end that is no wonder if one has been whistled at early in the morning with the… with the pneumothorax and afterward listens to the speeches of this Herr Albin and on top of that in a horizontal position. Imagine, I always feel as if I were no longer quite allowed to trust my five senses, and I must say that embarrasses me even more than the heat in my face and the cold feet. Tell me openly: do you consider it possible that Frau Stöhr knows how to make twenty-eight fish sauces? I do not mean whether she can really make them - I consider that impossible - but whether she actually just now claimed it at table or whether it only seemed so to me; that alone I should like to know."

Settembrini looked at him. He seemed not to have listened. Again his eyes had "looked themselves fixed," had fallen into a fixed and blind adjustment, and as this morning he said three times each "so, so, so" and "look, look, look" - mockingly thoughtful and with a sharp s-sound.

"Twenty-four, you said?" he then asked…

"No, twenty-eight!" said Hans Castorp. "Twenty-eight fish sauces! Not sauces in general, but specifically fish sauces; that is the monstrous thing."

"Engineer!" said Settembrini angrily and admonishingly. "Collect yourself and leave me in peace with this slovenly nonsense! I know nothing of it and want to know nothing of it. - In your twenty-fourth, you said? Hm… Permit me one more question, or an unbinding proposal, if you like. Since the stay does not seem to be beneficial to you, since you find yourself physically and, unless everything deceives me, mentally as well unwell among us - how would it be, then, if you renounced growing older here, in short, if tonight you packed up again and tomorrow with the scheduled express trains made off and away?"

"You mean I should leave?" asked Hans Castorp… "When I have only just arrived? But no, how can I judge after the first day!"

By chance he looked into the neighboring room at these words and there saw Frau Chauchat from the front, her narrow eyes and broad cheekbones. What, he thought, what and whom in all the world does she remind me of? But his tired head, despite some effort, did not know how to answer the question.

"Naturally it is not quite so easy for me to acclimatize among you up here," he continued. "That was to be foreseen, and to throw the gun into the grain at once just because I shall perhaps be a little confused and hot for a few days - why, I would have to be ashamed of myself, I would feel downright cowardly, and besides it would go against all reason - no, say so yourself…"

He suddenly spoke very urgently, with agitated movements of the shoulders, and seemed to want to induce the Italian to withdraw his proposal in all due form.

"I salute reason," answered Settembrini. "Incidentally, I salute courage too. What you say can well be heard; it would be difficult to raise anything valid against it. I too have observed fine cases of acclimatization. Last year there was Fraulein Kneifer, Ottilie Kneifer, quite of family, the daughter of a higher state functionary. She was here perhaps a year and a half and had settled in so excellently that when her health was completely restored - for that happens, one sometimes becomes healthy up here - that even then she would not leave at any price. She begged the Hofrat with all her soul to be allowed to stay longer; she could not and would not go home, here was her home, here she was happy; but since there was a lively influx and her room was needed, her pleading was in vain, and they insisted upon discharging her as healthy. Ottilie developed high fever; she made her curve climb vigorously. But she was unmasked by having the usual thermometer exchanged for a 'Silent Sister' - you do not yet know what that is; it is a thermometer without numbering, the doctor checks it by applying a measure to it and then draws the curve himself. Ottilie, my dear sir, had 36.9; Ottilie was fever-free. Then she bathed in the lake - we were writing the beginning of May then, we had night frosts, the lake was not exactly ice-cold; strictly speaking it had a few degrees above zero. She remained in the water a good while in order to catch this or that - but the result? She was and remained healthy. She departed in pain and despair, inaccessible to the consoling words of her parents. 'What am I to do down there?' she cried repeatedly. 'Here is my homeland!' I do not know what became of her… But it seems to me you are not listening, Engineer? It is costing you effort to keep on your feet, unless everything deceives me. Lieutenant, here is your cousin!" he turned to Joachim, who had just stepped up. "Lead him to bed! He unites reason and courage, but this evening he is a little frail."

"No, really, I understood everything!" Hans Castorp protested. "So the Silent Sister is only a mercury column, entirely without numbering - you see, I have grasped it perfectly!" But then he nevertheless rode up in the elevator with Joachim, together with several other patients - sociability was ended for today, people were dispersing and seeking halls and loggias for the evening rest cure. Hans Castorp went along to Joachim's room. The floor of the corridor with its coir runner performed gentle wave motions beneath his feet, but he did not find it further unpleasant. He sat down in Joachim's large flowered armchair - such a chair stood in his own room too - and lit himself a Maria Mancini. It tasted of glue, of coal, and many other things, only not as it should; yet he nevertheless continued to smoke it, while watching Joachim make himself ready for the rest cure, put on his litewka-like house jacket, draw an older overcoat over it, and then go out onto the balcony with the bedside lamp and his Russian exercise book, where he switched on the little lamp and, on the reclining chair, thermometer in his mouth, began with astonishing dexterity to wrap himself in two large camel's-hair blankets spread over the chair. Hans Castorp watched with sincere admiration how skillfully he carried it out. He struck the blankets, one after the other, first from the left lengthwise up under his armpit over himself, then from below over the feet, and then from the right, so that at last he formed a perfectly regular and smooth package, from which only head, shoulders, and arms looked out.

"You do that excellently," said Hans Castorp.

"It is practice," Joachim answered, holding the thermometer with his teeth as he spoke. "You will learn it too. Tomorrow we absolutely must get a couple of blankets for you. You can use them down below again, and here among us they are indispensable, especially since you do not have a fur sack."

"But I am not lying on the balcony at night," Hans Castorp declared. "I will not do that, I tell you straightaway. It would seem far too strange to me. Everything has its limits. And somehow, after all, I must mark the fact that I am only visiting among you up here. I shall sit here a little longer and smoke my cigar, as is proper. It tastes miserable, but I know that it is good, and that must suffice me for today. Now it is nearly nine o'clock - though unfortunately it is not even nine yet. But when it is half past nine, then things are already so far along that one can go to bed half-way normally."

A shiver of cold ran over him - one, and then several rapidly one after another. Hans Castorp sprang up and ran to the wall thermometer, as if it were a matter of catching it in flagrante. According to Reaumur there were nine degrees in the room. He touched the pipes and found them dead and cold. He murmured something disordered, to the effect that even if it was August, it was still a disgrace that there was no heating, for what mattered was not the name of the month one happened to be writing, but the prevailing temperature, and that was such that he was freezing like a dog. But his face burned. He sat down again, stood up once more, murmuringly asked permission to take Joachim's bedcover, and spread it over his lower body as he sat in the chair. Thus he sat, feverish and shivering, and tormented himself with the disgustingly tasting cigar. A great feeling of misery overcame him; it was to him as if things had never gone so badly for him in his life. "This is misery!" he murmured. But in between, quite suddenly, a wholly peculiar, extravagant feeling of joy and hope touched him, and after he had felt it, he sat there only in order to wait and see whether it might perhaps come again. But it did not come again; only the misery remained. And so at last he stood up, threw Joachim's cover back onto the bed, murmured with distorted mouth something like "Good night!" and "Just do not freeze to death!" and "You will fetch me again for breakfast, I suppose," and swayed across the corridor over into his room.

While undressing he sang to himself, though not from cheerfulness. Mechanically and without proper reflection he performed the small manipulations and cultural duties of the night toilette, poured bright-red mouthwash from the travel flask into the glass and gargled discreetly, washed his hands with his good and mild violet soap, and put on the long batiste shirt embroidered on the breast pocket with the letters H C. Then he lay down and put out the light, letting his hot, disturbed head fall back onto the American woman's death pillow.

Most definitely he had expected to sink at once into sleep, but this proved to be an error, and his eyelids, which earlier he had scarcely been able to hold open - now they absolutely would not stay closed, but opened with restless twitching as soon as he lowered them. It was not yet his accustomed sleeping time, he told himself, and then he had probably lain too much during the day. Outside, too, a carpet was being beaten - which was of course unlikely and in fact not the case at all; rather, it proved to be his heart, whose beating he heard outside himself and far away in the open air, exactly as if out there a carpet were being worked over with a woven cane beater.

It had not yet become completely dark in the room; the glow of the little lamps outside in the loggias, at Joachim's and at the couple's from the Bad Russian table, fell in through the open balcony door. And while Hans Castorp lay on his back with blinking lids, an impression suddenly renewed itself for him, a single one from the day, an observation that he had at once tried, with fright and tact, to forget. It was the expression Joachim's face had assumed when Marusja and her bodily qualities had been under discussion - that quite peculiarly piteous distortion of his mouth together with the blotchy pallor of his browned cheeks. Hans Castorp understood and saw through what it meant, understood and saw through it in so new, thorough, and intimate a way that the cane beater out there doubled its blows both in speed and in force and almost drowned out the sounds of the evening serenade in "Platz" - for there was again a concert in that hotel down there; a symmetrically built and tasteless operetta melody sounded across through the darkness, and Hans Castorp whistled along with it in a whispering tone (one can, after all, whistle whisperingly), while under the feather coverlet he beat time to it with his cold feet.

That, of course, was not the right way to fall asleep, and Hans Castorp now felt no inclination to do so at all. Since he had understood in such a novel and lively way why Joachim had changed color, the world seemed new to him, and that feeling of extravagant joy and hope touched him again in his innermost being. Incidentally, he was still waiting for something, without quite asking himself what. But when he heard how the neighbors on right and left ended the evening rest cure and sought their rooms in order to exchange the horizontal position outside for the one inside, he expressed to himself the conviction that the barbaric married couple would keep peace. I can calmly fall asleep, he thought. They will keep peace this evening; I expect it most definitely! But they did not do so, and Hans Castorp had not thought it sincerely at all; yes, to tell the truth, personally and for his part he would not even have understood it if they had kept the peace. Nevertheless he indulged in soundlessly thrust-out exclamations of the most violent astonishment at what he heard. "Unheard-of!" he cried without voice. "That is enormous! Who would have thought such a thing possible?" And in between he again took part with whispering lips in the tasteless operetta melody that persistently sounded over.

Later slumber came. But with it came the tangled dream images, still more tangled than in the first night, from which he often started up in fright or in pursuit of some confused idea. He dreamed he saw Hofrat Behrens walking along the garden paths with bent knees and arms hanging stiffly forward, adapting his long and somehow desolate-seeming steps to distant march music. When the Hofrat stopped before Hans Castorp, he wore spectacles with thick, perfectly round lenses and babbled absurdities. "Civilian of course," he said, and without asking permission pulled down Hans Castorp's eyelid with index and middle finger of his gigantic hand. "Honorable civilian, as I noticed at once. But not without talent, by no means without talent for increased general combustion! Would not stint the little years, the brisk service-years among us up here! Well, now hopla, gentlemen, and off with the pleasure stroll!" he cried, sticking both his enormous index fingers into his mouth and whistling upon them so peculiarly and resonantly that from various sides and in diminished form the teacher and Miss Robinson came flying through the air and sat down on his right and left shoulders, as in the dining hall they sat to Hans Castorp's right and left. Thus the Hofrat went away with hopping steps, while he reached behind his spectacles with a napkin to wipe his eyes - one did not know what there was to dry there, whether sweat or tears.

Then it seemed to the dreamer that he was on the schoolyard, where for so many years he had spent the pauses between lessons, and was in the act of borrowing a pencil from Madame Chauchat, who was likewise present. She gave him the red-colored pencil, only half-length now and fitted in a silver holder, while admonishing Hans Castorp in a pleasantly hoarse voice to be certain to give it back to her after the lesson, and when she looked at him with her narrow blue-gray-green eyes above the broad cheekbones, he tore himself violently up out of the dream, for now he had it and wanted to hold fast to what and whom she actually reminded him of so vividly. Hastily he secured the recognition for tomorrow, for he felt that sleep and dream were again enclosing him, and soon found himself in the position of having to seek refuge from Dr. Krokowski, who was pursuing him in order to perform soul-dissection upon him, of which Hans Castorp felt a mad, a truly nonsensical fear. He fled from the doctor on impeded feet past the glass walls through the balcony loggias, leaped down into the garden at risk of his life, in his distress even tried to climb the red-brown flagpole, and woke sweating at the moment when the pursuer seized him by the trouser leg.

Scarcely, however, had he calmed himself a little and fallen asleep again when the facts arranged themselves for him in the following way. He was trying to push Settembrini from his place with his shoulder, Settembrini who stood there and smiled - finely, dryly, and mockingly beneath the full black mustache, there where it bent upward in a handsome curve; and this smile itself was what Hans Castorp felt as an impairment. "You are disturbing!" he heard himself say distinctly. "Away with you! You are only a barrel-organ man, and you are disturbing here!" But Settembrini could not be pushed from his place, and Hans Castorp was still standing there, thinking what was to be done here, when quite unexpectedly he was granted the excellent insight into what time actually was: namely nothing other than simply a Silent Sister, a mercury column entirely without numbering, for those who wanted to cheat - over which he awoke with the definite intention of communicating this discovery to his cousin Joachim tomorrow.

Under such adventures and discoveries the night passed, and Hermine Kleefeld as well as Herr Albin and Captain Miklosich, the latter carrying Frau Stöhr away in his jaws and being pierced through with a spear by Prosecutor Paravant, played their confused roles in it. But Hans Castorp dreamed one dream twice that night, and both times in exactly the same form - the last time toward morning. He sat in the hall with the seven tables when amid the greatest crash the glass door fell into the latch and Madame Chauchat came in, in the white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. Instead of going to the Good Russian table, however, the ill-bred woman moved soundlessly toward Hans Castorp and silently offered him her hand to kiss - but it was not the back of her hand she offered him, but the inside, and Hans Castorp kissed her in the hand, in her unrefined, somewhat broad and short-fingered hand with the roughened skin at the sides of the nails. Then once again that feeling of wild sweetness penetrated him from head to foot, the feeling that had risen in him when, experimentally, he had felt himself rid of the pressure of honor and had enjoyed the bottomless advantages of shame - this he now felt again in his dream, only immeasurably more strongly.