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Doubts and Considerations

On Tuesday, then, our hero had been with those up here for a week, and so, when he returned from the morning walk, he found the bill in his room, his first weekly bill, a neatly executed commercial document enclosed in a greenish envelope, with an illustrated heading (the Berghof building was alluringly depicted up there) and adorned at the left side with an extract from the prospectus arranged in a narrow column, in which the "psychic treatment according to the most modern principles" was also mentioned in spaced type. The calligraphic listings themselves came to almost exactly 180 francs; namely, 12 francs a day fell to board together with medical treatment, and 8 francs a day to the room; furthermore 20 francs to the item "admission fee" and 10 francs to the disinfection of the room, while smaller gratuities for laundry, beer, and the wine consumed at the first evening meal rounded out the sum.

Hans Castorp found nothing to object to when he checked the addition with Joachim. "Yes, I make no use of the medical treatment," he said, "but that is my affair; it is included in the pension price, and I cannot demand that it be deducted; how should that be done anyway? In the disinfection they make a clean profit, for they cannot possibly have pulverized 10 francs' worth of H₂CO in order to fumigate the American woman. But all in all I must say I find it rather cheap than dear, considering what is offered." And so before second breakfast they went to the "Administration" to settle the debt.

The "Administration" was located on the ground floor: if, beyond the hall, one followed the corridor past the cloakroom and the kitchen and pantry rooms, one could not miss the door, especially since it was distinguished by a porcelain sign. There Hans Castorp gained with interest a certain insight into the commercial center of the institution's operation. It was a proper little office: a typewriter young lady was at work, and three male employees sat bent over desks, while in the adjoining room a gentleman of the higher aspect of a chief or director worked at a freestanding rolltop desk and cast over his eyeglass only a cold and objectively appraising glance at the clients. While one processed them at the counter, changed a note, collected, receipted, they preserved a serious-modest, silent, indeed obedient bearing, like young Germans who transfer respect for the authorities, for the official bureau, to every writing and service room; but outside, on the way to breakfast and later in the course of the day, they chatted somewhat about the constitution of the Berghof Institute, with Joachim, as the resident and knowledgeable one, answering his cousin's questions.

Hofrat Behrens was by no means the proprietor and owner of the institution, although one could very well gain that impression. Above and behind him stood invisible powers, which manifested themselves to a certain degree only in the shape of the bureau: a board of directors, a joint-stock company, to which it might not be bad to belong, since according to Joachim's credible assurance, despite high doctors' salaries and the most liberal principles of management, it could distribute a juicy dividend among its members every year. The Hofrat, then, was not an independent man; he was nothing but an agent, a functionary, a relative of higher powers, the first and highest one, to be sure, the soul of the whole, of determining influence upon the entire organization, the commissariat not excluded, although as directing physician he was naturally above any occupation with the commercial part of the operation. Born in northwestern Germany, he had, as was known, come years before into this position against intention and life-plan: brought up here by his wife, whose remains had long since been embraced by the cemetery of "Dorf" - the picturesque cemetery of Dorf Davos up there on the right-hand slope, farther back toward the entrance of the valley. She had been a very lovely, if rather over-eyed and asthenic appearance, judging by the photographs that stood everywhere in the Hofrat's service apartment, as well as by the oil portraits that, deriving from his own amateur hand, hung there on the walls. After she had given him two children, a son and a daughter, her light body, seized by heat, had been drawn up into these regions, and in a few months its wasting away and consumption had been completed. It was said that Behrens, who had idolized her, had been so severely struck by the blow that he had temporarily fallen into melancholy and eccentricity and had made himself conspicuous in the street by giggling, gesturing, and talking to himself. Then he had not returned to his original circle of life but had remained on the spot: certainly also because he did not want to part from the grave; but the decisive reason had probably been the less sentimental one that he himself had caught something and, according to his own scientific insight, simply belonged here. Thus he had naturalized himself as one of those doctors who are fellow sufferers of those whose stay they supervise; who do not, independent of illness, combat it from the free estate of personal intactness, but themselves bear its mark - a peculiar but by no means isolated case, which without doubt has its advantages as well as its questionable side. Comradeship between doctor and patient is certainly to be welcomed, and it may be said plausibly that only the sufferer can be the sufferer's guide and savior. But is true spiritual mastery over a power possible in someone who himself counts among its slaves? Can one free others who is himself subject? The sick doctor remains a paradox for simple feeling, a problematic phenomenon. Is his intellectual knowledge of illness perhaps not so much enriched and morally strengthened by experiential knowledge as clouded and confused by it? He does not look illness in the eye in clear opposition; he is compromised, is not unambiguous as a party; and with all due caution one must ask whether someone belonging to the world of illness can actually be interested in the healing or even preservation of others in the same sense as a man of health…

Of these doubts and considerations Hans Castorp expressed some, in his own way, when he chatted with Joachim about the "Berghof" and its medical director; but Joachim remarked against this that one did not know at all whether Hofrat Behrens was still himself a patient today - probably he had long since recovered. It was long ago that he had begun practicing here; he had carried on for a while on his own account and had quickly made a name for himself as a keen-eared auscultator as well as a sure pneumotomist. Then the "Berghof" had secured his person, the institute with which he had now for almost a decade been so closely grown together… Back there, at the end of the northwestern wing, lay his apartment (Dr. Krokowski lived not far from it), and that old-noble lady, the sister superior of whom Settembrini had spoken so mockingly and whom Hans Castorp had until now seen only fleetingly, presided over the little widower's household. Otherwise the Hofrat was alone, for his son was studying at universities in the German Reich, and his daughter was already married: namely to an advocate in the French part of Switzerland. Young Behrens came to visit occasionally during the holidays, which had already happened once during Joachim's stay, and he said that the ladies of the institution were then very much moved, temperatures rose, jealousies led to quarrels and disputes on the reclining halls, and increased traffic prevailed at Dr. Krokowski's special consultation hour…

For the assistant's private consultations a room of his own had been assigned, which, like the large examination room, the laboratory, the operating room, and the irradiation studio, was situated in the well-lit basement floor of the institution building. We speak of a basement floor because the stone staircase that led there from the ground floor did indeed awaken the idea that one was going into a cellar - which, however, rested almost entirely on deception. For first, the ground floor was rather high up, and second, the Berghof building as a whole was erected on sloping ground, on the mountain; and those "basement" rooms looked out toward the front, toward the garden and the valley: circumstances by which the effect and meaning of the staircase were in a sense crossed and canceled. For one did indeed believe one was descending its steps from ground level, but below one found oneself still and again at ground level, or only a few feet beneath it - an amusing impression for Hans Castorp when one afternoon he accompanied his cousin, who was to be weighed by the bath attendant, "down" into this sphere. Clinical brightness and cleanliness ruled there; everything was kept white upon white, and the doors gleamed in white enamel, including the one to Dr. Krokowski's reception room, to which the scholar's visiting card was fastened with a drawing pin and to which two steps led specially down from the height of the corridor, so that the room behind it acquired a dungeon-like character. This door lay to the right of the staircase, at the end of the corridor, and Hans Castorp had a special eye upon it while, waiting for Joachim, he walked up and down the passage. He also saw someone come out, a lady who had arrived recently and whose name he did not yet know, a little, delicate one with forehead curls and gold earrings. She bent low as she climbed the steps and gathered up her skirt, while with the other small ringed hand she pressed her little cloth to her mouth and over it, from her bent posture, stared into emptiness with large pale, disordered eyes. Thus she hurried with narrow little steps, her petticoat rustling, to the staircase, suddenly stopped as though remembering something, set herself tripping into motion again, and vanished in the stairwell, still bent and without taking the little cloth from her lips.

Behind her, when the door had opened, it had been much darker than in the white corridor: the clinical brightness of these lower rooms evidently did not reach into there; veiled half-light, deep twilight, prevailed, as Hans Castorp noticed, in Dr. Krokowski's analytical cabinet.