The Magic Mountain (28 page)

Yes, the meals in the dining hall with its seven tables held the greatest fascination for Hans Castorp. He regretted the end of each, but his consolation was that very soon, in two or two and a half hours, he would be sitting there again—and once he sat down it would be as if he had never stood up. What happened in the meantime? Nothing. A brief walk up to the water trough or to the English quarter, a little rest in his lounge chair. Those were no serious interruptions, no obstacles worth taking seriously. It would have been different had it been work, some worry or trouble, that interposed itself—his mind could not have overlooked or bridged that sort of thing quite so easily. But such was not the case in the cleverly and pleasantly regimented life of the Berghof. When he stood up from one communal meal, Hans Castorp was already delighting in the next—insofar as “delighting” was the right word, and not too cheery, simple, light, or common a word for the anticipation bound up with being together again with a lady as ill as Frau Clavdia Chauchat. It is possible that the reader may be inclined to see only such expressions, that is, cheery and common ones, as fitting and proper for the emotional life of a person like Hans Castorp; but we would like to remind the reader that as a young man of reason and conscience he could not simply “delight” in watching and being near Frau Chauchat; and since we must know, we can unequivocally state that had this word been suggested to him, he would have shrugged and cast it aside.

Indeed, he was getting to be very particular about how he did express himself—a characteristic well worth noting. As he walked around, his cheeks flushed with dry fever, he hummed to himself, sang to himself, because in his present state he was sensitive to all things musical. He hummed a little song that he had heard sung in a light soprano voice, who knew where or when, at some party or charity concert, and that had turned up now in his memory, a gentle bit of nonsense that began:

How oft it thrills me just to hear
You say some simple word,

and he was about to add:

That spoken from your lips, my dear,
Does leave my heart so stirred!

and suddenly he shrugged and said, “Ridiculous!” and cast aside the delicate little song as tasteless and insipidly sentimental—rejecting it, however, with a certain austere melancholy. Some young man who had “given his heart,” as they say, given it calmly, legitimately, and with a promising view to the future, to a healthy little goose down there in the flatlands—such a young man might have found satisfaction and taken pleasure in such a heartfelt song, abandoning himself to his legitimate, promising, reasonable, and ultimately cheerful emotions. When applied to him and his relationship with Madame Chauchat, however—and the word “relationship” must be credited to Hans Castorp, we refuse any responsibility for it—such verses were most decidedly inappropriate. Lying in his lounge chair, he found himself moved to pronounce upon them an aesthetic verdict of “Silly!”—and broke off now, turning up his nose, although he knew of nothing more suitable to replace them with.

He did take satisfaction in one thing, however, as he lay there listening to his heart, his physical heart, pounding rapidly and audibly in the stillness—the stillness that was prescribed by house rules and reigned over the entire Berghof during the main rest cure of the day. His heart was pounding insistently, urgently, the way it had done almost constantly ever since he had arrived here; and yet of late that did not upset Hans Castorp as it had the first few days. One could no longer say that it thudded on its own accord, for no reason, and without any connection to his soul. There was a connection now, or at least it would not have been difficult to establish one—a justifiable emotion could easily be assigned to his body’s overwrought activity. Hans Castorp needed only to think of Frau Chauchat—and he did think of her—and his heart had a suitable emotion to make it pound.

The weather was vile—in that regard Hans Castorp had no luck with his short vacation in these climes. It wasn’t snowing, exactly, but it had been raining heavily for days; ugly, thick fog filled the valley, where thunderstorms raged and rolled in knotty reverberations—absurdly superfluous, really, considering it was so cold that the heat had been turned on in the dining hall.

“What a shame,” Joachim said. “I had thought we would have breakfast up on Schatzalp or wherever at least once. But it looks as if it’s not to be. Let’s hope your last week will be better.”

But Hans Castorp replied, “No matter. I’m not itching for another excursion. My first didn’t turn out all that well. It does me more good just to live each day as it comes, without much variety. That’s for those who spend years up here. But with my three weeks, what do I need variety for?”

And that was how it was—he kept himself occupied, felt his days were full enough as things stood. Whatever hopes he might have were just as easily fulfilled or disappointed here as on some Schatzalp or other. It wasn’t boredom that bothered him; on the contrary, he began to fear that the end of his stay was winging its way toward him. His second week was passing quickly now; two-thirds of his time would soon be gone, and once the last third began, he would have to start thinking of packing. For Hans Castorp, the initial refreshment of his sense of time was long since past; the days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.

Is it necessary to spell out those private experiences, which both weighed down Hans Castorp’s days and gave them wings? But everyone knows them: flimsy, tender, perfectly normal experiences that would have taken the same course even in a more reasonable and promising situation, where the sentimental little song about “how oft it thrills me” would have been more applicable.

It was impossible for Madame Chauchat not to notice at least something of the threads strung between a certain table and her own; and it was definitely part of Hans Castorp’s uninhibited plan that she should notice something, indeed as much as possible. We call his plan uninhibited, because he was fully aware of just how irrational his situation was. But then, anyone in his condition, or incipient condition, will want the other side to be aware of it, even if there is no reason or common sense in doing so. That is how we humans are.

After Frau Chauchat had turned toward his table two or three times at meals, drawn either quite by chance or by some magnetic effect, and each time found her eyes met by Hans Castorp’s, she looked his way a fourth time on purpose—and met his eyes again. The fifth time, she did not catch him looking at her; he was not on guard at just that moment. And yet he immediately felt she was looking at him and turned his gaze so eagerly to her that she smiled and glanced away. Her smile filled him with apprehension and delight. If it meant she thought him childish, she was mistaken. But he definitely had to refine his tactics. And so at the sixth opportunity, when he felt, sensed, knew somewhere deep within, that she was looking his way, he pretended to stare with emphatic distaste at a pimply lady who had stepped up to his table to chat with the great-aunt; he held his eyes fixed on her for a good two or three minutes, never yielding until he was certain that the Kirghiz eyes across the way had given up—a strange bit of playacting that Frau Chauchat could easily have seen through, indeed was meant to see through, so that Hans Castorp’s refinement and self-control would give her pause. But something happens now: in a break between courses, Frau Chauchat turns around nonchalantly to survey the room. Hans Castorp has been on guard. Their eyes meet. And as they look at each other—the sick woman peering at him with vague mockery, Hans Castorp staring back fiercely, even clenching his teeth as he holds firm—her napkin begins to slip from her lap to the floor. With an anxious start, she reaches for it; he, too, is unnerved, is pulled up halfway from his chair, and is about to dash blindly across eight yards and around an intervening table to come to her aid, as if it would be a catastrophe for her napkin to touch the ground. She manages to grab it just before it reaches the stone tiles. But in that stretched and bent position and still holding the napkin by one corner, she scowls, evidently annoyed at her unreasonable little burst of panic, for which she apparently blames him. Now she glances his way again, notices his wide eyes and the way he is poised to leap—and she turns away with a smile.

The event left Hans Castorp triumphant, absolutely exuberant. But it came not without its setback, because Madame Chauchat did not turn his way even once for two whole days, for ten long meals—indeed, refrained from her custom of “presenting” herself to her audience as she entered the dining hall. That was hard. But since such acts of omission were without doubt committed for his sake, there was clearly a connection between the two of them now, even if it had taken a negative form; and that would have to suffice.

He had come to realize that Joachim had been quite right when he said that it was not all that easy to make acquaintances here, except for tablemates. During the one brief hour after supper—and sometimes that shrank to a mere twenty minutes—when there was some regular social interchange, without exception Madame Chauchat would take her seat at the back of the little salon, an area reserved apparently for the Good Russian table, where she was joined by the gentleman with the concave chest, the droll frizzy-haired girl, silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the two hunch-shouldered youths. And Joachim was always trying to urge an early departure so as not to cut short his evening rest cure, as he said, and perhaps for other reasons of regimen, which he did not go into but which Hans Castorp guessed and respected. We accused Hans Castorp before of being uninhibited, but whatever the aim of his desires, a social acquaintance with Frau Chauchat was not what he had in mind, and he was in fundamental agreement with those circumstances that worked against it. The vague, tense connection that his looks and actions had established between him and the Russian woman was of an extrasocial nature, entailing no obligations, indeed intended not to entail them. From his standpoint, a considerable amount of social distance suited their connection, but the fact that thoughts of “Clavdia” set his heart pounding was certainly not a sufficient reason for a grandson of Hans Lorenz Castorp to have his firmly held convictions shaken. In reality—that is, in any sense beyond this secret connection with her—he could not possibly have anything to do with a strange woman who lived her life at various resorts, separated from her husband and yet never wearing a wedding ring, who had bad posture, slammed doors behind her, rolled her bread into little pills, and doubtless chewed her fingernails; deep chasms separated her existence from his, and he could never have defended her against criticisms that he himself acknowledged. Quite understandably, Hans Castorp was a man without any personal arrogance; but an arrogance of a more general and traditional sort was written on his face and in the drowsy look in his eyes. It was the source of the sense of superiority that he could not and would not throw off when considering Frau Chauchat’s character and person. Strangely enough, it was the day he heard Frau Chauchat speak German that this general sense of superiority became especially vivid, that he was perhaps even conscious of it for the first time. It was after a meal, she was standing in the dining room with both hands in the pockets of her sweater, trying to carry on a conversation with another patient, an acquaintance from the lounging arcade presumably, struggling in a most charming way, as Hans Castorp could hear, to speak German; and he suddenly discovered a pride in his own mother tongue that he had never known before—and, simultaneously, an urge to sacrifice that pride to the enchantment that filled him at the sound of her winsomely bungled, broken stammering.

In a word, Hans Castorp saw his silent relationship to this one careless person among all the others up here as a vacation adventure, which had no claim before the court of reason—or of his own reasonable conscience—and that was primarily because Frau Chauchat was sick, listless, feverish, and worm-eaten deep inside, a condition that was closely bound up with the dubious nature of her whole being and that itself contributed strongly to Hans Castorp’s sense of caution and need to keep his distance. No, it never entered his mind to seek out a real acquaintanceship. As for the rest, it would all be over with no consequences, for better or worse, in another week and a half, when he would enter training with Tunder and Wilms.

For the present, however, he found himself beginning to see the emotions, tensions, satisfactions, and disappointments growing from his tender relationship to this patient as the true purpose and meaning of his vacation, to live entirely for them and allow his mood to be dependent on their success. Conditions here were most beneficial for encouraging him, because people lived together in a restricted area and followed a rigid schedule mandatory for all. Granted, Frau Chauchat’s room was on a different floor—the second—from his own, and she took her rest cures, as Hans Castorp learned from Fräulein Engelhart, in the general lounging area located on the roof, the same one where Captain Miklosich had turned off the lights recently. But the possibility, indeed inevitability, of meeting her presented itself at each of the day’s five meals and on countless other routine occasions from morning till evening. And Hans Castorp thought that was marvelous—as was also the fact that life here had no cares or worries to block the view. At the same time, however, there was something suffocating about being locked up in a box together with auspicious chance.

And yet he did help things along a bit, by putting his mind to the task and figuring out how best to improve his luck. Since Frau Chauchat normally arrived late for meals, he made a point of being late himself, so that he could meet her on the way. He dawdled in his room and wasn’t ready when Joachim came by to fetch him, told his cousin to go on ahead, said he would catch up. Following the advice of instinct, he would wait the few moments he thought necessary and then hurry down to the second floor; but instead of continuing down the same set of stairs, he would follow the corridor almost to the far end, to a second stairway, which was very close to a door he had come to know quite well—room 7. And at every step of the way along this hall connecting the two sets of stairs, there was a chance that one particular door might open at any moment—and so it did, on repeated occasions, slamming shut behind Frau Chauchat, who would emerge soundlessly and glide soundlessly toward the stairs. She might precede him, tucking her hair with her hand, or Hans Castorp might precede her, and then he would feel her eyes on his back, which made his legs cramp and caused pins and needles up and down his spine. But playing the role to the hilt, he would pretend not to know she was even there, as if he led his life in solitary, stout independence. He would bury his hands in his coat pockets and roll his shoulders pointlessly or clear his throat noisily while pounding his chest with his fist—all to proclaim his indifference.