A WEEK passed before Hans Castorp received, through the Directress von Mylendonk, the summons to present himself in the x-ray laboratory. He had not liked to press matters. The Berghof was a busy place, doctors and assistants had their hands full. New guests had recently come in: two Russian students with shocks of hair and black blouses closed to the throat, showing not a vestige of linen; a Dutch married couple, who were given places at Settembrini’s table; and a hunch-backed Mexican, who frightened his table by fearful attacks of asthma, when he would clutch his neighbour, whether man or woman, in an iron grip like a vice, and draw him, as it were, struggling and crying for help, into the circle of his own extremity. The dining-room was nearly full, though the winter season did not actually begin until October. And Hans Castorp’s case was scarcely of such severity as to give him any special claim to attention. Frau Stöhr, for all her stupidity and ill breeding, was unquestionably worse off than he—not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One must have lacked all discrimination not to have behaved retiringly, in Hans Castorp’s place—particularly since
discrimination was in the atmosphere of the house. The mild cases were of no great account, that he had often heard. They were slightingly spoken of, looked at askance, not only by the more serious and the very serious cases, but even by each other. Logically, of course, each mild case was thus driven to think slightingly of itself; yet preserved its individual self-respect by merging it with the general, as was natural and human.
“Oh,” they would say, of this or that patient, “there’s not much amiss with him. He hardly even ought to be up here, he has no cavities at all.” Such was the spirit—it was aristocratic in its own special sense, and Hans Castorp deferred to it, out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. It was natural to him to conform to the proverb which bids us, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And indeed travellers show small breeding when they jeer at the customs and standards of their hosts, for of characteristics that do honour to their possessors there are all sorts and kinds. Even toward Joachim Hans Castorp felt a certain deference—not so much because he was the older inhabitant, his guide and cicerone in these new surroundings, as because he was unquestionably the more serious case of the two. Such being the attitude, it was easy to understand that each patient inclined to make the most he could of his individual case, even exaggerating its seriousness, so as to belong to the aristocracy, or come as close to it as possible. So Hans Castorp, when asked at table, might add a couple of tenths to his temperature, and could never help feeling flattered when they shook their fingers at him and called him an artful dodger. But even when he laid it on a little, he still remained a member of the lower orders, in whom an attitude of unassuming diffidence was only right and proper.
He took up the life of his first three weeks, that familiar, regular, well-regulated life with Joachim, and it went as pat as though he had never left it off. The interruption, indeed, had been insignificant, as he saw when he resumed his seat at table. Joachim, who laid deliberate stress on such occasions, had decorated his place with a few flowers; but there was no great ceremony about the greetings of the other guests, these were almost what they would have been after a separation of three hours instead of three weeks. This was not due to indifference toward his simple and sympathetic personality, nor to preoccupation with their own absorbing physical state; but merely because they had actually not been conscious of the interval. And Hans Castorp could readily follow them in this; since sitting there in his place at the end of the table, between the schoolmistress and Miss Robinson, it was as though he had sat here no longer ago than yesterday at the furthest.
If, even at his own table, the end of his retirement caused no stir, how should it have been remarked in the rest of the dining-room? And literally no soul had taken notice of it save Settembrini, who strolled over at the end of the meal to exchange a lively greeting. Hans Castorp, indeed, would have made a mental reservation, in which he may or may not have been justified: he told himself that Clavdia Chauchat had noticed his return, that she had no sooner made her tardy entrance, and let the glass door slam behind her, than she rested her narrow gaze upon him—which he had met with his own—and that even after she sat down, she had turned and looked toward him, smiling over her shoulder, as she had three weeks before, on the day of his examination. The movement had been so open, so regardless—regardless of both himself and the other guests—that he did not know whether to be in ecstasies over it or to take it as a mark of contempt and feel angry. At all events, his heart had contracted beneath this glance, which so markedly and intoxicatingly gave the lie to the lack of social relations subsisting between him and the fair patient. It had contracted almost painfully at the moment when the glass door slammed, for to that moment he had looked forward with his breath coming thick and fast.
It must be said that Hans Castorp’s sentiments toward the patient of the “good” Russian table had made distinct progress during his retirement. The sympathy he entertained in his mind and his simple heart for this medium-sized person with the gliding gait and the “Kirghiz” eyes, as good as amounted to being “in love”—we shall let the word stand, although in strictness it is a conception of “down below,” a word of the plains, capable of giving rise to a misconception: namely, that the tender ditty beginning “One word from thy sweet lips” was to some extent applicable to his state. Her picture had hovered before him in those early hours when he had lain awake and watched the dawn unveil his chamber; or at evening when the twilight thickened. It had been vividly present the night Settembrini had suddenly entered his room and turned on the light; was the reason why he had coloured under the humanistic eye. In each hour of his diminished day he had thought of her: her mouth, her cheek-bones, her eyes, whose colour, shape, and position bit into his very soul; her drooping back, the posture of her head, her cervical vertebra above the rounding of her blouse, her arms enhanced by their thin gauze covering. Possessed of these thoughts, his hours had sped on soundless feet; if we have concealed the fact, we did so out of sympathy for the turmoil of his conscience, which mingled with the terrifying joy his visions imparted. Yes, he felt both terror and dread; he felt a vague and boundless, utterly mad and extravagant anticipation, a nameless anguish of joy which at times so oppressed the young man’s heart, his actual and corporeal heart, that he would lay one hand in the neighbourhood of that organ, while he carried the other to his brow and held it like a shield before his eyes, whispering: “Oh, my God!”
For behind that brow were thoughts—or half-thoughts—which imparted to the visions their perilous sweetness. Thoughts that had to do with Madame Chauchat’s recklessness and abandon, her ailing state, the heightening and accentuation of her physical parts by disease, the corporealization, so to speak, of all her being as an effect of disease—an effect in which he, Hans Castorp, by the physician’s verdict, was now to share. He comprehended the grounds of her audacity, her total disregard in smile and glance of the fact that no social relation existed between them, that they did not even know each other; it was as though they belonged to no social system, as though it were not even necessary that they should speak to each other! Precisely this it was that frightened Hans Castorp; for frightened he was, in the same sense as when, in the consulting-room, he had looked from Joachim’s nude body with panic-stricken searching up to his eyes—only that then the grounds of his fear had been pity and concern, whereas here something quite different was in play.
But now the Berghof life, that wonderfully favoured and well-regulated existence, was once more in full swing on its narrow stage. Hans Castorp, whilst awaiting his xray examination, continued to enjoy its measured course, together with good Cousin Joachim, and to do, hour for hour, precisely as he did. No question but his cousin’s society was beneficial to our young man. For though Joachim’s were but a
companionship in suffering, yet he suffered, as it were, conformably with military etiquette; even, though unconsciously, to the point of finding satisfaction in the service of the cure, of substituting it for the service down below and making of it an interim profession. Hans Castorp was not so dull as not to perceive all this, yet at the same time he was aware of its corrective and restraining influence upon his more civilian temper. It may have been this companionship, its example and the control it exercised, which held him back from overt steps and rash undertakings. For he saw all that Joachim had to endure from the daily assaults of an orange-scented atmosphere, commingled of such elements as round brown eyes, a little ruby, a great deal of unwarranted laughter, and a bosom fair to outward eyes. The honour and good sense which made Joachim flee these enticements gripped Hans Castorp, kept him under control, and prevented him from “borrowing a lead-pencil” so to speak—from the narrow-eyed one, a thing which he otherwise, from what we know of him, might well have been ready to do.
Joachim never spoke of the laughter-loving Marusja, and thus Hans Castorp could not mention Clavdia Chauchat. He made up for this by his stolen commerce with the schoolmistress at table, when he would sit supporting his chin after the manner of old Hans Lorenz, and tax the spinster with her weakness for the charming invalid, until her face positively flamed. He pressed her to find out new and interesting facts about Madame Chauchat’s personal affairs, her origin, her husband, her age, the particulars of her illness. He wanted to know if she had children. Oh, no, she had none; what should a woman like her do with children? Probably she was strictly forbidden to have any, and if she did, what kind of children would they be? Hans Castorp was forced to acquiesce. And now it was probably late in the day, he threw out, with prodigious objectivity. Madame Chauchat’s profile, at times, seemed to him already a little sharp. She must be over thirty. Fräulein Engelhart rejected the idea with scorn. Thirty? At worst not more than twenty-eight. She forbade her neighbour to use such words about Clavdia’s profile. It was the softest, sweetest, most youthful profile in the world, and at the same time interesting—of course it was not the profile of any ordinary healthy bread-and-butter miss. To punish him, she went on to say that she knew Frau Chauchat entertained a male visitor, a certain fellow-countryman who lived down in the Platz. She received him afternoons in her chamber.
It was a good shot. Hans Castorp’s face changed in spite of himself; he tried to react, saying: “Well, well! You don’t say so!” but the words sounded strained. He was incapable of treating lightly the existence of this fellow-countryman of Frau Chauchat, much as he wished to appear to do so, and came back to it again and again, his lips twitching. A young man? Young and good-looking, according to all accounts, the schoolmistress answered; she could not say from her own observation. Was he ill?
Only a light case, at most. “Let us hope,” Hans Castorp remarked with scorn, “that he displays more linen than the other two, at the ‘bad’ Russian table.” Fräulein Engelhart, on punishment intent, said she could vouch for that. He gave in, and admitted that it was a matter for concern. He earnestly charged her to find out all she could about this young man who came and went between the Platz and Frau
Chauchat’s room. A few days later she brought him, not information about the young Russian, but a fresh and startling piece of news. She knew that Clavdia Chauchat was having her portrait painted, and asked Hans Castorp if he knew it too. If not, he might be assured she had it on the best authority. She had been sitting for some time, to a person here in the house, and the person was—the Hofrat! Yes, Herr Hofrat Behrens, no less, and he received her for the purpose almost daily in his private dwelling. This intelligence affected Hans Castorp even more than the other. He made several forced jokes about it. Why, certainly, the Hofrat was known to occupy himself with oil-painting. Why not? It wasn’t a crime, anybody was free to paint. And the sittings took place in the widower’s own house—he hoped, at least, that Fräulein von Mylendonk was present! The schoolmistress objected that the Directress was probably too busy. No busier than the doctor ought to be, Hans Castorp severely rejoined. The remark sounded final; but he was far from letting the subject drop. He exhausted himself in questions: about the picture, what size it was, and whether it was a head or a knee-length; about the hours of the sitting—but Fräulein Engelhart could not gratify him with these particulars, and had to put him off until she could make further inquiry.
Hans Castorp measured 99.7° as a result of this communication. The visits Frau Chauchat received upset him far less than these she made. Her personal and private life—quite aside from what went on in it—had begun to be a source of anguish and unrest; how much keener, then, were his feelings when he heard such questionable things about the way she spent her time! Speaking generally, it was altogether possible that her relations with the Russian visitor had a disinterested and harmless character. But Hans Castorp had been for some time now inclined to reject harmless and disinterested explanations as being in the nature of “twaddle”; nor could he regard in any other light this oil-painting, considered as a bond of interest between a widower with a robust vocabulary and a narrow-eyed, soft-stepping young female. The taste displayed by the Hofrat in his choice of a model was too like Hans Castorp’s own for him to put great faith in the disinterested character of the affair, and the thought of the Hofrat’s purple cheeks and bloodshot, goggling eyes only strengthened his scepticism. An observation which he made in these days, of his own accord and quite by
chance, had a different effect upon him, though here again what he saw confirmed his own taste. There sat, at the same table with Frau Salomon and the greedy schoolboy with the glasses, at the cousins’ left, near the side door, a patient who was, so Hans Castorp had heard, a native of Mannheim. He was some thirty years old; his hair was thin, his teeth poor, and he had a self-depreciating manner of speech. He it was who played the piano evenings, usually the wedding march from Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was said to be very religious—as “those up here” naturally often were. Every Sunday he went to service down in the Platz, and in the rest-cure he read devotional books with a chalice or palm branch on the front cover. This man’s eyes, so Hans Castorp one day observed, travelled the same road as his own: they hung upon Madame Chauchat’s lissom person with timid, doglike devotion. Once Hans Castorp had remarked this, he could not forbear corroborating it again and again. He saw him stand, of an evening, in the card-room, among the other guests, quite lost in gazing at the lovely, contaminate creature on the sofa in the small salon, in talk with the whimsical, fuzzy-haired Tamara, Dr. Blumenkohl, and the hollow-chested, stooping young men who were her table-mates. He saw him turn away, then twist his head, with a piteous expression of the upper lip, and roll his eyes back over his shoulder in her direction. He saw him colour and not look up, but then gaze avidly as with a crash the glass door fell to, and Frau Chauchat slipped to her place. And more than once he saw how the poor soul would place himself, after the meal, between the
“good” Russian table and the exit, in order that she might pass close by him; she gave him neither glance nor thought, while he devoured her at close range with eyes full of sadness to their very depths.
This discovery of his affected young Hans Castorp no little, though the plaintive, devouring gaze of the Mannheimer did not trouble his rest like the thought of Clavdia Chauchat’s private relations with Hofrat Behrens, a man so much his superior in age, person, and position. Clavdia took no interest in the Mannheimer—had she done so, it would not have escaped Hans Castorp’s perception; in this case it was not the dart of jealousy he felt pierce his soul. But he did have all the sensations which the drunkenness of passion knows, when it sees its own case duplicated in the outer world, and which form a most fantastic mixture of disgust and fellow-feeling. To explore and lay open all the windings of his emotions would keep us far too long; suffice it to say that his observation of the Mannheimer gave our poor young friend enough to think on and to suffer.
In this wise passed the week before his x-ray examination. He had not known it was so long. But one morning at early breakfast he received the order through the Directress (she had a fresh stye, so this harmless though disfiguring ailment was clearly constitutional) to present himself in the laboratory that afternoon; and behold, when he came to think of it, a week had passed. He and his cousin were to go together, a half-hour before tea; the occasion would serve for Joachim to have another x-ray taken, as the old one was by now out of date.
They shortened the main rest period by thirty minutes and, promptly as the clock struck half past three, descended the stairs to the so-called basement, and sat down in the small antechamber between the consulting-room and the laboratory. Joachim was quite cool, this being for him no new experience, Hans Castorp rather feverishly expectant, as no one, up to the present, had ever had a view into his organic interior. They were not alone. Several other patients were already sitting when they entered, with tattered illustrated magazines on their laps, and they all waited together: a young Swede, of heroic proportions, who sat at Settembrini’s table; of whom one heard that, when he entered, the previous April, he had been so ill they had almost refused to take him, but he had put on nearly six stone, and was about to be discharged cured. There was also a mother from the “bad” Russian table, herself a lamentable case, with her long-nosed, ugly boy, named Sascha, whose case was more lamentable still. These three had been waiting longer than the cousins and would therefore go in before them—evidently there had been some sort of hitch in the laboratory, and a cold tea was on the cards.
They were busy in there. The voice of the Hofrat could be heard, giving directions. It was somewhat past the half-hour when the door was opened by the technical assistant to admit the Swedish giant and fortune’s minion. His predecessor had evidently gone out by another door. But now matters moved more rapidly. After no more than ten minutes they heard the Scandinavian stride off down the corridor, a walking testimonial to the establishment and the health resort; and the Russian mother was admitted with her Sascha. Both times, as the door opened, Hans Castorp observed that it was half dark in the x-ray room; an artificial twilight prevailed there, as in Dr. Krokowski’s analytic cabinet. The windows were shrouded, daylight shut out, and two electric lights were burning. But as Sascha and his mother went in, and Hans Castorp gazed after them, the corridor door opened, and the next patient entered the waiting-room—she was, of course, too early, on account of the delay in the
laboratory. It was Madame Chauchat.
It was Clavdia Chauchat who appeared thus suddenly in the little waiting-room. Hans Castorp recognized her, staring-eyed, and distinctly felt the blood leave his cheeks. His jaw relaxed, his mouth was on the point of falling open. Her entrance had taken place so casually, so unforeseen, she had not been there, and then, all at once, there she was, and sharing these narrow quarters with the cousins. Joachim flung a quick glance at Hans Castorp, afterwards not only casting down his eyes, but taking up again the illustrated sheet he had laid aside, and burying his face in it. Hans Castorp could not summon resolution to do the same. He grew very red, after his sudden pallor, and his heart pounded.
Frau Chauchat seated herself by the laboratory door, in a little round easy-chair with stumpy, as it were rudimentary arms. She leaned back, crossed one leg lightly over the other, and stared into space. She knew she was being looked at, and her Pribislav eyes shifted their gaze nervously, almost squinting. She wore a white sweater and blue skirt, and had a book from the lending-library in her lap. She tapped softly with the sole of the foot that rested on the floor.
After a minute and a half she changed her position; looked round, stood up, with an air of not knowing what she was to do or where to go—and began to speak. She was asking something, she addressed a question to Joachim, though he sat there apparently deep in his magazine, while Hans Castorp was doing nothing at all. She shaped the words with her lips and gave them voice out of her white throat; it was the voice, not deep, but with the slightest edge, and pleasantly husky, that Hans Castorp knew—had known so long ago and yet heard so lately, swing: “With pleasure, only you must be sure to give it me back after the lesson.” Those words had been uttered clearly and fluently; these came rather hesitatingly and brokenly, the speaker had no native right to them, she only borrowed them, as Hans Castorp had heard her do before, when he experienced the mingled feeling of superiority and ecstasy we have described. One hand in her sweater pocket, the other at the back of her head, Frau Chauchat asked:
“May I ask for what time you had an appointment?”
And Joachim, with a quick look at his cousin, answered, drawing his heels together as he sat: “For half past three.”
She spoke again: “Mine was for a quarter to four. What is it then—it is nearly four. Some people just entered, did they not?”
“Yes, two people. They were ahead of us. There seems to be some delay, everything is a half-hour late.”
“It is disagreeable,” she said, nervously touching her hair.
“Rather,” responded Joachim. “We have been waiting nearly half an hour already.”
Thus they conversed, and Hans Castorp listened as in a dream. For his cousin to speak to Frau Chauchat was almost the same as his doing it himself—and yet how altogether different! That “Rather” had affronted him, it sounded odd and brusque, if not worse, in view of the circumstances. To think that Joachim could speak to her like that—to think that he could speak to her at all!—and very likely he prided himself on his pert “Rather”—much as Hans Castorp had played up before Joachim and
Settembrini when he was asked how long he meant to stay, and answered: “Three weeks.” It was to Joachim, though he had the paper in front of his nose, that she had turned with her question; because he was the older inhabitant of course, whom she had known longer by sight; but perhaps for another reason as well, because they two might meet on a conventional footing and carry on an ordinary conversation in articulate words; because nothing wild and deep, mysterious and terrifying, held sway between them. Had it been somebody brown-eyed, with a ruby ring and orange perfume, who sat here waiting with them, it would have been his, Hans Castorp’s, part to lead the conversation and say: “Rather” in the purity and detachment of his sentiments. “Yes, madame, certainly rather unpleasant,” he would have said; and might have taken his handkerchief out of his breast pocket with a flourish, and blown his nose. “Have patience, our case is no better than yours.” How surprised Joachim would have been at his fluency—but without seriously wishing himself in Hans Castorp’s place. No, and Hans Castorp was not jealous of Joachim for being able to talk to Frau Chauchat. He was satisfied that she should have addressed herself to his cousin; it showed that she recognized the situation for what it was.—His heart pounded.
After Joachim’s cavalier treatment of Madame Chauchat—in which Hans Castorp seemed to savour something almost like faint hostility on his cousin’s part toward their fair fellow-patient, a hostility at which he could not help smiling, despite the commotion in his mind—“Clavdia” tried a turn up and down the room. Then, finding the space too confined, she too took up an illustrated paper, and returned to the easychair with the rudimentary arms. Hans Castorp looked at her, with his chin in his collar, like his grandfather—it was laughable to see how like the old man he looked. Frau Chauchat had crossed one leg over the other again, and her knee, even the whole slender line of the thigh, showed beneath the blue skirt. She was only of middle height—a thoroughly proper and delightful height, in Hans Castorp’s eyes—but relatively long-legged, and narrow in the hips. She sat leaning forward, with her crossed forearms supported on her knee, her shoulders drooping, and her back rounded, so that the neck-bone stuck out prominently, and nearly the whole spine was marked out under the close-fitting sweater. Her breasts, which were not high and voluptuous like Marusja’s, but small and maidenly, were pressed together from both sides. Hans Castorp recalled, suddenly, that she too was sitting here waiting to be x-rayed. The Hofrat painted her, he reproduced her outward form with oil and colours upon the canvas. And now, in the twilighted room, he would direct upon her the rays which would reveal to him the inside of her body. When this idea occurred to Hans Castorp, he turned away his head and put on a primly detached air; a sort of seemly
obscurantism presented itself to him as the only correct attitude in the presence of such a thought.
The waiting together in the little room did not last for long. They evidently gave rather short shrift to Sascha and his mother in there, in their effort to make up for lost time. The technician in his white smock once more appeared, Joachim stood up and tossed his paper back on to the table, and Hans Castorp, not without inward hesitation, followed him to the open door. He was struggling with chivalrous scruples, also with the temptation to put himself, after all, upon conventional terms with Frau Chauchat, to speak to her and offer her precedence—in French, if he could manage. Hastily he sought to muster the words, the sentence structure. But he did not know if such courtesies were practised up here; probably the established order was more powerful than the rules of chivalry. Joachim must know, and as he made no motion to defer to sex, even though Hans Castorp looked at him imploringly, the latter followed his cousin past Frau Chauchat, who merely glanced up from her stooping posture as they went through the door into the laboratory.
He was too much possessed by the events of the last ten minutes, and by what he left behind, for his mind to pass immediately with his body over the threshold of the x-ray laboratory. He saw nothing, or only vaguely, in the artificially lighted room; he still heard Frau Chauchat’s pleasantly veiled voice, with which she had said: “What is it, then?. . . Some people have just gone in. . . It is disagreeable”—the sound of it still shivered sweetly down his back. He saw the shape of her knee under the cloth skirt, saw the bone of her neck, under the short reddish-blond hairs that were not gathered up into the braids—and again the shiver ran down his back. Then he saw Hofrat Behrens, with his back to them, standing before a sort of built-in recess, looking at a black plate which he held at arm’s length toward the dim light in the ceiling. They passed him and went on into the room, followed by the assistant, who made preparations to dispatch their affair. It smelled very odd in here, the air was filled with a sort of stale ozone. The built-in structure, projecting between the two black-hung windows, divided the room into two unequal parts. Hans Castorp could distinguish physical apparatus. Lenses, switch-boards, towering measuring-instruments, a box like a camera on a rolling stand, glass diapositives in rows set in the walls. Hard to say whether this was a photographic studio, a dark-room, or an inventor’s workshop and technological witches’ kitchen.
Joachim had begun, without more ado, to lay bare the upper half of his body. The helper, a square-built, rosy-cheeked young native in a white smock, motioned Hans Castorp to do the same. It went fast, and he was next in turn. As Hans Castorp took off his waistcoat, Behrens came out of the smaller recess where he had been standing into the larger one.
“Hallo,” said he. “Here are our Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. If you feel any inclination to blub, kindly suppress it. Just wait, we shall soon see through you both. I expect, Castorp, you feel a little nervous about exposing your inner self to our gaze?
Don’t be alarmed, we preserve all the amenities. Look here, have you seen my picture-gallery?” He led Hans Castorp by the arm before the rows of dark plates on the wall, and turned on a light behind them. Hans Castorp saw various members: hands, feet, knee-pans, thigh-and leg-bones, arms, and pelvises. But the rounded living form of these portions of the human body was vague and shadowy, like a pale and misty envelope, within which stood out the clear, sharp nucleus—the skeleton.
“Very interesting,” said Hans Castorp.
“Interesting sure enough,” responded the Hofrat. “Useful object-lesson for the young. X-ray anatomy, you know, triumph of the age. There is a female arm, you can tell by its delicacy. That’s what they put around you when they make love, you know.” He laughed, and his upper lip with the close-cropped moustache went up still more on one side. The pictures faded. Hans Castorp turned his attention to the preparations for taking Joachim’s x-ray.
It was done in front of that structure on the other side of which Hofrat Behrens had been standing when they entered. Joachim had taken his place on a sort of shoemaker’s bench, in front of a board, which he embraced with his arms and pressed his breast against it, while the assistant improved the position, massaging his back with kneading motions, and putting his arms further forward. Then he went behind the camera, and stood just as a photographer would, legs apart and stooped over, to look inside. He expressed his satisfaction and, going back to Joachim, warned him to draw in his breath and hold it until all was over. Joachim’s rounded back expanded and so remained; the assistant, at the switch-board, pulled the handle. Now, for the space of two seconds, fearful powers were in play—streams of thousands, of a hundred thousand of volts, Hans Castorp seemed to recall—which were necessary to pierce through solid matter. They could hardly be confined to their office, they tried to escape through other outlets: there were explosions like pistol-shots, blue sparks on the measuring apparatus; long lightnings crackled along the walls. Somewhere in the room appeared a red light, like a threatening eye, and a phial in Joachim’s rear filled with green. Then everything grew quiet, the phenomena disappeared, and Joachim let out his breath with a sigh. It was over.
“Next delinquent,” said the Hofrat, and nudged Hans Castorp with his elbow.
“Don’t pretend you’re too tired. You will get a free copy, Castorp; then you can project the secrets of your bosom on the wall for your children and grandchildren to see!”
Joachim had stepped down; the technician changed the plate. Hofrat Behrens personally instructed the novice how to sit and hold himself.
“Put your arms about it,” he said. “Embrace the board—pretend it’s something else, if you like. Press your breast against it, as though it filled you with rapture. Like that. Draw a deep breath. Hold it!” he commanded. “Now, please!” Hans Castorp waited, blinking, his lungs distended. Behind him the storm broke loose: it crackled, lightened, detonated—and grew still. The lens had looked into his inside.
He got down, dazed and bewildered, notwithstanding he had not been physically sensible of the penetration in the slightest degree.
“Good lad,” said the Hofrat. “Now we shall see.” The experienced Joachim had already moved over toward the entrance door and taken position at a stand; at his back was the lofty structure of the apparatus, with a bulb half full of water, and distillation tubes; in front of him, breast-high, hung a framed screen on pulleys. On his left, between switch-board and instrumentarium, was a red globe. The Hofrat, bestriding a stool in front of the screen, lighted the light. The ceiling light went out, and only the red glow illumined the scene. Then the master turned this too off, with a quick motion, and thick darkness enveloped the laboratory.
“We must first accustom the eyes,” the Hofrat was heard to say, in the darkness.
“We must get big pupils, like a cat’s, to see what we want to see. You understand, our everyday eyesight would not be good enough for our purposes. We have to banish the bright daylight and its pretty pictures out of our minds.”
“Naturally,” said Hans Castorp. He stood at the Hofrat’s shoulder, and closed his eyes, since the darkness was so profound that it did not matter whether he had them open or shut. “First we must wash our eyes with darkness to see what we want to see. That is plain. I find it quite right and proper, as a matter of fact, that we should collect ourselves a little, beforehand—in silent prayer, as it were. I am standing here with my eyes shut, and have quite a pleasant sleepy feeling. But what is it I smell?”
“Oxygen,” said the Hofrat. “What you notice in the air is oxygen. Atmospheric product of our little private thunderstorm, you know. Eyes open!” he commanded.
“The magicking is about to begin.” Hans Castorp hastened to obey.
They heard a switch go on. A motor started up, and sang furiously higher and higher, until another switch controlled and steadied it. The floor shook with an even vibration. The little red light, at right angles to the ceiling, looked threateningly across at them. Somewhere lightening flashed. And with a milky gleam a window of light emerged from the darkness: it was the square hanging screen, before which Hofrat Behrens bestrode his stool, his legs sprawled apart with his fists supported on them, his blunt nose close to the pane, which gave him a view of a man’s interior organism.
“Do you see it, young man?” he asked. Hans Castorp leaned over his shoulder, but then raised his head again to look toward the spot where Joachim’s eyes were presumably gazing in the darkness, with the gentle, sad expression they had worn during the other examination. “May I?” he asked.
“Of course,” Joachim replied magnanimously, out of the dark. And to the pulsation of the floor, and the snapping and cracking of the forces at play, Hans Castorp peered through the lighted window, peered into Joachim Ziemssen’s empty skeleton. The breastbone and spine fell together in a single dark column. The frontal structure of the ribs was cut across by the paler structure of the back. Above, the collar-bones branched off on both sides, and the framework of the shoulder, with the joint and the beginning of Joachim’s arm, showed sharp and bare through the soft envelope of flesh. The thoracic cavity was light, but blood-vessels were to be seen, some dark spots, a blackish shadow.
“Clear picture,” said the Hofrat, “quite a decent leanness—that’s the military youth. I’ve had paunches here—you couldn’t see through them, hardly recognize a thing. The rays are yet to be discovered that will go through such layers of fat. This is nice clean work. Do you see the diaphragm?” he asked, and indicated with his finger the dark arch in the window, that rose and fell. “Do you see the bulges here on the left side, the little protuberances? That was the inflammation of the pleura he had when he was fifteen years old. Breathe deep,” he commanded. “Deeper! Deep, I tell you!” And Joachim’s diaphragm rose quivering, as high as it could; the upper pans of the lungs could be seen to clear up, but the Hofrat was not satisfied. “Not good enough,” he said. “Can you see the hilus glands? Can you see the adhesions? Look at the cavities here, that is where the toxins come from that fuddle him.” But Hans Castorp’s attention was taken up by something like a bag, a strange, animal shape, darkly visible behind the middle column, or more on the right side of it—the spectator’s right. It expanded and contracted regularly, a little after the fashion of a swimming jelly-fish.
“Look at his heart,” and the Hofrat lifted his huge hand again from his thigh and pointed with his forefinger at the pulsating shadow. Good God, it was the heart, it was Joachim’s honour-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw!”
“I am looking at your heart,” he said in a suppressed voice.
“Go ahead,” answered Joachim again; probably he smiled politely up there in the darkness. But the Hofrat told him to be quiet and not betray any sensibility. Behrens studied the spots and the lines, the black festoon in the intercostal space; while Hans Castorp gazed without wearying at Joachim’s graveyard shape and bony tenement, this lean memento mori, this scaffolding for mortal flesh to hang on. “Yes, yes! I see, I see!” he said, several times over. “My God, I see!” He had heard of a woman, a longdead member of the Tienappel connexion, who had been endowed or afflicted with a heavy gift, which she bore in all humility: namely, that the skeletons of persons about to die would appear before her. Thus now Hans Castorp was privileged to behold the good Joachim—but with the aid and under the auspices of physical science; and by his cousin’s express permission, so that it was quite legitimate and without gruesome significance. Yet a certain sympathy came over him with the melancholy destiny of his clairvoyant relative. He was strongly moved by what he saw—or more precisely, by the fact that he saw it—and felt stirrings of uneasy doubt, as to whether it was really permissible and innocent to stand here in the quaking, crackling darkness and gaze like this; his itch to commit the indiscretion conflicted in his bosom with religious emotion and feelings of concern.
But a few minutes later he himself stood in the pillory, in the midst of the electrical storm, while Joachim, his body closed up again, put on his clothes. Again the Hofrat peered through the milky glass, this time into Hans Castorp’s own inside; and from his half-utterances, his broken phrases and bursts of scolding, the young man gathered that what he saw corresponded to his expectations. He was so kind as to permit the patient, at his request, to look at his own hand through the screen. And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he must have expected, but what it is hardly permitted man to see, and what he had never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave. The process of decay was forestalled by the powers of the light-ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand, the seal ring he had inherited from his grandfather hanging loose and black on the joint of his ringfinger—a hard, material object, with which man adorns the body that is fated to melt away beneath it, when it passes on to another flesh that can wear it for yet a little while. With the eyes of his Tienappel ancestress, penetrating, prophetic eyes, he gazed at this familiar part of his own body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. At the thought there came over his face the expression it usually wore when he listened to music: a little dull, sleepy, and pious, his mouth half open, his head inclined toward the shoulder.
The Hofrat said: “Spooky, what? Yes, there’s something distinctly spooky about it.”
He closed off the current. The floor ceased to vibrate, the lightnings to play, the magic window was quenched in darkness. The ceiling light came on. As Hans Castorp flung on his clothes, the Hofrat gave the two young men the results of his observations, in non-technical language, out of regard for their lay minds. It seemed that in Hans Castorp’s case, the test of the eye confirmed that of the ear in a way to add lustre to science. The Hofrat had seen the old as well as the fresh spots, and “strands” ran from the bronchial tubes rather far into the organ itself—“strands” with “nodules.”
Hans Castorp would be able to see for himself later, in the diapositive which they would give him for his very own. The word of command was calm, patience, manly self-discipline; measure, eat, lie down, wake, and drink tea. They left; Hans Castorp, going out behind Joachim, looked over his shoulder. Ushered in by the technician, Frau Chauchat was entering the laboratory.