Zed Aliz again marvelled, and the scribe writ, that, that Thomas, missed not a trick

Page 102

"You say that," Joachim answered consideringly, "and yet he has a kind of pride about him that makes an altogether dif-ferent impression: as of a man who has great respect for himself, or for humanity in general; and Ilike that about him; it has some-thing good in my eyes."
      "You are right, there," Hans Castorp answered. "He's even austere; he makes one feel rather uncomfortable, as if you were - well, shall Isay as if you were being taken to task ? That's not such a bad way to describe it. Can you believe it, I had the feel-ing he was not at all pleased at my buying the blankets ? He had something against it, and he kept on dwelling on it."
     "Oh, no," Joachim said after reflecting, in some surprise. "How could he have ? I shouldnt think so." And then, ther-mometer in mouth, with sack and pack, he went to lie down, while Hans Castorp began at once to wash and change for dinner - which was rather less than an hour away.


At this another point in that point which is forever now The scribe thought of The Great Pyramid and the brilliance of the idea to leave an empty sarcophagus. The scribe in agreement,writ cor blimey, t'wer fair art a  this world,

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"...When they came upstairs after the meal, the parcel containing the blankets, lay on a chair in Hans Castorp's room; and that aftern-oon he made use of them for the first time. The experienced Joachim instructed him in the art of wrapping himself up as practised in the sanitorium; they all did it, and each new-comer had to learn. First the covers were spread, one after the other, over the chair, so that a sizable piece hung down at the foot. Then you sat down and began to put the inner one about you: first lengthwise, on both sides, up to the shoulders, and then from the feet up, stooping over as you sat and grasping the
folded-over end, first from one side and then from one side and then from the other, taking care to fit it neatly into the length,
in order to ensure the greatest pos-sible smoothness and eveness. Then you did precisely the same thing with the outer blanket - it was somewhat more difficult to handle, and our neophyte groaned not a little as he stooped and stretched out his arms to practise the grips his cousin showed him. Only a few old hands, Joachim said, could wield both blankets at once, flinging them into position with three self-assured motions. This was a rare and enviable facility, to which belonged not only long years of practise, but a certain knack as well. Hans Castorp had to laugh at this, lying back in his chair with aching muscles; Joachim did not at once see anything funny in what he had said, and looked at him dubiously, but finally laughed too.  

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"There he said, when Hans Castorp lay at last limbless and cylindrical in his chair, with the yielding roll at the back of his neck, quite worn out with all these gymnastic exercises; "there nothing can touch you now, not even if we were to have ten below zero." He withdrew behind the partition, to do himself up in his turn.
       That about the ten below zero Hans Castorp doubted; he was even now distinctly cold. He shivered repeatedly as he lay look-ing out through the wooden arch at the reeking , dripping damp outside, which seemed on the point of passing over into snow. It was strange that with all that humidity his cheeks still burned with a dry heat, as though he were sitting in an over-heated room. He felt absurdly tired from the practice of putting on his rugs; actually, as he held up Ocean Steamships to read it, the book shook in his hands. So very fit he certainly was not - and totally anaemic, as Hofrat Behrens had said; this, no doubt, was why he was so susceptible to cold. But such unpleasing sensations were outweighed by the great comfort of his position, the unalysable, the almost mysterious properties of his reclining chair,, which he had applauded even on his first experience of it, and which re-asserted themselves in the happiest way whenever he resorted to it anew. Whether due to the character of the upholstering, the inclination of the chair-back, the exactly proper width and height of the arms, or only to the appropriate consistency of the neck roll, the result was that no more comfortable provision for re-laxed limbs could be conceived than that purveyed by this ex-cellent chair. The heart of Hans Castorp rejoiced in the blessed fact that two vacant and securely tranquil hours lay before him, dedicated by the rules of the house to the principal cure of the day; he felt it - though himself but a guest up here - to be a most suitable arrangement. For he was by nature and temperament passive, could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him, and not to have the sense of its passing banished, wiped out or eaten up by prosaic activity. At four o'clock he partook of afternoon tea, with cake and jam. Followed a little movement in the open air, then rest again, then supper - which, like all the other meal-times, afforded a certain stimulus for eye an d brain, and a certain strain; after that a peep into one or other of the optical toys, the stereo-scope,    
The kaleidoscope, the cinematograph. It might be still too much to say that Hans Castorp had grown used to life up here; but at least he did have the daily routine at his fingers' ends.
     There is, after all, something peculiar about the process of habit-  

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uating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it all off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one's former state. It is an interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation, into the tenor of lifes main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in dan-ger,almost in process, of
being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald, unjointed monotony of its daily course. But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing-down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the percep-tion of time so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment. Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interesting-ness and novelty of the time-content are what "make the time pass"; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have indeed,
the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventual years to flow far more slowly than those poor empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call te-dium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uni-formity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares. Habitu-ation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which ex-plains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercala-tion of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejue-nate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is  

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the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident. Our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and sweeping, flow, persisting for some six or eight days. Then, as one "gets used to the place," a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt." He who clings or, better ex-pressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps is uncannily fugitive and fleet. On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with a broader flow, freshly and youthfully - but only the first few, for one adjusts oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or - and this is a sign of low vitality - it was never very well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and twenty hours it as though one has never been away, and the journey has been but a watch in the night.  
       We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later, he said to his cousin, and fixed him with his bloodshot eyes:
      "I shall never cease to find it strange that the time seems to go so slowly in a new place. I mean - of course it isn't a question of my being bored; on the contrary, I might say that I am royally enter-tained. But when I look back in retrospect, that is, you under-stand - it seems to me I've been up here goodness only knows how long; it seems an eternity back to the time when I arrived , and did not quite understand that Iwas there, and you said: 'Just get out here' - don't you remember? -  
That has nothing whatever to do with reason, or with the ordinary ways of measuring time; it is purely a matter of feeling.
Certainly it would be nonsense for me to say: 'I feel I have been up here two months' - all  I can say is very long. ' "
     "Yes," Joachim answered, thermometer in mouth, "I profit by it too; while you are here, I can sort of hang on by you, as it were." Hans Castorp laughed, to hear his cousin speak thus, quite simply without explanation."  

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"Hans Castorp made but one other aquaintance in these days: the pale, black-clad Mexican lady he had seen in the garden, whose nickname was Tous-les-deux. It came to pass that he heard from her own lips the tragic formula; and being forearmed, preserved a suitable demeanour and was satisfied with himself afterwards. The  

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cousins met her before the front door, as they were setting forth on their prescribed walk after early breakfast. She was restlessly ranging there with her pacing step, her legs bent at the knee-joints, wrapped in a black cashmere shawl, a
black veil wound about her disordered silver hair and tied under her chin, her ageing face, with the large writhen mouth, gleaming dead-white against her mourning. Joachim, bare headed as usual greeted her with a bow, which she slowly acknowledged, the furrows deepening in her narrow forehead as she looked at him. Then, seeing a new face, she paused and waited, nodding gently as they came up to her; obviously she found it of importance to learn if the stranger was aquainted with her sad case, and to hear what he would say about it Joachim presented his cousin. She drew her hand out of her shawl and gave it to him, a veined, emaciated, yellowish hand, with many rings, as she continued to gaze in his face. Then it came: "Tous les de, monsieur," she said. "Tous les de, vous savez."
       "Je le sais, madame," Hans Castorp answered gently, "et je le regrette beaucoup."
     The lax pouches of skin under her jet-black eyes were larger and heavier than he had ever seen. She exhaled a faint odour as of fading flowers. Amild and pensive feeling stole about his heart.  
       "Merci," she said with a loose, clacking pronunciation, oddly consonant with her broken appearance. Her large mouth drooped tragically at on corner. She drew her hand back beneath her mantle, inclined her head, and turned away. But Hans Castorp said as they walked on: "You see, I didn't mind it at all, Igot on with her quite well; I always do with such people; I understand instinctively how to go at them - don't you think so ? I even think, on the whole, Iget on better with sad peo-ple than with jolly ones - goodness knows why. Perhaps it's be-cause Im an orphan, and lost my parents early; but when people are very serious, or down in the mouth, or somebody dies, it doesn't deject or embarrass me; I feel quite in my element, a good deal more so than when everything is going on greased wheels. I was thinking just lately that it is pretty flat of the woman up here to take on as they do about death and things connected with death, so that they take such pains to shield them from contact with it, and bring the Eucharist at meal-times, and that. Icall it very feeble of them. Don't you like the sight of a coffin ? Ireally do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is possibly sublime. Funerals have something very edifying; I always think one ought to go to  

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a funeral instead of to a church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make a bad joke, the way they do in ordinary life. It's good for people to be serious, once in a way. I've some-times asked myself if I ought not to have become a clergyman - in a certain way it wouldn't have suited me so badly. - I hope I didn't make any mistake in my French
      "No," Joachim answered, ' Je le regrette beaucoup ' was per-fectly right as far as it went."
 
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"THUS Sunday passed..."
 
And, writ the scribe.

Page 116

"The Sunday was not further remarkable, except perhaps for the meals, which since they could not well be more abundant than they already were, displayed greater refinement in the menu..."
"...In the evening, after he had drunk his beer, Hans Castorp felt heavier in the limbs and more chilled and exhausted than on the day before: toward nine o' clock he bade his cousin good-night, drew his plumeau up to his chin, and slept like the dead        But next day, the first Monday spent by the guest up here, there came another regularly recurring variation in the daily routine: the lectures, one of which Dr Krokowski delivered every other Monday morning in the dining-room, before the entire adult population of the sanatorium,, with exception of the "moribund" and those who could not understand the language. The course, Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, consisted of a series of popular-scientific lectures, under the
General title: "Love as a force contributory to disease." These instructive entertainments took place after second breakfast; it was not permissible, Joachim reiterated, to absent oneself from them - or at least, absence was frowned upon. It was thus very daring of Settembrini, who surely must have more command of the language than anyone else, not only never to appear, but to refer to the entertainment in the most disparaging terms. For Hans Castorp's part, he straightway re-solved to be present, in the first place out of courtesy, but also with unconcealed curiosity as to what he should hear. Before the appointed hour, however, he did something quite perverse and ill-judged, which proved worse for him than one could possibly have guessed: he went for a long solitary walk.
     "Now listen to me,"had been his first words, when Joachim entered his room that morning. "I can see that it can't go on with me like this. I've had enough of the horizontal for the present;  

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one's very blood goes to sleep. Of course it is different with you; you are a patient, and I have no intention of tempting you. But I mean to take a proper walk after breakfast, if you don't mind, just walking at random for a couple of hours. I'll stick a little some-thing in my pocket for second breakfast; then I shall be inde-pendent. We shall see if I am not quite a different chap when I come back
       Joachim warmly agreed, as he saw his cousin was in earnest in his desire and his project. "But don't overdo it," he said; that's my advice. It's not the same thing up here as at home. And be sure to come back in time for the lecture."
       In reality young Hans Castorp had more ground than the phys-ical for his present resolve. His over-heated head, the prevailing bad taste in his mouth, the fitful throbbing of his heart, were, or so he felt, less evil accompaniments to the process of acclimatisa-tion ..."
"...it would be good to escape awhile from the Berghof circle, to breathe the air deep into his lungs, to get some proper exercise - and then, when he felt tired at night, he would at least know why. He took leave of Joachim in a spirit of enterprise, when his cousin addressed himself, after breakfast, to the usual round as far as the bench by the water-course; then, swinging his walking-stick, he took his own way down the road
        It was about nine o' clock of a cool morning, with a covered sky. According to programme, Hans Castorp drew in deep draughts of the pure morning air, the fresh, light atmosphere that breathed in so easily, that held no hint of damp, that was without associations, without content. He crossed the stream and the nar-row-gauge road to the street, with its scattered buildings; but left this again soon to strike into a meadow path, which went only a short way on the level and then slanted steeply up on the right. The climbing rejoiced Hans Castorp's heart, his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back on his forehead with the crook of his stick; having gained some little height he looked back, and, seeing in the distance the mirror- like lake he had passed on his journey hither he began to sing.
       He sang what songs he had at his command, all kinds of senti-  /
 
I wonder if he sang black iz the colour of my true loves hair, wondered the scribe absentmindedly.
 
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mental folk-ditties, out of collections of national ballads and stu-dents' song books; one of them, that went:

                                            Let poets all of love and wine,
                                            Yet oft of virtue sing the praises,

 

He sang at first softly, in a humming tone, then louder, finally at the top of his voice. His baritone lacked flexibility, yet to-day he found it good and sang on with mounting enthusiasm. When he found he had pitched the beginning too high, he shifted into fal-setto, and even that pleased him. When his memory left him in the lurch, he helped himself out by setting to the melody whatever words and syllables came to hand, heedless of the sense, giving them out like an operatic singer with arching lips and b pala-tal r. He even began to improvise both words and music, accom-panying his performance with theatrical gesturings. It is a good deal of a strain to sing and climb at the same time, and Hans Ca-storp found his breath growing scant, and scanter. Yet for sheer pleasure in the idea, for the joy of singing, he forced his voice and sang on with frequent gasps for breath, until he could no more, and sank, quite out of wind, half blind, with coloured sparks be-fore his eyes and racing pulses, beneath a sturdy pine. His exalta-tion gave way on the sudden to a pervading gloom; he fell prey
To dejection bordering on despair.
     When, his nerves being tolerably restored, he got to his feet again to continue his walk, he found his neck trembling; indeed his head shook in precisely the same way now, at his age, in which the head of old Hans Lorenz Castorp once had shaken. The phe-nomenon so freshly called up to him the memory of his dead grandfather that, far from finding it offensive, he took a certain pleasure in availing himself of that remembered and dignified method of supporting the chin, by means of which his grandfather had been wont to control the shaking of his head, and to which the boy had responded with such inward sympathy.
       He mounted still higher on the zigzag path, drawn by the sound of cow-bells, and came at length upon the herd, grazing near a hut whose roof was weighted with stones. Two bearded men ap-proached him, with axes on their shoulders. They parted, a little way off him, and "Thank ye kindly and God be with ye," said the one to the other, in a deep guttural voice, shifted his axe to the other shoulder, and began breaking a path through crackling pine-boughs to the valley. The words sounded strange in this lonely spot: they came dreamlike to Hans Castorp's senses, strained and benumbed. He repeated them softly, trying to reproduce the gut-tural, rustically formal syllables of the mountain tongue, as he climbed another stretch higher, above the hut. He had in mind to reach the hight where the trees left off, but on glancing at his watch resisted.
       He took the left hand-path in the direction of the village. It ran level for some way, then led downhill, among tall-trunked pines, where, as he went, he once more began to sing, tentatively, and despite the fact that he felt his knees to tremble more than they had during the ascent. On issuing from the wood he paused, struck by the charm of the small enclosed landscape before him, a scene composed of elements both peacefull and sublime.
       A mountain stream came flowing in its shallow, stony bed down the right-hand slope, poured itself foaming over the terraced boulders lying in its path, then coursed more calmly toward the valley, crossed at this point by a picturesque railed wooden foot-bridge  The ground all about was blue with the bell-like blossoms of a profusely growing, bushy plant. Sombre fir-trees of even, mighty growth stood in the bed of the ravine and climbed its sides to the height. One of them, rooted in the steep bank at the side of the torrent, thrust itself aslant into the picture, with bizzarre effect. The whole remote and lovely spot was wrapped in a sounding solitude by the noise of the rushing waters. Hans Castorp re-marked a bench that stood on the farther bank of the stream.
      He crossed the foot-bridge and sat down to regale himself with the sight of the foaming, rushing waterfall and the idyllic sound of its monotonous yet modulated prattle. For Hans Castorp loved like music the sound of rushing water - perhaps he loved it even more. But hardly had he settled himself when he was overtaken by a bleeding at the nose, which came on so suddenly he had barely time to save his clothing from soilure. The bleeding was violent and persistent, taking to staunch it nearly half an hour of going to and fro between bench and brook, snuffing water up his nostrils, rinsing his handkerchief and lying flat on his back upon the wooden seat with the damp cloth on his nose. He lay there, after the blood at length was staunched. His knees elevated, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed, and ears full of the noise of water. He felt no unpleasant sensation, the blood-letting had had a soothing effect, but he found himself in a state of extraordinarily reduced vitality, so that when he exhaled the air, he felt no need to draw it in again, and lay there moveless, for the space of several quiet heart-beats, before taking another slow and superficial breath.  

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Quite suddenly he found himself in the far distant past, trans-ported to a scene which had come back to him in a dream some nights before, summoned by certain impressions of the last few days. But so bly, so resistlessly, to the annihalation of time and space, was he rapt back into the past, one might have said it was a lifeless body lying here on the bench by the waterside, while the actual Hans Castorp moved in that far-away time and place - in a situation which was for him, despite its childishness, vibrant with daring and adventure..."

It will be out of context said the scribe. Within the this and that of that work, said Zed Aliz, nothing iz out of context. And so the scribe took the fact similar and opened it at just the right place.
A fortuitous juxtoposition for the eye that sees.