The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Read Free Book Online Page B

cold, and he felt a pleasurable and yet somehow annoying restlessness in his joints. Words tumbled out, he misspoke himself several times, but went right on with a dismissive wave of his hand. Joachim was likewise in a lively mood, and after the humming, drumming lady suddenly stood up and departed, their conversation turned even more candid and high-spirited. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, tucked bites of food in their cheeks, looked important, laughed, nodded, shrugged, and went right on talking without even first swallowing their food properly. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and brought the conversation around to plans for making the Elbe more navigable.
    “Epoch-making!” Hans Castorp said. “An epoch-making development for our maritime commerce—simply not to be overestimated. We’ve added a line in our budget for an immediate payment of fifty million, and you can be sure that we know exactly what we’re doing.”
    But then, despite the importance he attached to navigation on the Elbe, he at once abandoned the topic and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life “up here” and about the guests; which Joachim proved ready and willing to do, happy to open his heart and unburden himself. He had to repeat the part about the bodies being sent down by bobsled and once again asserted unequivocally that he knew it to be true. And when Hans Castorp was taken by another fit of laughter, Joachim joined in, seeming heartily to enjoy the opportunity, and then told more comic stories, just to add fuel to the general merriment. There was a lady who sat at his table, Frau Stöhr was her name, and quite ill by the way, the wife of a musician from Cannstatt—and she was the most illiterate person he had ever met. She said things like “decentfiction”—in all seriousness. And Krokowski, the assistant—she called him the “eighty camp.” You had to sit there and swallow it, without a trace of a smile. And she was a gossip, besides, as were most people up here, by the by, and she claimed that another lady, Frau Iltis, carried a “stirletto” around with her. “She calls it a stirletto—isn’t that capital!” And throwing themselves back in their chairs, half lying, half leaning, they laughed so hard that they shook until they both began to hiccough at almost the same time.
    But every now and then, Joachim was reminded of his own fate and would turn gloomy. “Yes, here we sit laughing,” he said with a pained expression, broken by occasional spasms of his diaphragm, “and yet there’s no telling when I’ll get out of here, because when Behrens says another six months, that’s his low estimate, and you need to be prepared for even longer. But it is hard, you must admit. It’s really sad, isn’t it? I had already been accepted and would have taken my officer’s exam next month. And here I am lounging about with a thermometer in my mouth and counting Frau Stöhr’s illiterate howlers, and time is passing me by. A single year plays such an important role at our age, it brings so many changes and so much progress with it when you’re living down below. And here I am stagnating like an old water hole—a stinking pond, and that’s not too crude a comparison, either.”
    Strangely enough, Hans Castorp’s only reply came as a question—did they serve porter here? And when Joachim looked at him in astonishment, he realized that his cousin was very near to falling asleep—was in fact already nodding.
    “Why, you’re asleep,” Joachim said. “Come on, it’s high time we went to bed, both of us.”
    “It’s not time for anything,” Hans Castorp said with a thick tongue. But he joined his cousin all the same, walking on stiff legs and bent so low that he looked like a man being dragged toward the floor by weariness. But as they moved across the now dimly lit lobby, he pulled himself together by sheer force of effort when he heard Joachim say, “That’s Krokowski sitting there. I