“Hello,” said Joachim. “That was your first night up here. Are you satisfied?”

He was ready to go out, sportively dressed, in well-made boots, and carried his ulster over his arm, the flat bottle showing in the side pocket. He didn’t have a hat today either.

“Thank you,” replied Hans Castorp, “it works. I don’t want to judge any more. I had a somewhat confused dream, and then the house has the disadvantage that it is very poorly soundproofed, which is a bit annoying. Who is that black woman out there in the garden?”

Joachim knew at once who was meant.

“Oh, that’s ‘ Tous-les-deux‘”, he said. “That’s what we commonly call her here, because that’s all you hear about her. Mexican woman, you know, can’t speak a word of German and hardly any French either, just a few words. She’s been here with her eldest son for five weeks, a completely hopeless case who’s going to die down fairly quickly now – he’s got it all over the place, he’s poisoned through and through, you could say, it’s starting to look something like typhus , says Behrens – horrible for everyone involved, anyway. A fortnight ago the second son came up because he still wanted to see his brother – handsome fellow by the way, like the other one – both are handsome fellows, so glowing-eyed, the ladies were over the moon. Well, the younger one had probably coughed a bit downstairs, but had otherwise been quite cheerful. And as soon as he’s here, what do you think, he gets a temperature – but immediately 39.5, the highest fever, you know, goes to bed, and if he still gets up, says Behrens, then he’s got more luck than brains. In any case, it was high time, he says, that he came upstairs… Yes, and since then their mother has been walking around like this when she’s not sitting with them, and when you speak to her she always just says, ‘Tous les deux! ‘ because that’s all she can say, and there’s no one here who understands Spanish at the moment.”

“So that’s the way it is with her,” said Hans Castorp. “Will she say it to me when I meet her? That would be strange—I mean, it would be comical and uncanny at the same time,” he said, and his eyes were like yesterday: they seemed hot and heavy to him, as if he were longcried, and they had that shine again, which the novelty of the gentleman’s rider’s cough kindled in them. In general, it seemed to him as if he had only just caught up with yesterday, as if he were in the picture again, which was not really the case when he first woke up. By the way, he was done, he explained, dripping some lavender water onto his handkerchief and dabbing his forehead and the area under his eyes with it. “If it’s all right with you, we can go tous les deux for breakfast,” he joked with a feeling of excessive high spirits, whereupon Joachim looked at him gently and smiled peculiarly, melancholy and somewhat mockingly, it seemed – why, that was his thing.

After Hans Castorp had convinced himself that he had a smoke with him, he defiantly took his cane, coat and hat, and this one too, for he was all too sure of his way of life and manners to be so easily familiar with unfamiliar and new customs for a mere three weeks to add – and so they went, went down the stairs, and in the corridors Joachim pointed to this and that door and called the names of the residents, German names and those with all sorts of foreign sounds, while making short comments about their characters and adding to the gravity of her case.

They also met people who were already returning from breakfast, and when Joachim said good morning to someone, Hans Castorp politely lifted his hat. He was tense and nervous, like a young man who is about to make himself known to many strangers and who is plagued by a distinct feeling that his eyes were dull and his face red, which, incidentally, was only partially true, for he was much more pale.

“Before I forget!” he said suddenly with a certain blind eagerness. “You’re welcome to introduce me to the lady in the garden if you can, I don’t mind. She should at least say ‘ tous les deux ‘ to me, that doesn’t bother me at all, I’m prepared and understand the meaning and I’ll put the right face to it. But I don’t wish to get acquainted with the Russian couple, do you hear? I expressly do not want that. They are extremely unmannerly people, and if I’ve been living next to them for three weeks and there was no other way, I still don’t want to know them, I have every right to forbid that with the utmost certainty…”

“Nice,” said Joachim. “Did they bother you that much? Yes, they are barbarians, so to speak, uncivilized in a word, I told you beforehand. He always comes to dinner in a leather jacket – I tell you it’s shabby, I’m always surprised that Behrens doesn’t intervene. And she’s not the smartest either, despite her feathered hat… By the way, don’t worry, they sit far away from us, at the Bad Russian Table, because there’s a Good Russian Table where only finer Russians sit – and it’s hardly a chance for you to meet them even if you wanted to. It’s not at all easy to make acquaintances, if only because there are so many foreigners among the guests, and I personally only know a few as long as I’ve been here.”

“Which of the two is sick?” asked Hans Castorp. “He or she?”

“He, I think. Yes, only him,” said Joachim, noticeably distracted, while they were at the coat racks in front of the dining roomtook off. And then they entered the bright, flat-vaulted room, where voices were buzzing, implements clattered, and the maids hurried about with steaming jugs.

There were seven tables in the dining room, most of them lengthwise, only two across. There were larger tables, for ten people each, even if the covers were not all full. Only a few steps diagonally into the hall, and Hans Castorp was already in his place: he was ready for him on the narrow side of the table, which was standing in the middle in front, between the two people standing at right angles. Standing upright behind his chair, Hans Castorp bowed stiffly and politely to the table companions, to whom Joachim ceremonially introduced him, and whom he scarcely saw, let alone that their names had penetrated his consciousness. All he understood was Frau Stohr’s person and name, and that she had a red face and greasy, ash-blonde hair. One could well credit her with the educational blunders, her facial expression was so stubbornly ignorant.

There were pots of jam and honey, bowls of rice pudding and oatmeal, platters of scrambled eggs and cold meat; Butter was profusely set out, someone lifted the glass cloche over a sodden Swiss cheese to slice off, and a bowl of fresh and dried fruit also sat in the center of the table. A maid in black and white asked Hans Castorp what he wanted to drink: cocoa, coffee or tea. She was small as a child, with an old, long face – a dwarf, he realised, with a start. He looked at his cousin, butas the latter merely shrugged his shoulders and brows indifferently, as if to say, “Yes, well, what next?” began to eat rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar, while his eyes wandered over the other dishes he wanted to taste and over the guests at the seven tables, Joachim’s colleagues and fellow sufferers, all of whom were internally ill and were chatting at breakfast.

The hall was furnished in that modern taste which knows how to give a certain fantastic touch to the most objective simplicity. It was not very deep in relation to its length and was surrounded by a kind of gallery with sideboards and which opened in large arches towards the interior with the tables. The pillars, clad halfway up in wood polished with sandalwood, then whitewashed smooth, like the upper part of the walls and the ceiling, sported bands of brightly colored bands, simple and amusing stencils, which continued along the wide girders of the flat vault. Several chandeliers, electric, made of bright brass, adorned the hall, each consisting of three hoops placed one on top of the other. which were connected with delicate wickerwork and on the bottom of which frosted glass bells went in circles like little moons. There were four glass doors there–on the opposite broadside two leading out onto a front porch, a third forward on the left leading straight into the front hall, and then the one through which Hans Castorp had entered from a hallway, there Joachim had led him down a different set of stairs than last night.

On his right he had an unsightly being in black with a downy complexion and faintly flushed cheeks, in whom he saw something like a seamstress or house dressmaker, probably also because she only had coffee with butter rolls for breakfast and because he had always associated the idea of ​​a house dressmaker with that of coffee and butter rolls. On his left sat an English lady, also elderly, very ugly, with spindly, frozen fingers, who read chubby letters from home and drank blood-colored tea with them. Next to her followed Joachim and then Frau Stöhr in a Scottish wool blouse. She kept her left hand clenched near her cheek while she ate, making a visible effort to speak with a delicate expression. pulling back the upper lip from her narrow and long buck teeth. A young man with a thin mustache and an expression as if he had something bad tasting in his mouth sat down next to her and ate breakfast in complete silence. He came in when Hans Castorp was already seated, lowered his chin on his chest as he walked and without looking at anyone in greeting and sat down, flatly refusing to be introduced to the new guest by his demeanor. Perhaps he was too ill to have any sense and respect for such external things or even to take any interest in his surroundings. For a moment an extraordinarily thin, fair-haired young girl sat across from him, dumping a bottle of yoghurt onto her plate, spooning up the milk dish, and immediately walking away again.

The conversation at the table was not lively. Joachim chatted formally with Frau Stohr, he asked about ither condition and heard with correct regret that it left something to be desired. She complained of “slackness”. “I’m so limp!” she drawled, pretending to be uneducated. She also had 37.3 when she got up, and how will it be then in the afternoon. The house dressmaker confessed to having the same body temperature, but explained that on the contrary she felt excited, inwardly tense and restless, as if she were about to do something special and decisive, which was not the case at all, but rather a physical excitement without mental causes. Surely she wasn’t a house dressmaker, because she spoke very correctly and almost learnedly. Incidentally, Hans Castorp found this excitement or at least the expression of it somehow inappropriate, almost offensive in such an inconspicuous and insignificant creature.

He had been a little afraid of horrible impressions, but he found himself disappointed: the hall was very tidy, one did not have the feeling of being in a place of misery. Tanned youths of both sexes came in, slurring, talking to the hall maids, and munching on breakfast with robust appetites. There were also more mature people, married couples, onewhole family with children who spoke Russian, also adolescent boys. Almost all the women wore tight-fitting jackets made of wool or silk, so-called sweaters, white or colored, with a fall collar and side pockets, and it looked pretty when they stood and chatted with both hands buried in these side pockets. Photographs were shown around several tables, new, home-made ones no doubt; at another one exchanged stamps. The weather was talked about, how one slept and how much one measured in the mouth in the morning. Most were jolly—probably for no particular reason, but only because they had no immediate worries and were in large numbers. A few, of course, sat at the table with their heads in their hands and stared straight ahead.

Suddenly Hans Castorp winced, annoyed and offended. A door had slammed shut, it was the front left door that led straight into the hall – someone had let it slam or even slammed it behind them, and that was a noise that Hans Castorp couldn’t stand, that he had always hated. Perhaps that hatred was from education, perhaps from innate idiosyncrasy—enough he detested door-smashing, and could have punched anyone who threw it in front of his ears. In this case the door was also filled with small panes of glass, and that added to the shock: it was a smash and clink. Pfui, thought Hans Castorp angrily, what kind of damned sloppiness is that! Incidentally, since the seamstress spoke to him at the same moment,be. But there were lines between his blond brows and his face was awkwardly contorted as he answered the seamstress.

Joachim asked if the doctors had come through yet. Yes, they had been there for the first time, someone replied, – they had left the room almost as soon as the cousins ​​had arrived. Then they wanted to go and not wait, said Joachim. There will be an opportunity to introduce yourself during the day. But at the door they almost collided with Hofrat Behrens, who, followed by Dr. Krokowski, came in at a brisk pace.

“Oops, attention gentlemen!” said Behrens. “That could easily have gone badly for the corns on both sides.” He spoke strongly in Lower Saxon, broadly and chewing. “So that’s you‘ he said to Hans Castorp, whom Joachim presented with his heels drawn together; “Well, I’m glad.” And he gave the young man his hand, which was big as a shovel. He was a bony man, probably three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, already quite white on the head, with a bulging neck, large, bulging and bloodshot blue eyes with tears swimming in them, a wrinkled nose and a cropped mustache that was pulled askew from a unilateral pursed upper lip. What Joachim had said about his cheeks was absolutely true, they were blue; and so his head looked quite colorful against the white surgeon’s coat he wore, a smock that reached over his knees, showing his striped trousers and a pair of colossal feet in yellow and slightly worn lace-up boots. also dr Krokowski was in professional attire, being aloneKittel was black, made of a black luster material, like a shirt, with elasticated wrists, and didn’t add a little to his pallor. He behaved purely as an assistant and took no part in the greeting, but a critical tightness in his mouth indicated that he found his subordinate relationship odd.

“Cousins?” asked the Hofrat, waving his hand back and forth between the young people and looking down with his bloodshot blue eyes… “Well, does he want to swear by the calfskin too?” he said to Joachim and pointed to Hans Castorp with his head … “I, God forbid – what? I saw right away” – and he was now speaking directly to Hans Castorp – “that you have something civilian, something comfortable, – nothing as rattling of arms as that squad leader over there. You’d be a better patient than him, I bet. I can tell by looking at everyone whether they can make a useful patient, because talent is necessary, talent is necessary for everything, and this Myrmidon here hasn’t got the slightest bit of talent either. For exercising, I don’t know, but not for being ill. Do you want to believe that he always wants to leave? He always wants to get away, taunts me and bothers me and can’t wait to be abused down there. Such a beer lover! He doesn’t want to give us half a year. And yet it is quite nice here with us – now tell yourself, Ziemssen, whether it is not quite nice here! Well, your cousin will appreciate us better, he’ll be amused. There is also no shortage of ladies – we have lovely ladies here. At least from the outside, some are quite picturesque. But will have fun. There is also no shortage of ladies – we have lovely ladies here. At least from the outside, some are quite picturesque. But will have fun. There is also no shortage of ladies – we have lovely ladies here. At least from the outside, some are quite picturesque. ButYou should get a little more Couleur, listen, or elsefall off at the ladies! Green is certainly the golden tree of life, but green is not quite the right color for the face. Totally anemic, of course,” he said, walking up to Hans Castorp without further ado and pulling down an eyelid with his index and middle fingers. “Totally anemic, of course, like I said. You know what? It wasn’t so stupid of you to leave Hamburg to its own devices for a while. It’s a very thankful institution, this Hamburg; always gives us a nice contingent with its boozy meteorology. But if I may take this opportunity to give you a little piece of advice-quite sine pecunia , you know-do whatever your cousin does while you’re here. InThere is nothing smarter to do in your case than to live for a while as in mild tuberculosis pulmonum, and put on a little egg white. That’s strange here with us with the protein metabolism… Although the general combustion is increased, the body still puts on protein… Well, did you sleep well, Ziemßen? Fine what? So now let’s go with the pleasure walk! But no more than half an hour! And then put the mercury cigar in your face! Always write it down nicely, Ziemßen! Official! Conscientious! Saturday I want to see the curve! Your cousin should also measure at the same time. Measuring can never hurt anything. Morning gentlemen! Good entertainment! Tomorrow… Tomorrow…” And Dr. He was joined by Krokowski, who sailed on, arms flapping, palms all the way back, jerking left and right asking if one had slept “nicely,” to which the general affirmative was.