October dawned, as new months usually dawn – it is in and of itself a completely modest and noiseless dawn, without signs and birthmarks, a quiet creeping in that easily escapes attention if it does not keep strict order. In reality, time has no cuts, there are no thunderstorms or the sound of trumpets at the beginning of onenew month or year, and even in that of a new seculum it is only we humans who shoot and ring.

In Hans Castorp’s case, the first day of October resembled the last day of September to a hair’s breadth; he was as cold and unfriendly as this one, and so were the ones that followed. You needed the winter suit and both camel hair blankets in the rest cure, not only in the evening but also during the day; the fingers with which one held his book were damp and stiff, even though his cheeks were in the dry heat, and Joachim was very tempted to use his fur sack; he only refrained from doing so in order not to spoil himself prematurely.

But a few days later, between the beginning and middle of the month, everything changed, and a belated summer fell of such splendor that it was amazing. It was not for nothing that Hans Castorp had heard these regions praised for October; For two and a half weeks heavenly splendor reigned over mountain and valley, one day surpassed the next in blue purity, and the sun burned down with such sudden force that everyone felt compelled to take back the lightest summer clothes, muslin dresses and canvas trousers, which had already been discarded to look for and even the large canvas umbrella without a crutch, which was attached to the armrest of the deck chair by means of an ingenious device, a peg with multiple holes,

“It’s nice that I’m still doing this,” said Hans Castorp to his cousin. “We’ve had it so miserably sometimes – it’s as if we’d already put winter behind us and now the good time would come.” He was right.Few features pointed to the true facts, and even these were inconspicuous. Leaving aside a few planted maples, which were just eking out a living down in “Platz” and had long since dropped their despondent leaves, there were no deciduous trees here whose condition had stamped the stamp of the season on the landscape, and only the hermaphrodite Alpine alder, which bears soft needles and changes them like leaves, was bare in autumn. The rest of the tree ornaments of the area, whether towering or crouching, were evergreen conifers, strong against the winter, which, vaguely restricted, is allowed to spread its blizzards here all year round; and only a multi-layered, rusty-reddish tone over the forest, despite the summer blaze in the sky, indicated the sinking of the year. Of course, looking closer, there were still the meadow flowers, who also spoke quietly to the point. There was no longer the orchid-like orchid, the shrub-like columbine that had adorned the hangings when the visitor arrived, and the wild carnation was no longer there either. Only the gentian, the short-seated autumn crocus could be seen and gave an indication of a certain inner freshness in the superficially heated atmosphere, a coolness that could suddenly kick at the bones of the resting, almost scorched on the outside, like a shiver of frost on a feverish person.

Hans Castorp, then, did not keep the inner order with which the man who manages his time supervises its course, divides, counts and names its units. He had ignored the quiet dawn of the tenth month; only the sensuous touched him, the heat of the sun with the secret frosty freshness in it and beneath it – a feelingwhich was new to him in this strength and inspired him to make a culinary comparison: according to a statement he made to Joachim, it reminded him of an “ omelette en surprise‘ with frozen food under the hot egg foam. He often said things like that, she said quickly, fluently, and in an emotional voice, like someone whose skin gets shivering. In between, of course, he was also silent, not to say withdrawn; for his attention was directed outward, but on one point; the rest, people as well as things, blurred in the fog, a fog created in Hans Castorp’s brain, which Hofrat Behrens and Dr. Krokowski would doubtless have been referred to as the product of soluble poisons, as the befuddled man said to himself, without this insight arousing the ability or even the remotest desire in himwould have to get rid of the intoxication.

Because this is an intoxication that is concerned with itself, and for which nothing seems more undesirable and despicable than disillusionment. He also asserts himself against dampening impressions, he does not allow them in order to preserve himself. Hans Castorp knew and had brought it up himself in the past that Frau Chauchat didn’t look good in profile, a bit sharp, no longer quite young. The consequence? He avoided looking at her in profile, literally shut his eyes when she happened to offer him this view from far or near, it hurt him. Why? His reason should have happily seized the opportunity to assert itself! But what do you ask . . .attractive, – appeared late and smashed the door and smiling, arms slightly raised to an unequal height, faced the hall to present himself. But he was delighted not so much by her looking so favourable, but by the fact that she was so, because it increased the sweet mist in his head, the intoxication that wanted itself, and was concerned about it, justified and to be nourished.

A reviewer of Lodovico Settembrini’s mind would have spoken of licentiousness, of “a form of licentiousness” in the face of such a lack of goodwill. Occasionally Hans Castorp thought of the literary things that he had said about “sickness and despair” and which he found incomprehensible or gave the impression of finding. He looked at Clawdia Chauchat, the slackness of her back, the thrust of her head; he constantly saw her arriving at the table very late, without reason or excuse, simply for lack of order and civilized energy; seeing her, out of this very basic deficiency, slam every door she went in or out of, turning bread balls and occasionally chewing the side fingertips, – and a wordless notion rose in him that if she was ill, and she probably was, almost hopelessly ill, since she had had to live up here so often and for so long, – her illness, if not entirely, then so but to a good extent of a moral nature, and indeed, as Settembrini had said, was not the cause or consequence of her “laxity,” but one and the same with her. He also remembered the dismissive gesture with which the humanist“Parthians and Scythians”, with whom he had to take a rest cure, a gesture of natural and direct contempt and rejection that could not first be justified, which Hans Castorp was well aware of from before – from back then when he, who stood very erect at the table, hated the slamming of doors from the bottom of his heart and was not even tempted to chew his fingers (if only because he had been given Maria Mancini instead), took serious offense at Frau Chauchat’s naughtiness and had a feeling had not been able to shake off his superiority when he had heard the narrow-eyed stranger try her hand at his native tongue.

Hans Castorp had almost completely given up such feelings because of the inner state of affairs, and it was the Italian who annoyed him much more because he spoke in his conceit of “Parthians and Scythians” – while he did not once had people from the “Bad” Russian table in mind, the one where the students with the too thick hair and the invisible underwear sat and argued incessantly in their completely foreign language, apart from which they apparently did not know how to express themselves, and their boneless character reminiscent of a thorax without ribs, as Hofrat Behrens recently described. It was true that the customs of these people could arouse lively feelings of detachment in a humanist. They ate with knives and defiled the toilet in an indescribable manner.vacuum be, andAccording to Hans Castorp’s own daily experiences, Frau Stoehr probably didn’t lie when she said at table that the couple at No. 32 received the lifeguard in the morning when he came to do the physicals, lying in bed together.

All this being true, the apparent distinction between good and bad was not in vain, and Hans Castorp assured himself he had but a shrug for any propagandist of the republic and of good style who, haughty and sober – especially sober, although he too was febrile and tipsy -, combined the two dinner parties under the name of Parthians and Scythians. The young Hans Castorp understood to a large extent what was meant, he had also begun to understand the connection between Mrs. Chauchat’s illness and her “casualness”. But the situation was as he himself said to Joachim one day: one begins with irritation and a feeling of distance, but suddenly “completely different things come up” which “has nothing to do with judgments”. and the moral strictness has played out – one is hardly accessible to pedagogical influences of a republican and eloquent kind. But what is that, we ask, probably also in Lodovico Settembrini’s sense, what kind of dubious intervening event is that paralyzes and eliminates man’s judgment, robs him of the right to it, or rather determines him to relinquish this right with senseless delight? We don’t ask his name because everyone knows it. We inquire as to his moral nature – and, frankly, do not expect a very lofty answer. In Hans Castorp’s case this condition proved itself to the extent probably also in Lodovico Settembrini’s sense, what kind of dubious incident is that which paralyzes and eliminates man’s judgement, deprives him of the right to it, or rather determines him to relinquish this right with senseless delight? We don’t ask his name because everyone knows it. We inquire as to his moral nature – and, frankly, do not expect a very lofty answer. In Hans Castorp’s case this condition proved itself to the extent probably also in Lodovico Settembrini’s sense, what kind of dubious incident is that which paralyzes and eliminates man’s judgement, deprives him of the right to it, or rather determines him to relinquish this right with senseless delight? We don’t ask his name because everyone knows it. We inquire as to his moral nature – and, frankly, do not expect a very lofty answer. In Hans Castorp’s case this condition proved itself to the extent We inquire as to his moral nature – and, frankly, do not expect a very lofty answer. In Hans Castorp’s case this condition proved itself to the extent We inquire as to his moral nature – and, frankly, do not expect a very lofty answer. In Hans Castorp’s case this condition proved itself to the extentthat he not only stopped judging, but also began to experiment with the way of life that appealed to him. He tried what it was like to slump at the table, with a slack back, and found it to be a great relief for the pelvic muscles. He also tried not to awkwardly close a door he walked through behind him, but to let it slam shut; And this, too, proved to be both convenient and appropriate: the expression corresponded to that shrug with which Joachim greeted him at the train station and which he had so often seen with those up here since then.

Put simply, our traveler was now head over heels in love with Clawdia Chauchat–we use the word again, as we think we have sufficiently obviated the misunderstanding which it might arouse. So it wasn’t a friendly, heartfelt melancholy in the spirit of that little song that made up the essence of his infatuation. Rather, it was a rather risky and homeless variety of this infatuation, mixed of chill and heat like the condition of a febrile, or like an October day in the upper spheres; and what was missing was a sentimental means that would have connected its extreme components. She referred, on the one hand, to Mrs. Chauchat’s knees and the line of her leg, to her back, her cervical vertebrae and her upper arms, with an immediacy that made the young man pale and distorted his features, whose small breasts were pressed together—in a word, her body, her lax and intensified body, enormously stressed by the illness and once more made into a body. And she, on the other hand, was something extremely fleeting andLong, a thought, no, a dream, the terrifying and endlessly alluring dream of a young man whose definite, even if unconsciously asked, questions had been answered only by hollow silence. Like everyone else, we claim the right to have our private thoughts about the narrative going on here, and we express the suspicion that Hans Castorp has not even reached the point at which he has actually reached the time originally set for his stay with those above would have transcended if his humble soul from the depths of time about the meaning and purpose of life’s service had somehow been given satisfactory information.

Moreover, being in love caused him all the pain and granted him all the joys that this state brings everywhere and under all circumstances. The pain is piercing; it contains a dishonorable element, like all pain, and is such a shock to the nervous system that it takes the breath away and can wring bitter tears from a grown man. In order to do justice to the joys, they were numerous and, although arising from inconspicuous causes, no less haunting than the sorrows. Almost every moment of the Berghof day was capable of bringing about it. For example: Hans Castorp, about to enter the dining room, notices the object of his dreams behind him. The result is clear in advance and of the utmost simplicity, but inwardly delightful up to also tear-inducing effect. Her eyes meet closely, his and hers grey-green, whose slightly Asian fit and cut enchant his marrow. He is unconscious, but even without consciousness he steps back to her sidefirst clear the way through the door. With a half-smile and a half-loud ” Merci “, she makes use of his offer, which is no more than civilized, and walks past and through. In the breath of her passing person he stands, foolish with happiness at the meeting and at the word of her mouth, namely the Merci, aimed at him directly and personally. He follows her, he staggers to the right to his table, and sinking into his chair, he is allowed to perceive that “Clawdia” over there, also taking a seat, is looking back at him – with an expression of reflection on the encounter at the door , it seems to him. O unbelievable adventure! O rejoicing, triumph, and boundless exultation! No, Hans Castorp would not have tried this intoxication of fantastic satisfaction at the look of some healthy little gosling down in the lowlands, to whom he would have “given his heart” in the sense of that little song, in a legitimate, peaceful and promising way. With feverish cheerfulness he greets the teacher, who has seen everything and is flushed with a fluffy flush – whereupon he pelts Miss Robinson with English conversation of such futility that the Fraulein,

Another time, at dinner, the rays of the clearly setting sun fall on the Good Russian Table. The curtains have been drawn over the patio doors and windows, but there’s a gap somewhere, and through it the red glow finds its way, cool but dazzling, hitting Mrs. Chauchat’s head so that, in conversation with the concave countryman, she turns to hers right, has to protect himself against it with his hand. This is an annoyance, but not a serious one;no one cares, the person concerned is probably not even aware of the discomfort. But Hans Castorp sees it across the hall – he also looks at it for a while. He examines the state of affairs, follows the path of the ray, establishes the place of its incidence. It’s that arched window over there on the right, in the corner between the French window and the Bad Russian Table, far from Frau Chauchat’s place and almost exactly as far from Hans Castorp’s. And he makes his decisions. Without a word he gets up, napkin in hand, walks across the room at an angle between the tables, pulls back the cream-colored curtains well, looks over his shoulder to make sure that the evening light is blocked and Mrs. Chauchat is free – and sets off on her way back, exerting a great deal of equanimity. A thoughtful young man who does what is necessary when no one else thinks to do it. Very few had noticed his intervention, but Mrs. Chauchat had felt the relief immediately and looked around – she remained in this position until Hans Castorp had reached his place again and, sitting down, looked over at her, whereupon she smiled in a friendly, astonished manner thanked, that is: pushed her head forward rather than tilted it. He acknowledged with a bow. His heart was motionless, not beating at all. Only later, when it was all over, did it start to pound, and only then did he notice that Joachim kept his eyes fixed on his plate, – as it later became clear to him that Mrs. Stöhr Dr. Cauliflower in the side and looked everywhere at his own table and at the others with a crouched laugh for sympathetic looks …

We describe everyday things; but the commonplace becomes strange when it flourishes on strange foundations. There were tensions and benevolent resolutions between them—or if not between them (for how far Madame Chauchat was affected by it we will leave undecided) at least for Hans Castorp’s imagination and sentiment. After lunch, on those beautiful days, a large part of the spa company used to go out onto the veranda in front of the dining room, to linger in groups for a quarter of an hour in the sun. It was happening there and an image developed, similar to that of the fortnightly Sunday brass band. The young people, absolutely idle, over-satiated with meat dishes and sweets, and all slightly feverish, chatted, flirted, eyed. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam might well be sitting on the balustrade, – hard pressed with her knees by the plump-lipped goose on one side and the Swedish warrior on the other, who, although completely recovered, extended his stay a little for a little follow-up treatment. Mrs. Iltis appeared to be a widow, for she had recently enjoyed the company of a “bridegroom” of at the same time melancholic and submissive appearance, whose presence did not prevent her, at the same time the homage of Captain Miklosich, a man with a hooked nose and a waxed mustache , raised chest and menacing eyes. There were lying-in hall ladies of different nationalities, new figures among them, only visible since October 1st, whom Hans Castorp could hardly have called by name, mixed in with cavaliers like Herr Albin; monocle-wearing seventeen-year-old; a bespectacled young Dutchmanwith a rosy face and a monomaniac passion for the stamp exchange; various Greeks, pomaded and almond-eyed, inclined to assault at table; two closely related little foxes who were called “Max and Moritz” and were considered great escapees … The hunchbacked Mexican, whose ignorance of the languages ​​​​represented here gave the expression of a deaf, took incessant photographs, lifting his tripod with purring agility dragged from one point on the terrace to another. The privy councilor might also turn up to perform the trick with the bootlaces. Somewhere, however, the religious man from Mannheim pushed himself lonely into the crowd, and his eyes, sad to the core, went a certain way secretly, to Hans Castorp’s disgust.

To come back to those “tensions and solutions” with one or the other example, on one such occasion Hans Castorp liked to sit on a varnished garden chair and chatting with Joachim, whom he had forced to come out with him despite his reluctance, against the wall of the house sitting while Mrs. Chauchat and her table companions were smoking a cigarette on the parapet in front of him. He spoke for her so that she might hear him. She turned her back on him… As you can see, we have a specific case in mind now. The cousin’s conversation was not enough for his affected talkativeness, he had made an acquaintance on purpose – which one? The acquaintance of Hermine Kleefeld – had directed the word to the young lady as if by chance,can. He asked whether she still remembered how devilishly she had frightened him when they first met him on the morning promenade. Yes, that’s himbeen whom they whistled at that time so refreshingly to welcome them! And she had achieved her purpose, he was willing to admit that, he was struck in the head as if with a club, she should only ask his cousin. Ha ha, whistling with the pneumothorax and scaring harmless hikers with it! He calls it a wicked game, freely describing it as sinful abuse and in just anger … And while Joachim, conscious of his instrumental role, sat with downcast eyes and Kleefeld from Hans Castorp’s blind and rambling looks gradually became the offensive for her person Feeling that he was only serving as a means to an end, Hans Castorp sulked and embarrassed himself and twisted figures of speech and gave himself a euphonious voice, until he actually achieved it, that Mrs. Chauchat turned and looked into the face of the man who spoke ostentatiously—but only for a moment. For so it was that her Pribislav eyes slid rapidly down his cross-legged figure, and lingered for a while on his yellow boot with an expression of such studious indifference that it looked like contempt, just like contempt,—whereupon they withdrew phlegmatically and perhaps with a smile in their depths.

A bad, bad accident! Hans Castorp went on talking feverishly for a while; then, as he inwardly became quite aware of this look at his boot, he almost fell silent in the middle of the word and sank into grief. the cloverfield,bored and offended, went their separate ways. Not without irritation in his voice, Joachim said, now they could probably take a rest cure. And a broken one answered him with a pale mouth that they could.

Hans Castorp suffered terribly from this incident for two days; for nothing happened meanwhile that would have been balm for his burning wound. Why this look? Why their contempt for him in the name of the Trinity? Was she looking at him like a healthy bully from below, whose receptiveness tended only towards the harmless? Like an innocence from the lowlands, so to speak, an ordinary fellow who went about laughing and stuffing his stomach and making money—a model student of life who knew nothing but the boring advantages of honor? Was he a windy guest for three weeks, not part of their sphere, or had he not professed on account of a damp spot – was he not ranked and belonging, one of us up here, with a good two months under his belt, and hadn’t Mercury risen again to 37.8 yesterday evening? … But that was it, that made his suffering complete! Mercury was no longer rising! The terrible despondency of those days caused Hans Castorp to become cold, sober and exhausted, which, to his bitter shame, expressed itself in very low, hardly above-normal measurement results, and it was cruel for him to see that his grief and grief could do nothing more , than to remove him further and further from Clawdia’s being and essence.

The third day brought tender redemption, brought it early in the morning. It was a beautiful autumn morning, sunnyand fresh, with meadows spun silvery grey. The sun and the waning moon were at about the same height in the clear sky at the same time. The cousins ​​had gotten up earlier than usual, in honor of the beautiful day, to extend their morning walk a little beyond the instruction to advance a little further along the forest path where the bench stood by the gully. Joachim, whose curve also showed a pleasing descent, had endorsed the refreshing irregularity and didn’t say no to Hans Castorp. ‘We’re recovered people,’ he had said, ‘fevered and detoxified, as good as ready for the flatlands. Why shouldn’t we lash out like the foals.” So they wandered bareheaded – for since he had made his profession, Hans Castorp had, in God’s name, conformed to the prevailing custom of going without a hat, as sure as he had felt in the beginning about this custom, his way of life and manners – and put their sticks. But they had not yet covered the ascending part of the reddish path, had only reached about the point where the pneumatic troop had met the newcomer, when they saw Mrs. Chauchat in front of them, slowly rising, at a distance, Mrs. Chauchat in White, in a white sweater, white flannel skirt, and even white shoes, ruddy hair lit by the morning sun. To be more precise: Hans Castorp had recognized her; Joachim only found himself aware of the circumstances through an unpleasant feeling of pulling and tugging at his side – a feeling brought about by the driving, lively gait that his companion suddenly struck, after he had suddenly stopped his steps and almost stopped. SuchJoachim felt that being rushed was extremely unhealthy and annoying; his breath shortened rapidly and he coughed. But that didn’t bother the purposeful Hans Castorp, whose organs seemed to be working splendidly; and when his cousin became aware of the situation, he just silently furrowed his brows and kept pace, for it was impossible for him to let them run ahead alone.

The beautiful morning revived young Hans Castorp. His mental powers had also secretly rested during the depression, and the certainty that the moment had come when the spell that had hung over him was to be broken shone clearly before his mind. So he reached out, dragging the panting, otherwise reluctant Joachim with him, and before the bend in the path, where it leveled off and led to the right along the wooded hill, they had almost reached Frau Chauchat. Then Hans Castorp slowed down again so as not to carry out his project in a state wild with exertion. And on the other side of the bend in the path, between the slope and the mountain wall, between the rusty-colored spruces through whose branches sunlight fell, it happened and happened wonderfully that Hans Castorp, to Joachim’s left,respectfully (why actually: respectfully) and received an answer from her: with a friendly, not particularly surprised, she thanked her with a friendly bow of her head, also said good morning in his language, whereby her eyes smiled – and that was all something else,something profound and blissful other than the glimpse of his boot, it was a stroke of luck and a turn of things for the better and the very best, quite unprecedented in nature and almost beyond comprehension; it was salvation.

On the soles of his wings, blinded by unreasonable joy, possessed of the greeting, the word, the smile, Hans Castorp rushed forward at the side of the abused Joachim, who silently looked away from him down the slope. It had been a prank, a rather boisterous one, and probably something like treason and malice in Joachim’s eyes, Hans Castorp knew that very well. It was not exactly as if he had asked a total stranger for a pencil; rather it would have been almost rude to walk stiffly and without a mark of honor on a lady with whom one had been living under the same roof for months; and hadn’t Clawdia even struck up a conversation with them in the waiting room the other day? That’s why Joachim had to keep quiet. But Hans Castorp understood well why the honor-loving Joachim was otherwise silent and walked with his head averted, while he himself was so openly and thoroughly happy about his successful trick. Couldn’t be happier who, for example, “gave his heart” to a healthy gosling in the flat country – more promising – and basically happily – and had great success – no,Such a man could not be as happy as he is now with the little he has stolen and secured in a good hour… So after a while he slapped his cousin hard on the shoulder and said:

“Hello, you, what about you? It’s such nice weather! Afterwards we want to go down to the Kurhaus, they’ll do it thereprobably music, think about it! Maybe they’re playing ‘Here, safe in the heart, the flower, look, from that morning’ from ‘Carmen’. What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” said Joachim. “But you look so hot, I’m afraid your sinking is over.”

That was the end of it. The shameful belittling of Hans Castorp’s nature was overcome by the greeting he had exchanged with Clawdia Chauchat, and in fact it was this awareness that he was really looking for in satisfaction. Yes, Joachim was right: Mercury rose again! When Hans Castorp consulted him after the walk, it rose to around 38 degrees.