The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Page A

his face with water again to cool it, which only made matters worse. And so he was feeling cross and at loose ends when he heard his cousin knock on the wall and call out to him. His expression, as Joachim entered the room, was not that of a man refreshed by sleep and ready to greet the morning.
BREAKFAST
    “Hello,” Joachim said. “So that was your first night up here. Are you well satisfied?”
    He was ready for a walk, dressed in sporty clothes and sturdy, tooled boots, his ulster flung over his arm, the outline of the flat bottle clearly visible in one pocket. He wasn’t wearing a hat today, either.
    “Thanks,” Hans Castorp replied, “well enough. I’ll not categorize it any further. I had some rather confused dreams. And the place has one shortcoming, you know, it’s not soundproof—that is rather annoying. Who was the woman in black out in the garden?”
    Joachim knew at once whom he meant.
    “Ah, that’s Tous-les-deux ,” he said. “That’s what we all call her at least, because those are the only words you ever hear out of her. She’s Mexican, you see, and knows not a word of German and almost no French, either, just a few scraps. She’s been here with her eldest son for five weeks now, a perfectly hopeless case, who’ll be making his exit soon enough—it’s all through him, his whole body’s poisoned with it, you could say, and at that stage it looks a lot like typhoid fever, Behrens says—gruesome for all involved, at any rate. And two weeks ago, now, her second son arrived up here, because he wanted to see his brother one last time—handsome young fellow, by the way, but then so is the other—both of them pretty as pictures, with those glowing eyes that drive the ladies crazy. Well, the younger one already had a little bit of a cough down below, but was otherwise in quite good shape. And no sooner does he arrive than he has a temperature—and I mean a high fever, a hundred and three right away—he takes to his bed, and if he ever gets up again, Behrens says, he’ll have more luck than sense. But in any case, it was high time, and then some, for him to come up here. Yes, and since then the mother just wanders about, when she’s not sitting with them, and the only thing she ever says to anyone she meets is: ‘ tous les deux! ’ Because that’s all she knows how to say, and there’s no one here who understands Spanish.”
    “So that’s her problem,” Hans Castorp said. “I wonder if she’ll say the same thing to me when I get to know her? That would be so strange—I mean, it would be comical and weird at the same time,” he said, and his eyes took on yesterday’s look—seemed too hot and heavy, as if he had been weeping for a long time, and shone with the same glint that the
    Austrian horseman’s novel cough had enkindled in them. In fact, he felt as if he had only just now reestablished a connection with yesterday, as if he were taking in the whole picture again, as it were, which had not really been the case since he awoke. He was ready, by the way, he declared, shaking a few drops of lavender water on his handkerchief so that he could dab at his brow and under his eyes. “If it’s all right with you, we can go to breakfast— tous les deux ,” he added as a joke, in a burst of high spirits. Joachim cast him a gentle glance and smiled a curious smile—melancholy and slightly mocking, it seemed—but why, he kept to himself.
    After making sure that he had cigars to smoke, Hans Castorp picked up his walking stick, coat, and hat—the last out of obstinacy, because he was all too definite in his own civilized habits to change them lightly and adopt strange new ones for a mere three weeks. And so they left, taking the stairs, and as they passed one door or another, Joachim would name its occupant—German names, but also all sorts of odd-sounding ones—adding brief remarks about the person’s character and the severity of the case.
    They also met people already returning