It was, when they met, no longer winter, no longer transition, no longer that offended time in which the snow makes everything correct and the green appears only as an exception. It was early summer, and that is an impertinence in the mountains: a green so fresh that it seems newly invented, a light so clear that it exposes every sentimentality, and an air that pretends to be pure, although it has long since been permeated by roads, kitchens, people, heating systems, and vanities.
The Sonnenalp lay in the countryside as if someone had not built it but set it down: a large complex of houses, terraces, paths, bodies of water, gardens, which settled into the hills like a village that thinks itself a castle, or like a ship that has run aground in the green and makes a virtue of it. From above, if one had the view, one would see how the complex spreads out like a city: the roofs like scales, the paths like veins, the pools like small lagoons – and all around it the meadows, the fields, the roads that wind as if they knew they were only the supporting roles in this great wellness play.
Hans Castorp stepped out of the main building, and he had, as always, this moment of irritation: inside it is stage, outside it is world. Inside one is addressed, registered, smiled at; outside it smells of grass, and the grass does not ask for names.
Morgenstern was already waiting.
Philipp Morgenstern – the man who had once stood in a wig and under a donkey mask to allow the world to be ridiculous for an evening, and who had then sworn never again to be a donkey who claims the grass is blue – stood today without mask, without wig, without prop. He wore a light jacket that looked as if it were expensive and at the same time practical; and his hands were, as with many people who think a lot and carry little, unoccupied. His face had that kind of tiredness that does not come from lack of sleep but from social conflicts: the tiredness of the good that has to grapple with the coarse.
Dr. AuDHS joined them a little later, as always with that mixture of self-evidence and absence that some people have who consider themselves responsible without being intrusive. He walked as if the path had already been thought before he entered it. His gaze was attentive but not curious; he did not look in order to possess, but in order to arrange.
“Herr Castorp,” he said, and in this tone lay the old form of address that Kautsonik liked to use so much: that old-fashioned dignity that in a modern context feels like a small rebellion.
“Herr Doktor,” said Hans Castorp, because he, as always, called him that, as if the abbreviation AuDHS were not a form of name but an office.
Morgenstern nodded to Hans.
“You look…” he began, and then paused, as if he did not want to fall into that trap that men are so fond of setting: the trap of publicly evaluating another man.
Hans Castorp smiled.
“Correct?” he asked.
Morgenstern snorted softly.
“Correct,” he said. “Yes. Correct. You look as if you could no longer desert.”
Hans Castorp felt a small sting, because the word fell so casually and yet contained everything. He did not answer. He answered as he so often answered: with a polite silence that revealed more than it concealed.
They set off.
