Part 33 of 39
“Ladies and gentlemen. This air—this characteristic thawing air, with its somewhat enervating breath, full of memories and promises of spring—we should not breathe it in to breathe it out in—Really.—I must implore you. We must not. It is an insult. We should give it out only in the form of praise—of complete and utter—enough, ladies and gentlemen. I interrupt myself—in honour of—” He did, indeed, stand still, bent backward, shading his brows with his hat. They followed his gaze. “May I,” said he, “may I draw your attention upwards—high in the sky, to that black, circling point against the blue, intensely blue, shading into black—that is a bird of prey. It is, if I am not mistaken—look, ladies and gentlemen, look, my child. It is an eagle. Most emphatically I call your attention—look, it is no buzzard, no vulture, it is an eagle. If you were as farsighted as my advancing age—yes, my child, advancing—my hair is white. You would see, as plainly as I do, the blunt pinions—it is a golden eagle. He circles directly overhead, he hovers, not a single beat of his wing—at a tremendous height in the blue, and with his keen, farsighted eyes under the prominent bony structure of his brows he is peering earthwards. The eagle, ladies and gentlemen, the bird of Jove, king of his kind, the lion of the upper air. He has feathered gaiters, and a beak of iron, with a sudden hook at the end; claws of enormous strength, their talons curving inwards, the front ones overlapped by the long hinder one in an iron clutch. Look!” And he tried to put his long fingers in the posture of an eagle’s claw. “Gaffer, why are you circling and spying up there?” He turned his head upwards again. “Strike! Strike downward, with your iron beak into head and eyes, tear out the belly of the creature God gives you—splendid! Splendid! Absolutely! Bury your talons in its entrails, make your beak drip with its blood—”
He had wrought himself to a pitch. All interest in Settembrini’s and Naphta’s antinomies was fled away. But the vision of the eagle remained—even though they ceased talking about it, and devoted themselves to the programme they were carrying out under Mynheer’s lead. They stopped at an inn to eat and drink—quite out of hours, but with an appetite whetted by silent memories of the eagle. There was a feasting and a tippling, such as always went on where Mynheer was, in Dorf or Platz, or the inns at Claris and Klosters, whither they had gone in the little train. Under his tutelage, they tasted the “classic” gifts of life: coffee and cream with fresh bread, moist cheese and fragrant Alpine butter, heavenly-tasting with hot roasted chestnuts. They drank red Veltliner, to their hearts’ content. Peeperkorn accompanied the impromptu meal with a fire of ejaculations; or incited Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to talk, that good-natured sufferer, who abhorred all high thoughts, but could hold forth so acceptably on the subject of the manufacture of rubber shoes in Russia. He described how the rubber mass was treated with sulphur and other substances, and the finished, glossy product subjected to a heat of over two hundred degrees to “vulcanize” it. He talked about the polar circle, for his business trips had more than once taken him thither; about the midnight sun, and eternal winter at the North Cape—all this out of his scraggy throat, from beneath his bushy moustaches. Up there, he said, the steamers looked tiny, next the gigantic cliffs, on the steel-grey surface of the sea. And a yellow radiation was diffused over great tracts of the heavens—the northern lights. The whole thing had seemed spooky to him, Anton Karlowitsch: the scene and himself to boot.
Thus Herr Ferge, the complete outsider, the only member of the group who stood detached from its complicated relationships. But now that we speak of these, it will be well to relate two conversations, two priceless conversations à deux, which our unheroic hero had, the first with Clavdia Chauchat, the second with the present companion of her travels; one in the hall, on an evening when the disturbing element lay above with a fever; the other on an afternoon by Mynheer’s bedside.
It was half dark in the hall. The social activities had been brief and languid, the guests withdrew early to the evening cure or else took their wilful way into town, to dance and game. A single light burned in the hall ceiling—and in the adjoining salons dimness reigned. But Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had taken dinner without her protector, was not gone upstairs after it, but still lingered in the writing-room, so he did the same. He sat by the tiled hearth, in the back part of the hall, which was raised by one step from the rest, and separated by arches supported on two columns; in a rocking-chair such as that one Marusja had leaned back in, on the evening Joachim had spoken with her for the first and last time. He was, permissibly at this hour, smoking a cigarette.
She came, he heard her approaching step and the sound of her frock; fanning the air with a letter she held by one corner, and saying, in her Pribislav voice: “The porter has gone. Do give me a timbre poste.”
She was wearing a thin dark silk this evening, cut round in the neck, with filmy sleeves finished by a buttoned cuff at the wrists. It was the cut he loved. She wore the pearls, they gleamed palely in the half light. He looked up into her Khirgiz face.
“Timbre?” he repeated, “I have none.”
“No? Tant pis pour vous. Not prepared to do a lady a favour?” She pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “I am disappointed. You ought to be more precise and dependable. I imagined you having a compartment in your pocketbook, nice neat little sheets of all denominations.”
“Why should I? I never write a letter. To whom should I write? I seldom do, even a card, and that is already stamped. I have no one to write to. I have no contact with the flat-land, it has fallen away. We have a folksong that says: ‘I am lost to the world’—so it is with me.”
“Well, then, lost soul, at least give me a papiros,” said she, and sat down opposite him on a bench with a linen cushion, one leg over the other. She stretched out her hand. “With those, at least, you are provided.” She took a cigarette, negligently, from the silver case he held out to her, and availed herself of his little pocket-device, the flame of which lighted up her face. The indolent “Give me a cigarette,” the taking it without thanks, bespoke the spoiled, luxurious female; yet even more it betokened a human companionship and mutual “belonging,” an unspoken give and take which came both thrilling and tender to his lovelorn sense.
He said: “Yes, I always have them. I am always provided, one must be. How should I get on without them? I have, as they say, a passion for them. To tell the truth, however, I am hardly a very passionate man, though I have my passions, phlegmatic ones.”
“I am extraordinarily relieved,” she said, breathing out, as she spoke, the smoke she had inhaled, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. But how should you be? You would have degenerated. Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C’est ça. You don’t realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you an enemy of the human race?”
“Well, well, well! Enemy of the human race! How can you make such a general statement, Clavdia? Have you something definite and personal in your mind, when you say we don’t live for the sake of life, but for the sake of enriching ourselves? Women don’t usually moralize like that, so abstractly. Oh, morality, and that! A subject for Naphta and Settembrini to quarrel over. It belongs to the realm of the Great Confusion. Whether one lives for oneself, or for the sake of life—one doesn’t know oneself, no one can know that precisely and certainly. I mean, the limits are fluid. There is egoistic devotion, and there is devoted egoism. I think, on the whole, that it is as it is in love. Of course, it is probably immoral of me that I cannot very well attend to what you say to me about morality for being so happy that we are sitting here as we once did, and then never again, even since you came back. And that I may tell you there was never anything so lovely as the way those cuffs suit your hand, and the soft flowing silk your arm—your arm, that I know so well—”
“I am going.”
“Oh, please, please not! I promise to have proper regard for the circumstances, and the—personalities.”
“As one would expect, from a man without passion!”
“Yes, you see—you mock at me when I—and then, when I—you say you will leave me—”
“Pray speak a little more connectedly, if you expect me to understand you.”
“So I am not to have any benefit from all your practice in guessing the meaning of disconnected sentences? Is that fair, I ask—or I would if I did not know that it is not a matter of justice at all—”
“No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy—when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous.”
“There—ridiculous. Then grant me my phlegm. I repeat, how could I do without it? For instance, how else could I have endured to wait so long?”
“I beg pardon?”
“Aussi longtemps pour toi.”
“Voyons, mon ami. I say no more about the form of address you persist in, in your folly. You will tire of it—and then, I am not prudish, not an outraged middle-class housewife—”
“No, for you are ill. Your illness gives you freedom. It makes you—wait, I must hunt for the word—it makes you—spirituelle!”
“We shall speak of that another time. It was something else I meant. Something I demand to hear. You shall not pretend I had anything to do with your waiting—if you did wait—that I encouraged you to it, or even permitted it. You must admit explicitly that the opposite was the case—”
“Certainly, Clavdia, with pleasure. You never asked me to wait, I did it on my own. I can quite understand your laying stress on the point—”
“Even when you make admissions, there is always some impertinence about them. You are impertinent by nature—not only with me, but in general—God knows why. Your admiration, your very humility, is an impertinence. Don’t think I can’t see it. I ought not to speak with you at all, and certainly not when you dare to talk about waiting for me. It is inexcusable that you are still here. You should have been long ago at your work, sur le chantier, or wherever it was.”
“Now that, Clavdia, is not spirituel—it even sounds conventional. You are just talking. You can’t mean it in Settembrini’s sense—and however else, then? I cannot take it seriously. I will not go off without permission, like my poor cousin, who, as you said he would, died because he tried to do service down below, and who knew himself, I suppose, that he would die, but preferred death to doing service up here any longer. Well, it was for that he was a soldier. But I am not. I am a civilian, for me it would be deserting the colours to do what he did, and go and serve the cause of progress down in the flat-land, despite what Behrens says. It would be the greatest disloyalty and ingratitude, to the illness, and its spirituel quality, and to my love for you, of which I bear scars both old and new—and to your arms I know so well, even admitting that it was in a dream, a highly spirituel dream, that I learned to know them, and that you had no responsibility for my dream, and were not bound by it, nor your freedom infringed on—”
She laughed, cigarette in mouth, so that the Tartar eyes became narrow slits; leaning back against the wainscoting, her hands resting on the bench on either side of her, one leg crossed over the other, and swinging her foot in its patent-leather shoe.
“Quelle générosité! Pauvre petit! Oh la la, vraiment—Precisely thus I have always imagined un homme de génie!”
“Don’t, Clavdia. I am no homme de génie—as little as I am a personality. Lord, no. But chance—call it chance—brought me up here to these heights of the spirit—you, of course, do not know that there is such a thing as alchemistic-hermetic pedagogy, transubstantiation, from lower to higher, ascending degrees, if you understand what I mean. But of course matter that is capable of taking those ascending stages by dint of outward pressure must have a little something in itself to start with. And what I had in me, as I quite clearly know, was that from long ago, even as a lad, I was familiar with illness and death, and had in the face of all common sense borrowed a lead pencil from you, as I did again on carnival night. But unreasoning love is spirituel; for death is the spirituel principle, the res bina, the lapis philosophorum, and the pedagogic principle too, for love of it leads to love of life and love of humanity. Thus, as I have lain in my loge, it has been revealed to me, and I am enchanted to be able to tell you all about it. There are two paths to life: one is the regular one, direct, honest. The other is bad, it leads through death—that is the spirituel way.”
“You are a quaint philosopher,” she said. “I will not assert that I have understood all your involved German ideas; but it sounds human and good, and you are good, a good young man. You have truly behaved en philosophe, one must say that for you—”
“Too much en philosophe for your taste, eh, Clavdia?”
“No more impertinences. They become tiresome. That you waited for me was silly—uncalled for. But you are not angry, because you waited in vain?”
“It was hard, Clavdia, even for a man phlegmatic in his passions. Hard for me and hard of you to come back with him like that—for of course you knew through Behrens that I was here and waiting for you. But I have told you I regard it as a dream, what we had together, and I admit that you are free. And I waited after all not quite in vain, for here you are, we sit together as once we did, I can hear the piercing sweetness of your voice, known to my ear from so long ago; and beneath this flowing silk are your arms, your arms that I know—even though upstairs there lies your protector, in a fever, the mighty Peeperkorn, whose pearls you wear—”
“And with whom, for your own profit and enrichment, you have struck up such a friendship.”
“Do not grudge me it, Clavdia, Settembrini reproached me with it too. But that is conventional prejudice. The man is a boon—for God’s sake, is he not a personality? He is already old—yes; but even so, I could well understand how you as a woman could love him madly. You do love him madly?”
“All honour to thy philosophy, my little German Hänschen,” she said, and lightly stroked his hair. “But I could not find it in my heart to speak to you of my love for him. It would not be hu‑man.”
“Ah, why not, Clavdia? It is my belief that love of humanity begins where poor-spirited people believe it leaves off. We can speak quite quietly of him. You love him passionately?”
She bent to toss her cigarette-end in the grate, and then sat with folded arms.
“He loves me,” she said, “and his love makes me proud and grateful, and devoted to him. Tu peux comprendre çela. Or else you are not worthy the friendship he feels for you. His feeling forced me to follow and serve him. What else could I do? You may judge. Is it possible for any human being to disregard his love?”
“Not possible,” Hans Castorp confirmed. “No, of course, it was out of the question. How could a woman bring herself to disregard his feeling, and his anguish over that feeling—to forsake him, as it were, in his Gethsemane—”
“Tu n’es pas du tout stupide,” said she, her slanting eyes fixed in a reverie. “You understand things. ‘Anguish over the feeling—’ ”
“Not much understanding is needed to know that you had to follow him—though, or rather because, there must be much that is troubling in his love.”
“C’est exact. Troubling. There is much care with him, you know, many difficulties.” She had taken his hand, and played absently with the fingers—but suddenly she knitted her brows, she looked up and said: “Mais—dis-moi: ce n’est pas un peu—ordinaire, que nous parlons de lui, comme ça?”
“No, Clavdia. Surely not. Far from it. Surely it is no more than human. You love the word, and I love to hear you say it, in your quaint pronunciation. My cousin Joachim did not like it—on military grounds. He thought it meant general licence and flabbiness; and in that sense, as an unlimited guazzabuglio of self-indulgence, I have my own suspicions of it, I confess. But in the sense of freedom, goodness, esprit, then it is great, we can freely apply it to our talk about Peeperkorn and the care and pain he causes you. Of course, they are the result of his sore spot—his dread of denying the feelings, that makes him love so much what he calls the classic gifts of life, the gift of Bacchus, liquid refreshment—we may speak of that in all reverence, for even in that weakness his scale is kingly and we shall lower neither him nor ourselves by speaking of it.”
“It is not a question of us,” she said. She had folded her arms again. “One would not be a woman if one were not willing to bear humiliation for the sake of a man like that, on the grand scale, as you say, when one is the object of his feeling and of his suffering from it.”
“Absolutely, Clavdia. Well said. For then even the humiliation is on the grand scale, and from the height of it the woman can look down on poor creatures built on smaller lines, and speak to them with such contempt as was in your voice when you said, about the postage stamps: ‘You ought to be more precise and dependable!’ ”
“You are hurt? You must not be. Let us put those feelings away, send them to Jericho. Do you agree? I have been wounded too sometimes—I will confess it, since we are sitting together like this. I have been angry with your phlegm, and your being such friends with him, on account of your egoistic craving for experience. Yet I was glad too, and grateful for the respect you paid him. You were loyal; if you were a bit impertinent too, after all I could make allowance for that.”
“Very kind of you.”
She looked at him. “You are incorrigible, it seems. And certainly I can’t quite tell how much esprit you have—but deep you are, a deep young man. Well, very good, one can do with it, and be friends. Shall we be friends, shall we make a league—not against but for him? Will you give me your hand on it? I am often frightened.—Sometimes I am afraid of the solitude with him—the inward solitude, tu sais—he is frightening; sometimes I am afraid something may happen to him—it makes me shudder.—I should be glad to feel I had someone beside me. En fin—if you care to know—that was why I came back here with him—chez toi.”
They sat knee to knee, he with his rocking-chair tipped toward her, she on her bench. Her last words were breathed close to his face, and she pressed his hand as she spoke. He said: “To me? Oh, Clavdia! That is beautiful beyond words! You came back to me with him? And yet will you say my waiting was silly and wrong and fruitless? It would be very inept of me to refuse, not to know how to value your friendship, friendship with me for his sake—”
She kissed him on the mouth. It was a Russian kiss, the kind that is exchanged in that spreading, soulful land, at high religious feasts, as a seal of love. But when a notoriously “deep” young man and a lady still young, and of such insinuating charm, exchange it, we are involuntarily reminded of Dr. Krokowski’s ingenious if not wholly unobjectionable method of treating the subject of love, in that slightly fluctuating sense, so that no one was ever quite sure whether it was earthly or heavenly, spiritual or fleshly love he had in mind. Are we so treating it, or were Clavdia Chauchat and Hans Castorp, when they exchanged their Russian kiss? But what will the reader say if we simply refuse to go into the question? To try to make a clean-cut distinction between the passionate and the soulful—that would, no doubt, be analytical. But we feel that it would also be inept—to borrow Hans Castorp’s useful word—and certainly not in the least “genial.” For what would “clean-cut” be? The subject is so equivocal, the limits so fluctuating. We make bold to laugh at the idea. Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly? All ambiguity is therein resolved: love cannot but be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself, as the height of shrewd “geniality” as in the depth of passion; it is organic sympathy, the touching sense-embrace of that which is doomed to decay. In the most raging as in the most reverent passion, there must be caritas. The meaning of the word varies? In God’s name, then, let it vary. That it does so makes it living, makes it human; it would be a regrettable lack of “depth” to trouble over the fact.
So while these youthful lips meet in their Russian kiss, let us darken our little stage and change the scene. For now, instead of the dimness of the hall we have the rather pensive light of a declining spring day in the season of melting snows; and our hero is seated in his wonted place at the bedside of Mynheer Peeperkorn, in friendly and respectful converse with that great man. Frau Chauchat, after the tea hour, at which she had appeared alone, as at the previous three meals, had gone shopping in the Platz, and Hans Castorp announced himself for his usual visit to the Dutchman. First of all to show him attention and help him pass the time; but also to be edified by the motions of the great man’s personality. In short, out of “varying” motives, varying as life varies. Peeperkorn laid aside the Telegraaf and tossed the horn-rimmed eyeglasses upon it. He reached his visitor a broad, sea-captain’s hand, and his thick chapped lips, on which sat a distressed expression, moved vaguely. Red wine and coffee were as usual to hand; the coffee things stood on a chair, stained brown from recent use—Mynheer had taken his regular afternoon drink, hot and strong, with sugar and cream, and was in a perspiration. His face with its fringe of white hair was flushed, and little beads stood on brow and upper lip.
“I am sweating somewhat,” he said. “Come in, young man, come in. On the contrary. Sit down. It is a sign of weakness when one takes a hot drink and sweats thereafter. Will you—quite right—a handkerchief—thank you.” The flush soon faded and gave place to the yellowish pallor which was Mynheer’s facial teint after a bad attack. The fever had been severe this morning, and in all three stages, the cold, the hot, the moist; Peeperkorn’s little eyes looked tired beneath the lined, masklike brow. He said: “It is—by all means, young man. I would like to express my—the word is—Positively. Appreciative—very kind of you to visit an ailing old man—”
“Not at all, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I am the one to be grateful, for permission to sit here a little; I get a great deal more out of it than you—I assure you my motives are not altruistic. But what sort of description is that of yourself—an ailing old man? It would never occur to anyone to call you that. It gives an entirely false picture.”
“Very good,” responded Mynheer. He closed his eyes for a second or so, leaning his majestic head against the pillows, the chin raised, the fingers with their long nails folded on his kingly chest, the muscles of which showed beneath the tricot shirt. “You are right, young man, or, rather, you mean it well. I am sure. It was pleasant yesterday—yes, yesterday afternoon, at that hospitable spot—the name of which I have now forgotten where we ate the excellent salami and scrambled eggs—and that sound native wine—”
“It was gorgeous,” Hans Castorp confirmed. “We certainly are filled up—the Berghof chef would not have been pleased to see us putting it in—one and all; he’d have felt insulted. That was genuine salami, the real thing; Herr Settembrini ate it with tears in his eyes. He is a patriot, you must know, a democratic patriot. He has consecrated his burgher’s pike on the altar of humanity, so that salami may be taxed at the Brenner frontier.”
“That is no matter,” Peeperkorn declared. “He is most chivalrous and courteous and very affable in conversation—a gallant gentleman, though obviously unable to change his clothing with any frequency.”
“None at all,” said Hans Castorp, “none at all! I know him well, have been friendly with him for a long time; he was kind enough to take me up, because he found I was a ‘delicate child of life.’ That is an expression we use between us, the sense of which is not obvious without the context. He has taken much pains to influence me for my good. But never, summer or winter, have I seen him wear anything but those check trousers and that threadbare double-breasted coat. He wears the old things with great dignity, there is something gallant about him, I agree with you there. The way he does it is a triumph over poverty—I like better to see it than little Naphta’s elegance, that always seems suspicious—a work of darkness, as it were, and he gets the money for it in some hole-and-corner way, I understand.”
“A chivalrous and affable gentleman,” repeated Peeperkorn, passing over Hans Castorp’s remarks about little Naphta. “But also—forgive me the reservation—not free from prejudice. Madame, my companion, has no great opinion of him—you may have seen. She feels little sympathy—no doubt because she perceives the same prejudice to exist toward herself. Not a word, young man. I am far from—comment on Herr Settembrini and your friendly feelings for him—No more! I should not think of saying that in any point—he has failed in any respect in knightly courtesy. My dear friend—irreproachable, very. But there is—a line drawn, a certain—a withdrawal—which makes comprehensible Madame Chauchat’s—”
“Feeling against him. Perfectly natural. Perfectly justified. Pardon me, Mynheer Peeperkorn, for taking the words out of your mouth. I venture to do so in the consciousness that you will not misunderstand me. When one thinks how women are made (you smile, to hear a person of my youth and inexperience making general observations on this subject)—how dependent a woman’s feeling for a man is upon his feeling for her—it is not surprising. Women, if you will permit me so to express myself, are creatures not of action but of reaction; they do not initiate, they are inactive in the sense that they are passive. May I, even at the risk of being tiresome, try to follow that a little further? Woman, so far as I have been able to observe, regards herself, in a love-affair, as the object. She lets it come; she does not make a free choice, she only chooses on the basis of the man’s having chosen, and even then, even then, I must repeat, her choice is suspect, it is prejudiced by the very fact that she has been chosen—provided, of course, the man is not too poor a specimen, and even so—Good Lord, what unalloyed drivel I’m talking! But when one is young, everything seems new and astonishing. You ask a woman: ‘Do you love him?’ And she tells you: ‘He loves me so much!’ and rolls her eyes up, or else rolls them down. Imagine an answer like that from one of us—if you will pardon me putting us in the same category. Perhaps there are men who would answer like that, but they are poor-spirited creatures—their women wear the breeches, if you will forgive the expression. I should like to know what kind of self-appraisement is at the bottom of the feminine answer. Is it that the woman thinks she owes a man boundless devotion merely because he has conferred the favour of his choice upon so lowly a creature? Or does she see in the man’s love an infallible sign of her personal excellence? I’ve often asked myself these questions, when I have been thinking quietly alone.”
“Primitive—traditional mysteries you touch on there, young man, applying your glib little phrases to the sacred conditions of our existence,” responded Peeperkorn. “Man is intoxicated by his desire, woman demands and expects to be intoxicated by it. Hence our holy duty of feeling, hence the shame in unfeelingness, in powerlessness to awaken the woman to desire. Will you take a glass of red wine with me? I will drink, for I am thirsty. I have given out a considerable amount of water today.”
“Thanks, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I do not usually take anything at this hour; but I am always ready to drink a swallow or so to your health.”
“Then take the wineglass. There is only one, I will use the water-glass. It won’t insult this simple wine to drink it out of an ordinary tumbler—” He poured out the wine, with Hans Castorp’s help, as his hand trembled slightly, and drank thirstily, as though it had been water.
“That is refreshing,” he said. “Won’t you have some more? No? Permit me to fill my glass”—the second time, he spilled some wine; the turned-over sheet was stained with dark-red spots. “I repeat,” he said, with one lancelike finger reared up, “I repeat, that therein lies our duty, our sacred duty to feel. Feeling, you understand, is the masculine force that rouses life. Life slumbers. It needs to be roused, to be awakened to a drunken marriage with divine feeling. For feeling, young man, is godlike. Man is godlike, in that he feels. He is the feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing but the organ through which God consummates his marriage with roused and intoxicated life. If man fails in feeling, it is blasphemy; it is the surrender of His masculinity, a cosmic catastrophe, an irreconcilable horror—” He drank.
“Permit me to relieve you of your glass,” Hans Castorp said. “I find your train of thought highly edifying, Mynheer Peeperkorn. You are developing a theology there, in which you ascribe to man a highly honourable, if perhaps rather a one-sided religious function. There is, if I may say so, a certain austerity in your conception, it has its alarming side. Pardon me. All religious austerity is naturally somewhat alarming to people who are built on modest lines. I have no thought of criticizing the conception, I should like simply to return to your remark about certain prejudices, which, according to your observations, Herr Settembrini has on the subject of Madame. I have known Herr Settembrini for some time, more than a year, for years, in fact. And I can assure you that his prejudices, in so far as they exist, are in no case of a petty or bourgeois character. It would be absurd to think so. It can only be a question of prejudice in a general sense, impersonal, relating to certain pedagogic principles, which, in my character as a delicate child of life, Herr Settembrini has been at pains to—but that would lead us too far. It is a very complex subject, into which I could not—”
“And you love Madame?” Mynheer suddenly asked. He turned toward his visitor that kingly countenance, with the sore, writhen mouth and the pale little eyes under the arabesque of lines on the brow.
Hans Castorp started. He stammered: “I—that is—I feel great respect for Frau Chauchat, certainly, in her character as—”
“Pray!” said Peeperkorn, stretching out his hand with that gesture which held back the flow of words. Having thus made a free space for what he was about to say, “Let me,” he went on, “let me repeat, that I am far from reproaching this Italian gentleman with any actual offence against the rules of chivalry. I levelled this reproach against no one—no one. But it occurs to me—Understand me, young man, I am gratified, very. Your presence rejoices my heart. At the same time, I say to myself: your acquaintance with Madame is older than ours. You were a companion of her earlier sojourn up here. And she is a woman of the rarest charms, and I am only an ailing old man. How does it happen—today, as I was unable to accompany her, she goes down unattended to the village to make purchases—there is no harm in that, none at all. But doubtless—am I then to ascribe it to the—what was it you said?—the pedagogic principles of Signor Settembrini that you—I beg you not to misunderstand me—”
“Not at all, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Absolutely not. Not in the least. I act independently. On the contrary, Herr Settembrini has even taken occasion to—I regret to see that you have spilled wine on your sheets, Mynheer Peeperkorn. May I not—we usually put salt on while the spots are fresh—”
“It does not matter,” said Peeperkorn, fixing his guest with his glance.
Hans Castorp changed colour. He said, with a hollow smile: “Everything up here is out of the ordinary. The spirit of the place, if I may put it so, is not conventional. The sufferer, whether man or woman, is privileged. The laws of chivalry are thus forced rather into the background. You are for the moment indisposed, Mynheer Peeperkorn, an acute indisposition. Your companion is relatively well. I think I do as Madame would wish in representing her here beside you, in her absence—in so far as there can be any talk of representing her, ha ha!—instead of representing you with her and offering to attend her into the village. How indeed should I come to be playing the cavalier to Madame? I have no title to the position, no mandate, and I have, I must admit, a strong sense of mine and thine. In short, I find my position is correct, in face of the general situation, and also the very genuine feelings I entertain for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn. You asked me, I believe, a question, and I think what I have said should be a satisfactory answer to it.”
“A very amiable answer,” Peeperkorn responded. “I listen with involuntary pleasure, young man, to your fluent little phrases. Your tongue runs on, it springs over stock and stone, and rounds off all the sharp corners. But satisfactory—no. Your answer does not quite satisfy me—you must forgive me for disappointing you. Austere, my dear friend—you used the word with reference to some of my remarks just now. But in yours too I seem to note a certain austerity, they seem a little stiff and forced, and not in harmony with your nature, though I am acquainted with the phenomenon through your bearing in one respect and therefore recognize it now. I mean the formal manner you assume toward Madame—and toward no one else in our little circle, on our walks and excursions. And of which you owe me an explanation. It is a duty, an obligation. I am not mistaken. I have confirmed my observation too many times, and it is unlikely it has not been remarked by others as well—with the difference that these others may perhaps—or even probably—possess a key which I do not.”
Mynheer spoke with uncommon precision and clarity this afternoon, despite the exhaustion consequent upon his fever. There was scarcely a trace of his usual rhapsodic style. He half sat in his bed, his powerful shoulders and splendid head turned toward his guest; one arm was stretched out over the coverlet, with the freckled, sea-captain’s hand erect at the end of the woollen sleeve, forming the ring of precision. The lance-tipped fingers were aloft. And his lips formed the words, as precisely, as “plastically,” as Herr Settembrini himself could have wished, and rolled the r in his throat in words like “probably” and “austerity.”
“You smile,” he went on. “You seem to be busy searching the tablets of your memory and finding them blank. But there can be no doubt that you know what I mean. I do not say that you do not sometimes address Madame, or that you do not answer her, as occasion arises. But I repeat, you do so with a definite constraint, an evasiveness, and, in fact, an avoidance of one certain form. One gets the impression that there has been a one-sided wager; it is as though you had eaten a philippina with Madame, and made up that you will not address her with the usual form of address. In short, you never use the third person plural. You never say She to Madame.”
“But Mynheer Peeperkorn—how absurd—what sort of philippina would that be?”
“May I mention the circumstance—you are surely aware of it yourself—that you have just grown pale to the lips?”
Hans Castorp did not look up. He bent over and busied himself with the red stains on the sheet. “It had to come to that, I suppose,” he thought. “It had to come out.—And I suppose I even helped it on myself. I can see that now. Did I really go pale? It may be. For now we’ve certainly come to grips. What will happen? Shall I keep on lying? It might still go—but I won’t. I’ll just sit tight a few minutes and look at these bloodstains—I mean wine-stains—on the sheet.”
Part 33 of 39