MYNHEER PEEPERKORN remained in House Berghof the whole winter—what there was left of it—and on into the spring; and there took place, among others, a memorable excursion (in which Settembrini and Naphta joined) into the Fluela valley, to see the waterfall. This occurred at the end of his stay. At the end? Did he remain no longer, then? No. He went away? Yes—and no. How yes and no? Pray let us have no prying into secrets—in the fullness of time we shall know. We are aware that Lieutenant Ziemssen died, not to speak of other less admirable performers of the dance of death. Then Peeperkorn’s malignant tropical fever carried him off? No, not so—but why so impatient? Let us not forget the condition of life as of narration: that we can never see the whole picture at once—unless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge. Let us at least pay time so much honour as the nature of our story permits—little enough, in all conscience; for it has begun to rush pell-mell and helter-skelter; or, if the words suggest too much noise and confusion, shall we say it is going like the wind? The little hand on time’s clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it. Yet how much logical clarity, how much pure light of reason have we opposed to the stealing vague? Not by chance, may we say, have we kept company with intellectual lights like Naphta and Settembrini, instead of surrounding ourselves with incoherent Peeperkorns! And this leads us to a comparison, which in many respects, notably that of scale, must result in favour of this latest arrival on the scene. It did so in Hans Castorp’s own mind. He lay, considering matters, in his loge, and admitted to himself that his two over-vocal mentors, the self-elected guardians of his soul, were dwarfed beside Pieter Peeperkorn. Almost he inclined to call them what Peeperkorn in his royal cups had called him, Hans Castorp—chatterboxes. He was well pleased that hermetic pedagogy should have given him this too: contact with an out-and-out personality.
True, this personality was the companion of Clavdia Chauchat’s travels, and as such a greatly disturbing element. But that was another matter, and one which Hans Castorp did not allow to prejudice his judgment. He persisted in his sincere and respectful if also rather forward sympathy for this man on the grand scale, regardless of his partnership in the travelling-trunks of the woman of whom once, on a carnival night, Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil. That was his way; though we know some people, male and female, will not understand such a lack of sensibility, preferring that our hero should hate Peeperkorn, avoid him, call him an old dotard, a drivelling old sot. Instead of which we see him by Peeperkorn’s bedside in his attacks of fever—prattling to him (the word applies to his own share in the conversation, not the majestic Peeperkorn’s) and with the receptivity of inquiring youth on his travels, letting himself be played on by the power of the personality. All this Hans Castorp did, and all this we report of him, indifferent to the danger that someone may thereby be reminded of Ferdinand Wehsal, who once was wont to carry Hans Castorp’s
overcoat. The comparison is not pertinent—for our hero was no Wehsal. Depths of self-abasement were not his line. But he was no “hero” either: which is to say, he would never let his relation to the masculine be conditioned by the feminine. True to our principle of making him out neither better nor worse than he was, we assert that he simply declined—not expressly and consciously, but quite naïvely, declined to let his judgment of his own sex be perverted by romantic considerations. Nor his sense of what was formative in experience. The female sex may find this offensive; we believe Frau Chauchat did feel some involuntary chagrin over the fact—a biting remark or so escaped her, to which we shall refer later on. But surely it was this very characteristic of his which rendered him so irresistible an object for pedagogic rivalry.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay grievously ill, the day after that evening of cards and champagne we have described—and no wonder. Nearly all the participants in those long-drawn-out, exhausting revels were the same. Hans Castorp was no exception, his head ached to splitting; which did not prevent him from paying a visit to the bedside of his last night’s host. He craved permission through the Malay, whom he met in the corridor; and it was readily granted.
He entered the Dutchman’s double bedroom through the salon which separated it from Frau Chauchat’s. It was larger and more luxuriously furnished than most of the Berghof rooms, with satin-upholstered arm-chairs and curly-legged tables. A thick, soft carpet covered the floor, and the beds—they were not the usual hygienic dyingbed of the establishment, but very stately indeed, of polished cherry-wood with brass mounting, and above them hung a little canopy without curtains, like one umbrella sheltering both.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay in one of the two; its red satin coverlet was strewn with papers, books, and letters, and he was reading the Telegraaf through his horn-rimmed pince-nez with the high nose-piece. The coffee-machine stood on a chair at the bedside, and a half-empty bottle of the same simple effervescent red wine was on the night-table, among vials of medicine. Hans Castorp was rather put off to see the Dutchman wearing not a white night-shirt, but a long-sleeved woollen vest, buttoned at the wrists and collar-less, cut round in the neck, and clinging to the old man’s powerful torso, his broad shoulders and breast. This undress threw into even greater relief the splendid humanity of his head on the pillow; in it he looked more remote than ever from the conventional and middle-class, suggesting on the one hand the homme du peuple, on the other a portrait-bust.
“By all means, young man,” he said, taking off the horn spectacles by the nose-piece. “Come in. Don’t mention it—on the contrary.” Hans Castorp sat down by the bed, and concealed his surprise—for it was that rather than admiration which he felt, however sympathetically—under a burst of cordial and lively chatter, which
Peeperkorn seconded with magnificent disjecta membra and much play of gesture. He looked very “poorly,” yellow and in evident distress; a good deal affected by the attack of fever he had had toward morning, and the subsequent exhaustion—in part undoubtedly the result of his last night’s bout. “We were pretty—last night, you know—carried it pretty far,” he said. “But you are—Good. With you there were no further—but my age, and the condition I am in—my child,” he turned with mild yet quite perceptible severity to Frau Chauchat, who just then entered the room from the salon, “very well, very well indeed. Very. But I repeat—ought to have been
prevented.” Something like an approach to his regal fit of rage rose in face and voice. The injustice, the unreason of the reproof were obvious to anybody who tried to imagine the storm that would have burst on the head of one seriously thinking to disturb him in his drink. But such are the moods of the great. Frau Chauchat moved to and fro in the room, after greeting Hans Castorp, who rose as she entered, without a handshake, but with a smile and nod, and a “Pray don’t disturb yourself”—in his tête- à-tête, that was, with Mynheer. She busied herself about the room, summoned the Malay to take the coffee-machine, then withdrew awhile, and on her return, softfooted, took part standing in the others’ talk. Hans Castorp got an impression that she was there on guard. It was all very well for her to come back to the Berghof in company with a personality. But when the long-suffering lover took leave to evince regard for the personality, as man for man, then she betrayed uneasiness in pointed phrases like “Pray don’t disturb yourself” and the like. They cost Hans Castorp a smile, which he bent his head to hide, though inwardly aglow. Peeperkorn poured him out a glass of wine from the bottle on the night-table. Under the circumstances the best thing, in the Dutchman’s opinion, was to begin where one had left off; and that innocent effervescent wine had the same effect as soda-water. They touched glasses. Hans Castorp, as he drank, looked at the freckled, sea-captain’s hand, with its pointed nails, the woollen band buttoned round the wrist. It took up the glass, carried it to the thick, cracked lips; the throat, so like a statue’s and yet rather like a day labourer’s, worked up and down as it swallowed the wine. Peeperkorn indicated the medicine bottle on the table, a brown liquid, of which he took a spoonful from Frau Chauchat’s hand. It was an antipyretic, chiefly quinine, he baid. He made his guest try its characteristic bitter and pungent taste; and had much to say in praise of the wonderworking, germ-destroying properties of the drug, its tonic quality, its wholesome effect in regulating the temperature. It slowed down protein catabolism, promoted assimilation, in short it was a boon to mankind, a wonderful cordial, tonic and stimulant—an intoxicant as well, for one could get quite tipsy on it, he said, making the last night’s suggestive gesture of fingers and head like a pagan priest at his ritual dance.
Yes, a wonderful substance, cinchona. It had not been three hundred years since European pharmacology made its acquaintance; not a century since the alkaloid had been isolated which was its active principle; isolated and, to a certain extent, analysed, for it would be too much to say that chemistry knew all there was to know about it, or was in a position to reproduce it synthetically. Our pharmacology need not be too arrogant over its science; for the state of its knowledge on the subject of quinine was a fair example of the rest. It had various facts about the operation of this or that drug; but was very often embarrassed to know the causes of the effect produced. If the young man were to survey the field of our toxicological knowledge, he would find that no one could tell him anything of the elementary properties conditioning the effects of the so-called poisons. For example, take the venom of snakes: all that was known of these animal substances was that they belonged to the albuminoid group, and consisted of various proteids, none of which produced a violent effect, except in this certain—and most uncertain—combination. Introduced into the blood-circulation, the effect was astonishing indeed, considering how far we were from being
accustomed to think of albumen as a poison. The truth was, Peeperkorn said, and lifted his head from the pillow, elevated the arabesques on his brow, and gave point to his remarks by the little circle and the upright finger-tips—the truth was, in the world of matter, that all substances were the vehicle of both life and death, all of them were medicinal and all poisonous, in fact therapeutics and toxicology were one and the same, man could be cured by poison, and substances known to be the bearer of life could kill at a thrust, in a single second of time.
He spoke very impressively, and with unwonted coherence, of drugs and poisons, and Hans Castorp listened and nodded; less concerned with the content of his speech—he seemed to have the subject much at heart—than with silently exploring this extraordinary personality, which in the end remained as inexplicable as the operation of the snake-poison he was discussing. In the world of matter, Peeperkorn said, everything depended on dynamics, all else being entirely hypothetical. Quinine was one of the medicinal poisons; one of the strongest of these. Four grammes could make one deaf and giddy and short-winded; it acted like atropine on the visual organs, it was as intoxicating as alcohol; workers in quinine factories had inflamed eyes and swollen lips and suffered from affections of the skin. Peeperkorn described the cinchona, the quinine-tree, in the primeval forests of the Cordilleras, three thousand metres above sea-level. Its bark, called Peruvian or Jesuits’ bark, came late to Spain, long after the natives of South America knew its use. He spoke of the enormous quinine plantations owned by the Dutch government in Java, whence yearly many million pounds of the coils of reddish bark, like cinnamon, were shipped to Amsterdam and London. In fact, said Peeperkorn, bark, the wood-fibre itself, from the epidermis to the cambium, contained, almost always, extraordinary dynamic virtue, for good or evil. The knowledge of drugs possessed by the coloured races was far superior to our own. In certain islands east of Dutch New Guinea, youths and maidens prepared a love charm from the bark of a tree—it was probably poisonous, like the manzanilla tree, or the antiaris toxicaria, the deadly upas-tree of Java, which could poison the air round with its steam and fatally stupefy man and beast. This bark they powdered and mixed with coconut shavings, rolled the mixture into a sheet and toasted it, then sprinkled a brew in the face of the reluctant one, who was straightway inflamed with love for the sprinkler. Sometimes it was the bark of the root that contained the principle, as was the case with a certain creeper growing in the Malay Archipelago, called strychnos tieuté, from which the natives prepared the upas- radsha, by adding snake-venom. This drug caused immediate death when introduced into the circulation—as for instance by means of an arrow—but nobody could explain how it operated. All that seemed clear was that the upas had a dynamic relation with strychnine. . . Peeperkorn, by this time, was sitting erect in his bed; now and then, with a hand that slightly trembled, conveying the wineglass to his cracked lips, to take great, thirsty draughts. He went on to speak of the “crows’-eye” tree of the Coromandel Coast, from the orange-yellow berries of which—the crows’ eyes—was extracted the most powerful alkaloid of all, strychnine. His voice sank to a whisper, and the great folds of his brow rose high, as he described to Hans Castorp the ash-grey boughs, the strikingly glossy foliage and yellow-green blossoms; the picture of this tree conjured up in the mind’s eye of the young man was luridly, almost hysterically garish—it made him shudder. But here Frau Chauchat intervened, saying it was not good for Mynheer Peeperkorn to talk any longer, it tired him too much. She disliked to interfere, but Hans Castorp would forgive her if she suggested that they had had enough for the time. The young man accordingly took his leave. But often, in the months that followed, did Hans Castorp sit by the bed of that kingly man, when he kept it after an attack of fever; Frau Chauchat being within hearing, as she moved about the rooms, and sometimes taking part with a few words. They spent much time together when Peeperkorn was free of fever; for the Dutchman, on his good days, seldom failed to gather round him a select company, to play and drink and otherwise divert themselves and rejoice the inner man. These reunions took place either in the salon, as on the first occasion, or in the restaurant; and Hans Castorp had a habitual place between the great man and his languid companion. They even went abroad together, took walks with Herr Ferge and Wehsal, Naphta and Settembrini, those opposed spirits, whom they could hardly fail to meet. Hans Castorp counted himself fortunate in presenting them to Peeperkorn, and even, in the end, to Clavdia Chauchat. He troubled not at all whether the acquaintance was to these pedagogues’ liking or not. Secure in the knowledge that they needed a tree whereon to sharpen their pedagogical tusks, he reckoned on their putting up even with unwelcome society, in order to continue in enjoyment of his own.
And he was not wrong in thinking that the members of this motley group would at least get used to not getting used to each other. Strangeness, tension, even suppressed hostility there was of course enough between them; it is surely rather remarkable that a comparatively insignificant personality could have held them together. That he did so must be laid to a certain shrewd geniality native to him, which found everything fish that came to his net, and not only bound to him people of the most diverse tastes and characters, but exerted enough power to bind them to each other.
Again, how involved were the relations between the various members of our group!
Let us con them a little, as Hans Castorp himself did, with shrewd, yet friendly eye, as they went their ways together. There was the unhappy Wehsal, consumed by his louring passion for Frau Chauchat; who grovelled before Peeperkorn and Hans Castorp, the one on grounds of the past, the other for the sake of the compelling present. And there was Clavdia Chauchat herself, charming, soft-stepping invalid, the property of Peeperkorn—surely by choice and conviction, yet uneasy and sharptongued to see her carnival cavalier on such good terms with her sovereign lord. The irritation was probably the same in kind as that which coloured her feeling toward Herr Settembrini, the humanist and haranguer, whom she could not abide, calling him arrogant, not “hu— man.” Dearly would she have liked to ask this mentor of Hans Castorp’s the meaning of certain words in his own Mediterranean tongue, of which, though less contemptuously, she was as ignorant as he of hers: the words he had flung after the altogether nice young German, quite correct and of good family, on that carnival night when at length he had summoned courage to approach her.—Hans Castorp was in love up to his ears, so much was true; not in the accepted blissful sense, but as one loves when the case is out of all reason, and cannot be celebrated in any pretty little flat-land ditties we know of. He was badly smitten, quite subjugated, endured all the orthodox pangs; yet was the man to retain, even in his slavery, a certain sense of proportion, which told him that his devotion was worth something to the fair one with the Tartar eyes; not too blind in his abasement to measure its worth by Settembrini’s own attitude toward her. The Italian was as distant as the dictates of humanistic courtesy would permit; while she was only too obviously piqued by his bearing. The position with regard to Leo Naphta was scarcely more—or, from Hans Castorp’s point of view, scarcely less—favourable. True, there was here no
fundamental antagonism such as set Herr Ludovico’s being against hers and all its works. Also, the language difficulty was less, and they sometimes strolled and talked apart, Clavdia and the knife-edged little man; discussed books, and questions of political philosophy, upon which both held radical views. Hans Castorp, in his simplicity, would sometimes take part. Yet Frau Chauchat could not but be aware of a certain haughty aloofness in Naphta’s bearing. Its source was the caution of the parvenu, a feeling of insecurity in this unfamiliar society. But in truth his Spanish terrorism had little in common with her roving, door-slamming, all-too-human humanity. And there was moreover the subtle, scarcely perceptible animosity felt by both pedagogues on the score of this disturbing female element that came between them and their fledgling, and united them in an unspoken, primitive hostility, at least as potent as their long-standing conflict with each other. If Hans Castorp was aware of these sentiments they could hardly escape his charmer’s feminine intuition. Was there something of the same aversion in the attitude of the two dialecticians toward Pieter Peeperkorn? At least, Hans Castorp thought he discerned it, though perhaps he went out to meet it, and took malicious pleasure in watching tongue-tied majesty in contact with his two “auditors,” as, with reference to his stocktaking activities, he jestingly called them—though distinctly feeling that the word was but a definition by contraries! Mynheer, in the open, was not so impressive as in the house. He wore a soft felt hat drawn down on his brows, covering the blaze of white hair and the forehead’s extraordinary folds, reducing, as it were, the scale of his features, even the commanding large red nose. He looked better standing than walking; for he took small steps, and with each one of them shifted the full weight of his body on to the leg he had advanced—it was the comfortable gait of an old man, but it was not kingly. He stooped slightly too, or rather, shrank together; though even so he overlooked Herr Ludovico, and was a whole head taller than little Naphta. But it was not his height alone that made his presence oppressive—oh, quite as oppressive as Hans Castorp had anticipated!—to the two politicians.
Yes, they suffered by comparison—so much was perceptible not only to the connoisseur’s watchful eye, but very probably to the feelings of those concerned, the tongue-tied giant as well as the two insignificant and over-articulate others. Peeperkorn treated both with distinguished attention, a respect which Hans Castorp would have called ironic had he not known that irony is not on the grand scale. Kings are never ironical—not even in the sense of a direct and classic device of oratory, to say nothing of any other kind. The Dutchman’s manner toward Hans Castorp’s friends was rather mocking than ironic. He made beautiful fun of them, either openly or veiled in exaggerated respect. “Oh, yes, yes,” he would say, with his finger threatening their direction, the head and smiling lips turned away, “this is—these are—ladies and gentlemen, I call your attention—cerebrum, cerebral, you understand!
No, no—positively. Extraordinary—displays great—” In revenge, they looked at each other, pantomimed despair, angled for Hans Castorp’s glance; but he refused to be drawn.
Settembrini however attacked Hans Castorp directly, and confessed to pedagogic concern.
“Lord, what a stupid old man you have there, Engineer,” said he. “What is it you see in him? What good can he do you? I am at a loss. I should understand—though scarcely approve—your putting up with his society in order to enjoy that of his mistress. But it is obvious that you are even more interested in him than in her. Come to the aid of my understanding, I implore you.”
Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means,” said he. “Absolutely. That is to say—very good. Very good indeed.” He tried to imitate Peeperkorn’s gestures. “Yes, yes,” he went on, laughing, “you find it stupid, Herr Settembrini, and I admit it is unclear, which in your eyes is even worse. Stupid—well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. There, I have made an epigram—a bon mot! What do you think of it?”
“Very good. I look forward eagerly to your collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time to beg you not to forget some comment we once made on the anti-social nature of paradox.”
“I won’t indeed, Herr Settembrini. I certainly will not. No, my mot was not in the nature of paradox, I assure you. I only meant to indicate the difficulty I really find in distinguishing between stupidity and cleverness. It is so hard to draw a line—one goes over into the other.—I know you hate all that mystical guazzabuglio; you are all for values, judgment, and judgment of values; and I’m sure you are right. But this about stupidity and—on my honour, it’s a complete mystery; and after all, it is allowable to think about mysteries, isn’t it, so long as one is honestly bent on getting to the bottom of them? But I ask you. Can you deny that he puts us all in his pocket? That’s expressing it crudely, perhaps—but, so far as I can see, you can’t deny it. He puts us all in his pocket; somehow or other, he has the right to laugh at us all—but where does he get it? Where does it come from? How does he do it? Certainly it’s not that he’s so clever. I admit that you can’t talk about his cleverness. He’s inarticulate—it’s more feeling with him, feeling is just his mark, if you’ll excuse my language. No, as I say, it’s not out of cleverness, not on intellectual grounds at all, that he can do as he likes with us. You would be right to deny it. It isn’t the point. But not on physical either. It’s not the massive shoulders, or the strength of his biceps; not because he could knock us down if he liked. He isn’t conscious of his power; if he does take a notion, he can easily be put off it with a couple of civilized words.—So it is not physical. And yet the physical has something to do with it; not in a muscular sense—
it’s something quite different, mystical; because so soon as the physical has anything to do with it, it becomes mystical, the physical goes over into the spiritual, and the other way on, and you can’t tell them apart, nor can you cleverness and stupidity. But the result is what we see, the dynamic effect—he puts us in his pocket. We’ve only one word for that—personality. We use it in another, more regular sense too, in which we are all personalities—morally, legally, and otherwise. But that is not the sense in which I am using it now. I am speaking of the mystery of personality, something above either cleverness or stupidity, and something we all have to take into account: partly to try to understand it; but partly, where that is not possible, to be edified by it. You are all for values; but isn’t personality a value too? It seems so to me, more so than either cleverness or stupidity, it seems positive and absolute, like life—in short, something quite worth while, and calculated to make us trouble about it. That’s what I wanted to say in answer to what you said about stupidity.”
Nowadays, when Hans Castorp relieved his mind, he did not hem and haw, become involved and stick in the middle. He said his say to the end like a man, rounded off his period, let his voice drop and went his way; though he still got red, and at heart was still afraid of the silence he knew would follow when he had done, to give him time to feel mortified at what he had expressed.
Herr Settembrini let it have full sway before he said: “You deny that you are hunting paradoxes; but at the same time you well know that I love them as much as I do mysteries. In making a mystery of the personality, you run a risk of idol-worship. You do reverence to a hollow mask. You see mystery in mystification, in one of those counterfeits with which a malicious demon of physical form loves sometimes to mock us. Have you ever frequented theatrical circles? You know those physiognomies in which the features of Julius Cæsar, Beethoven, and Goethe unite—the happy
possessor of which has only to open his mouth to prove himself the most pitiable fool on God’s earth?”
“Very good, a freak of nature,” said Hans Castorp. “But not alone a freak of nature, not simply a hoax. For since these people are actors, they must have a gift, and the gift itself is beyond cleverness and stupidity, it is after all a value. Mynheer Peeperkom has a gift, say what you like; and thus it is he can stick us all in his pocket. Put Herr Naphta in one corner of the room, and let him deliver a discourse on Gregory the Great and the City of God—it would be highly worth listening to—and put Mynheer Peeperkorn in the other, with his extraordinary mouth and the wrinkles on his forehead, and let him not say a word except ‘By all means—capital—settled, ladies and gentlemen!’ You will see everybody gather round Peeperkorn, and Herr Naphta will be sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, though he may be uttering such penetrating wisdom that it pierces through marrow and cucumber, as Behrens says—”
“Take shame to yourself for bowing down to success,” Herr Settembrini adjured him. “Mundus vult decipi. I do not claim that people ought to flock about Herr Naphta. He is too full of guile for my taste. But I am inclined to range myself on his side, in the imaginary scene you have conjured up with such relish. Will you despise logic, precision, discrimination? Will you contemn them, in favour of some
suggestion—hocus-pocus and emotional charlatanry? If you will, then the devil has you in his—”
“But he can often talk as coherently as you please,” said Hans Castorp, “when he gets interested. The other day he was telling me about dynamic drugs and Asiatic poison-trees; it was so interesting it was almost uncanny—interesting things are always a bit uncanny—but the interest was not so much in what he was saying as it was taken in connexion with his personality, which made it interesting and uncanny at once.”
“Ah, yes, your weakness for Asia is well known to me. True, I cannot oblige with marvels such as those,” the Italian said, so bitterly that Hans Castorp hastened to assure him how much he valued his conversation and instruction from quite another angle, and that it had not occurred to him to make comparisons which would be unjust to both sides. Herr Settembrini paid no heed, he spurned the politeness, and went on:
“In any case, Engineer, you must permit me to admire your serene objectivity. It approaches the fantastic, you will admit. The way things stand: this zany has taken away your Beatrice from you, yet you—it is unheard of.”
“These are temperamental differences, Herr Settembrini. We have different views as to what is knightly and warm-blooded. You, a southerner, would prescribe poison and dagger, at least you would conceive the affair in its social and passionate aspect, and want me to act like a game-cock. That would of course be masculine and gallant, in a social sense. But with me it is different. I am not at all masculine in the sense that I see in another man only a rival male and nothing more. Perhaps I am not masculine at all—certainly I am not in the sense which I tend to call ‘social,’ I don’t exactly know why. What I do is to question my sad heart whether I have any ground of complaint against the man. Has he really insulted me? But an insult must be of intent, otherwise it can be none. And as for his having ‘done anything’ to me, there I should have to apply to her— and I have no right to, certainly not with regard to Peeperkorn. For he is a quite extraordinary personality, which by itself is something for women, and then he is hardly a civilian, like me, he is a sort of military, a bit like my poor cousin, in that he has a point d’honneur, a sore spot, as it were, which is feeling, life.—I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes. That must be a military trait in my character, after all, if I may say so—”
“You may say so,” Settembrini acquiesced. “A trait at least worthy of praise. The courage to recognize and express—that is the quality that makes literature—that is humanism.”
Thus they parted on good terms, Herr Settembrini having given the conversation this placable turn. It was the wiser course; his position had not been so strong he could afford to push the argument to extremes. A conversation dealing with jealousy was rather slippery ground for him; at one point he would have been obliged to admit that his own position—as a pedagogue—was scarcely masculine in the social and cockfighting sense, else why should the prepotent Peeperkorn disturb his tranquillity, in the same way Naphta and Frau Chauchat did? Lastly, the Italian could not hope to argue his pupil out of interest in a personality to whose native superiority he himself and his partner in cerebral gymnastic were willy-nilly constrained to bow.
They were on safer ground when they could sustain the conversation in the realms of the intellectual, and hold the attention of their audience by one of their elegant and impassioned debates, academic, yet conducted as though the matter discussed were the most burning question of the time, or of all time. They were of course almost the sole support of such discussions; while these lasted; they did, to some extent, neutralize the effect of “bigness” purveyed by a certain member of their group, who could only accompany them by a running play of wrinkles, gestures, and snatches of mockery. But even that was enough to cast a shadow, rob their brilliant performance of some of its gloss, emasculate it, as it were, set up a cross-current perceptible to them all, though Peeperkorn himself remained unconscious, or conscious to a degree impossible for them to guess. Neither side could get any advantage, both were embarrassed, and the stamp of futility set upon their debate. We might put it like this: that their life-and-death duel of wits came to be carried on always with vague subterranean reference to “bigness” walking beside them, and to be deflected from its orbit by the magnetism “bigness” exerted. One cannot characterize otherwise this puzzling, for the two disputants maddening, posture of affairs. One can only add that had there been no Pieter Peeperkorn, party feeling would have run higher on both sides; as when Leo Naphta defended the arch-revolutionary nature of the Church, against Settembrini’s dogmatic assertion that that great historic power was to be looked upon merely as the protectress of the sinister forces of reaction; whereas all the forces that made for life and future, and looked undismayed on change and resolution, he claimed for the principles of enlightenment; science and progress, which had their rise in an epoch of quite opposed tendencies, the famous century that witnessed the rebirth of classical culture. He drove home his convictions with a graceful play of word and gesture. Whereupon Naphta, with chilling acuity, undertook to show—and showed too, with devastating clarity—that the Church, as the embodiment of the religious and ascetic ideal, was remote indeed from posing as the champion and support of the existing order, in other words of secular culture and civil law—rather had she from the beginning inscribed upon her radical banner the programme of their extirpation root and branch; that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.
After that, Settembrini took the floor—and well he knew how to avail himself of it. It was lamentable, he said—this confusion of luridly revolutionary doctrine with a general insurrection of all the powers of evil. The Church’s love of innovation had for centuries manifested itself in putting to the question the living idea, wherever she found it; throttling it, quenching it in smoke at the stake; to-day she announces through her emissaries that she rejoices in revolution, that her goal is the uprooting of freedom, culture, and democracy, which she intends to replace by barbarism and the dictatorship of the mob. Yea, verily, a fearsome mixture of contradictory consistency and consistent contradiction. . .
His opponent, Naphta retorted, displayed no lack of the same qualities. By his own account, he was a democrat; yet his words sounded neither democratic nor egalitarian; but rather displayed a reprehensible and arrogant aristocratism, as when he alluded to the delegated dictatorship of the proletariat as mob rule! However, where the Church was in question, assuredly he showed himself a democrat; for the Church was admittedly the most aristocratic force in the history of mankind; an aristocracy in the last and highest sense, that of the spirit. For the ascetic spirit—if the pleonasm might be pardoned him—the spirit that would deny and destroy the world, was aristocracy itself, a pure culture of the aristocratic principle. It could never be popular; and the Church, accordingly, had at all times been unpopular. A little research into the cultural history of the Middle Ages would convince Herr Settembrini of the stout resistance which the people—in the widest sense—opposed to the things of the Church. There were for instance monkish figures, the invention of popular fantasy, who, quite in the spirit of Luther, had set up wine, women, and song in opposition to the ascetic idea. All the instincts of secular heroism, all warlike spirit, all court poetry, set themselves in more or less open conflict with the religious idea and the hierarchy. For all that was “the world,” all that was “the common people,” compared with the aristocracy of the spirit represented by Church.
Herr Settembrini thanked him for jogging his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan in the Rosengarten he did indeed find refreshing by comparison with this muchlauded aristocracy of the grave. He, the speaker, was no friend to the German Reformation; but they would find him ever ready to defend whatever of democratic individualism there was in its teaching, against any and every clerical and feudal craving for dominion over the individual.
“Aha!” cried Naphta. So Herr Settembrini would condemn the Church for lack of democracy, for being wanting in a sense of the value of human personality? But what of the humane freedom from prejudice evinced by canonical law? For whereas Roman law made the possession of legal rights dependent upon citizenship, and Germanic law upon individual freedom and membership in the tribe, ecclesiastical law, orthodoxy, was alone in divorcing legal rights from either national or social considerations, and asserting that slaves, serfs, and prisoners of war were all capable of making wills and inheriting property.
Settembrini bitingly remarked that he might mention, as not entirely irrelevant in this connexion, the so-called “canonical portion,” which subtracted a substantial sum from every testamentary bequest. And he spoke of priestly demagoguery, which began to vent its thirst for power in exaggerated solicitude for the under dog, when the top dog would none of it. The Church, he asserted, cared more about the quantity of souls she got hold of than their quality—which certainly reflected upon her pretensions to spiritual refinement.
So the Church lacked refinement? Herr Settembrini’s attention was invited to the inexorable aristocratism which underlay the idea that shame could be inherited: the passing on of guilt to the—democratically considered—innocent descendants; for example, the illegitimacy and lifelong pollution of natural children. But the Italian bade him be silent: in the first place, because his human feelings rose up in arms against Naphta’s words, and in the second, because he had had enough of such quibbles, and saw in the shifts of his opponent’s apologetics only the same old infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which wanted to be called Spirit, and found so legitimate, so sacrosanct the admittedly existent hatred of the ascetic principle. But here Naphta begged to be forgiven for laughing outright. The nihilism or the Church! The nihilism of the most realistic system of government in the history of the world! Herr Settembrini, then, had never been touched by a breath of that ironic humanity which made constant concession to the world and the flesh, cleverly veiling the letter and letting the spirit rule, not to put too sore a constraint on nature? He had never heard of the ecclesiastical conception of indulgence, under which was to be classified one of the sacraments of the Church—namely, marriage, not in itself an absolute good, like the other sacraments, but only a protection against sin, countenanced in order to set bounds to sensual desire; that the ascetic principle, the ideal of complete chastity, might be upheld, without at the same time opposing an unpolitic harshness to the flesh?
Herr Settembrini, of course, could not refrain from protesting against this hideous conception of “policy”; against the gesture of a shrewd and sinister complaisance, made by the “Spirit”—or what called itself so—against the imaginary guilt of its opposite, which it pretended to deal with in a “politic” sense, but which in reality stood in no need of the pernicious indulgence it proffered; against the accursed dualism of a conception which bedevilled the universe—that is to say, life—as well as life’s dark opposite, the Spirit—for if life was evil, the Spirit, as pure negation, must be so too. And he broke a lance in defence of the blamelessness of sensual
gratification—hearing which, Hans Castorp could not but think of the humanistic cuddy under the roof, with its standing desk, rush-bottomed chairs, and water-bottle. Naphta asserted that sensual gratification was never blameless—nature, he said, always had a bad conscience in respect of the spiritual. The ecclesiastical policy of indulgence practised by the Spirit he designated as “Love”—this to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle. Hans Castorp felt how very odd indeed the word sounded in the mouth of sharp, skinny little Naphta.
So it went on—we know already how it went, and so did Hans Castorp. We have listened, as he did, for a little while, in order to learn how such a peripatetic passageat-arms fares, in what way it is blown upon, by the presence of a personality. It seemed as though a secret impulse to animadvert upon the presence of Peeperkorn quenched the leaping spark of wit, and called up that sense of weary devitalization that comes over us when an electric connexion fails to connect. Yes, that was it. No spark leaped nimbly from pole to pole, no flash of lightning, no current. The intellect which should in its own opinion have neutralized the presence was neutralized by it— as Hans Castorp, amazed and curious, perceived.
Revolution, conservation—he looked at Peeperkorn, saw him stalking along, not particularly majestic on foot, with his slumping gait, his hat drawn over his brows; saw his thick lips with their broken line, heard him say, jerking his head mockingly in the direction of the debaters: “Yes, yes—cerebrum, highly cerebral, you understand. Very; that is—it shows”—and behold, in a trice, the current cut off! Dead. As a doornail. They tried another tack, invoked more powerful spells, came on the “aristocratic problem,” on popularity and exclusiveness. Not a spark. Despite itself, what they said sounded personal. Hans Castorp saw Clavdia’s traveling-companion as he lay under the red satin coverlet, in his collarless woollen shirt, half ancient ouvrier, half royal bust. And the nerve of the debate quivered and died. They tried to galvanize it into life. Negation, cult of nihilism on the one hand, on the other the positive assertion of life, and the inclining of the heart unto love. But where was the spark, where the current, directly one looked at Mynheer, as one did, irresistibly, as though magnetized? They simply were not there—which remained, to use Hans Castorp’s expression, neither more nor less than a mystery. He took note, for his collection of aphorisms, that either one expresses a mystery in the simplest words, or leaves it unexpressed. But to get this one expressed, one could only say straight out that Pieter Peeperkorn, with his kingly mask, and bitter, irregular mouth, was both, now this, now that; both seemed to fit him and to neutralize each other when one looked at him—both this and that, the one and the other. Yes, this stupid old man, this commanding cipher! He did not paralyse the opposition by cross-purposes and confusion, like Naphta, he was not like him equivocal, or was so in an entirely different way, in a positive way, this staggering mystery, which so naïvely set at naught not only cleverness and stupidity, but so much else in the way of opposed views invoked by Settembrini and Naphta, in order to stimulate interest, to their own pedagogical ends. The personality, it appeared, was not pedagogically inclined—yet what a find, what a prize, for inquiring youth on its travels! Fascinating it was to watch riddling royalty when the conversation turned on marriage and sin, indulgences, the guilt or innocence of pleasures of the sense! His head would sink upon his shoulder or chest, the calamitous lips part as the mouth relaxed into pathetic curves, the nostrils dilate as with pain, the folds on the forehead rose until the eyes were fixed in a wide, suffering gaze.—It was a picture of bitterness and woe. And behold, as one looked, this martyr’s visage blossomed into wantonness. The head was roguishly on a side, the still open lips wreathed in wickedly suggestive smiles, the sybaritic little dimple appeared in one cheek—he was again the dancing priest, and jerked his head as before, mockingly, in the direction of so much cerebration, as they heard him say:
“Ah, yes, yes, absolutely! But isn’t there a—are there not—sacraments of pleasure—you understand—”
Still, as we said, Hans Castorp’s diminished friends and teachers were always well served when they could wrangle. They were in their element, whereas the personality was not. Though one might have two views of the rôle he played when wrangling was the order of the day. But on the other hand, when the scene changed from the sphere of the intellectual to the strictly earthly and practical, and dealt with questions, and in fields, where commanding natures prove their worth—then there were no two views possible. For then the others were undone, then they were cast in the shade, then they drew in their horns, and Peeperkorn came out, grasped the sceptre, arranged, decided,
“settled.” Was there any wonder, then, that he behaved so as to bring that state of things about, that he sought to override logomachy? He suffered, while it held sway, or if it held sway for long. But not in his vanity. Of that Hans Castorp felt assured. For vanity is not on the grand scale, nor is greatness vain. No, Peeperkorn’s need of reality had other grounds. It sprang, to put it baldly, from fear: from a characteristic infirmity of minds on the grand scale, from the sensitively and passionately cherished point d’honneur which Hans Castorp had struggled to explain to Herr Settembrini, describing it as in a sense a military trait.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Dutchman said, and lifted his sea-captain’s hand, with its nails like lance-heads, in entreaty and monition. “Ladies and gentlemen. Very good. Very. Asceticism. Indulgences. Lust of the flesh. By all means. Most important. Most debatable. But may I—I should like to—I fear we may commit a serious error. Are we not irresponsibly neglecting—one of our highest—” He drew in a deep breath.
“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 far-sighted 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, far-sighted 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 writingroom, 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 pocket-book, 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 folk-song 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 love-lorn 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 poorspirited 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 if 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 poorspirited 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 to-day.”
“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—to-day, 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 blood-stains—I mean wine-stains—on the sheet.” They were both silent. The stillness lasted some two or three minutes—and gave evidence how much under such circumstances these very small units of time can expand.
It was Pieter Peeperkorn who first spoke. “On the evening when I first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” he said, beginning in a singsong tone, and letting his voice fall at the end, as though embarked on a long recitative, “we had a little celebration, sat very late eating and drinking and making merry, and then, in an elevated mood, of spirit free and unrestrained, arm in arm we sought our beds. As we parted, here at my door, the idea came to me to ask you to salute Madame on the brow, as a good friend from her former visit up here. You bluntly refused, rejected the idea on the ground that it would be preposterous. You will not deny that the expression itself demanded an explanation—an explanation for which you have remained until now in my debt. Are you willing to absolve yourself of it?”
“Ah, so he noticed that too,” Hans Castorp thought, and bent closer over the winestains, one of which he scratched with his middle finger. “The fact is I suppose I wanted him to notice it, or I should not have said it. But what to say now? My heart is pounding. Will there be an exhibition of royal rage? Perhaps I’d best keep an eye on his fist, he may be holding it over me already. Certainly I am in a fine position—
between the devil and the deep blue sea, as it were.”
And suddenly he felt his right wrist grasped by the hand of Peeperkorn.
“Hullo!” he thought. “Why should I be sitting here with my tail between my legs?
Have I done him any injury? Not in the least. Let him talk to the man in Daghestan before he does to me. And after that somebody else, and so on. And then me. And what has he to complain of about me? Nothing, so far. Then why should my heart be pounding like this? It is high time I sit up and look him in the eye—with all due respect to his personality, of course.”
He did so. The great man’s face was yellow, the eyes pale beneath the forehead’s heavy folds, a bitter expression sat on the wounded lips. They looked each other in the eye, the splendid old man and the insignificant young one, and Peeperkorn continued to hold Hans Castorp by the wrist. At last he said, gently: “You were Clavdia’s lover when she was here before.”
Hans Castorp bowed his head once more but lifted it again straightway, took a deep breath, and began: “Mynheer Peeperkorn! It is in the highest degree repugnant to me to tell you a lie. I am searching for a means of avoiding it, but this is not easy. I should be boasting if I say yes, lying if I say no. Let me explain in what sense this is to be taken. I lived a long time, oh, a very long time in this house with Clavdia—I beg pardon, with the present companion of your travels—before making her acquaintance. Our relations—or, rather, my relation to her was never the social one; I can only say of it that its beginnings are shrouded in darkness. In my thoughts I have never named Clavdia but with the thou—and never in reality either. For on the evening when, casting off certain pedagogic restraints of which we were speaking, I made bold to approach her, upon a pretext furnished me by the long-ago past, it was carnival. It was an evening of masks and freedom, an irresponsible hour, when the thou was in force, and by the power of magic and dreams, somehow had—full sway. And—it was also the eve of Clavdia’s departure.”
“Full sway,” repeated Peeperkorn. “You have put that very—very—well.” He released Hans Castorp’s hand, and began with his own huge ones to massage both sides of his own face, eyes, cheeks, and chin. Then he folded his hands upon the winebespotted sheet, and laid his head on the left shoulder, the one toward his guest, with the effect that his face was lightly turned away.
“I have given you the best answer I could, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp said. “I have tried to say neither too much nor too little. I was concerned to let you see that it is in a way open to us to count that evening—when the thou had full sway, and it was the eve of Clavdia’s departure—or not to count it. It was an extraordinary occasion, almost outside the calendar, intercalated, so to speak, a twenty-ninth of February. It would have been only half a lie if I had simply denied the truth of what you said.”
Peeperkorn made no answer.
“I preferred,” Hans Castorp began again, after a pause, “to tell you the truth, rather than run the risk of losing your favour, which, I openly admit, would be a sensible loss to me, I may say a blow, a real blow, comparable to the one I received when Frau Chauchat returned hither as the companion of your travels. I have risked letting this happen, because I have long wished and hoped that there might be understanding between myself and the man for whom I entertained feelings of the most
extraordinary respect and reverence. It seemed finer, more ‘human’ to me—you know that is Clavdia’s favourite word, and how she pronounces it, in that enchanting, husky drawl of hers—than silence and dissimulation; and in that sense a weight was lifted from my heart when you put your question.”
No answer.
“One thing more, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp went on. “There was another thing that made me wish to make a clean breast of it to you: and that was the personal experience I had with the irritating effect of uncertainty, being let in for suspicions that could be neither confirmed nor dismissed. You know now who it was—before this present relationship was established which it would be absurd of me not to respect—with whom Clavdia spent—or experienced, or committed—that
twenty-ninth of February. It is clear to you now. But for my part I have never been able to know—though of course I realized that anyone in my situation has to reckon with the past—by which I really mean predecessors—and though I also realized that Hofrat Behrens is an amateur portrait-painter, and had, in the course of many sittings, made a capital portrait of her, with a treatment of the skin so very lively and realistic that—between ourselves—it gave me very seriously to think. I have tormented myself no end with that riddle, and still do.”
“You still love her?” Peeperkorn asked, without changing his position, his face still turned away. The large room fell more and more into twilight.
“You will pardon me, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” answered Hans Castorp, “but my feeling for you, which is one of the highest respect and admiration, will not permit me to speak of my feeling for the present companion of your travels,”
“And does she—” Peeperkorn asked, with lowered voice, “does she still return your feeling?”
“I do not say,” answered Hans Castorp, “I do not say that she ever returned it. That is scarcely credible. We were touching upon this subject earlier in the afternoon, when we spoke of the responsive nature of women. There is nothing much about me to fall in love with. I am not built on a grand scale, as you can see. The possibility of—of a twenty-ninth of February could only be ascribed to feminine receptivity on the basis of the man’s choice already made. I must say that when Í refer to myself as a man, it seems to me a sort of self-advertising and bad taste—but at all events, Clavdia is a woman.”
“She was responsive to your feeling,” murmured Peeperkorn, with wry lips.
“How much more so to yours,” said Hans Castorp. “And in all probability to many another. One has to face that, when—”
“Stop!” Peeperkorn said, still turned away, but with a gesture of the palm toward his interlocutor. “Is it not rather—common—of us to talk about her?”
“I don’t feel it so, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I think I can set your mind at rest on that point. These are human topics we are treating of; human in the sense that they have to do with freedom and the spirituel— you must pardon me if I use a rather ambiguous terminology, but I needed the expression lately, and made it my own.”
“Very good, go on,” Peeperkorn said in a low voice.
Hans Castorp spoke in a low voice, too, and sat on the edge of his chair by the bed, bent toward the kingly old man, his hands between his knees.
“For she is certainly a most spirituel being,” he said, “and the husband beyond the Caucasus—you know, of course, that she has a husband beyond the Caucasus—gives her her freedom, whether out of stupidity or intelligence I don’t know, I don’t know the chap. But it is a good thing he does, for it is her illness grants it to her—and whoever falls into our situation will do well to follow his example, and not complain, either of the past or of the future.”
“You don’t complain?” asked Peeperkorn, and turned his face. It seemed ashen in the twilight, the pale, weary eyes stared out beneath the great folds of brow, the large chapped lips stood half open, like the mouth of a tragic mask.
“I hardly thought it was a question of myself,” Hans Castorp answered modestly.
“What I meant was that you should not complain, nor deprive me of your friendship because of events in the past. That is what concerns me at this hour.”
“But aside from that,” Peeperkorn said, “I must involuntarily have been the cause of much suffering on your part.”
“If you put the question,” responded Hans Castorp, “and if I answer yes, my answer must not be taken to mean that I did not know how to value the enormous privilege of knowing you; for that privilege was indissolubly bound up with the suffering.”
“I thank you, young man, I thank you. I value the courtesy of your little phrases. But, aside from our acquaintance—”
“It is difficult,” Hans Castorp said, “to divorce the two; and the idea does not commend itself to me that I should divorce them in order to be free to reply in the affirmative to your question. The very fact that it was a personality like you in whose company Clavdia returned could only make more distressing and involved her coming back in the company of anybody whatever. It gave me a quarter of an hour, I assure you, and still does, that I do not deny; I have purposely kept as much as I could to the positive element, that is my sincere feeling of honour and reverence for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn—in which there mingled a spice of malice against your mistress; for women are never at ease when their lovers come to terms.”
“True enough,” Peeperkorn said, and ran his hand over mouth and chin to conceal a smile, as though he were afraid Madame Chauchat might see it. Hans Castorp too smiled discreetly—and then they both nodded, in mutual understanding.
“This little revenge,” went on Hans Castorp, “was granted me at the end, because, so far as I personally am concerned, I have a quarrel after all, not with Clavdia, not with you, Mynheer Peeperkorn, but with my lot in general, my destiny. I will try to tell you about it, in so far as I can, now that I am secure in the honour of your confidence, and in this altogether exceptional and extraordinary twilight hour.”
“Pray do so,” said Peeperkorn, courteously, and Hans Castorp went on.
“I have been up here a long time, Mynheer Peeperkorn, years. How long I hardly know myself, but it has been years of my life. My cousin, to visit whom I came up, in the first instance, was a soldier, an upright and honourable soul, but that was no help to him—he died, and left me, and I remained here alone. I was no soldier, but a civilian, I had a profession, as you may have heard, a good, two-fisted job, which is even supposed to do its share in drawing together the nations of the earth—but somehow it did not draw me. I admit this freely; but the reasons for it I cannot describe otherwise than to say that they are veiled in obscurity, the same obscurity that envelops the origin of my feeling for Madame your mistress—I call her that expressly to show that I am not thinking of undermining the situation as it exists—my feeling for Clavdia Chauchat, and my intimate sense of her being, which I have had since the first moment her eyes met mine and bewitched me, enchanted me, you understand, beyond all reason. For love of her, in defiance of Herr Settembrini, I declared myself for the principle of unreason, the spirituel principle of disease, under whose ægis I had already, in reality, stood for a long time back; and I remained up here, I no longer know precisely how long. I have forgotten, broken with, everything, my relatives, my calling, all my ideas of life. When Clavdia went away, I waited here for her return, so that now I am wholly lost to life down below, and dead in the eyes of my friends. That is what I meant when I spoke of my destiny, and said there might be some justice in a complaint over my present state. I have read a story—no, I saw it in the theatre: a good-natured youth, a soldier like my cousin, who comes to know a charming gipsy—
charming she was, with a flower behind her ear, a wild and fatal creature, who so bewitches him that he goes off altogether, sacrifices everything to her, deserts the colours, joins the smugglers, dishonours himself in every way. Well, when he has got so far, she for her part has had enough of him, and takes up with a matador, a forceful personality with a magnificent baritone voice. The end of it all is that the little soldier, white as a sheet, shirt open at the throat, stabs his mistress with his knife in front of the circus—which, after all, she brought upon herself. It is rather a pointless story after all: how did I come to think of it?”
Mynheer Peeperkorn, at mention of the knife, had shifted his position in the bed, with a quick motion to one side, turning his face toward his guest, and looking him piercingly in the eye. Now he pulled himself to a more comfortable posture, supporting himself on one elbow, and said: “Well, young man, I have listened to you, and I have the whole picture. On my side, let me make you an honourable declaration. Were my hair not white, my limbs not racked with fever, you would see me ready to give you satisfaction, man to man, weapon to weapon, for the injury I unwittingly did you, and that which my companion added to it, for which likewise it is mine to atone. Positively, my friend—you would see me at your service. But as matters lie, you must let me make a different proposal. It is this: I recall an exalted moment, when our acquaintance was very young, when I felt myself pleasantly impressed by your native parts, and stood ready to offer you the brotherly thou; but then perceived that the moment was premature. Very good. I stand again to-day at that moment, I return to it, I declare that the period of probation has come to an end. Young man, we are brothers. Your phrase was that the thou had full sway—very good, let ours likewise have full sway, let us give free rein to brotherly feeling. The satisfaction which age and incapacity prevent me from giving you, I offer in another form, in the form of a brotherly alliance, such as one forms against a third party, against the world, against all and sundry; let us swear it to each other in the name of our feeling for somebody. Take your wineglass, young man, I will use the water-glass again, it does the crude new wine no shame—” With his trembling hand he filled the glasses, Hans Castorp hastening to assist him.
“Take it,” repeated Peeperkorn, “take my arm, let us drink so, let us drink it out—
positively, young man. Very. Here is my hand. Art thou satisfied?”
“That is no word for it, of course, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” said Hans Castorp. He had not found it easy to drink out the full glass at a draught; he spilled a little and dried his knee with his handkerchief. “I might better say that I am immensely happy, and can hardly grasp how this has all come about, it is like a dream. What an immense honour for me! How I have deserved it I scarcely know, certainly in no active sense. It is not surprising that at first it seems entirely too bold, and I doubt if I shall be able to fetch it out—especially in Clavdia’s presence, who is not quite so likely to be pleased with the new arrangement, all at once.”
“Leave that to me,” responded Peeperkorn; “the rest is a matter of practice and habit. Go, now, young man. Leave me, my son. The night has fallen, our loved one may return any moment, and a meeting between you just now would perhaps not be quite well-advised.”
“Farewell, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp said, and rose. “Yes, it has grown dark. I can imagine Herr Settembrini coming in suddenly and turning on the light, to let reason and convention reign—it is a weakness of his. Good-bye until to-morrow. I leave you, so proud, so joyful, as I could never have dreamed it was possible for me to be. And now you will have at least three good days, and free of fever, and that rejoices me as much as though it were myself. Brother, good-night!”