The Magic Mountain (108 page)

Such were the tales of Herr Ferge, the only person in the little group who stood outside its interwoven relationships. Speaking of which, there are two brief conversations from this same period that should be recorded, two curious, tête-à-tête interchanges our unheroic hero had with Clavdia Chauchat and her traveling companion, with each of them alone, that is—the first in the lobby one evening, when the “bothersome disruption” was lying upstairs with a fever; the second, one afternoon at Mynheer’s bedside.

The lobby lay in semidarkness. The regular social gathering had been dull and cursory; the guests had departed early for their balconies and the late rest cure—those, that is, who did not follow unhealthy paths down into town, to dance and gamble. Only one ceiling lamp was lit somewhere in the deserted lobby, and the adjoining social rooms were hardly any brighter. But Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had eaten supper without her lord and master, had not yet returned to the second floor and was lingering behind in the reading room; and so he, too, hesitated to go upstairs. He was sitting at the far end of the lobby, in an area one wide step up from the main space and separated from it by two white arches with wood-paneled columns—was sitting next to the tiled stove in a rocking chair like the one that had cradled Marusya when Joachim engaged her in the only conversation they ever had. He was smoking a cigarette, which was more or less permitted in the lobby at that hour.

And here she came, he heard her footsteps, her dress trailing behind; she was beside him, she was holding a letter by one corner and waving it back and forth in the air, and she said in her Pribislav voice: “The concierge is gone. Do give me a
timbre-poste
.”

She was dressed in filmy dark silk this evening, a gown with a rounded neckline and loose sleeves that gathered to buttoned cuffs at the wrists. It was the sort of dress he was very partial to. There was the added touch of her strand of pearls, which shimmered softly in the twilight. He looked up into her Kirghiz eyes. “
Timbre?
” he repeated. “I don’t have one.”

“What, not a one?
Tant pis pour vous
. Not prepared to do a lady a favor?” She pouted her lips and shrugged. “I’m disappointed. Gentlemen should at least be punctual and dependable. I was under the impression that you had sheets of them folded up and tucked away in a little pocket of your wallet, all arranged according to denomination.”

“No, why should I?” he said. “I never write letters. To whom, really? At most a postcard now and then, and they’re prestamped. To whom should I be writing letters? I have no feeling whatever for the flatlands anymore, I’ve lost that somehow. We had a folk song in school, that went, ‘The world is lost to me now.’ That’s how it is with me.”

“Well, then, at least give me a
papyrosa
, my lost young man,” she said, sitting down opposite him next to the stove, on a bench cushioned with a linen pillow. She crossed one leg over the other and held out her hand. “It seems you come equipped with those.” And without a word of thanks, she nonchalantly took a cigarette from the silver case he held out to her, then accepted a light from the pocket lighter he let flicker before her face as she leaned forward. There was a voluptuousness in this spoiled woman’s “do give me,” in the way she took without a word of thanks; but beyond that, there was also a sense of mutual human—or better,
hu
mane—interests, of sharing, of a naturalness, at once both savage and tender, in the act of giving and taking.

With the critical eye of a lover, he remarked on all this to himself. Then he said, “Yes, always have those. I always come equipped with those. One must have them. How would one possibly manage without them? That’s what people call a passion, I believe. I am, to be frank, not a passionate man, but I do have my passions, detached passions.”

“I find it terribly reassuring,” she said, letting the inhaled smoke pour back out, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. But, then, how could you be? That would be a degeneration of the species. Passion—means to live life for life’s sake. But I am well aware you Germans live it for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves.
C’est ça
. You haven’t the least notion how repulsively egoistic that is of you and that someday it may well make you the enemy of humankind.”

“Now, now! The enemy of humankind, just like that? That’s quite a generalization, Clavdia. Do you have anything in particular, anyone special in mind when you say we do not live for life but for enrichment? You women don’t usually moralize like that for no good reason. Ah, yes, morality. It’s one of the things Naphta and Settembrini argue about. It is part of the great general confusion. A man doesn’t really know whether he lives for his own sake or for life’s sake, and no one can tell him for sure which it is, either. I think the boundaries are rather fluid. There is both egoistic sacrifice and sacrificial egoism. I suppose that on the whole it’s the same with love. Of course, it’s probably immoral of me that I’m unable to pay much attention to what you’re saying about morality, since mainly I’m just happy that we’re sitting here together, just as we did one time before and never again, not once since you came back. And that I can tell you how absolutely perfect those narrow cuffs look at your wrists, and how I love the way light silk billows around your arms—arms I know well . . .”

“I’m leaving.”

“No, please, don’t go. I shall pay all due respect to circumstances and personalities.”

“One should at the least be able to count on that much from a man without passion.”

“There, you see—you mock me, Clavdia, you scold me, just because I—you’re going to leave, just because I . . .”

“If you wish to be understood, I would ask you to speak in a less fragmentary fashion.”

“And so I’m not to benefit, not the least little bit, from all your practice in guessing at fragments? That’s unfair—or at least I would say so if I weren’t well aware that it is not a matter of fairness.”

“Oh, no. Fairness is a detached passion. In contrast to jealousy, with which a detached person would simply make himself ridiculous.”

“You see? Ridiculous. So, then, allow me my detachment. I repeat: how could one possibly manage without it? For example, how could I have stood the waiting without it?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Waiting for you, Clavdia.”

“
Voyons, mon ami
. I will not dwell on the foolish stubbornness of your continuing to use my first name and informal pronouns. You are surely weary of my mentioning that by now—after all, I am not a prude, not some outraged bourgeois housewife.”

“No, you aren’t. Because you are ill. Illness gives you your freedom. It gives you a certain—wait, a word has just come to mind that I have never used before—it gives you a certain genius.”

“We shall speak of genius some other time. That is not what I wanted to say. I demand only one thing. You cannot pretend that I had anything to do with your waiting—if indeed you did wait—that I encouraged you to wait, or even gave you permission to do so. You will please acknowledge here and now that the opposite is the case.”

“Gladly, Clavdia, but of course. You did not ask me to wait, I waited quite on my own. I understand completely that it is a matter of importance to you—”

“There is something impertinent even in the way you concede the point. You are, on the whole, an impertinent person, God knows why. Not only in your dealings with me, but in general. Even your admiration, your deference is impertinent somehow. Don’t think I don’t notice. I should not even be talking to you, given your impudence, particularly not when you dare speak of waiting. It is irresponsible of you still to be here. You should have gone back to your work long before this,
sur le chantier
, or wherever it was.”

“And now there is no genius whatever about you. You are speaking quite conventionally, Clavdia. Those are phrases. You can’t mean that the way Settembrini does; but if not, how do you mean it? You said it just for something to say, I cannot take it seriously. I shall not undertake a wild departure, like my poor cousin, who died, just as you predicted he would, trying to do his duty in the flatlands, and who probably knew himself that he would die, but preferred that to continuing his rest-cure duties here. Fine, that’s why he was a soldier. But I am not, I am a civilian. For me it would be deserting the colors to do what he did, to go down to the flatlands at all costs, despite Rhadamanthus’s prohibition, and try to be of use and serve progress. That would be base ingratitude and the worst disloyalty to my illness and to genius and to my love for you, from which I bear both old scars and new wounds, and to those arms of yours, that I know well—though I must admit it was only in our dream, a dream with a touch of genius, that I came to know them, which certainly implies no consequences or duties for you, no limitations on your freedom.”

She laughed, the cigarette still in her mouth, and her Tartar eyes narrowed to slits; leaning back against the wainscoting and supporting herself on both sides with her hands, one leg still crossed over the other, she jiggled her foot in its patent leather shoe.

“
Quelle générosité! Oh là, là, vraiment
, it’s precisely the way I’ve always imagined an
homme de génie
, my poor little fellow.”

“Enough of that, Clavdia. I am certainly no
homme de génie
by birth, any more than I am a man of stature—good God, no. But purely by chance—let us call it chance—I have been forced upward into these regions where genius flourishes. In a word—though you probably are not aware that there is such a thing as alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy—an enhancement, a transubstantiation to something higher, if you understand what I mean. Naturally, the substance that is forced upward by the application of external influences must have a little something to it to begin with. And I know very well just what there was to me: I have been an intimate of sickness and death for a very long time, and even as a boy I borrowed a pencil from you, in the same irrational way I did again on that Mardi Gras night. But irrational love is a mark of genius, because death, you see, is the principle of genius, the
res
bina
, the
lapis philosophorum
, and it is also the pedagogic principle. For the love of death leads to the love of life and humanity. That is how it is. It came to me up on my balcony, and I am delighted to be able to tell it to you. There are two ways to life: the one is the regular, direct, and good way. The other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.”

“You are a silly philosopher, Hans Castorp,” she said. “I can’t claim that I understand everything in that complicated German brain of yours, but what you say sounds
hu
mane, and no doubt you are a good young man. And one must admit, you behaved quite
en philosophe
.”

“All too
en philosophe
for your taste, Clavdia, is that it?”

“That’s enough impertinence—it gets to be a bore. For you to wait like that was stupid and quite impermissible. But you aren’t angry with me, are you, because you waited in vain?”

“Well, it was rather hard, Clavdia, even for a man with detached passions—hard on me and hard-hearted of you to come back with him, because of course you knew from Behrens that I was still here, waiting for you. But I’ve told you that I think of that night simply as a dream, our dream, and that I concede you have your freedom. After all, I did not really wait in vain, because you are here again, we are sitting next to one another just as then, I can hear the wonderful edge to your voice, so familiar to my ear for a very long time; and under that billowing silk are arms that I know well—though, granted, your traveling companion is lying upstairs in a fever, the great Peeperkorn, who gave you those pearls . . .”

“And with whom you are on such friendly terms, for your own enrichment.”

“Don’t hold it against me, Clavdia. Even Settembrini scolded me about it, but that’s simply conventional prejudice. The man is a godsend—good Lord, he’s a personality. He’s well on in years—but so what. I would still understand completely how as a woman you must feel immense love for him. And you do love him very much, don’t you?”

“All due deference to your philosophizing, my little German Hans,” she said, passing her hand through his hair, “but I would not consider it
hu
mane to speak to you about my love for him.”

“Ah, Clavdia, why not? I think humanity begins where people of no genius think it is already at an end. We can go ahead and talk about him. Do you love him passionately?”

She bent forward to toss the butt of her cigarette into the grate beside her, then sat back and crossed her arms. “He loves me,” she said, “and his love makes me proud and grateful and devoted to him. That’s something you can understand—or you’re unworthy of the friendship he has offered you. His feelings compel me to follow him and help him. How could I not? Judge for yourself. How could it be
hu
manly possible to disregard his feelings?”

“Impossible,” Hans Castorp agreed. “No, it would be quite out of the question, of course. How could any woman ever bring herself to disregard his feelings, disregard his fear of the feeling of being left behind in Gethsemane, so to speak.”

“That’s not a stupid way to put it, Hans,” she said, and her slanted eyes grew fixed, lost in thought. “You understand. Fear of the feeling . . .”

“It doesn’t take much to understand that you have to follow him, even though—or perhaps precisely because—there must be something rather fearful about his love.”

“
C’est exact
. . . fearful. There are a lot of worries—you know, difficulties.” She had taken his hand now and was playing with his fingers without even noticing. Suddenly, however, she looked up with a frown and said, “Stop. Isn’t it rather shabby of us to speak about him this way?”

“Certainly not, Clavdia. No, not in the least. It’s really quite human, quite humane of us. You love that word, you draw it out and accent it with such enthusiasm. I’ve always enjoyed listening to you say it. My cousin Joachim did not like it, as a soldier, that is. He thought it implied a general weak-willed slovenliness, and in that sense, then, a boundless
guazzabuglio
of tolerance. And I have my own reservations about it, too, I grant you. But if it implies freedom and genius and kindness, then there really is something fine about it, and we can go right ahead and use it in our conversation about Peeperkorn and the difficulties and worries he causes you. They all stem from his penchant for honor, of course, from his fear that his feelings will fail him, the same fear that makes him love the classic gifts, the regalements, the way he does. We can speak of it with all due reverence, because everything about him has stature, the magnificent stature of a king, and we demean neither him nor ourselves when we speak about it humanely.”