The Magic Mountain (110 page)

“And you love Madame, do you not?” Mynheer suddenly asked, turning toward his guest a regal countenance with painfully ragged lips and pale little eyes under a brow full of arabesques.

In his shock, Hans Castorp stammered, “You asked if—that is—but of course I respect Frau Chauchat in her position as—”

“I beg you,” Peeperkorn said, stretching out his hand in one of his restraining, cultured gestures. “Allow me,” he continued, having now created a space to say what he had to say, “allow me to repeat that I am in no way reproaching this Italian gentleman for any lapse of courtesy that a cavalier—I reproach no one for such a lapse, no one. It merely occurs to me—that at the present moment I am enjoying—fine, young man. By all means—fine, lovely. I am delighted, let there be no doubt of that. It truly gives me great pleasure. And yet, I say to myself—to be brief, I say: your acquaintance with Madame is older than our own. You shared with her her previous sojourn here. She is, moreover, a lady of the most charming attributes, and I am but a sick old man. How does it happen that—since I am indisposed and she has gone down to the resort to do some shopping, quite alone, with no one to accompany her—nothing wrong with that, certainly not! And yet it would doubtless be—‘should I ascribe it to the influence, shall we say, to the pedagogic principles of Signor Settembrini that in regard to your own chivalrous impulses, you have—I beg you, please understand me when I say . . .”

“Oh, but I do, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Oh, no, that isn’t it at all. I’m acting quite independently. On the contrary, Herr Settembrini has on occasion even—oh, I’m so sorry, I see some wine stains on your sheets, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Should we not—one usually sprinkles salt on them, at least if they’re fresh—”

“That is unimportant,” Peeperkorn said, keeping his gaze fixed firmly on his guest.

Hans Castorp blushed. “Things up here,” he said with a forced smile, “are different from what is usual elsewhere. The spirit of the place, if I may put it that way, is not a conventional one. The patient has priority, whether man or woman. The rules of chivalry are of secondary importance. You are temporarily indisposed, Mynheer Peeperkorn—acutely indisposed, at this very moment. Your traveling companion is relatively healthy in comparison. And so I believe that I am acting as Madame would wish by serving as her representative here with you in her absence—to the extent one can speak of representing her, ha ha—instead of serving as your representative with her and offering to accompany her down into town. And why should I even think of forcing my chivalrous services upon your traveling companion? I have neither the right nor the authorization for that. I may say that I have a good sense of what is legitimate. In short, my situation is, I think, correct; it corresponds to the general state of affairs and in particular to my own sincere regard for your person, Mynheer Peeperkorn. And so in answer to your question—for you did ask a question of me—I believe I have given you a satisfactory answer.”

“A very agreeable answer,” Peeperkorn replied. “I listen with instinctive pleasure to your nimble little discourse, young man. It leaps over every hedge and ditch and rounds everything off agreeably. But satisfactory—no. Your answer does not quite satisfy me—forgive me if I disappoint you there. ‘Rigor’—you used the word in regard to certain views I expressed just now. There is also a certain rigor in your remarks, a kind of stiffness, an austerity that does not seem consistent with your own nature, although I have noticed something of the sort in your behavior before. And I recognize it again now. It is the same stiffness you show toward Madame, and toward no one else in our group, during our strolls and outings. And you owe me an explanation—it is a debt, an obligation you owe me, young man. I am not mistaken in this. I have confirmed my observation too often, and it is not improbable that the same notion has occurred to the others—with one difference, that possibly, indeed probably, they know the explanation for this phenomenon.”

Mynheer spoke in an unusually precise and compact style this afternoon, despite his fatigue from the malign attack of fever. There was almost nothing fragmented about it. Half sitting up in bed, with mighty shoulders and majestic head turned toward his visitor, he stretched one arm out across the bedclothes and held his freckled captain’s hand erect at the end of the woolen sleeve, forming a precise ring of thumb and forefinger, thrusting the other finger lances in the air; and his mouth formed the words as sharply and exactly, as graphically in fact, as Herr Settembrini himself might have wished, and he added a throaty rolled
r
to words like “difference” and “occurred.”

“You smile,” he went on, “you blink and turn your head back and forth, endeavoring, it appears, to cogitate, but to no avail. And yet there can be no doubt that you know what I mean and what this is about. I do not claim that you do not occasionally address Madame, or that you fail to respond when the conversation happens to turn around the other way. But I repeat, it is done with a definite stiffness, or to be more precise—you are dodging, or avoiding something, and upon closer inspection, it turns out you are avoiding something specific. Indeed, one has the impression you have made a bet with Madame, a philopena, by the terms of which you are never to address her directly. You never say ‘you’ to her, never use the pronoun, formal or informal.”

“But, Mynheer Peeperkorn. What sort of a bet would . . .”

“Surely I may call your attention to something of which you yourself cannot be unaware—indeed, you just turned very pale, even your lips.”

Hans Castorp did not look up. He was bent over, engrossed in the problem of the red stains on the sheets. “It was bound to come to this,” he thought. “That is what he was aiming for. I have even done my share, I’m afraid, to bring it to this. I’ve been plotting it to some extent, though that has only become clear to me at this moment. Am I really so pale? It may be—well, this is the critical moment. No way of knowing what will happen. Can I still lie? It probably wouldn’t work—and I don’t even want to. For now, I’ll just stick with these bloodstains, red wine stains here on the sheet.”

But no one spoke about them, either. The silence lasted for two or three minutes—revealing how even these smallest units of time can expand under such circumstances.

It was Pieter Peeperkorn who reopened the conversation. “It was on the evening when I had the privilege of first making your acquaintance,” he began in a lilting tone, letting his voice fall at the end, as if this were the first sentence in a long story. “We had just celebrated a little feast, had enjoyed food and drink, and linking arms in an elevated mood, in a humanely relaxed and adventurous spirit, we sought out our nocturnal couches in the small hours of the morning. And then it was, here at my door, as we took our leave of one another, that the inspiration came to me to invite you to place your lips upon the brow of the lady who had introduced you to me as a good friend from her previous stay here, leaving it then to her to respond in my presence to such a solemn, yet cheerful token of the advanced hour. You rejected my proposal outright, rejected it because you found it nonsensical to exchange kisses on the brow with my traveling companion. You will surely not dispute that was your explanation, which itself would have demanded an explanation—an explanation which you still owe me to this day. Are you willing to pay that debt now?”

“So he noticed that, too,” Hans Castorp thought and bent down closer still to the wine stains, scratching at one of them with the tip of his curled middle finger. “The fact is, I had wanted him to notice, and remember, even then—otherwise I would not have said it. But what now? My heart’s pounding fairly hard. Will there be a first-rate royal temper tantrum? It might be a good idea to look up to see if his fist is hovering just above my head. I find myself in a highly peculiar and extremely ticklish position.”

Suddenly he felt his wrist, his right wrist, grasped by Peeperkorn’s hand.

“Now he’s grabbing my wrist,” he thought. “Well, how ridiculous for me to sit here with my tail tucked between my legs. Have I wronged him in any way? Not in the least. Let the husband in Daghestan complain first. And then whoever after that. And then me. As far as I know,
he
has nothing at all to complain about. So why is my heart pounding like this? It’s high time for me to sit up and look squarely, if respectfully, into that majestic countenance.”

Which he did. The majestic countenance was yellow, with pale eyes gazing out from under the raised tracery of the brow; the expression on the ragged lips was bitter. Each read the other’s eyes—the grand old man and the insignificant young man, the former still with a grasp on the latter’s wrist.

At last Peeperkorn said softly: “You were Clavdia’s lover during her previous stay here.”

Hans Castorp let his head fall briefly, but then sat up straight again and took a deep breath. “Mynheer Peeperkorn,” he said, “I would find it most repugnant to lie to you, and I am seeking some way to avoid doing so. It is not easy. I would be boasting if I were to confirm your observation, and I would be lying if I were to deny it. The matter should be seen as follows. For a long time, a very long time, I lived here at the Berghof with Clavdia—excuse me—with your current traveling companion without knowing her socially. Our relationship, or my relationship to her, precluded any social element; indeed I must say its beginnings lie in darkness. In my own mind, at least, I never addressed Clavdia except by that name and with informal pronouns—or indeed in reality, either. For the evening when I cast aside certain pedagogic fetters, of which we were just speaking, and approached her—under a pretense suggested to me by a past experience—was an evening of masks and disguises. It was Mardi Gras, an irresponsible evening, an evening of first names, in the course of which, in a manner both irresponsible and dreamlike, the use of informal pronouns achieved its full meaning. It was likewise the evening before Clavdia’s departure.”

“Its full meaning,” Peeperkorn repeated. “Very delicately put.” He let go of Hans Castorp and began to massage both sides of his face with the palms of his long-nailed captain’s hands—the eye sockets, the cheeks, the chin. Then he folded his hands across the wine-stained sheets and laid his head down against his left shoulder, the shoulder nearer his guest, and it was the same as if he had turned his face away.

“I have answered your question as accurately as possible, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp said, “and have conscientiously tried to say neither too much nor too little. The main point was to allow you to see that it is more or less left to you whether or not you count that evening of farewell and meaningful informal pronouns—to allow you to see that it was an evening outside any schedule, almost outside the calendar, an hors d’oeuvre, so to speak, an extra evening, a leap-year evening, the twenty-ninth of February. And so it would have been only half a lie had I denied your observation.”

Peeperkorn did not reply.

“I preferred,” Hans Castorp began after another pause, “to tell you the truth even at the risk of losing your favor, which, to be frank, would have been a grievous loss for me—a blow, I can tell you, a real blow, that could only be compared to the blow I took when Frau Chauchat reappeared here, and not alone, but as your traveling companion. I was willing to take that risk because it has long been my wish that clarity should be established between us—between me and the man for whom I entertain such extraordinary respect. That course seemed finer and more humane—and I’m sure you know how Clavdia drawls the word out so charmingly in that magical, husky voice of hers—than silence and dissembling, and to that extent a weight was lifted from my heart, when you made your observation just now.”

No answer.

“And there was one more reason, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp continued, “one more reason why I wanted to make a clean breast of things—and that is that I know from personal experience how annoying uncertainty can be in this area, when one is at the mercy of surmises and guesses.
You
now know who it was with whom Clavdia marked, spent, observed—yes, that’s it—observed her twenty-ninth of February before the establishment of the present legitimate state of affairs, which it would be utter madness not to respect. I, for my part, was never able to attain such clarity, although it was clear to me that anyone who found himself in a situation where he must ponder such matters would have to assume certain precedents, or indeed predecessors—though I did know that Director Behrens, who as you are perhaps aware is an amateur painter in oils, had in the course of a great many sittings produced a magnificent portrait of her, with a lifelike mastery of the skin that, just between us, certainly takes one aback. It caused me a great deal of torment as I racked my brains over it, and does so even today.”

“You still love her, do you?” Peeperkorn asked, without shifting position—his face still turned away. The large room sank more and more into twilight.

“Forgive me, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” Hans Castorp replied, “but my sentiments toward you, sentiments of the greatest respect and admiration, would make it unseemly for me to say anything to you about my sentiments toward your traveling companion.”

“And does she,” Peeperkorn asked in a dull voice, “still share those sentiments even now?”

“I am not saying—” Hans Castorp responded, “I am not saying that she ever shared them. That is hardly credible. We touched on the matter theoretically a while ago when we spoke of woman’s reactive nature. There is not much about me to love. What sort of stature do I have—judge for yourself. And even if a twenty-ninth of February did come to pass, that was solely because a woman can be lured on by the primary choice of the man—to which I may add that I find it rather boastful and tasteless of me to call myself ‘the man,’ although Clavdia to be sure is a woman.”

“She followed her feelings,” Peeperkorn muttered with ragged lips.

“As she did far more amenably in your case,” Hans Castorp said, “and as she has done a good many times in all probability—that much must be clear to anyone who finds himself in the situation where . . .”