Perfectly at home, in more than one respect in his element, Hans Castorp stood at the bier, expertly reverential. “He seems to sleep,” said he, humanely; though such was far from being the case. Then, in a voice appropriately subdued, he began a conversation with the widow, eliciting information about the sufferings, the last days and moments of her departed husband, and the arrangements for transporting the body to Carinthia; displaying a sympathy and conversance that was in part physicianly, in part priestly and moralizing. The widow, speaking in her drawling, nasal, Austrian accent, with now and then a sob, found it remarkable that young folk should so occupy themselves with a stranger’s pain. Hans Castorp answered that he and his cousin were themselves ill; that he, when still very young, had stood at the deathbed of near relatives; he was a double orphan, and, if he might say so, long familiar with the sight of death. She asked what profession he had chosen; he replied that he “had been” an engineer.
“Had been?” she queried.
“Had been,” he replied, in the sense that his illness and a stay up here of still undetermined length had come between him and his work; that might mean a considerable interruption, even a turning-point in his career, he could not tell. Joachim, at this, searched his face in some alarm. And his cousin? He was a soldier, was at present in training for an officer.
“Ah,” she said, “the trade of a soldier is another serious calling, one must be prepared to come into close touch with death, it is well to accustom oneself to the sight beforehand.” She dismissed the cousins with thanks and expressions of friendliness, which could not but touch them, considering her distressed state, and the bill for oxygen her departed husband had left behind him.
They returned to their own storey, Hans Castorp greatly pleased and edified by the visit.
“Requiescat in pace,” he said. “Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. You see, when death is in question, when one speaks to or of the dead, then the Latin comes in force; it is, so to say, the official language. So then you see that death is a thing apart. But it isn’t a humanistic gesture, speaking Latin in honour of death; and the Latin isn’t what you learn at school, either—the spirit of it is quite different, one might almost say hostile. It is ecclesiastical Latin, monkish Latin, medieval dialect, a sort of dull, monotonous, underground chanting. Settembrini has no use for it, it is nothing for humanists and republicans and suchlike pedagogues, it comes from quite another point of the compass. I find one ought to be clear about these two intellectual trends, or perhaps it would be better to say states of mind: I mean the devout and the freethinking. They both have their good sides; what I have against Settembrini’s—the freethinking line—is that he seems to imagine it has a corner in human dignity. That’s exaggerated, I consider, because the other has its own kind of dignity too, and makes for a tremendous lot of decorum and correct bearing and uplifting ceremony; more, in fact, than the freethinking, when you remember it has our human infirmity and proneness to err directly in mind, and thoughts of death and decay play such an important role in it. Have you seen Don Carlos given at the theatre? Do you remember at the Spanish court, when King Philip comes in, all in black, with the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and takes off his hat—it looks pretty much like one of our melons—he lifts it from the top, and says: ‘Cover, my lords,’ or something like that? That is the last degree of formality, I should think; no talk of any free-and-easy manners there! The Queen herself says: ‘In my own France how different!’ Of course it is too precise for her, too fussy, she would like it a little gayer and more human. But what is human? Everything is human. I find all that strict punctilio and God-fearing solemnity of the Spanish is a
