“I do indeed,” Joachim said. “Naturally, I can’t abide any kind of looseness or slovenliness. There must be discipline.”
“Yes, you say that as a soldier; and I must admit the military has an understanding of these matters. The widow was right when she said your trade is a solemn one, that has to reckon on coming to grips with death. You have your tight-fitting, immaculate uniform, with a stiff collar—there’s your bienséance for you; then your regulations of rank, and military obedience, and all the forms you preserve toward each other—quite in the Spanish spirit, there is something reverent about it, I can do with it very well, at bottom. We civilians ought to show more of the same spirit in our customs and manners, I should really like it, and find it fitting. I think the world, and life generally, is such as to make it appropriate for us all to wear black, with a starched ruff instead of your stand-up collar; and for all our intercourse with each other to be subdued and ceremonial, and mindful of death. That would seem right and moral to me. There is another of Settembrini’s arrogant ideas; I may tell him so, some time: he thinks he has a monopoly of morals as well as of human dignity—with his talk about ‘practical lifework’ and Sunday services in the name of ‘progress’—as though one hadn’t something else to think about, on Sundays, besides progress!—and his ‘systematic elimination of suffering’; you have not heard anything about that, but he has instructed me on the subject, and it is to be systematically eliminated by means of a lexicon. I may find all that positively immoral—but what of it? I don’t tell him so, naturally. He fairly goes for me, you know, of course in his plastic way, and says: ‘I warn you, Engineer.’ But a person can take leave to think what he pleases, at least: ‘Sire, grant freedom of thought.’ Let me tell you something,” he went on—they had by now arrived in Joachim’s room, and Joachim was making ready for the rest-cure—“let me tell you something I propose to do. We live up here, next door to the dying, close to misery and suffering; and not only we act as though we had nothing to do with it, but it is all carefully arranged in order to spare us and prevent our coming into contact with it, or seeing anything at all—they will take away the gentleman rider while we are at breakfast or tea—and that I find immoral. The Stöhr woman was furious, simply because I mentioned his death. That’s too absurd for words. She is ignorant, to be sure, and thinks that ‘Leise, leise, fromme Weise’ comes out of Tannhäuser, she said so the other day. But even so, she might have a little human feeling, and the rest of them too. Well, I have made up my mind to concern myself a bit in future with the severe cases and the moribund. It will do me good—I feel our visit just now has done me good already. That poor chap Reuter in number twenty-five, whom I saw through the door when I first came, he has most likely long ago been gathered to his fathers, and been spirited away on the quiet. His eyes were so enormous even then. But there are more of them, the house is full, and they keep coming. Sister Alfreda or the Directress, or even Behrens himself, would most likely be glad to put us in the way of it. Say that one of the moribund was having a birthday, and we hear of it—that could easily be brought about. Good. We send him, or her, whichever it is, a pot of flowers, an attention from two fellow-guests, who prefer to remain anonymous, with best wishes for recovery; it is always polite to say that. Then afterwards, of course, it is found out who sent it, and he—or she—in her infirmity, lets us greet her, in a friendly way, through the doorway; she may even ask us in for a minute, and we have a little human intercourse with him, before he sinks away. That’s how I imagine it. Are you agreed? For my part, my mind is made up.”
Joachim had not much to bring up against the plan. “It is against the rules of the house,” he said. “In a certain way you would be transgressing them. But Behrens would probably be willing to make an exception, and give permission, if you wanted it, I should think. You might refer to your interest in the medical side.”
“Yes, among other things,” Hans Castorp answered: for in truth somewhat involved motives lay at the bottom of his desire. His protest against the prevailing egotism was only one of these: there was also and in particular a spiritual craving to take suffering and death seriously, and pay them the respect that was their due. Contact with the suffering and dying would, or so he hoped, feed and strengthen this craving of the spirit, by counteracting the manifold woundings to which it was daily and hourly subjected, and which he felt the more keenly on account of the Settembrinian critique. Instances there were only too many: if one had asked Hans Castorp for them, he would probably have mentioned certain persons who were admittedly not much ailing, and not under the smallest compulsion, but who made a pretext of slight illness to live up here, for their own pleasure, and because the life suited them. Such was the Widow Hessenfeld, whom we have mentioned in passing. Her passion was betting; she staked against the gentlemen every conceivable object upon every conceivable subject: the weather, the dishes at dinner, the result of the monthly examination, the
