“You don’t say!” answered the Hofrat—a little as he had that time when Hans Castorp told him, shortly before the first examination, that he had fever. He said no more.
“Yes,” went on the youth, “I made her acquaintance—a thing that isn’t so easy, hereabouts, you know. But Frau Chauchat and I, we managed, at the eleventh hour, we had some conversation—Ff—f!” went Hans Castorp, and drew his breath sharply through his teeth. The needle had gone in. “That was certainly a very important nerve you happened to hit on, Herr Hofrat,” he said. “I do assure you, it hurt like the devil. Thanks, a little massage does it good … Yes, we came a little closer to each other, in conversation.”
“Ah? Well?” the Hofrat said. His manner was as one expecting from his own experience a very favouring reply, and expressing his agreement in anticipation by the way he puts the question.
“I’m afraid my French was rather lame,” Hans Castorp answered evasively. “I haven’t had much occasion to use it. But the words somehow come into one’s mind when one needs them—so we understood each other tolerably well.”
“I believe you,” said the Hofrat. “Well?” he repeated his inquisition; and even added, of his own motion: “Pretty nice, what?”
Hans Castorp stood, legs and elbows extended, his face turned up, buttoning his shirt-collar.
“It’s the old story,” he said. “At a place like this, two people, or two families, can live weeks on end under one roof, without speaking. But some day they get acquainted, and take to each other, only to find that one of the parties is on the point of leaving. Regrettable incidents like that happen, I suppose. In such cases, one feels like keeping in touch by post, at least. But Frau Chauchat—”
“Tut, she won’t, won’t she?” the Hofrat laughed.
“No, she wouldn’t hear of it. Does she write to you, now and again, from where she is staying?”
“Lord bless you!” Behrens answered, “she’d never think of it. In the first place, she’s too lazy, and in the second—how could she? I can’t read Russian, though I can jabber it, after a fashion, when I have to, but I can’t read a word—nor you either, I should suppose. And the puss can purr fast enough in French or in book German, but writing—it would floor her altogether. Think of the spelling! No, my poor young friend, we’ll have to console each other. She always comes back again, sooner or later. Different people take it differently—it’s a question of procedure, or of temperament. One goes off and keeps coming back, another stops long enough that he doesn’t need to come back. Just put it to your cousin that if he goes off now, you’re likely to be still here to see him return in state.”
“But Herr Hofrat, how long do you mean that I—?”
“That you? You mean that he, don’t you? That he won’t stop as long a time below as he has been up here, that is what I mean, and so I tell you. That’s my humble opinion, and I lay it on you to tell him so from me, if you will be so kind as to undertake the commission.”
Such, more or less, would be the trend of their conversation, artfully conducted by Hans Castorp, who, however, reaped nothing or less than nothing for his pains. How long one must remain in order to see the return of a person departed before her time—on that point the result was equivocal; while as for direct news of the departed fair one, he got simply none at all. No, he would have no news of her, so long as they were separated by the mystery of time and space. She would never write, and no opportunity would be afforded him to do so. And when he came to think of it, how should it be otherwise? Was it not very bourgeois, even pedantic, of him, to imagine they ought to write, when he himself had been of opinion that it was neither necessary nor desirable for them to speak? Had he even spoken with her, that carnival evening—anything that might be called speaking, and not rather the utterance of a dream, couched in a foreign tongue, and very little “civilized” in its drift? Why should he write to her, on letter-paper or on postcards, setting down for her edification, as he did for that of his people at home, the fluctuations of his curve? Clavdia had been right in feeling herself dispensed from writing by virtue of the freedom her illness gave her. Speaking and writing were of course the first concern of a humanistic and republican spirit; they were the proper affair of Brunetto Latini, the same who wrote the book about the virtues and the vices, and taught the Florentines the art of language and how to guide their state according to the rules of politics.
And here Hans Castorp was reminded of Ludovico Settembrini, and flushed, as once he had when the Italian entered his sickroom and turned on the light. Hans Castorp might have applied to him with his metaphysical puzzles, if only by way of challenge or in a carping spirit, without any serious expectation of an answer from the humanist, whose concerns and interests, of course, were all of this earth. But since the carnival gaieties, and Settembrini’s impassioned exit from the music-room, there had been a coolness between them, due on Hans Castorp’s side to a bad conscience, on the other’s to the deep wound dealt his pedagogic pride. They avoided each other, and for weeks exchanged not a single word. In the eyes of one whose view it was that all moral sanctions resided in the reason and the virtue, Hans Castorp must have ceased to
