“Yes, yes; but tell me, why did he never become a Father? He was old enough, wasn’t he?”
“I did tell you—it was his illness prevented him.”
“Well, but don’t you think—if he is first a Jesuit and second a man of intellect, always making new combinations—don’t you think this second, added characteristic has to do with his illness?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I only mean—look: he has a moist spot, and that hinders him from becoming a Father. But his combinations would probably have hindered him anyhow, and so, in a certain way, the spot and the combinations hang together. In his way he too is a sort of delicate child—a joli jésuite with a petite tache humide.”
They had reached the sanatorium, but stood in a little group on the terrace before the house talking still awhile before parting, and watched by a few guests who happened to be lounging there. Herr Setrembrini said: “I repeat, my young friends—I warn you. I cannot prevent you from cultivating the acquaintance now it is made, if curiosity leads you to do so. But arm yourselves, arm your hearts and minds with suspicion, oppose him with a critical spirit. I will characterize this man for you with a single word. He is a voluptuary.”
The cousins made astonished faces. Hans Castorp asked: “A—what? But he is a member of a Society. They have to take certain vows, I have always supposed—and then he is such a poor creature physically, so—”
“You are talking rubbish, Engineer,” Settembrini interposed. “It has nothing to do with physical insufficiency; while as for the vows you speak of, there are always reservations. I was speaking in a broader, more intellectual sense, your comprehension of which I felt I might presume upon, by now. You probably remember my visiting you one day in your room—it was long ago, frightfully long ago—you had just finished your three weeks in bed, after being received into the sanatorium.”
“Of course. You came in at dusk, and turned on the light—I remember it as if it were yesterday—”
“Good. We fell into talk, as we have often done, I rejoice to say, and upon somewhat elevated subjects. We spoke, I believe, of life and death: of the dignity of death in so far as it is the condition and appurtenance of life, and the grotesqueness into which it declines so soon as the mind erects it into an independent principle. Young men,” went on Herr Settembrini, standing close to the two, with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand splayed out like a fork, as if to collect their attention, while he raised the forefinger of his right in warning, “imprint it upon your minds: the mind is sovereign. Its will is free, it conditions the moral world. Let it once dualistically isolate death, and death will become, in actual fact, actu, by this mental act of will, you understand me, a power in itself, the power opposed to life, the inimical principle, the great temptation; whose kingdom is the kingdom of the flesh. You ask me why of the flesh? I answer you: because it unlooses and delivers, because it is deliverance—yet not deliverance from evil, but deliverance by evil. It relaxes manners and morals, it frees man from discipline and restraint, it abandons him to lust. If I warn you against this man, whose acquaintance with you I have unwillingly brought about, if I exhort you to go thrice-armed with a critical spirit in all your dealings with him, it is because all his thoughts are voluptuous, and stand under the aegis of death—and death is the most dissolute of powers, as I told you then, Engineer—I well remember my words, for I never fail to retain in my mind any good and telling phrase I may have chanced to avail myself of—a power hostile to civilization and progress, to work and to life, against whose mephitic breath it is the noblest task of the teacher to shield the mind of youth.”
Who could talk more beautifully than Herr Settembrini, who clearer, or in better-rounded periods? Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen thanked him most warmly for all he had said, and mounted the Berghof steps, while Herr Settembrini betook himself once more to his humanistic writing-desk, in the storey above Naphta’s silken cell.
This first visit of the cousins to Naphta, whose course we have described, was followed by two or three others; one, even, in the absence of Herr Settembrini. All of them afforded young Hans Castorp much food for thought, when, in his blue-blossoming retreat, with the image of the human form divine, called Homo Dei, hovering before his mind’s eye, he sat and “took stock.”
Choler. And Worse
August arrived, and with its entry slipped past the anniversary of our hero’s arrival in these parts. So much the better when it was gone—young Hans Castorp had scarcely looked forward to it with pleasure. And that was the rule. The anniversary was not popular. The old inhabitants passed it by without thought; and—though in general they seized on every pretext for jollification, and took occasion to celebrate their own private anniversaries in addition to these that accented the recurrent rhythm of the year; making merry with popping of corks in the restaurant, over birthdays, general examinations, imminent departures whether “wild” or sanctioned, and the like—they accorded to the anniversary of arrival no other attention than
