Peeperkorn put down her plight to lack of nourishment. He expressed himself in this sense, with impressive disjointedness, forefinger aloft. People must nourish themselves properly, he gave them to understand, in order to do justice to life’s manifold claims. And he ordered sustenance for the company: platters of cold meat, joint and roast; tongue, goose, ham, sausage, whole dishes of delectables, all garnished with little radishes, butterballs, and parsley, gay as flowerbeds. They found a welcome, despite the lately consumed supper, which, it were superfluous to tell the reader, had lacked nothing in heartiness. But Mynheer Peeperkorn, after a few bites, dismissed the whole as “kickshaws”—dismissed them with a scorn which gave dismaying evidence of the uncertain temper of this lordly man. Yes, he waxed choleric, turned upon one of the company who tried to defend the collation. He swelled with rage, struck the table with his fist, and cursed the food for garbage, fit for the dustbin. This reduced the offender to silence, for certainly Peeperkorn, as host and dispenser of the good cheer, might find fault with its quality if he chose.
But his rage, however disproportionate, became him magnificently, Hans Castorp saw that. It did not misrepresent or render him petty: it wrought his incoherence, which no one in the group could have had the heart to connect with the mixture of wine he had drunk, to so royal a pitch that they all with one accord agreed, and took not another bite of the offending viands. Frau Chauchat set to work to mollify her companion’s mood. She stroked his great sea-captain’s hand, as it rested on the cloth after the blow he had struck, and said cajolingly that they might order something else, a hot dish, perhaps, if the chef could be won over. “Very good, my child,” Peeperkorn said, assuaged. And passed, without abating his dignity, from a full torrent of wrath to a state of appeasement, as he took Clavdia’s hand and kissed it. He ordered omelets for himself and the company, for each person a fine large omelette aux fines herbes, to help them do justice to the demands life made on them. And accompanied the order with a hundred-franc note as a sweetener for the staff.
His placidity was fully restored by the appearance of the steaming dishes, with their burden of canary-yellow besprent with green, which dispersed a mild warm fragrance of eggs and butter upon the air. They fell to with Peeperkorn, who ate and presided over the enjoyment, with broken words and compelling gesture enjoining upon everybody a perfervid appreciation of these gifts of God. He ordered a Hollands all round to go with the omelets; the transparent liquor gave out a healthy grain odour, mingled with just the faintest whiff of juniper—and Peeperkorn laid upon them all to drink it reverently.
Hans Castorp smoked, Frau Chauchat as well; the latter Russian cigarettes with a mouthpiece, from a lacquered box with a troika going full speed on the lid, which lay to hand on the table before her. Peeperkorn made no objection to his neighbours’ enjoyment, but did not smoke himself—he never had done so. If they understood him aright, he considered the use of tobacco one of those overrefined enjoyments the cultivation of which robbed of their majesty the simpler pleasures of life—those gifts and claims to which our power of feeling was even at best scarcely equal. “Young man,” said he to Hans Castorp, holding him by the power of his pale eye and his developed gesture: “Young man—the simple—the holy. Good—you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirit—let us absorb such things as these, exhaust them, satisfy their claims, before we—Positively, sir. Not a word. I have known men and women, cocaine eaters, hashish smokers, morphine takers—My dear friend, very good. Very good indeed. Very. Let them. We cannot judge, or condemn. But the simple, the great, the primeval gifts of God—to them they were unequal in the first place. Settled, my friend. Condemned, rejected. They could not respond.—Your name, young man? Good. I knew it, but I had forgotten. Not in cocaine, not in opium, not in vice as such does the viciousness lie. The unpardonable—the—unpardonable—sin—”
He paused. Tall and broad, he bent toward his neighbour; paused and maintained a marvellously expressive silence. His forefinger was raised, his mouth a broken line beneath the bare, red upper lip, which was somewhat raw from the razor, the horizontal folds of his bald forehead rose to meet the white aureole of his hair; the small pale eyes stared wide, and Hans Castorp seemed to read in them some flicker of horror at the crime, the great transgression, the unforgivable sin, which seeking to expound he stood there now, charming the silence with all the force of a commanding though incoherent personality. Hans Castorp thought it a disinterested horror, yet with something too of a personal kind, something that touched the kingly creature near: fear, perhaps, but not of any mean or narrow sort; that was very like panic flickering up momentarily in the eyes. Hans Castorp—despite the grounds he had for hostile misinterpretation of Frau Chauchat’s majestic friend—was by nature too respectful not to feel shocked at the revelation.
He cast down his eyes, and nodded, to give
