True, this personality was the companion of Clavdia Chauchat’s travels, and as such a greatly disturbing element. But that was another matter, and one which Hans Castorp did not allow to prejudice his judgment. He persisted in his sincere and respectful if also rather forward sympathy for this man on the grand scale, regardless of his partnership in the travelling-trunks of the woman of whom once, on a carnival night, Hans Castorp had borrowed a lead-pencil. That was his way; though we know some people, male and female, will not understand such a lack of sensibility, preferring that our hero should hate Peeperkorn, avoid him, call him an old dotard, a drivelling old sot. Instead of which we see him by Peeperkorn’s bedside in his attacks of fever—prattling to him (the word applies to his own share in the conversation, not the majestic Peeperkorn’s) and with the receptivity of inquiring youth on his travels, letting himself be played on by the power of the personality. All this Hans Castorp did, and all this we report of him, indifferent to the danger that someone may thereby be reminded of Ferdinand Wehsal, who once was wont to carry Hans Castorp’s overcoat. The comparison is not pertinent—for our hero was no Wehsal. Depths of self-abasement were not his line. But he was no “hero” either: which is to say, he would never let his relation to the masculine be conditioned by the feminine. True to our principle of making him out neither better nor worse than he was, we assert that he simply declined—not expressly and consciously, but quite naively, declined to let his judgment of his own sex be perverted by romantic considerations. Nor his sense of what was formative in experience. The female sex may find this offensive; we believe Frau Chauchat did feel some involuntary chagrin over the fact—a biting remark or so escaped her, to which we shall refer later on. But surely it was this very characteristic of his which rendered him so irresistible an object for pedagogic rivalry.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay grievously ill, the day after that evening of cards and champagne we have described—and no wonder. Nearly all the participants in those long-drawn-out, exhausting revels were the same. Hans Castorp was no exception, his head ached to splitting; which did not prevent him from paying a visit to the bedside of his last night’s host. He craved permission through the Malay, whom he met in the corridor; and it was readily granted.
He entered the Dutchman’s double bedroom through the salon which separated it from Frau Chauchat’s. It was larger and more luxuriously furnished than most of the Berghof rooms, with satin-upholstered armchairs and curly-legged tables. A thick, soft carpet covered the floor, and the beds—they were not the usual hygienic dying-bed of the establishment, but very stately indeed, of polished cherrywood with brass mounting, and above them hung a little canopy without curtains, like one umbrella sheltering both.
Pieter Peeperkorn lay in one of the two; its red satin coverlet was strewn with papers, books, and letters, and he was reading the Telegraaf through his horn-rimmed pince-nez with the high nosepiece. The coffee-machine stood on a chair at the bedside, and a half-empty bottle of the same simple effervescent red wine was on the night-table, among vials of medicine. Hans Castorp was rather put off to see the Dutchman wearing not a white nightshirt, but a long-sleeved woollen vest, buttoned at the wrists and collarless, cut round in the neck, and clinging to the old man’s powerful torso, his broad shoulders and breast. This undress threw into even greater relief the splendid humanity of his head on the pillow; in it he looked more remote than ever from the conventional and middle-class,
