He had wrought himself to a pitch. All interest in Settembrini’s and Naphta’s antinomies was fled away. But the vision of the eagle remained—even though they ceased talking about it, and devoted themselves to the programme they were carrying out under Mynheer’s lead. They stopped at an inn to eat and drink—quite out of hours, but with an appetite whetted by silent memories of the eagle. There was a feasting and a tippling, such as always went on where Mynheer was, in Dorf or Platz, or the inns at Claris and Klosters, whither they had gone in the little train. Under his tutelage, they tasted the “classic” gifts of life: coffee and cream with fresh bread, moist cheese and fragrant Alpine butter, heavenly-tasting with hot roasted chestnuts. They drank red Veltliner, to their hearts’ content. Peeperkorn accompanied the impromptu meal with a fire of ejaculations; or incited Anton Karlowitsch Ferge to talk, that good-natured sufferer, who abhorred all high thoughts, but could hold forth so acceptably on the subject of the manufacture of rubber shoes in Russia. He described how the rubber mass was treated with sulphur and other substances, and the finished, glossy product subjected to a heat of over two hundred degrees to “vulcanize” it. He talked about the polar circle, for his business trips had more than once taken him thither; about the midnight sun, and eternal winter at the North Cape—all this out of his scraggy throat, from beneath his bushy moustaches. Up there, he said, the steamers looked tiny, next the gigantic cliffs, on the steel-grey surface of the sea. And a yellow radiation was diffused over great tracts of the heavens—the northern lights. The whole thing had seemed spooky to him, Anton Karlowitsch: the scene and himself to boot.
Thus Herr Ferge, the complete outsider, the only member of the group who stood detached from its complicated relationships. But now that we speak of these, it will be well to relate two conversations, two priceless conversations à deux, which our unheroic hero had, the first with Clavdia Chauchat, the second with the present companion of her travels; one in the hall, on an evening when the disturbing element lay above with a fever; the other on an afternoon by Mynheer’s bedside.
It was half dark in the hall. The social activities had been brief and languid, the guests withdrew early to the evening cure or else took their wilful way into town, to dance and game. A single light burned in the hall ceiling—and in the adjoining salons dimness reigned. But Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat, who had taken dinner without her protector, was not gone upstairs after it, but still lingered in the writing-room, so he did the same. He sat by the tiled hearth, in the back part of the hall, which was raised by one step from the rest, and separated by arches supported on two columns; in a rocking-chair such as that one Marusja had leaned back in, on the evening Joachim had spoken with her for the first and last time. He was, permissibly at this hour, smoking a cigarette.
She came, he heard her approaching step and the sound of her frock; fanning the air with a letter she held by one corner, and saying, in her Pribislav voice: “The porter has gone. Do give me a timbre poste.”
She was wearing a thin dark silk this evening, cut round in the neck, with filmy sleeves finished by a buttoned cuff at the wrists. It was the cut he loved. She wore the pearls, they gleamed palely in the half light. He looked up into her Khirgiz face.
“Timbre?” he repeated, “I have none.”
“No? Tant pis pour vous. Not prepared to do a lady a favour?” She pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “I am disappointed. You ought to be more precise and dependable. I imagined you having a compartment in your pocketbook, nice neat little sheets of all denominations.”
“Why should I? I never write a letter. To whom should I write? I seldom do, even a card, and that is already stamped. I have no one to write to. I have no contact with the flat-land, it has fallen away. We have a folksong that says: ‘I am lost to the world’—so it is with me.”
“Well, then, lost soul, at least give me a papiros,” said she, and sat down opposite him on a bench with a linen cushion, one leg over the other. She stretched out her hand. “With those, at least, you are provided.” She took a cigarette, negligently, from the silver case he held out to her, and availed herself of his little pocket-device, the flame of which lighted up her face. The indolent “Give me a cigarette,” the taking it without
