He said: “Yes, I always have them. I am always provided, one must be. How should I get on without them? I have, as they say, a passion for them. To tell the truth, however, I am hardly a very passionate man, though I have my passions, phlegmatic ones.”
“I am extraordinarily relieved,” she said, breathing out, as she spoke, the smoke she had inhaled, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. But how should you be? You would have degenerated. Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C’est ça. You don’t realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you an enemy of the human race?”
“Well, well, well! Enemy of the human race! How can you make such a general statement, Clavdia? Have you something definite and personal in your mind, when you say we don’t live for the sake of life, but for the sake of enriching ourselves? Women don’t usually moralize like that, so abstractly. Oh, morality, and that! A subject for Naphta and Settembrini to quarrel over. It belongs to the realm of the Great Confusion. Whether one lives for oneself, or for the sake of life—one doesn’t know oneself, no one can know that precisely and certainly. I mean, the limits are fluid. There is egoistic devotion, and there is devoted egoism. I think, on the whole, that it is as it is in love. Of course, it is probably immoral of me that I cannot very well attend to what you say to me about morality for being so happy that we are sitting here as we once did, and then never again, even since you came back. And that I may tell you there was never anything so lovely as the way those cuffs suit your hand, and the soft flowing silk your arm—your arm, that I know so well—”
“I am going.”
“Oh, please, please not! I promise to have proper regard for the circumstances, and the—personalities.”
“As one would expect, from a man without passion!”
“Yes, you see—you mock at me when I—and then, when I—you say you will leave me—”
“Pray speak a little more connectedly, if you expect me to understand you.”
“So I am not to have any benefit from all your practice in guessing the meaning of disconnected sentences? Is that fair, I ask—or I would if I did not know that it is not a matter of justice at all—”
“No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy—when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous.”
“There—ridiculous. Then grant me my phlegm. I repeat, how could I do without it? For instance, how else could I have endured to wait so long?”
“I beg pardon?”
“Aussi longtemps pour toi.”
“Voyons, mon ami. I say no more about the form of address you persist in, in your folly. You will tire of it—and then, I am not prudish, not an outraged middle-class housewife—”
“No, for you are ill. Your illness gives you freedom. It makes you—wait, I must hunt for the word—it makes you—spirituelle!”
“We shall speak of that another time. It was something else I meant. Something I demand to hear. You shall not pretend I had anything to do with your waiting—if you did wait—that I encouraged you to it, or even permitted it. You must admit explicitly that the opposite was the case—”
“Certainly, Clavdia, with pleasure. You never asked me to wait, I did it on my own. I can quite understand your laying stress on the point—”
“Even when you make admissions, there is always some impertinence about them. You are impertinent by nature—not only with me, but in general—God knows why. Your admiration, your very humility, is an impertinence. Don’t think I can’t see it. I ought not to speak with you at all, and certainly not when you dare to talk about waiting for me. It is inexcusable that you are still here. You should have been long ago at your work, sur le chantier, or wherever it was.”
“Now that, Clavdia, is not spirituel—it even sounds conventional. You are just talking. You can’t mean it in Settembrini’s sense—and however else, then? I cannot take it seriously. I will not go off without permission, like my poor cousin, who, as you said he would, died because he tried to do service down below, and who knew himself, I suppose, that he would die, but preferred death to doing service up here any longer. Well, it was for that he was a soldier. But I am not. I am a civilian, for me it would be deserting the colours to do what he did, and go and serve the cause of progress down in the flat-land, despite what Behrens says. It would be the greatest disloyalty and ingratitude, to the illness, and its spirituel quality, and to my love for you, of which I bear scars both old and new—and to your arms I know so well, even admitting that it was in a dream, a highly spirituel dream, that I learned to know them, and that you had no responsibility for my dream, and were not bound by it, nor your freedom infringed on—”
She laughed, cigarette in mouth, so that the Tartar eyes became narrow slits; leaning back against the wainscoting, her hands resting on the bench on either side of her, one leg crossed over the other, and swinging, her foot in its patent-leather shoe.
“Quelle générosité! Pauvre petit! Oh la la, vraiment—Precisely thus I have always imagined un homme de génie!”
“Don’t, Clavdia. I am no homme de génie—as little
