“You are a quaint philosopher,” she said. “I will not assert that I have understood all your involved German ideas; but it sounds human and good, and you are good, a good young man. You have truly behaved en philosophe, one must say that for you—”
“Too much en philosophe for your taste, eh, Clavdia?”
“No more impertinences. They become tiresome. That you waited for me was silly—uncalled for. But you are not angry, because you waited in vain?”
“It was hard, Clavdia, even for a man phlegmatic in his passions. Hard for me and hard of you to come back with him like that—for of course you knew through Behrens that I was here and waiting for you. But I have told you I regard it as a dream, what we had together, and I admit that you are free. And I waited after all not quite in vain, for here you are, we sit together as once we did, I can hear the piercing sweetness of your voice, known to my ear from so long ago; and beneath this flowing silk are your arms, your arms that I know—even though upstairs there lies your protector, in a fever, the mighty Peeperkorn, whose pearls you wear—”
“And with whom, for your own profit and enrichment, you have struck up such a friendship.”
“Do not grudge me it, Clavdia, Settembrini reproached me with it too. But that is conventional prejudice. The man is a boon—for God’s sake, is he not a personality? He is already old—yes; but even so, I could well understand how you as a woman could love him madly. You do love him madly?”
“All honour to thy philosophy, my little German Hänschen,” she said, and lightly stroked his hair. “But I could not find it in my heart to speak to you of my love for him. It would not be hu‑man.”
“Ah, why not, Clavdia? It is my belief that love of humanity begins where poor-spirited people believe it leaves off. We can speak quite quietly of him. You love him passionately?”
She bent to toss her cigarette-end in the grate, and then sat with folded arms.
“He loves me,” she said, “and his love makes me proud and grateful, and devoted to him. Tu peux comprendre çela. Or else you are not worthy the friendship he feels for you. His feeling forced me to follow and serve him. What else could I do? You may judge. Is it possible for any human being to disregard his love?”
“Not possible,” Hans Castorp confirmed. “No, of course, it was out of the question. How could a woman bring herself to disregard his feeling, and his anguish over that feeling—to forsake him, as it were, in his Gethsemane—”
“Tu n’es pas du tout stupide,” said she, her slanting eyes fixed in a reverie. “You understand things. ‘Anguish over the feeling—’ ”
“Not much understanding is needed to know that you had to follow him—though, or rather because, there must be much that is troubling in his love.”
“C’est exact. Troubling. There is much care with him, you know, many difficulties.” She had taken his hand, and played absently with the fingers—but suddenly she knitted her brows, she looked up and said: “Mais—dis-moi: ce if est pas un peu—ordinaire, que nous parlons de lui, comme ça?”
“No, Clavdia. Surely not. Far from it. Surely it is no more than human. You love the word, and I love to hear you say it, in your quaint pronunciation. My cousin Joachim did not like it—on military grounds. He thought it meant general licence and flabbiness; and in that sense, as an unlimited guazzabuglio of self-indulgence, I have my own suspicions of it, I confess. But in the sense of freedom, goodness, esprit, then it is great, we can freely apply it to our talk about Peeperkorn and the care and pain he causes you. Of course, they are the result of his sore spot—his dread of denying the feelings, that makes him love so much what he calls the classic gifts of life, the gift of Bacchus, liquid refreshment—we may speak of that in all reverence, for even in that weakness his scale is kingly and we shall lower neither him nor ourselves by speaking of it.”
“It is not a question of us,” she said. She had folded her arms again. “One would not be a woman if one were not willing to bear humiliation for the sake of a man like that, on the grand scale, as you say, when one is the object of his feeling and of his suffering from it.”
“Absolutely, Clavdia. Well said. For then even the humiliation
