“Not at all, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I am the one to be grateful, for permission to sit here a little; I get a great deal more out of it than you—I assure you my motives are not altruistic. But what sort of description is that of yourself—an ailing old man? It would never occur to anyone to call you that. It gives an entirely false picture.”
“Very good,” responded Mynheer. He closed his eyes for a second or so, leaning his majestic head against the pillows, the chin raised, the fingers with their long nails folded on his kingly chest, the muscles of which showed beneath the tricot shirt. “You are right, young man, or, rather, you mean it well. I am sure. It was pleasant yesterday—yes, yesterday afternoon, at that hospitable spot—the name of which I have now forgotten where we ate the excellent salami and scrambled eggs—and that sound native wine—”
“It was gorgeous,” Hans Castorp confirmed. “We certainly are filled up—the Berghof chef would not have been pleased to see us putting it in—one and all; he’d have felt insulted. That was genuine salami, the real thing; Herr Settembrini ate it with tears in his eyes. He is a patriot, you must know, a democratic patriot. He has consecrated his burgher’s pike on the altar of humanity, so that salami may be taxed at the Brenner frontier.”
“That is no matter,” Peeperkorn declared. “He is most chivalrous and courteous and very affable in conversation—a gallant gentleman, though obviously unable to change his clothing with any frequency.”
“None at all,” said Hans Castorp, “none at all! I know him well, have been friendly with him for a long time; he was kind enough to take me up, because he found I was a ‘delicate child of life.’ That is an expression we use between us, the sense of which is not obvious without the context. He has taken much pains to influence me for my good. But never, summer or winter, have I seen him wear anything but those check trousers and that threadbare double-breasted coat. He wears the old things with great dignity, there is something gallant about him, I agree with you there. The way he does it is a triumph over poverty—I like better to see it than little Naphta’s elegance, that always seems suspicious—a work of darkness, as it were, and he gets the money for it in some hole-and-corner way, I understand.”
“A chivalrous and affable gentleman,” repeated Peeperkorn, passing over Hans Castorp’s remarks about little Naphta. “But also—forgive me the reservation—not free from prejudice. Madame, my companion, has no great opinion of him—you may have seen. She feels little sympathy—no doubt because she perceives the same prejudice to exist toward herself. Not a word, young man. I am far from—comment on Herr Settembrini and your friendly feelings for him—No more! I should not think of saying that in any point—he has failed in any respect in knightly courtesy. My dear friend—irreproachable, very. But there is—a line drawn, a certain—a withdrawal—which makes comprehensible Madame Chauchat’s—”
“Feeling against him. Perfectly natural. Perfectly justified. Pardon me, Mynheer Peeperkorn, for taking the words out of your mouth. I venture to do so in the consciousness that you will not misunderstand me. When one thinks how women are made (you smile, to hear a person of my youth and inexperience making general observations on this subject)—how dependent a woman’s feeling for a man is upon his feeling for her—it is not surprising. Women, if you will permit me so to express myself, are creatures not of action but of reaction; they do not initiate, they are inactive in the sense that they are passive. May I, even at the risk of being tiresome, try to follow that a little further? Woman, so far as I have been able to observe, regards herself, in a love-affair, as the object. She lets it come; she does not make a free choice, she only chooses on the basis of the man’s having chosen, and even then, even then, I must repeat, her choice is suspect, it is prejudiced by the very fact that she has been chosen—provided, of course, the man is not too poor a specimen, and even so—Good Lord, what unalloyed drivel I’m talking! But when one is young, everything seems new and astonishing. You ask a woman: ‘Do you love him?’ And she tells you: ‘He loves me so much!’ and rolls her eyes up, or else rolls them down. Imagine an answer like that from one of us—if you will pardon me putting us in the same category. Perhaps there are men who would answer like that, but they are poor-spirited creatures—their women wear the breeches, if you will forgive the expression. I should like to know what kind of self-appraisement is at the bottom of the feminine answer. Is it that the woman thinks she owes a man boundless devotion merely because he has conferred the favour of his choice upon so lowly a creature? Or does she see in the man’s love an infallible sign of her personal excellence? I’ve often asked myself these questions, when I have been thinking quietly alone.”
“Primitive—traditional mysteries you touch on there, young man, applying your glib little phrases to the sacred conditions of our existence,” responded Peeperkorn. “Man is intoxicated by his desire, woman demands and expects to be intoxicated by it. Hence our holy duty of feeling, hence the shame in unfeelingness, in powerlessness to awaken the woman to desire. Will you take a glass of red wine with me? I will drink, for I am thirsty. I have given out a considerable amount of water today.”
“Thanks, Mynheer Peeperkorn. I do not usually take anything at this hour; but I am always ready to drink a swallow or so to your health.”
“Then take the wineglass. There is only one, I will use the water-glass. It won’t insult this simple wine to drink it out
