Mynheer spoke with uncommon precision and clarity this afternoon, despite the exhaustion consequent upon his fever. There was scarcely a trace of his usual rhapsodic style. He half sat in his bed, his powerful shoulders and splendid head turned toward his guest; one arm was stretched out over the coverlet, with the freckled, sea-captain’s hand erect at the end of the woollen sleeve, forming the ring of precision. The lance-tipped fingers were aloft. And his lips formed the words, as precisely, as “plastically,” as Herr Settembrini himself could have wished, and rolled the r in his throat in words like “probably” and “austerity.”
“You smile,” he went on. “You seem to be busy searching the tablets of your memory and finding them blank. But there can be no doubt that you know what I mean. I do not say that you do not sometimes address Madame, or that you do not answer her, as occasion arises. But I repeat, you do so with a definite constraint, an evasiveness, and, in fact, an avoidance of one certain form. One gets the impression that there has been a one-sided wager; it is as though you had eaten a philippina with Madame, and made up that you will not address her with the usual form of address. In short, you never use the third person plural. You never say She to Madame.”
“But Mynheer Peeperkorn—how absurd—what sort of philippina would that be?”
“May I mention the circumstance—you are surely aware of it yourself—that you have just grown pale to the lips?”
Hans Castorp did not look up. He bent over and busied himself with the red stains on the sheet. “It had to come to that, I suppose,” he thought. “It had to come out.—And I suppose I even helped it on myself. I can see that now. Did I really go pale? It may be. For now we’ve certainly come to grips. What will happen? Shall I keep on lying? It might still go—but I won’t. I’ll just sit tight a few minutes and look at these bloodstains—I mean wine-stains—on the sheet.”
They were both silent. The stillness lasted some two or three minutes—and gave evidence how much under such circumstances these very small units of time can expand.
It was Pieter Peeperkorn who first spoke. “On the evening when I first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” he said, beginning in a singsong tone, and letting his voice fall at the end, as though embarked on a long recitative, “we had a little celebration, sat very late eating and drinking and making merry, and then, in an elevated mood, of spirit free and unrestrained, arm in arm we sought our beds. As we parted, here at my door, the idea came to me to ask you to salute Madame on the brow, as a good friend from her former visit up here. You bluntly refused, rejected the idea on the ground that it would be preposterous. You will not deny that the expression itself demanded an explanation—an explanation for which you have remained until now in my debt. Are you willing to absolve yourself of it?”
“Ah, so he noticed that too,” Hans Castorp thought, and bent closer over the wine-stains, one of which he scratched with his middle finger. “The fact is I suppose I wanted him to notice it, or I should not have said it. But what to say now? My heart is pounding. Will there be an exhibition of royal rage? Perhaps I’d best keep an eye on his fist, he may be holding it over me already. Certainly I am in a fine position—between the devil and the deep blue sea, as it were.”
And suddenly he felt his right wrist grasped by the hand of Peeperkorn.
“Hullo!” he thought. “Why should I be sitting here with my tail between my legs? Have I done him any injury? Not in the least. Let him talk to the man in Daghestan before he does to me. And after that somebody else, and so on. And then me. And what has he to complain of about me? Nothing, so far. Then why should my heart be pounding like this? It is high time I sit up and look him in the eye—with all due respect to his personality, of course.”
He did so. The great man’s face was yellow, the eyes pale beneath the forehead’s heavy folds, a bitter expression sat on the wounded lips. They looked each other in the eye, the splendid old man and the insignificant young one, and Peeperkorn continued to hold Hans Castorp by the wrist. At last he said, gently: “You were Clavdia’s lover when she was here before.”
Hans Castorp bowed his head once more but lifted it again straightway, took a deep breath, and began: “Mynheer Peeperkorn! It is in the highest degree repugnant to me to tell you a lie. I am searching for a means of avoiding it, but this is not easy. I should be boasting if I say yes, lying if I say no. Let me explain in what sense this is to be taken. I lived a long time, oh, a very long time in this house with Clavdia—I beg pardon, with the present companion of your travels—before making her acquaintance. Our relations—or, rather, my relation to her was never the social one; I can only say of it that its beginnings are shrouded in darkness. In my thoughts I have never named Clavdia but with the ‘thou’—and never in reality either. For on the evening when, casting off certain pedagogic restraints of which we were speaking, I made bold to approach her, upon a pretext furnished me by the long-ago past, it was carnival. It was an evening of masks and
