“But aside from that,” Peeperkorn said, “I must involuntarily have been the cause of much suffering on your part.”
“If you put the question,” responded Hans Castorp, “and if I answer yes, my answer must not be taken to mean that I did not know how to value the enormous privilege of knowing you; for that privilege was indissolubly bound up with the suffering.”
“I thank you, young man, I thank you. I value the courtesy of your little phrases. But, aside from our acquaintance—”
“It is difficult,” Hans Castorp said, “to divorce the two; and the idea does not commend itself to me that I should divorce them in order to be free to reply in the affirmative to your question. The very fact that it was a personality like you in whose company Clavdia returned could only make more distressing and involved her coming back in the company of anybody whatever. It gave me a quarter of an hour, I assure you, and still does, that I do not deny; I have purposely kept as much as I could to the positive element, that is my sincere feeling of honour and reverence for you, Mynheer Peeperkorn—in which there mingled a spice of malice against your mistress; for women are never at ease when their lovers come to terms.”
“True enough,” Peeperkorn said, and ran his hand over mouth and chin to conceal a smile, as though he were afraid Madame Chauchat might see it. Hans Castorp too smiled discreetly—and then they both nodded, in mutual understanding.
“This little revenge,” went on Hans Castorp, “was granted me at the end, because, so far as I personally am concerned, I have a quarrel after all, not with Clavdia, not with you, Mynheer Peeperkorn, but with my lot in general, my destiny. I will try to tell you about it, in so far as I can, now that I am secure in the honour of your confidence, and in this altogether exceptional and extraordinary twilight hour.”
“Pray do so,” said Peeperkorn, courteously, and Hans Castorp went on.
“I have been up here a long time, Mynheer Peeperkorn, years. How long I hardly know myself, but it has been years of my life. My cousin, to visit whom I came up, in the first instance, was a soldier, an upright and honourable soul, but that was no help to him—he died, and left me, and I remained here alone. I was no soldier, but a civilian, I had a profession, as you may have heard, a good, two-fisted job, which is even supposed to do its share in drawing together the nations of the earth—but somehow it did not draw me. I admit this freely; but the reasons for it I cannot describe otherwise than to say that they are veiled in obscurity, the same obscurity that envelops the origin of my feeling for Madame your mistress—I call her that expressly to show that I am not thinking of undermining the situation as it exists—my feeling for Clavdia Chauchat, and my intimate sense of her being, which I have had since the first moment her eyes met mine and bewitched me, enchanted me, you understand, beyond all reason. For love of her, in defiance of Herr Settembrini, I declared myself for the principle of unreason, the spirituel principle of disease, under whose aegis I had already, in reality, stood for a long time back; and I remained up here, I no longer know precisely how long. I have forgotten, broken with, everything, my relatives, my calling, all my ideas of life. When Clavdia went away, I waited here for her return, so that now I am wholly lost to life down below, and dead in the eyes of my friends. That is what I meant when I spoke of my destiny, and said there might be some justice in a complaint over my present state. I have read a story—no, I saw it in the theatre: a good-natured youth, a soldier like my cousin, who comes to know a charming gipsy—charming she was, with a flower behind her ear, a wild and fatal creature, who so bewitches him that he goes off altogether, sacrifices everything to her, deserts the colours, joins the smugglers, dishonours himself in every way. Well, when he has got so far, she for her part has had enough of him, and takes up with a matador, a forceful personality with a magnificent baritone voice. The end of it all is that the little soldier, white as a sheet, shirt open at the throat, stabs his mistress with his knife in front of the circus—which, after all, she brought upon herself. It is rather a pointless story after all: how did I come to think of it?”
Mynheer Peeperkorn, at mention of the knife, had shifted his position in the bed, with a quick motion to one side, turning his face toward his guest, and looking him piercingly in the eye. Now he pulled himself to a more comfortable posture, supporting himself on one elbow, and said: “Well, young man, I have listened to you, and I have the whole picture. On my side, let me make you an honourable declaration. Were my hair not white, my limbs not racked with fever, you would see me ready to give you satisfaction, man to man, weapon to weapon, for the injury I unwittingly did you, and that which my companion added to it, for which likewise it is mine to atone. Positively, my friend—you would see me at your service. But as matters lie, you must let me make a different proposal. It is this: I recall an exalted moment, when our acquaintance was very young, when I felt myself pleasantly impressed by your native parts, and stood ready to offer you the brotherly ‘thou’; but then perceived that the moment was premature. Very good. I stand again today at that moment,
