“Topping, thanks, I hope it’s mutual,” responded the young man.
The sun shone, the day was beautiful and bright. But they had done well to don overcoats, driving would be cool. Madame Chauchat too wore a warm belted mantle of some woolly stuff with a pattern of large checks, and a small fur about her shoulders. The rim of her felt hat was turned down at one side by the olive-green veil she wore bound under her chin; an effect so charming that it was actual pain to most of the beholders—Ferge being the only man there not in love with her. To his disinterested state was probably due the temporary advantage he presently enjoyed, of being selected to sit opposite Mynheer and Madame in the first landau, while Hans Castorp mounted with Wehsal into the second, catching as he did so a mocking smile that for a moment visited Frau Chauchat’s face. The others would be called for at their lodgings. The Malayan servant joined the party with a capacious basket, from the top of which protruded the necks of two wine-bottles. He bestowed it under the back seat of the first landau, took his place by the coachman on the box and folded his arms; the horses started up, and the carriages, with the brakes against their wheels, drove down the drive.
Wehsal had seen Frau Chauchat’s smile, and expressed himself on the subject to his companion, showing his bad teeth as he talked.
“Did you see,” he asked, “how she was laughing at you for having to drive alone with me? Yes, yes, a man like me is always fair game. Do you find it so disgusting to have to sit next to me?”
“Pull yourself together, Wehsal, and stop talking in that poor-spirited way,” Hans Castorp admonished him. “Women are forever smiling, at anything, just for the sake of smiling; there is no sense in attending to it. Why do you always cry yourself down? You have your advantages and your disadvantages, like the rest of us. For instance, you can play out of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s not everybody who can. Will you play for us again soon?”
“Yes, you think you can talk to me condescendingly, like that,” retorted the wretched soul, “and you don’t know what cheek there is in your consolation and how it just lowers me the more. You have the right to, though. You are laughing out of the wrong corner of your mouth now; but once you were in the seventh heaven, and felt her arms about your neck—oh, God, it burns me in the pit of my stomach when I think of it—and you are conscious of all you have had, when you look down on me and my torments and think what a beggarly wretch I am.”
“You haven’t a pretty way of expressing yourself, Wehsal. I don’t need to conceal my opinion of it, since you reproach me with being cheeky: it is really very repulsive and probably intentional on your part; you lay yourself out to be disgusting and humiliate yourself, the whole time. Are you really so desperately in love with her?”
“Fearfully,” answered Wehsal, with a head-shake. “Words cannot express what I have had to endure from my craving for her. I wish I could say it will be the death of me—but the trouble is, one can neither die nor live. It was a bit better while she was away, I was gradually beginning to forget her. But since she came back, and I have her daily before my eyes, I get attacks—I bite my hand and strike about me, and am beside myself. Such things ought not to be; yet one cannot wish not to have them. Whoever is in that state cannot wish not to be, it would be like wishing not to live, because it has bound itself up with life. What good would it do to die? Afterwards—afterwards, yes, gladly. In her arms it would be bliss. But before—no; it would be preposterous, because life is longing, and longing is life—it cannot go against itself, that is the cursed catch in the game. Even when I say cursed, it is only a way of talking, as though I were somebody else, for in myself I cannot feel it so. There are many kinds of torture, Castorp, and whichever one you are under, your one desire and longing is to be free of it. But the torture of fleshly lust is the only one you can never wish to be free of, except through satisfaction. Never, never in any other way, never at any price. So it is; the man who is not suffering from it doesn’t dwell on it; but the man who is learns to know our Lord Jesus Christ, and his tears run down. Good Lord in heaven, what a thing it is, that the flesh can crave the flesh like that, simply because it is not its own flesh, but belongs to another soul—how strange, and yet, when you come to look at it, how unassuming, how friendly, how almost apologetic! One might say, almost, if that is all he wants, in God’s name let him have it! What is it I want, Castorp? Do I want to
