“MM. Kasimir Japoll and Janusz Teofil Lenart remained entirely passive during the whole of the above proceedings. Dated and signed: Michael Lodygowski, Ign. v. Meilin.”
The prevailing temper did not permit Hans Castorp to laugh, as he would otherwise surely have done, at this rapid fire of boxes on the ear. Instead, he quaked as he read. The irreproachable bearing of the one side, the contemptibleness and total lack of self-respect of the other were both apparent in the document, which was, despite its frigid objectivity, so impressive as to move him deeply. So it was with them all. The Polish affaire d’honneur was conned far and wide, and discussed through clenched teeth. A counterblast by Herr Kasimir Japoll fell rather flat. The substance of it was that Zutawski had been perfectly well aware that he, Japoll, had been declared incapable of giving satisfaction by some conceited puppy in Lemberg, once on a time, and that his whole proceeding had been a pretence, since he knew full well it would not issue in a duel. Furthermore, the sole and only reason Zutawski had declined to institute proceedings was that all the world, himself included, was aware that his wife Jadwiga had provided him with a complete assortment of horns; as to the truth of which fact Japoll would have found nothing easier than to give evidence; and that lastly the appearance of the Kryloff before a court would have been little edifying for anybody concerned. Anyhow, it was only his own honour that had been impeached, not that of his partner in the famous conversation; von Zutawski had entrenched himself behind the fact in order not to involve himself in any danger. As for the role played by Herr von Asarapetian in the whole affair, he preferred not to speak of it, but for the encounter in the Kurhaus bar, he, Japoll, though ready of tongue and wit, was admittedly of very feeble strength; he was at a great physical disadvantage with Zutawski and his friends and the uncommonly powerful Zutawska; while the two young ladies who were in his and Lenart’s society were lively creatures enough, but timid as rabbits. Under the circumstances, and in order to avoid a free fight and public scandal, he had compelled Lenart, who would have put himself on the defensive, to be quiet, and to suffer in God’s name the transient social contact with MM. von Zutawski and Lodygowski, which had not hurt them at all, and which had been regarded in the light of a pleasantry by the bystanders.
Thus Japoll, for whom, of course, not much could be said. His defence did not greatly invalidate the elegant contrast of honour with pusillanimity presented by the document on the other side; the less because he had not the manifolding facilities disposed of by his opponents, and could only distribute a few typed duplicates of his reply. The protocol, on the contrary, everyone received, even the most uninterested. Naphta and Settembrini, for instance, had copies sent them, which Hans Castorp saw in their hands, and remarked, to his surprise, that they too perused them with bitter concentration. For him the ruling temper of the Berghof was too much—he was powerless to dissipate its mood by a burst of blithe and cleansing laughter, but this he had confidently expected to hear from Herr Settembrini. Alas, no, even the unclouded eye of the Freemason was dimmed by the prevailing spleen; it weighed on his spirit, stilling his mirth; it made him susceptible to the rasping provocation of the tale of the ear-boxing. Moreover he, the protagonist of Life, was suffering in spirit from the state of his health. Slowly, remorselessly, with deceptive interludes of brighter hope, it grew worse. He despised, he scorned it, and himself; but had reached the point where it obliged him, every few days, to take to his bed.
His housemate and antagonist was no better off. The organic disease which had been the cause—or must we say pretext—for the untimely end to his activities within his order, made rapid progress; even the high and thin conditions of life up here could not give it pause. Naphta too was often confined to his bed; the crack in his voice was more cracked than ever when he talked; and as his fever increased he talked more, and more malignantly, than ever. That ideal opposition to the forces of disease and death, the forced surrender of which before the superior power of abject nature gave Herr Settembrini such pain, was foreign to little Naphta. His way of taking the deterioration of his physical part was not with sorrow or aversion, but with a sort of jeering levity, an unnatural lust of combat, a mania of intellectual doubt, denial, and distraction, that was a sore irritant to the other’s melancholy, and daily embittered more the intellectual quarrel between them. Hans Castorp, of course, could only speak of those at which he was present; but he felt tolerably sure he did not miss any; that his presence, the presence of the bone of pedagogic contention, was necessary, to give rise to a disputation of any magnitude. And though he did not spare Herr Settembrini the pain of finding Naphta’s gibes worth hearing, he had to admit that these were latterly going beyond all bounds and often enough overstepping the borderline of mental sanity.
For this sufferer possessed neither the power nor the good will to rise above his illness; but rather saw all the world in its sign and image. In the presence of Herr Settembrini’s quivering resentment, who would sooner have drawn his nursling away from the room or even stopped his ears, Naphta declared that matter was so bad a material that the spirit could not be realized within it. Any effort in that direction
