an impression profoundly otherworldly, though at the same time not a little startling to young Hans Castorp. He supported his statements with a wealth of illustration and anecdote from the books and loose notes on the table before him; several times he even quoted poetry. And he discussed certain startling manifestations of the power of love, certain extraordinary, painful, uncanny variations, which the majestic phenomenon at times displayed. It was, he said, the most unstable, the most unreliable of man’s instincts, the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion. In the which there was nothing that should cause surprise. For this mighty force did not consist of a single impulse, it was of its nature complex; it was built up out of components which, however legitimate they might be in composition, were, taken each by itself, sheer perversity. But—continued
Dr. Krokowski—since we refuse, and rightly, to deduce the perversity of the whole from the perversity of its parts, we are driven to claim, for the component perversities, some part at least, though perhaps not all, of the justification which attaches to their united product. We were driven by sheer force of logic to this conclusion;
Dr. Krokowski implored his hearers, having arrived at it, to hold it fast. Now there were psychical correctives, forces working in the other direction, instincts tending to conformability and regularity—he would almost have liked to characterize them as bourgeois; and these influences had the effect of merging the perverse components into a valid and irreproachable whole: a frequent and gratifying result, which,
Dr. Krokowski almost contemptuously added, was, as such, of no further concern to the thinker and the physician. But on the other hand, there were cases where this result was not obtained, could not and should not be obtained; and who,
Dr. Krokowski asked, would dare to say that these cases did not, psychically considered, form a higher, more exclusive type? For in these cases the two opposing groups of instincts—the compulsive force of love, and the sum of the impulses urging in the other direction, among which he would particularly mention shame and disgust—both exhibited an extraordinary and abnormal height and intensity when measured by the ordinary bourgeois standards; and the conflict between them which took place in the abysses of the soul prevented the erring instinct from attaining to that safe, sheltered, and civilized state which alone could resolve its difficulties in the prescribed harmonies of the love-life as experienced by the average human being. This conflict between the powers of love and chastity—for that was what it really amounted to—what was its issue? It ended, apparently, in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure. Her confused and tumultuous claims were never allowed to rise to consciousness or to come to proof in anything like their entire strength or multiformity. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory; for the claims of love could not be crippled or enforced by any such means. The love thus suppressed was not dead; it lived, it laboured after fulfilment in the darkest and secretest depths of the being. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge—if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable. But what then was this form, this mask, in which suppressed, unchartered love would reappear?
Dr. Krokowski asked the question, and looked along the listening rows as though in all seriousness expecting an answer. But he had to say it himself, who had said so much else already. No one knew save him, but it was plain that he did. Indeed, with his ardent eyes, his black beard setting off the waxen pallor of his face, his monkish sandals and grey woollen socks, he seemed to symbolize in his own person that conflict between passion and chastity which was his theme. At least so thought Hans Castorp, as with the others he waited in the greatest suspense to hear in what form love driven below the surface would reappear. The ladies barely breathed. Lawyer Paravant rattled his ear anew, that the critical moment might find it open and receptive. And Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
So now they knew—though very probably not all of them were capable of an opinion on what they heard. A sigh passed through the assemblage, and Lawyer Paravant weightily nodded approbation as Krokowski proceeded to develop his theme. Hans Castorp for his part sat with bowed head, trying to reflect on what had been said and test his own understanding of it. But he was unpractised in such exercises, and rendered still further incapable of mental exertion by the unhappy effect of the walk he had taken. His thoughts were soon drawn off again by the sight of Frau Chauchat’s back, and the arm appertaining, which was lifting and bending itself, close before Hans Castorp’s eyes, so that the hand could hold the braids of hair.
It made him uncomfortable to have the hand so close beneath his eye, to be forced to look at it whether he wished or no, to study it in all its human blemishes and imperfections, as though under a magnifying-glass. No, there was nothing aristocratic about this stubby schoolgirl hand, with the badly cut nails. He was even not quite sure that the ends of the fingers were perfectly clean; and the skin round the nails was distinctly bitten. Hans Castorp made a face; but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat’s back, as he vaguely recalled what Dr. Krokowski had been saying, about counteracting influences of a bourgeois kind, which set themselves up against the power of love.—The arm, in its gentle upward curve, was better than the hand; it was scarcely clothed, for
