Hans Castorp was in the seventh heaven over this occurrence. True, he had to pay for it: for full two days—that is to say, for the space of ten mealtimes, Madame Chauchat never looked his way. She even intermitted her habit of pausing on her entrance, to survey the room and, as it were, present herself to it. That was hard to bear; yet, since it undoubtedly happened on his account, it preserved the relation between them, if only on its negative side. That was something.
He saw how right Joachim had been in saying that it was hard to get acquainted here, except with one’s table companions. For one brief hour after the evening meal social relations of a sort did obtain. But they often shrank to twenty minutes’ length; and always Madame Chauchat spent the time, whether longer or shorter, with her own uncle, in the small salon. Her friends were the hollow-chested man, the whimsical girl with the fuzzy hair, the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the youth with the drooping shoulders—the “good” Russian table had, it seemed, preempted the room for its own use. Furthermore, Joachim was always urging an early withdrawal. He said it was in order to spend full time in the evening cure—but there were perhaps other disciplinary reasons left unspecified, which his cousin surmised and respected. We have reproached Hans Castorp with being “willful”; but certainly, whatever the goal toward which his wishes led, it was not that of social intercourse with Madame Chauchat. He concurred, generally speaking, in the circumstances that militated against it. The relation between him and the young Russian, a tense though tenuous bond, the product of his assiduous glances, was of an extra-social sort. It entailed, and could entail, no obligations. It could subsist, in his mind, along with a degree of distaste for any social approach. It was one thing for our young friend to call “Clavdia” to account for the beatings of his heart; but quite another for him, the grandson of Hans Lorenz Castorp, to be shaken in the smallest degree in the sure inward conviction that this door-slamming, finger-gnawing, bread-pill-making foreigner—who carried herself so badly, who lived apart from her husband, and without a ring on her finger careered from one resort to another—that this foreigner was indubitably not a person for him to cultivate; not, that is, over and above the secret relation we have indicated. A deep gulf divided their two existences; he felt, he knew, that he was not up to defending her in the face of any recognized social authority. Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was. It was this which he neither could, nor wished to, shake off. Strangely enough, he first became vividly conscious of his conviction on a day when he heard Frau Chauchat speaking in his native tongue. She stood in the dining-room after a meal, her hands in the pockets of her sweater, and charmingly struggled to converse in German with another patient, probably a rest-hall acquaintance. Hans Castorp felt an unwonted thrill—never before had he been so proud of his mother-tongue—yet at the same time experienced a temptation to offer up his pride on the altar of quite a different feeling—the rapture which filled him at the sound of her pretty stammerings and manglings of his speech.
In a word, Hans Castorp envisaged in this opening affair between him and the heedless creature who was a member of the Berghof society no more than a holiday adventure. Before the tribunal of reason, conscience, and common sense it could make no claims to be heard; principally, of course, because when all was said and done, Frau Chauchat was an ailing woman, feeble, fevered, and tainted within; her physical condition had much to do with the questionable life she led, as also with Hans Castorp’s instinctive reservations. No, it simply did not occur to him to seek her society; while as for the rest—well, however the thing turned out, it would be over in one way or another inside ten days, when he would enter upon his apprenticeship at Tunder and Wilms’s.
For the moment, however, he had begun to live in and for the emotions roused in him
