“Oh, yes, very energetic,” said Hans Castorp. He mentally assayed the temper of his native city, and found that his interlocuter had characterized it justly. “Phlegmatic and energetic, yes, I should say they are.”
“I assume,” continued Herr Settembrini, “in case your stay is prolonged, we shall make the acquaintance of your uncle—I mean your great-uncle—shall we not? He will undoubtedly come up to ascertain your condition.”
“Out of the question,” cried Hans Castorp. “Under no conceivable circumstances. Wild horses could not drag him up here. My uncle is apoplectic, you understand; he has almost no neck at all. No, he has to have a reasonable atmospheric pressure; it would be worse for him up here than it was for your lady from the Baltic provinces—he would be in a dreadful way.”
“I am disappointed. And apoplectic? Energy and phlegm are not much use under those circumstances.—Your uncle is rich, I suppose? You are all rich down your way?”
Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini’s literary generalizations. And again, from his distant couch, he cast a metaphorical eye upon the sphere from which he had been snatched. He called up memories, he made an effort to judge objectively, and found that distance enabled him to do so.
He answered: “One is rich—or else one isn’t. And if not, so much the worse. I myself am no millionaire, but what I have is secured to me, I have enough to live on and be independent. But personalities aside—well, if you had said one must be rich, I should have agreed with you. If you aren’t rich, or if you leave off being, then woe be unto you. ‘Oh, he?’ they will say about this or that person. ‘He hasn’t any money, has he?’ Literally that, and making just such a face; I have often heard them, and I see now it made an impression on me—which it would not have done, of course, unless it had struck me as strange. Or don’t you think that follows? No, I don’t think you, for instance, as homo humanus, would feel very comfortable down there; it often struck me that it was pretty strong, as I can see now, though I am a native of the place and for myself have never had to suffer from it. If a man does not serve the best and dearest wines at his dinners, people don’t go, and his daughters are left on his hands. That is what they are like. Lying here and looking at it from this distance, I find it pretty gross. What were the words you used—phlegmatic and—and energetic. That’s very good. But what does it mean? It means hard, cold. And what do hard and cold mean? They mean cruel. It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless. When you lie here and look at it, from a distance, it makes you shudder.”
Settembrini listened, and nodded; nodded after Hans Castorp had come to an end, for the present, of his pronouncement and fallen silent.
Then he took a breath and said: “I will not seek to extenuate the specific forms which life’s normal cruelty assumes in your native sphere. It is all one—for the reproach of cruelty rests upon somewhat sentimental grounds. You would scarcely even have levelled it, while you were in that atmosphere, for fear of being ridiculous in your own eyes. You left it to the drones to make, and rightly. That you make it now bears witness to a certain estrangement, which I should be sorry to see increase; since he who falls in the habit of making it is in danger of being lost to life, to the manner of life to which he was born. Do you know, Engineer, what I mean by being lost to life? I, I know it, I see it here every day. Six months at most after they get here, these young people—and they are mostly young who come—have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature. And if they remain a year, they will have lost the power of grasping any other; they will find any other ‘cruel’—or, more precisely, ignorant and inadequate. You are fond of anecdote—I could serve your turn. I could tell you of a young man I know, a husband and son, who was up here for eleven months. He was a little older than you, yes, rather older. They let him go home, provisionally, as much improved; he returned to the bosom of his family—not uncles, you understand, but his wife and his mother. The whole day he lay with the thermometer in his mouth, he took no interest in anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘No one understands who has not lived up there. Down here the fundamental conception is lacking.’ In the end it was the mother who settled it. ‘Go back,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to be done with you any more.’ He went back, went back ‘home’—you know, don’t you, that they call this home when they have once lived here? He was entirely estranged from his young wife, she lacked the fundamental conception, and she gave up trying to get it. It was borne in upon her that he would find a mate up here who had it, and that he would stop with her.”
Hans Castorp seemed to be only half listening. He went on staring into the incandescent brilliance of his white room, as into far space.
He laughed belatedly, and said: “He called it home? That is sentimental, as you say. You know no end of stories. I was still thinking of what we said about hardness and cruelty; the same idea has gone through my head a number of times in these days. You see, a person has to have a rather thick skin to find it natural, the way they have of thinking and talking down there, the ‘has he got
