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Table Talk

At meals in the colorful dining hall it caused young Hans Castorp some embarrassment that from that walk undertaken on his own account the grandfatherly head-trembling had remained with him - precisely at table it set in again almost regularly and then could not be prevented and was hard to hide. Apart from the dignified chin support, which could not be held continuously, he devised various means of masking the weakness - for example, he kept his head moving as much as possible by conversing to right and left, or, when he brought the soup spoon to his mouth, say, pressed his left forearm firmly on the table to give himself bearing, and in the pauses even set up his elbow and supported his head with his hand, although this was boorish in his own eyes and could at most pass in unrestrained sick society. But all this was troublesome, and little was lacking before it would have completely spoiled the meals for him, which otherwise, for the tensions and sights they brought with them, he knew so well how to value.

But the situation was this - and Hans Castorp knew it quite precisely - that the blameworthy phenomenon with which he struggled was not merely of bodily origin, not merely to be traced back to the air up here and the exertion of acclimatization, but expressed an inner agitation and was directly connected with those tensions and sights themselves.

Madame Chauchat almost always came late to table, and until she came Hans Castorp sat there unable to keep his feet still, for he was waiting for the crashing of the glass door by which her entrance was unfailingly accompanied, and knew that he would start at it and feel his face grow cold, which then regularly happened. At first, each time, he had thrown his head around in anger and followed the negligent latecomer with wrathful eyes to her place at the "Good" Russian table, sometimes even sending after her half aloud and between his teeth a scolding word, a cry of outraged disapproval. He left that off now, bent his head lower over his plate, at times even biting his lip, or turned it intentionally and artificially to the other side; for it seemed to him as though anger no longer belonged to him, as though he were not quite free to censure, but rather complicit in the offense and co-responsible for it before the others - in short, he was ashamed, and it would have been inaccurate to say that he was ashamed for Frau Chauchat; rather, quite personally, he was ashamed before the people - which, incidentally, he might have spared himself, since no one in the hall concerned himself with Frau Chauchat's vice or with Hans Castorp's shame about it, except perhaps the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, to his right.

The wretched creature had understood that thanks to Hans Castorp's sensitivity to door-slamming a certain affective relation of the young table neighbor to the Russian woman had arisen; further, that little depended on the character of such a relation, if only it existed at all; and finally, that his feigned indifference - and indeed, for lack of acting practice and talent, very badly feigned indifference - meant not a weakening but an intensification, a higher phase of the relation. Without claim or hope for her own person, Fräulein Engelhart constantly indulged in selflessly delighted speeches about Frau Chauchat - the strange thing being that Hans Castorp recognized and saw through her inflammatory activity perfectly clearly, if not at once then in the long run, indeed that it even disgusted him, without his being any less willing to let himself be influenced and beguiled by it.

"By Jove!" said the old maid. "That is she. One need not look up to convince oneself who has come in. Of course, there she goes - and how charmingly she walks - exactly as a kitten creeps to the milk bowl! I wish we could exchange places, so that you could look at her as unconstrainedly and comfortably as I can. I understand, of course, that you do not always care to turn your head toward her - God knows what she would end up imagining if she noticed it… Now she is saying good day to her people… You really ought to look over; it is so refreshing to observe her. When she smiles and speaks as she is doing now, she gets a dimple in one cheek, but not always, only when she wishes. Yes, she is a golden child of a woman, a spoiled creature, that is why she is so careless. One must love such people whether one wants to or not, for when they annoy one by their carelessness, even the annoyance is only one more stimulus to be fond of them; it is so blissful to be annoyed and yet have to love…"

So the schoolmistress whispered behind her hand and unheard by the others, while the downy flush on her old-maiden cheeks recalled her above-normal bodily temperature; and her voluptuous talk went into poor Hans Castorp's marrow and blood. A certain dependence created in him the need to have it confirmed from a third side that Madame Chauchat was an enchanting woman, and besides, the young man wished to be encouraged from outside to surrender to feelings against which his reason and his conscience opposed disturbing resistances.

Incidentally, these conversations proved only little fruitful in factual respects, for Fräulein Engelhart, with the best will in the world, knew nothing more particular to say about Frau Chauchat, no more than anyone in the sanatorium; she did not know her, could not even boast of an acquaintance she might have had in common with her, and the only thing with which she could give herself some standing before Hans Castorp was that she was at home in Königsberg - that is, not so very far from the Russian border - and knew a few scraps of Russian: meager qualities, in which Hans Castorp was nevertheless prepared to see something like extensive personal relations with Frau Chauchat.

"She wears no ring," he said, "no wedding ring, as I see. How is that? She is a married woman, after all, you told me?"

The schoolmistress became embarrassed, as if she had been driven into a corner and had to talk her way out, so responsible did she feel to Hans Castorp for Frau Chauchat.

"You must not take that so exactly," she said. "She is reliably married. No doubt about that is possible. That she calls herself Madame is not only for the sake of greater distinction, as foreign unmarried ladies do when they are a little more mature; we all know that she really has a husband somewhere in Russia, that is known throughout the whole place. By birth she has another name, a Russian one and not a French one, one ending in -anow or -ukow; I have known it before and only forgotten it again; if you like, I shall inquire about it; there are certainly several people here who know the name. A ring? No, she wears none; I too have already noticed it. Dear heaven, perhaps it does not become her, perhaps it makes her hand broad. Or she finds it philistine to wear a wedding ring, such a smooth hoop… all that is missing is the basket of keys… no, she is surely too large-natured for that… I know this: Russian women all have something so free and large-natured in their being. Besides, such a ring has something positively repellent and sobering; it is, after all, a symbol of bondage, I should like to say, it gives a woman something downright nunlike, makes her the pure little touch-me-not flower. I am not at all surprised if that is not to Frau Chauchat's taste… Such a charming woman, in the bloom of her years… Probably she has neither reason nor desire to let every gentleman whose hand she gives immediately feel her marital bondage…"

Great God, how the schoolmistress exerted herself! Hans Castorp looked quite startled into her face, but she defied his gaze with a kind of wild embarrassment. Then both were silent for a while, to recover. Hans Castorp ate and suppressed the trembling of his head. At last he said:

"And the husband? He does not concern himself with her at all? He never visits her up here? What is he actually?"

"An official. A Russian administrative official, in a quite remote government, Daghestan, you know, that lies far to the east beyond the Caucasus; he has been posted there. No, I told you, no one up here has ever seen him yet. And meanwhile she is already here for the third month again."

"So this is not her first time here?"

"Oh no, already the third. And in between she is somewhere else again, in similar places. Conversely, she visits him now and then, not often, once a year for a time. They live apart, one may say, and she visits him now and then."

"Well yes, since she is ill…"

"Certainly, she is ill. But not so. Not so seriously ill that she would positively always have to live in sanatoriums and separated from her husband. There must be further and other reasons. Here it is generally assumed that there are others. Perhaps she does not like it in Daghestan beyond the Caucasus, such a wild, remote region; that would not be surprising in the end. But it must also be a little the husband's fault if she does not like it with him at all. He has a French name, true, but for all that he is a Russian official, and that is a raw breed of men, you may believe me. I once saw one of them; he had such iron-colored whiskers and such a red face… To the highest degree corruptible they are, and then they are all given to wutki, to brandy, you know… For decency's sake they have a little something to eat served to them, a few marinated mushrooms or a piece of sturgeon, and with it they drink - simply to excess. Then they call that a snack…"

"You put everything on him," Hans Castorp said. "But we do not know, after all, whether it may not perhaps be her fault if they do not live well together. One must be just. When I look at her and at this bad habit with the door-slamming… I do not take her for an angel, do not take that amiss, please; I do not trust her out of my sight. But you are not impartial; you are up to your ears in prejudices in her favor…"

So he did it sometimes. With a slyness that was actually foreign to his nature, he represented it as though Fräulein Engelhart's infatuation with Frau Chauchat did not mean what he knew very well it really meant, but as though this infatuation were an independent, droll fact with which he, the independent Hans Castorp, could tease the old maid from a cool and humorous distance. And since he was sure that his accomplice would let this brazen distortion stand and submit to it, nothing was risked by it.

"Good morning!" he said. "Did you rest well? I hope you dreamed of your beautiful Minka?… No, how you blush the moment one merely mentions her! You are quite smitten with her, you had better not deny it!"

And the schoolmistress, who really had blushed and bent deep over her cup, whispered from the left corner of her mouth:

"But no, fie, Herr Castorp! It is not nice of you to embarrass me so with your allusions. Everyone notices that we have our eye on her, and that you say things to me over which I have to blush…"

It was strange, what the two table neighbors were doing there. Both knew that they were lying doubly and trebly, that Hans Castorp teased the schoolmistress with Frau Chauchat only in order to be able to speak of Frau Chauchat, but in doing so found an unhealthy and transferred pleasure in flirting with the old maid - who for her part went along with it: first for matchmaking reasons, then also because, to please the young man, she really had perhaps become somewhat infatuated with Frau Chauchat, and finally because she meagerly enjoyed being teased by him and made to blush in some fashion. Both knew this of themselves and of the other, and also knew that each knew it of himself and of the other, and all this was tangled and unclean. But although Hans Castorp was on the whole disgusted by tangled and unclean things, and felt disgusted by them in this case too, he nevertheless continued to splash about in the murky element, reassuring himself by saying that he was only visiting up here and would soon depart again. With artificially objective matter-of-factness he judged, like a connoisseur, the exterior of the "careless" woman, established that seen from the front she had a decidedly younger and prettier effect than in profile, that her eyes lay too far apart and her posture left much to be desired, for which, however, her arms were beautiful and "softly formed." And while he said this, he tried to hide the trembling of his head; but in doing so he had not only to recognize that the schoolmistress noticed his futile effort, but also made, with the greatest repugnance, the observation that she herself was likewise trembling with her head. It had also been nothing but policy and unnatural slyness that he had called Frau Chauchat "beautiful Minka"; for in this way he could ask further:

"I say 'Minka,' but what is she actually called in reality? I mean by first name. As infatuated with her as you unquestionably are, you absolutely must know her first name."

The schoolmistress reflected.

"Wait, I know it," she said. "I have known it. Is she not called Tatjana? No, that was not it, and not Natascha either. Natascha Chauchat? No, that is not how I heard it. Stop, I have it! Awdotja is her name. Or it was something in that character. For she is certainly not called Katjenka or Ninotschka. It has truly escaped me. But I can find it out with ease if it matters to you."

She really did know the name the next day. She pronounced it at midday meal, as the glass door thundered into the latch. Frau Chauchat was called Clawdia.

Hans Castorp did not understand at once. He had the name repeated and spelled before he grasped it. Then he repeated it several times, looking across meanwhile with red-veined eyes at Frau Chauchat and, as it were, trying it on her.

"Clawdia," he said, "yes, that may well be what she is called; it suits quite well." He made no secret of his joy over the intimate knowledge and now spoke only of "Clawdia" when he meant Frau Chauchat. "Your Clawdia is rolling bread pellets, I just saw. That is not refined." "It depends on who does it," the schoolmistress answered. "It suits Clawdia."

Yes, the meals in the hall with the seven tables had the very greatest charm for Hans Castorp. He regretted it when one of them came to an end, but his consolation was that very soon, in two or two and a half hours, he would be sitting here again; and when he sat here again, it was as though he had never risen. What lay between? Nothing. A short walk to the watercourse or into the English Quarter, a little rest in the chair. That was no serious interruption, no obstacle to be taken heavily. It would have been different if work, any cares and efforts, had lain before it, not easy in spirit to overlook, to pass over. But this was not the case in the wisely and happily regulated life of the "Berghof." Hans Castorp, when he rose from a common meal, could look forward quite directly to the next - provided, that is, that "look forward" was the right word for the kind of expectation with which he anticipated the new being-together with the sick Frau Clawdia Chauchat, and not too light, cheerful, simple-minded, and ordinary a word. Possibly the reader is inclined to consider only such expressions, namely cheerful and ordinary ones, fitting and admissible with respect to Hans Castorp's person and inner life; but we recall that as a young man of reason and conscience he could not simply "look forward" to the sight and nearness of Frau Chauchat, and since we must know, we establish that if this word had been offered to him, he would have rejected it with a shrug.

Yes, he grew haughty toward certain means of expression - that is a detail deserving to be noted. He went about while his cheeks stood in dry heat and sang before himself, sang inwardly into himself, for his condition was musical and sensitive. He hummed a little song that, who knows where and when, he had once heard in company or at a charity concert from a small soprano voice and had now found within himself - a gentle nonsense that began:

"How wondrously I am often touched By a word from you,"

and he was about to add:

"That from your lips came forth And to my heart!" -

when he suddenly shrugged his shoulders, said "ridiculous," and rejected and dismissed the tender little song as tasteless and mawkishly sentimental - dismissed it with a certain melancholy and severity. Some young man might find satisfaction and pleasure in such an intimate little song who, as the saying goes, had "given his heart" permissibly, peacefully, and with prospects to some healthy little goose down there in the flatland, and now yielded himself to his permissible, promising, reasonable, and at bottom cheerful feelings. For him and his relation to Madame Chauchat - the word "relation" is on his account; we decline responsibility for it - such a little poem was decidedly not fitting; in his reclining chair he found himself moved to pass the aesthetic judgment "silly!" upon it and broke off in the middle, wrinkling his nose, although he knew of nothing more suitable to put in its place.

One thing, however, gave him satisfaction when he lay there and paid attention to his heart, his bodily heart, which beat quickly and audibly in the silence - the regulation silence of the house rules, which during the main and sleeping rest cure prevailed over the whole "Berghof." His heart beat stubbornly and obtrusively, as it had done almost constantly since he had been up here; yet of late Hans Castorp took less offense at it than in the first days. One could no longer say that it beat on its own account, groundlessly and without connection with the soul. Such a connection existed, or at least was not difficult to establish; a justifying emotion could be laid beneath the exalted bodily activity without constraint. Hans Castorp had only to think of Frau Chauchat - and he did think of her - and he possessed the corresponding feeling for the beating of his heart.