Part 8 of 8
Dr. Krokowski was there too, short, stout, solid, with his black alpaca shirt fastened like a domino on his shoulders, the sleeves dangling. He was holding his punch-glass with his hand at the level of his eyes and twisting the wrist round as he talked and jested with a group of masqueraders. Music was heard; the tapir-faced lady was playing Handel’s Largo on the violin, and then a drawing-room sonata by Grieg, characteristically northern in mood. The Mannheimer accompanied her on the piano. There was good-natured applause, even from the bridge-tables, which had been set up and occupied by maskers, with bottles in coolers at their sides. The doors were all open, and some of the guests stood in the hall as well. A group about the punch-table watched the Hofrat, who was introducing a new diversion. Bent over the table with his eyes closed and his head thrown back in evidence of good faith, he was sketching with his mighty hand a figure on the back of a visiting-card, the outline of a pig. It was rather more fanciful than realistic, yet undoubtably the lineaments of a pig, which under these difficult conditions, without the help of his eyes, he had managed to trace. It was a feat, and he could perform it. The little eyes were almost in the right place, so was the pointed ear, and the tiny legs under the rounded little belly; the curving line of the back ended in a small neat ringlet of tail. There was a general "Ah!" as he finished; then everyone was fired with an ambition to emulate the master. What abortions were brought forth! They lacked all coherence. The eyes were outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, the line of the latter came nowhere near joining, the little tail curled away by itself without organic connexion with the figure, an in-dependent arabesque. They nearly split with laughing; the group increased. The notice of the bridge party was attracted, the players were drawn by curiosity and came up holding their cards fan-shaped in their hands. The bystanders watched the performer to see that he did not wink—which his feeling of powerlessness made him sometimes do; they giggled and guffawed while he committed his frantic blunders, and burst out in extravagant mirth when he at last opened his eyes and looked down upon his ridiculous handiwork. Blatant self-confidence lured everyone on to try his hand. The card, a large one, was soon filled on both sides with overlapping failures. The Hofrat contributed a second from his case; whereon Lawyer Paravant, after taking thought, essayed to draw a pig without lifting the pencil—and lo, the measure of his unsuccess led all the rest: his creation had no faintest likeness either to a pig or to anything else on the broad earth. It was greeted with hilarity and boisterous congratulations. Menu cards were fetched from the dining-room, and now several people could draw at the same time; each performer having his own circle of onlookers and aspirants, waiting for the pencil he was using. There were three pencils, they snatched them out of each other’s hands. The Hofrat, having set the sport afoot, and seen it thriving, withdrew with his adjutants.
Hans Castorp stood in the thick of the crowd, at Joachim’s back, watching. He rested his elbow on his cousin’s shoulder and supported his chin with all five fingers of that hand, his other arm set akimbo on his hip. He was talking and laughing, anxious to try his skill; asked on all sides for a pencil, and at length received a stump of a thing, hardly to be held between thumb and forefinger. Then he shut his eyes, lifted his face to the ceiling, and drew, all the time uttering objurgations against the pencil, some horrible inanity upon the paper, in his haste spoiling even this, and running off the paper on to the tablecloth. "That doesn’t count!" he cried as his audi-ence burst out in well-merited jeers. "What can you do with a pencil like that—deuce take it!" and he flung the offending morsel into the punch-bowl. "Has anybody a decent one? Who will lend me a pencil? I must have another try. A pencil, a pencil, who has a pencil?" he shouted, leaning with his left hand on the table, and shaking the other high in the air. There was no answer. Then he turned and, passing through the room, went straight up to Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he was well aware, was standing near the door of the little salon, watching with a smile the throng round the punch-table.
Behind him he heard someone calling—euphonious words, in a foreign tongue: "Eh, Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa, Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!" But he drowned out the voice with his own, and Herr Settembrini, flinging up his hand with a swing of the arm—a gesture common in his own country, whose meaning it would be hard to put into words—and giving vent to a long-drawn "Eh—h!" turned his back on the room and the carnival gaieties.—But Hans Castorp was standing on the tiled court of the school yard, gazing at close quarters into these blue-grey-green epicanthus eyes, above the prominent cheekbones, and saying: "Do you happen to have a pencil?"
He was deadly pale, as pale as when he had come back blood-spattered to the lecture, from that walk of his. The nerves controlling the blood-vessels that supplied his face functioned so well that the skin, robbed of all its blood, went quite cold, the nose looked peaked, and the hollows beneath the young eyes were lead-coloured as any corpse’s. And the Sympathicus caused his heart, Hans Castorp’s heart, to thump, in such a way that it was impossible to breathe except in gasps; and shivers ran over him, due to the functioning of the sebaceous glands, which, with the hair follicles, erected themselves.
She stood there, in her paper cap, and looked him up and down, with a smile that betrayed no trace of pity, nor any concern for the ravages written on his brow. The sex knows no such compassion, no mercy for the pangs that passion brings; in that element the woman is far more at home than the man, to whom, by his very nature, it is foreign. Nor does she ever encounter him in it save with mocking and malignant joy—compassion, indeed, he would have none of.
He had used the second person singular. She answered: "I? Perhaps I have, let me see." Her voice and smile did betray an excitement, a consciousness—such as comes when the first word is uttered in a relationship long secretly sustained—a subtle con-sciousness, which concentrates all the past in a single moment of the present. "You are so eager—you are very ambitious"—she continued thus to mock him, in her slightly veiled, pleasantly husky voice, with her quaint pronunciation, giving a foreign sound to the r and making the vowels too open, even accenting the word ambitious on the first syllable, with exotic effect; rummaging and peering the while in her leather bag, whence she fetched out, first a handkerchief, and then a little silver pencil, slender and fragile, a pretty trinket scarcely meant for use—the other, the first one, had been something more to take hold of.
"Voilà," she said, and held the toy by its end before his eyes, between thumb and forefinger, and lightly turned it to and fro.
Since she thus both gave and withheld it, he took it, so to speak, without receiving it: that is, he held out his hand, with the fingers ready to grasp the delicate thing, but not actually touching it. His eyes—in their leaden sockets—went from the little object to Clavdia’s Tartar physiognomy. His bloodless lips were open, and so remained, he did not use them to utter the words, as he said: "You see, I knew you would have one."
"Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile" she said. "C’est à visser, tu sais."
Their heads bent over it together, and she showed him the mechanism—it was quite ordinary, the little needle of hard, probably worthless lead came down as one loosened the screw.
They stood bent toward each other. The stiff collar of his evening dress served him to support his chin.
"A poor thing—but yours," he said, brow to brow with her, speaking down upon the pencil, stiff-lipped, so that most of the labials went unsounded.
"Ah, so you are even witty," she answered him, with a short laugh. She straightened up, and surrendered the pencil. It is a question by what means he was witty, since it was plain there was not a drop of blood in his head. "Well, away with you, go and draw, draw yourself out!" And wittily in her turn, she seemed to drive him away.
"But you have not drawn yet, you must draw too," he said, without managing the m in must, and drew a step backwards, invitingly.
"I?" she said again, with an inflection of surprise which seemed to have reference to something else than his invitation. She stood a moment in smiling confusion, then as if magnetized followed him a few steps toward the punch-table.
But interest in the activity there seemed to have fallen away. Someone was still drawing, but without an audience. The cards were covered with futilities, they had all done their worst, and now the current had set in another direction. Directly the doctors had left the scene, the word had gone round for a dance, already the tables were being pushed back; spies were posted at the doors of the writing- and music-rooms, with orders to give the sign in case the "old man," Krokowski, or the Oberin should show themselves. A young Slavic youth attacked con espressione the keyboard of the little nut-wood piano, and the first couple began to turn about within an irregular circle of chairs and tables, on which the spectators perched themselves.
Hans Castorp dismissed the departing punch-table with a wave of the hand, and indicated with his chin two empty seats in a sheltered corner of the small salon, near the portières. He did not speak, perhaps because the music was too loud. He drew up a seat—it was a reclining-chair with plush upholstery—for Frau Chauchat, in the corner he had indicated, and took for himself a creaking, crackling basket-chair with curling arms, in which he sat down, bent forward toward her, his own arms on the arms of the chair, her pencil in his hand and his feet drawn back under his seat. She lay buried in the plushy slope, her knees brought high; notwithstanding which, she crossed one leg over the other, and swung her foot in the air, in its black patent-leather shoe and black silk stocking spanned over the anklebone. There was a coming and going in the room, some of the guests standing up to dance, while others took their places to rest.
"You’ve a new frock on," he said, as an excuse for looking at her; and heard her answer.
"New? So you are acquainted with my wardrobe?"
"Am I right?"
"Yes—I had it made here lately; the tailor down in the village, Lukaçek, did it. He does work for several of the ladies up here. Do you like it?"
"Very much," he said, surveying her once more and then casting down his eyes. "Would you like to dance?" he added.
"Would you like to?" she asked, with lifted brows, yet smiling, and he answered:
"I would, if you wished."
"That is not so brave as I thought you were," she said, and when he laughed deprecatingly, she went on: "Your cousin has gone up already."
"Yes, he is my cousin," he confirmed her, unnecessarily. "I noticed he had gone, he is probably in the rest-cure by now."
"C’est un jeune homme très étroit, très honnête, très allemand."
"Étroit? Honnête?" he repeated. "I understand French better than I speak it. You mean he is pedantic. You think we are pedantic, we Germans—nous autres allemands ?"
"Nous causons de votre cousin. Mais c’est vrai, you are a little bourgeois. Vous aimez l’ordre mieux que la liberté, toute l’Europe le sait."
"Aimer, aimer—qu’est-ce que c’est? Ça manque de définition, ce mot là. We love what we have not—that is proverbial," Hans Castorp asserted. "Lately," he went on, "I’ve thought very much about liberty. That is, I’ve heard the word so often, I’ve begun to think about it. Je te le dirai en français, what I have been thinking. Ce que toute l’Europe nomme la liberté, c’est peut-être une chose assez pédante et assez bourgeoise en comparaison de notre besoin d’ordre—c’est ça!"
"Tiens! C’est amusant! C’est ton cousin à qui tu penses en disant des choses étranges comme ça?"
"No, c’est vraiment une bonne âme, a simple nature, not exposed to intellectual dangers, tu sais. Mais il n’est pas bourgeois, il est militaire."
"Not exposed?" she repeated his word, not without difficulty. "Tu veux dire une nature tout à fait ferme, sûr d’elle-même? Mais il est sérieusement malade, ton pauvre cousin."
"Who told you so?"
"We all know about each other, up here."
"Was it Hofrat Behrens?"
"Peut-être en me faisant voir ces tableaux."
"C’est à dire: en faisant ton portrait!"
"Pourquoi pas? Tu l’as trouvé réussi, mon portrait?"
"Mais oui, extrêmement. Behrens a très exactement rendu ta peau, oh, vraiment très
fidèlement. J’aimerais beaucoup être portraitiste, moi aussi, pour avoir l’occasion d’étudier ta peau comme lui."
"Parlez allemand, s’il vous plaît!"
"Oh, I speak German, even in French. C’est une sorte d’étude artistique et médicale—en un mot: il s’agit des lettres humaines, tu comprends.—What do you say, shall we dance?"
"Oh, no, it would be childish—behind their backs! Aussitôt que Behrens reviendra, tout le monde va se précipiter sur les chaises. Ce sera fort ridicule."
"Have you such respect for him as that?"
"For whom?" she said, giving her query a curt, foreign intonation.
"For Behrens."
"Mais va donc avec ton Behrens! But there really is not room to dance. Et puis sur le tapis—Let us look on."
"Yes, let’s," he assented, and gazed beyond her, with his blue eyes, his grandfather’s musing eyes, in his pale young face, at the antics of the masked patients in salon and writing-room. There was the Silent Sister capering with the Blue Peter, there was Frau Salomon as master of ceremonies, dressed in evening clothes with a white waistcoat and swelling shirt-front; she wore a monocle and a tiny painted moustache, and twirled upon tiny, high-heeled patent-leather shoes, that came out oddly beneath her black trousers, as she danced with the Pierrot, whose blood-red lips stared from his ghastly white face, with the eyes of an albino rabbit. The Greek flourished his symmetrical legs in their lavender tights alongside the darkly glittering Rasmussen in his low-cut gown. Lawyer Paravant in his kimono, Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt, and young Gänser danced all three together, with their arms round each other. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing the bristles as though they were a man’s hair.
"Yes, let’s," Hans Castorp repeated, mechanically. They spoke in low tones, covered by the music. "Let us sit here, and look on, as though in a dream. For it is like a dream to me, that we are sitting like this—comme un rêve singulièrement profond, car il faut dormir très profondément pour rêver comme cela. Je veux dire—c’est un rêve bien connu, rêvé de tout temps, long, éternel, oui, être assis près de toi comme à présent, voilà l’éternité."
"Poète!" she said. "Bourgeois, humaniste, et poète—voilà l’allemand au complet, comme il faut!"
"Je crains que nous ne soyons pas du tout et nullement comme il faut," he answered. "Sous aucun égard. Nous sommes peut-être des delicate children of life, tout simplement."
"Joli mot. Dis-moi donc.—Il n’aurait pas été fort difficile de rêver ce rêve-là plus tôt. C’est un peu tard, que monsieur se résout d’adresser la parole à son humble servante."
"Pourquoi des paroles?" he said. "Pourquoi parler? Parler, discourir, c’est une chose bien républicaine, je le concède. Mais je doute, que ce soit poétique au même degré. Un de nos pensionnaires, qui est un peu devenu mon ami, M. Settembrini—"
"Il vient de te lancer quelques paroles."
"Eh bien, c’est un grand parleur sans doute, il aime même beaucoup à réciter de beaux vers—mais est-ce un poète, cet homme-là?"
"Je regrette sincèrement de n’avoir jamais eu le plaisir de faire la connaissance de ce chevalier."
"Je le crois bien."
"Ah, tu le crois?"
"Comment? C’était une phrase tout-à-fait indifférente, ce que j’ai dit là. Moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français. Pourtant, avec toi je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière—sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve. Tu comprends?"
"A peu près"
"Ça suffit.—Parler," went on Hans Castorp, "pauvre affaire! Dans l’éternité, on ne parle point. Dans l’éternité, tu sais, on fait comme en dessinant un petit cochon: on penche la tête en arrière et on ferme les yeux."
"Pas mal, ça! Tu es chez toi dans l’éternité, sans aucun doute, tu le connais à fond. Il faut avouer, que tu es un petit rêveur assez curieux.’"
"Et puis," said Hans Castorp, "si je t’avais parlé plus tôt, il m’aurait fallu te dire ‘vous’."
"Eh bien, est-ce que tu as l’intention de me tutoyer pour toujours?"
"Mais oui. Je t’ai tutoyé de tout temps et je te tutoierai éternellement."
"C’est un peu fort, par exemple. En tout cas, tu n’auras pas trop longtemps l’occasion de me dire ‘tu’. Je vais partir."
It took time for the words to penetrate his consciousness. Then he started up, staring about him as though roused out of a dream. The conversation had proceeded rather slowly, for Hans Castorp spoke French uneasily, feeling for the sense. The piano had been silent awhile, now it sounded again, under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had relieved the Slavic youth. He put some music in place, and Fräulein Engelhart sat down beside him to turn the leaves. The party was thinning out; many of the guests had presumably taken up the horizontal. From where they sat they could see no one; but there were players at the card-tables in the writing-room.
"You are going to—what?" Hans Castorp asked, quite dashed.
"I am going away," she repeated, smiling with pretended surprise at his discomfiture.
"Impossible," he said. "You are jesting."
"Not at all. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving."
"When?"
"To-morrow. Après dîner."
There took place within him a feeling of general collapse. He said: "Where?"
"Far away."
"To Daghestan?"
"Tu n’es pas mal instruit. Peut-être, pour le moment—"
"Are you cured, then?"
"Quant à ça—non. But Behrens thinks there is not greatly more to be gained here, for the present. C’est pourquoi je vais risquer un petit changement d’air."
"Then you are coming back!"
"That is the question. Or, rather, the question is when. Quant à moi, tu sais, j’aime la liberté avant tout et notamment celle de choisir mon domicile. Tu ne comprends guère ce que c’est: d’être obsédé d’indépendance. C’est de ma race, peut-être."
"Et ton mari au Daghestan te l’accorde—ta liberté?"
"C’est la maladie qui me la rend. Me voilà à cet endroit pour la troisième fois. J’ai passé un an ici, cette fois. Possible que je revienne. Mais alors tu seras bien loin depuis longtemps."
"You think so, Clavdia?"
"Mon prénom aussi! Vraiment tu les prends bien au sérieux, les coutumes du carnaval!"
"Then you know about my case too?"
"Oui—non—comme on sait ces choses ici. Tu as une petite tache humide là dedans et un peu de fièvre, n’est-ce pas?"
"Trente-sept et huit ou neuf l’après-midi" said Hans Castorp. "And you?"
"Oh, mon cas, tu sais, c’est un peu plus compliqué—pas tout-à-fait simple."
"Il y a quelque chose dans cette branche de lettres humaines dite la médecine" Hans Castorp said, "qu’on appelle bouchement tuberculeux des vases de lymphe."
"Ah! Tu as mouchardé, mon cher, on le voit bien."
"Et toi—forgive me! Let me ask you a question—ask it in all earnestness: six months ago, when I left the table for my first examination—you looked round after me—do you remember?"
"Quelle question! Il y a six mois!"
"Did you know where I was going?"
"Certes, c’était tout-à-fait par hasard—"
"Behrens had told you?"
"Toujours ce Behrens!"
"Oh, il a représenté ta peau d’une façon tellement exacte—D’ailleurs, c’est un veuf aux joues ardentes et qui possède un service à café très remarquable. Je crois bien qu’il connaît ton corps non seulement comme médecin, mais aussi comme adepte d’une autre discipline de lettres humaines."
"Tu as décidément raison de dire, que tu parles en rêve, mon ami."
"Soit. Laisse-moi rêver de nouveau, après m’avoir réveillé si cruellement par cette cloche d’alarme de ton départ. Sept mois sous tes yeux—et à présent, où en réalité j’ai fait ta connaissançe, tu me parles de départ!"
"Je te répète, que nous aurions pu causer plus tôt."
"You would have liked it?"
"Moi? Tu ne m’échapperas pas, mon petit. Il s’agit de tes intérêts, à toi. Est-ce que tu étais trop timide pour t’approcher d’une femme à qui tu parles en rêve maintenant, ou est-ce qu’il y avait quelqu’un qui t’en a empêché?"
"Je te l’ai dit. Je ne voulais pas te dire ‘vous.’ "
"Farceur! Réponds donc—ce monsieur beau parleur, cet italien-là qui a quitté la soirée—qu’est-ce qu’il t’a lancé tantôt?"
"Je n’en ai entendu absolument rien. Je me soucie très peu de ce monsieur, quand mes yeux te voient. Mais tu oublies—il n’aurait pas été si facile du tout de faire ta connaissance dans le monde. Il y avait encore mon cousin, avec qui j’étais lié et qui incline très peu à s’amuser ici; il ne pense à rien qu’à son retour dans les plaines, pour se faire soldat."
"Pauvre diable! Il est, en effet, plus malade qu’il ne sait. Ton ami italien du reste ne va pas trop bien non plus."
"Il le dit lui-même. Mais mon cousin—est-ce vrai? Tu m’effraies."
"Fort possible qu’il va mourir, s’il essaye d’être soldat dans les plaines."
"Qu’il va mourir. La mort. Terrible mot, n’est-ce pas? Mais c’est étrange, il ne m’impressionne pas tellement aujourd’hui, ce mot. C’était une façon de parler bien conventionnelle, lorsque je disais: ‘Tu m’effraies.’ L’idée de la mort ne m’effraie pas. Elle me laisse tranquille. Je n’ai pas pitié—ni de mon bon Joachim ni de moi-même, en entendant qu’il va peut-être mourir. Si c’est vrai, son état ressemble beaucoup au mien et je ne le trouve pas particulièrement imposant. Il est moribond, et moi, je suis amoureux, eh bien!—Tu as parlé à mon cousin à l’atelier de photographie intime, dans l’antichambre, tu te souviens."
"Je me souviens un peu."
"Donc ce jour-là Behrens a fait ton portrait transparent!"
"Mais oui."
"Mon dieu! Et l’as-tu sur toi?"
"Non, je l’ai dans ma chambre."
"Ah—dans ta chambre. Quant au mien, je l’ai toujours dans mon portefeuille. Veux-tu que je te le fasse voir?"
"Mille remerciements. Ma curiosité n’est pas invincible. Ce sera un aspect très innocent."
"Moi, j’ai vu ton portrait extérieur. J’aimerais beaucoup mieux voir ton portrait intérieur qui est enfermé dans ta chambre. Laisse-moi demander autre chose! Parfois un monsieur russe qui loge en ville vient te voir. Qui est-ce? Dans quel but vient-il, cet homme?"
"Tu es joliment fort en espionnage, je l’avoue. Eh bien, je réponds. Oui, c’est un compatriote souffrant, un ami. J’ai fait sa connaissance à une autre station balnéaire, il y a quelques années déjà. Nos relations? Les voilà: nous prenons notre thé ensemble, nous fumons deux ou trois papiros, et nous bavardons, nous philosophons, nous parlons de l’homme, de Dieu, de la vie, de la morale, de mille choses. Voilà mon compte rendu. Es-tu satisfait?"
"De la morale aussi! Et qu’est-ce que vous avez trouvé en fait de morale, par exemple?"
"La morale? Cela t’intéresse? Eh bien, il nous semble, qu’il faudrait chercher la morale non dans la vertu, c’est-à-dire dans la raison, la discipline, les bonnes moeurs, l’honnêteté, mais plutôt dans le contraire, je veux dire dans le péché, en s’abandonnant au danger, à ce qui est nuisible, à ce qui nous consume. Il nous semble qu’il est plus moral de se perdre et même de se laisser dépérir, que de se conserver. Les grands moralistes n’étaient point de vertueux, mais des aventuriers dans le mal, des vicieux, des grands pécheurs qui nous enseignent à nous incliner chrétiennement devant la misère. Tout ça doit te déplaire beaucoup, n’est-ce pas?"
He was silent; sitting as before, with his feet twined together, thrust back beneath the creaking wicker chair, leaning toward the figure opposite, in its cocked hat; her pencil between his fingers. With Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes he looked out into the room. It was empty, the company dispersed. The piano, in the corner diagonally opposite, was being touched softly and lightly with one hand, by the Mannheimer, by whose side sat Fräulein Engelhart, turning the leaves of a music-book she held on her knee. At this pause which had ensued in the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, the pianist left off playing, and sat with his hand in his lap, while Fräulein Engelhart continued to turn the pages of her music-book. These four alone remained, from all the carnival merry-makers; they sat here motionless. The silence lasted several minutes. Deeper and deeper, under its weight, sank the heads of the pair at the piano: his toward his keyboard, hers toward her book; but at last the two as by common consent stood up cautiously, and carefully refraining from any glance in the direction of the opposite corner, their heads drawn down in their shoulders, their arms hanging stiffly at their sides, disappeared together, on tiptoe, through the writing-room.
"Everyone is going," said Frau Chauchat. "C’étaient les derniers. Il se fait tard. Eh bien, la fête de carnaval est finie." She raised her arms to remove the paper cap from her head, with its reddish braid wound round it like a wreath. "Vous connaissez les conséquences, monsieur."
But Hans Castorp gainsaid them, closing his eyes, and not otherwise changing his position. He answered: "Jamais, Clavdia. Jamais je te dirai ‘vous,’ jamais de la vie ni de la mort, if one may say that—one should be able to. Cette forme de s’adresser à une personne, qui est cette de l’Occident cultivé et de la civilisation humanitaire, me semble fort bourgeoise et pédante. Pourquoi, au fond, de la forme? La forme, c’est la pédanterie elle-même! Tout ce que vous avez fixé à l’égard de la morale, toi et ton compatriote souffrant—tu veux sérieusement que ça me surprenne? Pour quel sot me prends-tu? Dis donc, qu’est-ce que tu penses de moi?"
"C’est un sujet qui ne donne pas beaucoup à penser. Tu es un petit bonhomme convenable, de bonne famille, d’une tenue appétissante, disciple docile de ses précepteurs et qui retournera bientôt dans les plaines, pour oublier complètement qu’il a jamais parlé en rêve ici et pour aider à rendre son pays grand et puissant par son travail honnête sur le chantier. Voilà ta photographie intime, faite sans appareil. Tu la trouves exacte, j’espère?"
"Il y manque quelques détails que Behrens y a trouvés."
"Ah, les médecins en trouvent toujours, ils s’y connaissent."
"Tu parles comme M. Settembrini. Et ma fièvre? D’où vient-elle?"
"Allons donc, c’est un incident sans conséquence qui passera vite."
"Non, Clavdia, tu sais bien que ce que tu dis là n’est pas vrai et tu le dis sans conviction, j’en suis sûr. La fièvre de mon corps et le battement de mon coeur harassé et le frissonement de mes membres, c’est le contraire d’un incident, car ce n’est rien d’autre" —and his pale face with the twitching lips bent closer over hers—"rien d’autre que mon amour pour toi, oui, cet amour qui m’a saisi à l’instant, où mes yeux t’ont vue, ou, plutôt, que j’ai reconnu quand je t’ai reconnue toi—et c’était lui, évidemment, qui m’a mené à cet endroit—"
"Quelle folie!"
"Oh, l’amour n’est rien, s’il n’est pas de la folie, une chose insensée, défendue et une aventure dans le mal. Autrement, c’est une banalité agréable, bonne pour en faire de petites chansons paisibles dans les plaines. Mais quant à ce que je t’ai reconnue et que j’ai reconnu mon amour pour toi—oui, c’est vrai, je t’ai déjà connue, anciennement, toi et tes yeux merveilleusement obliques et ta bouche et ta voix, avec laquelle tu parles—une fois déjà, lorsque j’étais collégien, je fea demandé ton crayon, pour faire enfin ta connaissance mondaine, parceque je t’aimais irraisonablement, et c’est de là, sans doute, c’est de mon ancien amour pour toi, que ces marques me restent que Behrens a trouvées dans mon corps, et qui indiquent que jadis aussi j’étais malade—"
His teeth struck together. As he raved, he had drawn one foot from under his chair, and moved it forward, so that the other knee touched the floor, there he knelt before her, his head bent, his whole body quivering. "Je t’aime," he babbled, "je t’ai aimée de tout temps, car tu es le Toi de ma vie, mon rêve, mon sort, mon envie, mon éternel désir—"
"Allons, allons!" she said. "Si tes précepteurs te voyaient—"
But he shook his head, violently, bowed as it was toward the carpet, and replied: "Je m’en ficherais, je me fiche de tous ces Carducci et de la République éloquente et du progrès humain dans le temps, car je t’aime!"
She caressed softly the close-cropped hair at the back of his head.
"Petit bourgeois!" she said. "Joli bourgeois à la petite tache humide. Est-ce vrai que tu m’aimes tant?"
And beside himself at her touch, now on both his knees, with bowed head and closed eyes, he went on: "Oh, l’amour, tu sais—Le corps, l’amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu’un. Car le corps, c’est la maladie et la volupté, et c’est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l’amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie! Mais la mort, tu comprends, c’est d’une part une chose mal famée, impudente, qui fait rougir de honte; et d’autre part c’est une puissance très solennelle et très majestueuse—beaucoup plus haute que la vie riante gagnant de la monnaie et farcis-sant sa panse—beaucoup plus vénérable que le progrès qui bavarde par les temps—parcequ’elle est l’histoire et la noblesse et la piété et l’éternel et le sacré qui nous fait tirer le chapeau et marcher sur la pointe des pieds.—Or, de même, le corps, lui aussi, et l’amour du corps, sont une affaire indécente et fâcheuse, et le corps rougit et pâlit à sa surface par frayeur et honte de lui-même. Mais aussi il est une grande gloire adorable, image miraculeuse de la vie organique, sainte merveille de la forme et de la beauté, et l’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde! Oh, enchantante beauté organique qui ne se compose ni de teinture à l’huile ni de pierre, mais de matière vivante et corruptible, pleine du secret fébrile de la vie et de la pourriture! Regarde la symétrie merveilleuse de l’édifice humain, les épaules et les hanches et les mamelons fleurissants de part et d’autre sur la poitrine, et les côtes arrangées par paires, et le nombril au milieu dans la mollesse du ventre, et le sexe obscur entre les cuisses! Regarde les omoplates se remuer sous la peau soyeuse du dos, et l’échine qui descend vers la luxuriance double et fraîche des fesses, et les grandes branches des vases et des nerfs qui passent du tronc aux rameaux par les aisselles, et comme la structure des bras correspond à celle des jambes. Oh, les douces régions de la jointure intérieure du coude et du jarret, avec leur abondance de délicatesses organiques sous leurs coussins de chair! Quelle fête immense de les caresser, ces endroits délicieux du corps humain! Fête à mourir sans plainte après! Oui, mon dieu, laisse-moi sentir l’odeur de la peau de ta rotule, sous laquelle l’ingénieuse capsule articulaire sécrète son huile glissante! Laisse-moi toucher dévotement de ma bouche l’Arteria femoralis qui bat au front de ta cuisse et qui se divise plus bas en les deux artères du tibia! Laisse-moi ressentir l’exhalation de tes pores et tâter ton duvet, image humaine d’eau et d’albumine, destinée pour l’anatomie du tombeau, et laisse-moi périr, mes lèvres aux tiennes!"
He did not stir, or open his eyes; on his knees with bowed head, his hands holding the silver pencil outstretched before him, he remained, swaying and quivering.
She said: "Tu es en effet un galant qui sait solliciter d’une manière profonde, à l’allemande. " And she set the paper cap on his head.
"Adieu, mon prince Carnaval! Vous aurez une mauvaise ligne de fièvre ce soir, je vous le prédis."
She slipped from her chair, and glided over the carpet to the door, where she paused an instant, framed in the doorway; half turned toward him, with one bare arm lifted high, her hand upon the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly: "N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon."
And went out.