“Animals are sad as a rule,” she went on. “And when a man is sad--I
don’t mean because he has the toothache or has lost some money, but
because he sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and
everything, and is sad in earnest--he always looks a little like an
animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than
usual. That’s how it is, and that’s how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I
saw you for the first time.”
“Well, Hermine, and what do you think about this book with a
description of me in it?”
“Oh, I can’t always be thinking. We’ll talk about it another time. You
can give it me to read one day. Or, no, if I ever start reading again,
give me one of the books you’ve written yourself.”
She asked for coffee and for a while seemed absent-minded and
distraught. Then she suddenly beamed and seemed to have found the clue
to her speculations.
“Hullo,” she cried, delighted, “now I’ve got it!”
“What have you got?”
“The fox-trot. I’ve been thinking about it all the evening. Now tell
me, have you a room where we two could dance sometimes? It doesn’t
matter if it’s small, but there mustn’t be anybody underneath to come
up and play hell if his ceiling rocks a bit. Well, that’s fine, you can
learn to dance at home.”
“Yes,” I said in alarm, “so much the better. But I thought music was
required.”
“Of course it’s required. You’ve got to buy that. At the most it won’t
cost as much as a course of lessons. You save that because I’ll give
them myself. This way we have the music whenever we like and at the end
we have the gramophone into the bargain.”
“The gramophone?”
“Of course. You can buy a small one and a few dance records--”
“Splendid,” I cried, “and if you bring it off and teach me to dance,
the gramophone is yours as an honorarium. Agreed?”
I brought it out very pat, but scarcely from the heart. I could not
picture the detested instrument in my study among my books, and I was
by no means reconciled to the dancing either. It had been in my mind
that I might try how it went for a while, though I was convinced that
I was too old and stiff and would never learn now. And to go at it
hammer and tongs as she proposed seemed to me altogether too sudden
and uncompromising. As an old and fastidious connoisseur of music, I
could feel my gorge rising against the gramophone and jazz and modern
dance-music. It was more than any one could ask of me to have dance
tunes that were the latest rage of America let loose upon the sanctum
where I took refuge with Novalis and Jean Paul and to be made to dance
to them. But it was not any one who asked it of me. It was Hermine, and
it was for her to command, and for me to obey. Of course, I obeyed.
We met at a café on the following afternoon. Hermine was there before
me, drinking tea, and she pointed with a smile to my name which she had
found in a newspaper. It was one of the reactionary jingo papers of my
own district in which from time to time violently abusive references
to me were circulated. During the war I had been opposed to it and,
after, I had from time to time counselled quiet and patience and
humanity and a criticism that began at home; and I had resisted the
nationalist jingoism that became every day more pronounced, more insane
and unrestrained. Here, then, was another attack of this kind, badly
written, in part the work of the editor himself and in part stolen from
articles of a similar kind in papers of similar tendencies to his own.
It is common knowledge that no one writes worse than these defenders
of decrepit ideas. No one plies his trade with less of decency and
conscientious care. Hermine had read the article, and it had informed
her that Harry Haller was a noxious insect and a man who disowned his
native land, and that it stood to reason that no good could come to the
country so long as such persons and such ideas were tolerated and the
minds of the young turned to sentimental ideas of humanity instead of
to revenge by arms upon the hereditary foe.
“Is that you?” asked Hermine, pointing to my name. “Well, you’ve made
yourself some enemies and no mistake. Does it annoy you?”
I read a few lines. There was not a single line of stereotyped abuse
that had not been drummed into me for years till I was sick and tired
of it.
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t annoy me. I was used to it long ago. Now
and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even
every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep
with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his
own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war
and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only
possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me that,
for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the
generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of
them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt.
One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few
million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though
such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often sadden me
all the same. Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper,
read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are
every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their
peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it
all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and
nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All
that is perfectly clear and simple. Any one could comprehend it and
reach the same conclusion after a moment’s reflection. But nobody wants
to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself
and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect
for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he
has in the world’s confusion and wickedness--look you, nobody wants
to do that. And so there’s no stopping it, and the next war is being
pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day. It
has paralysed me since I knew it, and brought me to despair. I have no
country and no ideals left. All that comes to nothing but decorations
for the gentlemen by whom the next slaughter is ushered in. There is
no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human import, to
bother one’s head with thoughts of goodness--for two or three men who
do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches, meetings
in public and in private, that make the opposite their daily endeavour
and succeed in it too.”
Hermine had listened attentively.
“Yes,” she said now, “there you’re right enough. Of course, there will
be another war. One doesn’t need to read the papers to know that. And
of course one can be sad about it, but it isn’t any use. It is just the
same as when a man is sad to think that one day, in spite of his utmost
efforts to prevent it, he will inevitably die. The war against death,
dear Harry, is always a beautiful, noble and wonderful and glorious
thing, and so, it follows, is the war against war. But it is always
hopeless and quixotic too.”
“That is perhaps true,” I cried heatedly, “but truths like that--that
we must all soon be dead and so it is all one and the same--make the
whole of life flat and stupid. Are we then to throw everything up
and renounce the spirit altogether and all effort and all that is
human and let ambition and money rule forever while we await the next
mobilisation over a glass of beer?”
Remarkable the look that Hermine now gave me, a look full of amusement,
full of irony and roguishness and fellow-feeling, and at the same time
so grave, so wise, so unfathomably serious.
“You shan’t do that,” she said in a voice that was quite maternal.
“Your life will not be flat and dull even though you know that your
war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for
something good and ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to
attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No--we
live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death’s sake it
is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.
You’re a child, Harry. Now, do as I tell you and come along. We’ve a
lot to get done to-day. I am not going to bother myself any more to-day
about the war or the papers either. What about you?”
Oh, no, I had no wish to.
We went together--it was our first walk in the town--to a music shop
and looked at gramophones. We turned them on and off and heard them
play, and when we had found one that was very suitable and nice and
cheap I wanted to buy it. Hermine, however, was not for such rapid
transactions. She pulled me back and I had to go off with her in search
of another shop and there, too, look at and listen to gramophones of
every shape and size, from the dearest to the cheapest, before she
finally agreed to return to the first shop and buy the machine we first
thought of.
“You see,” I said, “it would have been as simple to have taken it at
once.”
“Think so? And then perhaps to-morrow we should have seen the very
same one in a shop window at twenty francs less. And besides, it’s fun
buying things and you have to pay for your fun. You’ve a lot to learn
yet.”
We got a porter to carry the purchase home.
Hermine made a careful inspection of my room. She commended the stove
and the sofa, tried the chairs, picked up the books, stood a long
while in front of the photograph of Erica. We had put the gramophone
on a chest of drawers among piles of books. And now my instruction
began. Hermine turned on a fox-trot and, after showing me the first
steps, began to take me in hand. I trotted obediently round with her,
colliding with chairs, hearing her directions and failing to understand
them, treading on her toes, and being as clumsy as I was conscientious.
After the second dance she threw herself on the sofa and laughed like a
child.
“Oh! how stiff you are! Just go straight ahead as if you were walking.
There’s not the least need to exert yourself. Why, I should think you
have made yourself positively hot, haven’t you? No, let’s rest five
minutes! Dancing, don’t you see, is every bit as easy as thinking, when
you can do it, and much easier to learn. Now you can understand why
people won’t get the habit of thinking and prefer calling Herr Haller
a traitor to his country and waiting quietly for the next war to come
along.”
In an hour she was gone, assuring me that it would go better next time.
I had my own thoughts about that, and I was sorely disappointed over
my stupidity and clumsiness. It did not seem to me that I had learnt
anything whatever and I did not believe that it would go better next
time. No, one had to bring certain qualities to dancing that I was
entirely without, gaiety, innocence, frivolity, elasticity. Well, I had
always thought so.
But there, the next time it did in fact go better. I even got some fun
out of it, and at the end of the lesson Hermine announced that I was
now proficient in the fox-trot. But when she followed it up by saying
that I had to dance with her the next day at a restaurant, I was thrown
into a panic and resisted the idea with vehemence. She reminded me
coolly of my oath of obedience and arranged a meeting for tea on the
following day at the Balance Hotel.
That evening I sat in my room and tried to read; but I could not. I
was in dread of the morrow. It was a most horrible thought that I, an
elderly, shy, touchy crank, was to frequent one of those modern deserts
of jazz music, a _thé dansant_, and a far more horrible thought
that I was to figure there as a dancer, though I did not in the least
know how to dance. And I own I laughed at myself and felt shame in my
own eyes when alone in the quiet of my studious room I turned on the
machine and softly in stockinged feet went through the steps of my
dance.
A small orchestra played every other day at the Balance Hotel and
tea and whisky were served. I made an attempt at bribing Hermine, I
put cakes before her and proposed a bottle of good wine, but she was
inflexible.
“You’re not here for your amusement to-day. It is a dancing lesson.”
I had to dance with her two or three times, and during an interval
she introduced me to the saxophone player, a dark and good-looking
youth of Spanish or South American origin, who, she told me, could
play on all instruments and talk every language in the world. This
señor appeared to know Hermine well and to be on excellent terms with
her. He had two saxophones of different sizes in front of him which
he played on by turns, while his darkly gleaming eyes scrutinised the
dancers and beamed with pleasure. I was surprised to feel something
like jealousy of this agreeable and charming musician, not a lover’s
jealousy, for there was no question of love between Hermine and me,
but a subtler jealousy of their friendship; for he did not seem to me
so eminently worthy of the interest, and even reverence, with which
she so conspicuously distinguished him. I apparently was to meet some
queer people, I thought to myself in ill-humour. Then Hermine was
asked to dance again, and I was left alone to drink tea and listen to
the music, a kind of music that I had never till that day known how
to endure. Good God, I thought, so now I am to be initiated, and made
to feel at home in this world of idlers and pleasure seekers, a world
that is utterly strange and repugnant to me and that to this day I have
always carefully avoided and utterly despised, a smooth and stereotyped
world of marble-topped tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial
travellers! Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of
second-rate elegance. Two beautiful girls caught my eye. They were both
good dancers. I followed their movements with admiration and envy. How
elastic, how beautiful and gay and certain their steps!
Soon Hermine appeared once more. She was not pleased with me. She
scolded me and said that I was not there to wear such a face and sit
idling at tea-tables. I was to pull myself together, please, and dance.
What, I knew no one? That was not necessary. Were there, then, no girls
there who met with my approval?
I pointed out one of the two, and the more attractive, who happened at
the moment to be standing near us. She looked enchanting in her pretty
velvet dress with her short luxuriant blonde hair and her rounded
womanly arms. Hermine insisted that I should go up to her forthwith and
ask her to dance. I shrank back in despair.
“Indeed, I cannot do it,” I said in my misery. “Of course, if I were
young and good-looking--but for a stiff old hack like me who can’t
dance for the life of him--she would laugh at me!”
Hermine looked at me contemptuously.
“And that I should laugh at you, of course, doesn’t matter. What a
coward you are! Every one risks being laughed at when he addresses a
girl. That’s always at stake. So take the risk, Harry, and if the worst
come to the worst let yourself be laughed at. Otherwise it’s all up
with my belief in your obedience....”
She was obdurate. I got up automatically and approached the young
beauty just as the music began again.
“As a matter of fact, I’m engaged for this one,” she said and looked me
up and down with her large clear eyes, “but my partner seems to have
got stranded at the bar over there, so come along.”
I grasped her and performed the first steps, still in amazement that
she had not sent me about my business. She was not long in taking
my measure and in taking charge of me. She danced wonderfully and I
caught the infection. I forgot for the moment all the rules I had
conscientiously learnt and simply floated along. I felt my partner’s
taut hips, her quick and pliant knees, and looking in her young and
radiant face I owned to her that this was the first time in my life
that I had ever really danced. She smiled encouragement and replied to
my enchanted gaze and flattering words with a wonderful compliance,
not of words, but of movements whose soft enchantment brought us more
closely and delightfully in touch. My right hand held her waist firmly
and I followed every movement of her feet and arms and shoulders with
eager happiness. Not once, to my astonishment, did I step on her feet,
and when the music stopped, we both stood where we were and clapped
till the dance was played again; and then with all a lover’s zeal I
devoutly performed the rite once more.
When, too soon, the dance came to an end, my beautiful partner in
velvet disappeared and I suddenly saw Hermine standing near me. She had
been watching us.
“Now do you see?” she laughed approvingly. “Have you made the discovery
that women’s legs are not table legs? Well, bravo! You know the
fox-trot now, thank the Lord. To-morrow we’ll get on to the Boston, and
in three weeks there’s the Masked Ball at the Globe Rooms.”
We had taken seats for the interval when the charming young Herr
Pablo, with a friendly nod, sat down beside Hermine. He seemed to be
very intimate with her. As for myself, I must own that I was not by
any means delighted with the gentleman at this first encounter. He
was good-looking, I could not deny, both of face and figure, but I
could not discover what further advantages he had. Even his linguistic
accomplishments sat very lightly on him--to such an extent, indeed,
that he did not speak at all beyond uttering such words as please,
thanks, you bet, rather and hallo. These, certainly, he knew in several
languages. No, he said nothing, this Señor Pablo, nor did he even
appear to think much, this charming caballero. His business was with
the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to
devote himself with love and passion. Often during the course of the
music he would suddenly clap with his hands, or permit himself other
expressions of enthusiasm, such as, singing out “O O O, Ha Ha, Hallo.”
Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to
pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and
a great number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining
us consisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking
at his wrist watch and in rolling cigarettes--at which he was an
expert. His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no
romance, no problems, no thoughts. Closely looked at, this beautiful
demigod of love was no more than a complacent and rather spoilt young
man with pleasant manners. I talked to him about his instrument and
about tone-colours in jazz music, and he must have seen that he was
confronted by one who had the enjoyment of a connoisseur for all that
touched on music. But he made no response, and while I, in compliment
to him, or rather, to Hermine, embarked upon a musicianly justification
of jazz, he smiled amiably upon me and my efforts. Presumably, he had
not the least idea that there was any music but jazz or that any music
had ever existed before it. He was pleasant, certainly, pleasant and
polite, and his large, vacant eyes smiled most charmingly. Between
him and me, however, there appeared to be nothing whatever in common.
Nothing of all that was, perhaps, important and sacred to him could be
so for me as well. We came of contrasted races and spoke languages in
which no two words were akin. (Later, nevertheless, Hermine told me a
remarkable thing. She told me that Pablo, after a conversation about
me, had said that she must treat me very nicely, for I was so very
unhappy. And when she asked what brought him to that conclusion, he
said: “Poor, poor fellow. Look at his eyes. Doesn’t know how to laugh.”)
When the dark-eyed young man had taken his leave of us and the music
began again, Hermine stood up. “Now you might have another dance with
me. Or don’t you care to dance any more?”
With her, too, I danced more easily now, in a freer and more sprightly
fashion, even though not so buoyantly and more self-consciously than
with the other. Hermine had me lead, adapting herself as softly and
lightly as the leaf of a flower, and with her, too, I now experienced
all these delights that now advanced and now took wing. She, too, now
exhaled the perfume of woman and love, and her dancing, too, sang
with intimate tenderness the lovely and enchanting song of sex. And
yet I could not respond to all this with warmth and freedom. I could
not entirely forget myself in abandon. Hermine stood in too close a
relation to me. She was my comrade and sister--my double, almost, in
her resemblance not to me only, but to Herman, my boyhood friend, the
enthusiast, the poet, who had shared with ardour all my intellectual
pursuits and extravagances.
“I know,” she said when I spoke of it. “I know that well enough. All
the same, I shall make you fall in love with me, but there’s no use
hurrying. First of all we’re comrades, two people who hope to be
friends, because we have recognised each other. For the present we’ll
each learn from the other and amuse ourselves together. I show you my
little stage, and teach you to dance and to have a little pleasure and
be silly; and you show me your thoughts and something of all you know.”
“There’s little there to show you, Hermine, I’m afraid. You know far
more than I do. You’re a most remarkable person--and a woman. But do I
mean anything to you? Don’t I bore you?”
She looked down darkly to the floor.
“That’s how I don’t like to hear you talk. Think of that evening when
you came broken from your despair and loneliness, to cross my path and
be my comrade. Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognise you
and understand you?”
“Why, Hermine? Tell me!”
“Because it’s the same for me as for you, because I am alone exactly
as you are, because I’m as little fond of life and men and myself as
you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such
people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with
its stupidity and crudeness.”
“You, you!” I cried in deep amazement. “I understand you, my comrade.
No one understands you better than I. And yet you’re a riddle. You are
such a past-master at life. You have your wonderful reverence for its
little details and enjoyments. You are such an artist in life. How can
you suffer at life’s hands? How can you despair?”
“I don’t despair. As to suffering--oh, yes, I know all about that!
You are surprised that I should be unhappy when I can dance and am so
sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am
surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home
with the very things in it that are the deepest and most beautiful,
spirit, art, and thought! That is why we were drawn to one another and
why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and
play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me
to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both
children of the devil?”
“Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his
unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in
space. And that reminds me of something. In the Steppenwolf treatise
that I told you about, there is something to the effect that it is only
a fancy of his to believe that he has one soul, or two, that he is made
up of one or two personalities. Every human being, it says, consists of
ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.”
“I like that very much,” cried Hermine. “In your case, for example, the
spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward
in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred
years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he
we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little
and stupid and stunted as he is.”
She looked at me, smiling; and then asked softly in an altered voice:
“And how did you like Maria, then?”
“Maria? Who is she?”
“The girl you danced with. She is a lovely girl, a very lovely girl.
You were a little smitten with her, as far as I could see.”
“You know her then?”
“Oh, yes, we know each other well. Were you very much taken with her?”
“I liked her very much, and I was delighted that she was so indulgent
about my dancing.”
“As if that were the whole story! You ought to make love to her a
little, Harry. She is very pretty and such a good dancer, and you are
in love with her already, I know very well. You’ll succeed with her,
I’m sure.”
“Believe me, I have no such aspiration.”
“There you’re lying a little. Of course, I know that you have an
attachment. There is a girl somewhere or other whom you see once or
twice a year in order to have a quarrel with her. Of course, it’s very
charming of you to wish to be true to this estimable friend of yours,
but you must permit me not to take it so very seriously. I suspect you
of taking love frightfully seriously. That is your own affair. You can
love as much as you like in your ideal fashion for all I care. All I
have to worry about is that you should learn to know a little more of
the little arts and lighter sides of life. In this sphere, I am your
teacher, and I shall be a better one than your ideal love ever was, you
may be sure of that! It’s high time you slept with a pretty girl again,
Steppenwolf.”
“Hermine,” I cried in torment, “you have only to look at me, I am an
old man!”
“You’re a child. You were too lazy to learn to dance till it was
nearly too late, and in the same way you were too lazy to learn to
love. As for ideal and tragic love, that, I don’t doubt, you can do
marvellously--and all honour to you. Now you will learn to love a
little in an ordinary human way. We have made a start. You will soon
be fit to go to a ball, but you must know the Boston first, and we’ll
begin on that to-morrow. I’ll come at three. How did you like the
music, by the way?”
“Very much indeed.”
“Well, there’s another step forward, you see. Up to now you couldn’t
stand all this dance and jazz music. It was too superficial and
frivolous for you. Now you have seen that there’s no need to take
it seriously and that it can all the same be very agreeable and
delightful. And, by the way, the whole orchestra would be nothing
without Pablo. He conducts it and puts fire into it.”
* * * * *
Just as the gramophone contaminated the æsthetic and intellectual
atmosphere of my study and just as the American dances broke in as
strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully
tended garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and
dreaded and disintegrating influences upon my life that, till now, had
been so sharply marked off and so deeply secluded. The Steppenwolf
treatise, and Hermine too, were right in their doctrine of the thousand
souls. Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old
ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw
as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had
been. The few capacities and pursuits in which I had happened to be
strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of
myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined
and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I
had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities,
instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label
of Steppenwolf.
Meanwhile, though cured of an illusion, I found this disintegration of
the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing adventure. On the
contrary, it was often exceedingly painful, often almost intolerable.
Often the sound of the gramophone was truly fiendish to my ears in the
midst of surroundings where everything was tuned to so very different a
key. And many a time, when I danced my one-step in a stylish restaurant
among pleasure seekers and elegant rakes, I felt that I was a traitor
to all that I was bound to hold most sacred. Had Hermine left me for
one week alone I should have fled at once from this wearisome and
laughable trafficking with the world of pleasure. Hermine, however, was
always there. Though I might not see her every day, I was all the same
continually under her eye, guided, guarded and counselled--besides, she
read all my mad thoughts of rebellion and escape in my face, and smiled
at them.
As the destruction of all that I had called my personality went on,
I began to understand, too, why it was that I had feared death so
horribly in spite of all my despair. I began to perceive that this
ignoble horror in the face of death was a part of my old conventional
and lying existence. The late Herr Haller, gifted writer, student
of Mozart and Goethe, author of essays upon the metaphysics of art,
upon genius and tragedy and humanity, the melancholy hermit in a cell
encumbered with books, was given over bit by bit to self-criticism
and at every point was found wanting. This gifted and interesting
Herr Haller had, to be sure, preached reason and humanity and had
protested against the barbarity of the war; but he had not let himself
be stood against a wall and shot, as the proper consequence of his way
of thinking would have been. He had found some way of accommodating
himself; one, of course, that was outwardly reputable and noble, but
still a compromise and no more. He was, further, opposed to the power
of capital and yet he had industrial securities lying at his bank
and spent the interest from them without a pang of conscience. And
so it was all through. Harry Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself
out finely as an idealist and contemner of the world, as a melancholy
hermit and growling prophet. At bottom, however, he was a bourgeois
who took exception to a life like Hermine’s and fretted himself over
the nights thrown away in a restaurant and the money squandered there,
and had them on his conscience. Instead of longing to be freed and
completed, he longed, on the contrary, most earnestly to get back
to those happy times when his intellectual trifling had been his
diversion and brought him fame. Just so those newspaper readers--whom
he despised and scorned--longed to get back to the ideal time before
the war, because it was so much more comfortable than taking a lesson
from those who had gone through it. Oh, the devil, he made one sick,
this Herr Haller! And yet I clung to him all the same, or to the mask
of him that was already falling away, clung to his coquetting with the
spiritual, to his bourgeois horror of the disorderly and accidental (to
which death, too, belonged) and compared the new Harry--the somewhat
timid and ludicrous dilettante of the dance rooms--scornfully and
enviously with the old one in whose ideal and lying portrait he had
since discovered all those fatal characteristics which had upset
him that night so grievously in the professor’s print of Goethe. He
himself, the old Harry, had been just such a bourgeoise idealisation of
Goethe, a spiritual champion whose all-too-noble gaze shone with the
unction of elevated thought and humanity, until he was almost overcome
by his own nobleness of mind! The devil! Now, at last, this fine
picture stood badly in need of repairs! The ideal Herr Haller had been
lamentably dismantled! He looked like a dignitary who had fallen among
thieves--with his tattered breeches--and he would have shown sense if
he had studied now the rôle that his rags appointed him instead of
wearing them with an air of respectability and carrying on a whining
pretence to lost repute.
I was constantly finding myself in the company of Pablo, the musician,
and my estimate of him had to be revised if only because Hermine liked
him so much and was so eager for his company. Pablo had left on me
the impression of a pretty nonentity, a little beau, and somewhat
empty at that, as happy as a child for whom there are no problems,
whose joy it is to dribble into his toy trumpet and who is kept quiet
with praises and chocolate. Pablo, however, was not interested in my
opinions. They were as indifferent to him as my musical theories. He
listened with friendly courtesy, smiling as he always did; but he
refrained all the same from any actual reply. On the other hand, in
spite of this, it seemed that I had aroused his interest. It was clear
that he put himself out to please me and to show me goodwill. Once
when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humour, over one of
these fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a
troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it,
he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me
good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch.
The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and
more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. Hermine told
me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through
secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a
master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling
pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively
spirits and the passion of love.
One day I met him in the street near the quay and he turned at once to
accompany me. This time I succeeded at last in making him talk.
“Herr Pablo,” I said to him as he played with his slender ebony and
silver walking-stick, “you are a friend of Hermine’s and that is why
I take an interest in you. But I can’t say you make it easy to get on
with you. Several times I have attempted to talk about music with you.
It would have interested me to know your thoughts and opinions, whether
they contradicted mine or not, but you have disdained to make me even
the barest reply.”
He gave me a most amiable smile and this time a reply was accorded me.
“Well,” he said with equanimity, “you see, in my opinion there is no
point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What
reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were
perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a
professor, and I don’t believe that, as regards music, there is the
least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on
having good taste and education and all that.”
“Indeed. Then what does it depend on?”
“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as
possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is
the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and
Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them not a
soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouth-piece
and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will
give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood.
That’s the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance-hall at
the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes
sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. _That_ is why one
makes music.”
“Very good, Herr Pablo. But there is not only sensual music. There
is spiritual also. Besides the music that is actually played at the
moment, there is the immortal music that lives on even when it is not
actually being played. It can happen to a man to lie alone in bed and
to call to mind a melody from the _Magic Flute_ or the _Matthew
Passion_, and then there is music without anybody blowing into a
flute or passing a bow across a fiddle.”
“Certainly, Herr Haller. _Yearning_ and _Valencia_ are
recalled every night by many a lonely dreamer. Even the poorest
typist in her office has the latest one-step in her head and taps her
keys in time to it. You are right. I don’t grudge all those lonely
persons their mute music, whether it’s _Yearning_ or the _Magic
Flute_ or _Valencia_. But where do they get their lonely and
mute music from? They get it from us, the musicians. It must first have
been played and heard, it must have got into the blood, before any one
at home in his room can think of it and dream of it.”
“Granted,” I said coolly, “all the same it won’t do to put Mozart and
the latest fox-trot on the same level. And it is not one and the same
thing whether you play people divine and eternal music or cheap stuff
of the day that is forgotten to-morrow.”
When Pablo observed from my tone that I was getting heated, he at once
put on his most amiable expression and touching my arm caressingly he
gave an unbelievable softness to his voice.
“Ah, my dear sir, you may be perfectly right with your levels. I have
nothing to say to your putting Mozart and Haydn and _Valencia_ on
what levels you please. It is all one to me. It is not for me to decide
about levels. I shall never be asked about them. Mozart, perhaps, will
still be played in a hundred years and _Valencia_ in two will be
played no more--we can well leave that, I think, in God’s hands. God is
good and has the span of all our days in his hands and that of every
waltz and fox-trot too. He is sure to do what is right. We musicians,
however, we must play our parts according to our duties and our gifts.
We have to play what is actually in demand, and we have to play it as
well and as beautifully and as expressively as ever we can.”
With a sigh I gave it up. There was no getting past the fellow.
At many moments the old and the new, pain and pleasure, fear and joy
were quite oddly mixed with one another. Now I was in heaven, now in
hell, generally in both at once. The old Harry and the new lived at
one moment in bitter strife, at the next in peace. Many a time the old
Harry appeared to be dead and done with, to have died and been buried,
and then of a sudden there he was again, giving orders and tyrannising
and contradictory till the little new young Harry was silent for very
shame and let himself be pushed to the wall. At other times the young
Harry took the old by the throat and squeezed with all his might.
There was many a groan, many a death-struggle, many a thought of the
razor-blade.
Often, however, suffering and happiness broke over me in one wave.
One such moment was when a few days after my first public exhibition
of dancing, I went into my bedroom at night and to my indescribable
astonishment, dismay, horror and enchantment found the lovely Maria
lying in my bed.
Of all the surprises that Hermine had prepared for me this was the most
violent. For I had not a moment’s doubt that it was she who had sent me
this bird of paradise. I had not, as usually, been with Hermine that
evening. I had been to a recital of old church music in the Cathedral,
a beautiful, though melancholy, excursion into my past life, to the
fields of my youth, the territory of my ideal self. Beneath the lofty
Gothic of the church whose netted vaulting swayed with a ghostly
life in the play of the sparse lights, I heard pieces by Buxtehude,
Pachelbel, Bach and Haydn. I had gone the old beloved way once more.
I had heard the magnificent voice of a Bach singer with whom in the
old days when we were friends I had enjoyed many a memorable musical
occasion. The notes of the old music with its eternal dignity and
sanctity had called to life all the exalted enchantment and enthusiasm
of youth. I had sat in the lofty choir, sad and abstracted, a guest
for an hour of this noble and blessed world which once had been my
home. During a Haydn duet the tears had come suddenly to my eyes. I had
not waited for the end of the concert. Dropping the thought I had had
of seeing the singer again (what evenings I had once spent with the
artistes after such concerts) and stealing away out of the Cathedral,
I had wearily paced the dark and narrow streets, where here and there
behind the windows of the restaurants jazz orchestras were playing the
tunes of the life I had now come to live. Oh, what a dull maze of error
I had made of my life!
For long during this night’s walk I had reflected upon the significance
of my relation to music, and not for the first time recognised this
appealing and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German
spirit. In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in
the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other
people. We intellectuals instead of opposing ourselves to this tendency
like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word,
and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without
words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless.
Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the
German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and
against reason and courted music. And so the German spirit, carousing
in music, in wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of
feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the
greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals
is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile. That is why
the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our
history and politics and public opinion, has been so lamentable a one.
Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing
sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be seriously
and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing
but æsthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended,
however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. The generals and the
captains of industry were quite right. There was nothing to be made of
us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented
chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning. With a curse, I came back
to the razor.
So, full of thoughts and the echoes of the music, my heart weighed down
with sadness and the longing of despair for life and reality and sense
and all that was irretrievably lost, I had got home at last; climbed
my stairs; put on the light in my sitting room; tried in vain to read;
thought of the appointment which compelled me to drink whisky and dance
at the Cecil Bar on the following evening; thought with malice and
bitterness not only of myself, but of Hermine too. She might be good
and have the best and kindest intentions and she might be a wonderful
person, but she would have done better all the same to let me go to
perdition instead of sweeping me into this whirligig of frivolities
where I should never be any other than an alien and where the best in
me was demoralised and had been lowered.
And so I had sadly put out the light and taken myself to my bedroom and
sadly begun to undress; and then I was surprised by an unaccustomed
smell. There was a faint aroma of scent, and looking round I saw the
lovely Maria lying in my bed, smiling and a little startled, with large
blue eyes.
“Maria!” I said. And my first thoughts were that my landlady would give
me notice when she knew of it.
“I’ve come,” she said softly. “Are you angry with me?”
“No, no. I see Hermine gave you the key. Isn’t that it?”
“Oh, it does make you angry. I’ll go again.”
“No, lovely Maria, stay! Only, just to-night, I’m very sad. I can’t be
jolly to-night. Perhaps to-morrow I’ll be better again.”
I was bending over her and she took my head in her large firm hands
and drawing it down gave me a long kiss. Then I sat down on the bed
beside her and took her hands and asked her to speak low in case we
were heard, and looked at her beautiful full rounded face that lay so
strangely and wonderfully on my pillow like a large flower. She drew my
hand slowly to her lips and laid it beneath the clothes on her warm and
evenly breathing breast.
“You don’t need to be jolly,” she said. “Hermine told me that you had
troubles. Any one can understand that. Tell me, then, do I please you
still? The other day, when we were dancing, you were very much in love
with me.”
I kissed her eyes, her mouth and neck and breasts. A moment ago I had
thought of Hermine with bitterness and reproach. Now I held her gift in
my hands and was thankful. Maria’s caresses did not harm the wonderful
music I had heard that evening. They were its worthy fulfilment. Slowly
I drew the clothes from her lovely body till my kisses reached her
feet. When I lay down beside her, her flower-face smiled back at me
omniscient and bountiful.
During this night by Maria’s side I did not sleep much, but my sleep
was as deep and peaceful as a child’s. And between sleeping I drank
of her beautiful warm youth and heard, as we talked softly, a number
of curious tales about her life and Hermine’s. I had never known much
of this side of life. Only in the theatrical world, occasionally, in
earlier years had I come across similar existences--women as well as
men who lived half for art and half for pleasure. Now, for the first
time, I had a glimpse into this kind of life, remarkable alike for
its singular innocence and singular corruption. These girls, mostly
from poor homes, but too intelligent and too pretty to give their
whole lives to some ill-paid and joyless way of gaining their living,
all lived sometimes on casual work, sometimes on their charm and easy
virtue. Now and then, for a month or two, they sat at a typewriter; at
times were the mistresses of well-to-do men of the world, receiving
pocket money and presents; lived at times in furs and motor-cars,
at other times in attics, and though a good offer might under some
circumstances induce them to marry, they were not at all eager for it.
Many of them had little inclination for love and gave themselves very
unwillingly, and then only for money and at the highest price. Others,
and Maria was one of them, were unusually gifted in love and unable to
do without it. They lived solely for love and besides their official
and lucrative friends had other love affairs as well. Assiduous and
busy, care-ridden and light-hearted, intelligent and yet thoughtless,
these butterflies lived a life at once childlike and raffiné;
independent, not to be bought by every one, finding their account in
good luck and fine weather, in love with life and yet clinging to it
far less than the bourgeois, always ready to follow a fairy prince to
his castle, always certain, though scarcely conscious of it, that a
difficult and sad end was in store for them.
During that wonderful first night and the days that followed Maria
taught me much. She taught me the charming play and delights of the
senses, but she gave me, also, new understanding, new insight, new
love. The world of the dance and pleasure resorts, the cinemas, bars
and hotel lounges that for me, the hermit and æsthete, had always about
it something trivial, forbidden, and degrading, was for Maria and
Hermine and their companions the world pure and simple. It was neither
good nor bad, neither loved nor hated. In this world their brief and
eager lives flowered and faded. They were at home in it and knew all
its ways. They loved a champagne or a special dish at a restaurant
as one of us might a composer or poet, and they lavished the same
enthusiasm and rapture and emotion on the latest craze in dances or the
sentimental cloying song of a jazz singer as one of us on Nietzsche
or Hamsun. Maria talked to me about the handsome saxophone player,
Pablo, and spoke of an American song that he had sung them sometimes,
and she was so carried away with admiration and love as she spoke of it
that I was far more moved and impressed than by the ecstasies of any
highly cultured person over artistic pleasures of the rarest and most
distinguished quality. I was ready to enthuse in sympathy, be the song
what it might. Maria’s glowing words and her eager effusive face made
large rents in my æsthetics. There was to be sure a Beauty, one and
indivisible, small and select, that seemed to me, with Mozart at the
top, to be above all dispute and doubt, but where was the limit? Hadn’t
we all as connoisseurs and critics in our youth been consumed with love
for works of art and for artists that to-day we regarded with doubt
and dismay? Hadn’t that happened to us with Liszt and Wagner, and,
to many of us, even with Beethoven? Wasn’t the blossoming of Maria’s
childish emotion over the song from America just as pure and beautiful
an artistic experience and exalted as far beyond doubt as the rapture
of any academic big-wig over Tristan, or the ecstasy of a conductor
over the Ninth Symphony? And didn’t this agree remarkably well with the
views of Herr Pablo and prove him right?
Maria too appeared to love the beautiful Pablo extremely.
“He certainly is a beauty,” said I. “I like him very much too. But
tell me, Maria, how can you have a fondness for me as well, a tiresome
old fellow with no looks, who even has grey hairs and doesn’t play a
saxophone and doesn’t sing any English love-songs?”
“Don’t talk so horribly,” she scolded. “It is quite natural. I like
you too. You, too, have something nice about you that endears you and
marks you out. I wouldn’t have you different. One oughtn’t to talk of
these things and want them accounted for. Listen, when you kiss my neck
or my ear, I feel that I please you, that you like me. You have a way
of kissing as though you were shy, and that tells me: ‘You please him.
He is grateful to you for being pretty.’ That gives me great, great
pleasure. And then again with another man it’s just the opposite that
pleases me, that he kisses me as though he thought little of me and
conferred a favour.”
Again we fell asleep and again I woke to find my arm still about her,
my beautiful, beautiful flower.
And this beautiful flower, strange to say, continued to be none the
less the gift that Hermine had made me. Hermine continued to stand in
front of her and to hide her with a mask. Then suddenly the thought
of Erica intervened--my distant, angry love, my poor friend. She was
hardly less pretty than Maria, even though not so blooming; and she
was more constrained, and not so richly endowed in the little arts of
making love. She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully,
loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep
oblivion, at a half regretted distance.
And so in the tender beauty of the night many pictures of my life rose
before me who for so long had lived in a poor pictureless vacancy.
Now, at the magic touch of Eros, the source of them was opened up and
flowed in plenty. For moments together my heart stood still between
delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and
how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal
stars and constellations. My childhood and my mother showed in a
tender transfiguration like a distant glimpse over mountains into
the fathomless blue; the litany of my friendships, beginning with
the legendary Herman, soul-brother of Hermine, rang out as clear as
trumpets; the images of many women floated by me with an unearthly
fragrance like moist sea-flowers on the surface of the water, women
whom I had loved, desired and sung, whose love I had seldom won and
seldom striven to win. My wife, too, appeared. I had lived with her
many years and she had taught me comradeship, strife and resignation.
In spite of all the shortcomings of our life, my confidence in her
remained untouched up to the very day when she broke out against me and
deserted me without warning, sick as I was in mind and body. And now,
as I looked back, I saw how deep my love and trust must have been for
her betrayal to have inflicted so deep and lifelong a wound.
These pictures--there were hundreds of them, with names and
without--all came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night
of love, and I knew again, what in my wretchedness I had forgotten,
that they were my life’s possession and all its worth. Indestructible
and abiding as the stars, these experiences, though forgotten, could
never be erased. Their series was the story of my life, their starry
light the undying value of my being. My life had become weariness. It
had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and
nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it
had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been for all its
wretchedness a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it
might, the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It had purpose and
character and turned not on trifles, but on the stars.
Time has passed and much has happened, much has changed; and I can only
remember a little of all that passed that night, a little of all we
said and did in the deep tenderness of love, a few moments of clear
awakening from the deep sleep of love’s weariness. That night, however,
for the first time since my downfall gave me back the unrelenting
radiance of my own life and made me recognise chance as destiny once
more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul
breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I felt
with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise
my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one
picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be
immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every
human life?
In the morning, after we had shared breakfast, I had to smuggle Maria
from the house. Later in the same day I took a little room in a
neighbouring quarter which was designed solely for our meetings.
True to her duties, Hermine, my dancing mistress, appeared and I had to
learn the Boston. She was firm and inexorable and would not release me
from a single lesson, for it was decided that I was to attend the Fancy
Dress Ball in her company. She had asked me for money for her costume,
but she refused to tell me anything about it. To visit her, or even to
know where she lived, was still forbidden me.
This time, about three weeks before the Fancy Dress Ball, was
remarkable for its wonderful happiness. Maria seemed to me to be the
first woman I had ever really loved. I had always wanted mind and
culture in the women I had loved, and I had never remarked that even
the most intellectual and, comparatively speaking, educated woman
never gave any response to the Logos in me, but rather constantly
opposed it. I took my problems and my thoughts with me to the company
of women and it would have seemed to me utterly impossible to love a
girl for more than an hour who had scarcely read a book, scarcely knew
what reading was, and could not have distinguished Tschaikovsky from
Beethoven. Maria had no education. She had no need of these circuitous
substitutes. Her problems all sprang directly from the senses. All
her art and the whole task she set herself lay in extracting the
utmost delight from the senses she had been endowed with, and from
her particular figure, her colour, her hair, her voice, her skin, her
temperament; and in employing every faculty, every curve and line and
every softest modelling of her body to find responsive perceptions in
her lovers and to conjure up in them an answering quickness of delight.
The first shy dance I had had with her had already told me this much.
I had caught the scent and the charm of a brilliant and carefully
cultivated sensibility and had been enchanted by it. Certainly, too, it
was no accident that Hermine, the all-knowing, introduced me to this
Maria. She had the scent and the very significance of summer and of
roses.
It was not my fortune to be Maria’s only lover, nor even her favourite
one. I was one of many. Often she had no time for me, often only an
hour at midday, seldom a night. She took no money from me. Hermine
saw to that. She was glad of presents, however, and when I gave her,
perhaps, a new little purse of red lacquered leather there might be two
or three gold pieces inside it. As a matter of fact, she laughed at
me over the red purse. It was charming, but a bargain, and no longer
in fashion. In these matters, about which up to that time I was as
little learned as in any language of the Esquimaux, I learned a great
deal from Maria. Before all else I learned that these playthings were
not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the
purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather,
a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a
multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving
love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us,
endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder
and scent to the dancing-show, from ring to cigarette-case, from
waist-buckle to hand-bag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse,
flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of
love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon,
a battle-cry.
I often wondered who it was whom Maria really loved. I think she loved
the young Pablo of the saxophone, with his melancholy black eyes and
his long, white, distinguished, melancholy hands. I should have thought
Pablo a somewhat sleepy lover, spoilt and passive, but Maria assured
me that though it took a long time to wake him up he was then more
strenuous and forward and virile than prize-fighter or riding master.
In this way I got to know many secrets about this person and that,
jazz-musicians, actors and many of the women and girls and men of
our circle. I saw beneath the surface of the various alliances and
enmities and by degrees (though I had been such an entire stranger to
this world) I was drawn in and treated with confidence. I learned a
good deal about Hermine, too. It was of Herr Pablo, however, of whom
Maria was fond, that I saw the most. At times she, too, availed herself
of his secret drugs and was for ever procuring these delights for me
also; and Pablo was always most markedly on the alert to be of service
to me. Once he said to me without more ado: “You are so very unhappy.
That is bad. One shouldn’t be like that. It makes me sorry. Try a mild
pipe of opium.” My opinion of this jolly, intelligent, childlike and,
at the same time, unfathomable person gradually changed. We became
friends, and I often took some of his specifics. He looked on at my
affair with Maria with some amusement. Once he entertained us in his
room on the top floor of an hotel in the suburbs. There was only one
chair, so Maria and I had to sit on the bed. He gave us a drink from
three little bottles, a mysterious and wonderful draught. And then when
I had got into a very good humour, he proposed, with beaming eyes, to
celebrate a love-orgy for three. I declined abruptly. Such a thing was
inconceivable to me. Nevertheless I stole a glance at Maria to see how
she took it, and though she at once backed up my refusal I saw the
gleam in her eyes and observed that the renunciation cost her some
regret. Pablo was disappointed by my refusal but not hurt. “Pity,” he
said. “Harry is too morally minded. Nothing to be done. All the same it
would have been so beautiful, so very beautiful! But I’ve got another
idea.” He gave us each a little opium to smoke, and sitting motionless
with open eyes we all three lived through the scenes that he suggested
to us while Maria trembled with delight. As I felt a little unwell
after this, Pablo laid me on the bed and gave me some drops, and while
I lay with closed eyes I felt the fleeting breath of a kiss on each
eyelid. I took the kiss as though I believed it came from Maria, but I
knew very well it came from him.
And one evening he surprised me still more. Coming to me in my room he
told me that he needed twenty francs and would I oblige him? In return
he offered that I instead of him should have Maria for the night.
“Pablo,” I said, very much shocked, “you don’t know what you say.
Barter for a woman is counted among us as the last degradation. I have
not heard your proposal, Pablo.”
He looked at me with pity. “You don’t want to, Herr Harry. Very good.
You’re always making difficulties for yourself. Don’t sleep to-night
with Maria if you would rather not. But give me the money all the same.
You shall have it back. I have urgent need of it.”
“What for?”
“For Agostino, the little second violin, you know. He has been ill for
a week and there’s no one to look after him. He hasn’t a son, nor have
I at the moment.”
From curiosity and also partly to punish myself, I went with him
to Agostino. He took milk and medicine to him in his attic, and a
wretched one it was. He made his bed and aired the room and made a most
professional compress for the fevered head, all quickly and gently and
efficiently like a good sick-nurse. The same evening I saw him playing
till dawn in the City Bar.
I often talked at length and in detail about Maria with Hermine, about
her hands and shoulders and hips and her way of laughing and kissing
and dancing.
“Has she shown you this?” asked Hermine on one occasion, describing to
me a peculiar play of the tongue in kissing. I asked her to show it me
herself, but she was most earnest in her refusal. “That is for later. I
am not your love yet.”
I asked her how she was acquainted with Maria’s ways of kissing and
with many secrets as well that could be known only to her lovers.
“Oh,” she cried, “we’re friends, after all. Do you think we’d have
secrets from one another? I must say you’ve got hold of a beautiful
girl. There’s no one like her.”
“All the same, Hermine, I’m sure you have some secrets from each other,
or have you told her everything you know about me?”
“No, that’s another matter. Those are things she would not understand.
Maria is wonderful. You are fortunate. But between you and me there are
things she has not a notion of. Naturally I told her a lot about you,
much more than you would have liked at the time. I had to win her for
you, you see. But neither Maria nor any one else will ever understand
you as I understand you. I’ve learnt something about you from her
besides, for she’s told me all about you as far as she knows you at
all. I know you nearly as well as if we had often slept together.”
It was curious and mysterious to know, when I was with Maria again,
that she had had Hermine in her arms just as she had me.... New,
indirect and complicated relations rose before me, new possibilities in
love and life; and I thought of the thousand souls of the Steppenwolf
treatise.
* * * * *
In the short interval between the time that I got to know Maria and
the Fancy Dress Ball I was really happy; and yet I never had the
feeling that this was my release and the attainment of felicity. I had
the distinct impression, rather, that all this was a prelude and a
preparation, that everything was pushing eagerly forward, that the gist
of the matter was to come.
I was now so proficient in dancing that I felt quite equal to playing
my part at the Ball of which everybody was talking. Hermine had a
secret. She took the greatest care not to let out what her costume was
to be. I would recognise her soon enough, she said, and should I fail
to do so, she would help me; but beforehand I was to know nothing. She
was not in the least inquisitive to know my plans for a fancy dress and
I decided that I should not wear a costume at all. Maria, when I asked
her to go with me as my partner, explained that she had a cavalier
already and a ticket too, in fact; and I saw with some disappointment
that I should have to attend the festivity alone. It was the principal
Fancy Dress Ball of the town, organised yearly by the Society of
Artists in the Globe Rooms.
During these days I saw little of Hermine, but the day before the Ball
she paid me a brief visit. She came for her ticket, which I had got for
her, and sat quietly with me for a while in my room. We fell into a
conversation so remarkable that it made a deep impression on me.
“You’re really doing splendidly,” she said. “Dancing suits you. Any one
who hadn’t seen you for the last four weeks would scarcely know you.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Things haven’t gone so well with me for years. That’s
all your doing, Hermine.”
“Oh, not the beautiful Maria’s?”
“No. She is a present from you like all the rest. She is wonderful.”
“She is just the girl you need, Steppenwolf--pretty, young, light
hearted, an expert in love and not to be had every day. If you hadn’t
to share her with others, if she weren’t always merely a fleeting
guest, it would be another matter.”
Yes, I had to concede this too.
“And so have you really got everything you want now?”
“No, Hermine. It is not like that. What I have got is very beautiful
and delightful, a great pleasure, a great consolation. I’m really
happy--”
“Well then, what more do you want?”
“I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for
it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.”
“To be unhappy in fact? Well, you’ve had that and to spare, that time
when you couldn’t go home because of the razor.”
“No, Hermine, it is something else. That time, I grant you, I was very
unhappy. But it was a stupid unhappiness that led to nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it
all the same. The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It
is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after
death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.”
“I understand that. There we are brother and sister. But what have
you got against the happiness that you have found now with Maria? Why
aren’t you content?”
“I have nothing against it. Oh, no, I love it. I’m grateful for it. It
is as lovely as a sunny day in a wet summer. But I suspect that it
can’t last. This happiness leads to nothing either. It gives content,
but content is no food for me. It lulls the Steppenwolf to sleep and
satiates him. But it is not a happiness to die for.”
“So it’s necessary to be dead, Steppenwolf?”
“I think so, yes. My happiness fills me with content and I can bear it
for a long while yet. But sometimes when happiness leaves a moment’s
leisure to look about me and long for things, the longing I have is not
to keep this happiness forever, but to suffer once again, only more
beautifully and less meanly than before. I long for the sufferings that
make me ready and willing to die.”
Hermine looked tenderly in my eyes with that dark look that could so
suddenly come into her face. Lovely, fearful eyes! Picking her words
one by one and piecing them together, and speaking slowly and so low
that it was an effort to hear her, she said:
“I want to tell you something to-day, something that I have known for
a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it
to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about
you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker,
a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and
eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life
has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has
your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair
that have overtaken you, till you were up to the neck in them. And all
that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all
the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of
no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found
no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true,
Harry? Is that your fate?”