“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you
were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became
aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of
you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to
play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content
with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And
whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful,
and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and
a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I
was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect
much of myself and do great things. I could have played a great part.
I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary,
the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed
me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has
been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I
was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life,
thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my
beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and
wrong-headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes
and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this
so-called life and at my neighbours and acquaintances, fifty or so
of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew that my
dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been.
It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right that a
woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty
and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker,
or to marry such a man for his money’s sake, or to become some kind
of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and
despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was
more material and moral and with you more spiritual--but it was the
same road. Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox-trot,
your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz music
and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of
politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible
antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one
that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays
think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they
hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a
thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too
exacting and hungry for this simple, easy-going and easily contented
world of to-day. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live
and enjoy his life to-day must not be like you and me. Whoever wants
music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold,
creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no
home in this trivial world of ours--”
She looked down and fell into meditation.
“Hermine,” I cried tenderly, “sister, how clearly you see! And yet you
taught me the fox-trot! But how do you mean that people like us with a
dimension too many cannot live here? What brings it about? Is it only
so in our days, or was it so always?”
“I don’t know. For the honour of the world, I will suppose it to be
in our time only--a disease, a momentary misfortune. Our leaders
strain every nerve, and with success, to get the next war going, while
the rest of us, meanwhile, dance the fox-trot, earn money and eat
pralinées--in such a time the world must indeed cut a poor figure. Let
us hope that other times were better, and will be better again, richer,
broader and deeper. But that is no help to us now. And perhaps it has
always been the same--”
“Always as it is to-day? Always a world only for politicians,
profiteers, waiters and pleasure-seekers, and not a breath of air for
men?”
“Well, I don’t know. Nobody knows. Anyway, it is all the same. But I am
thinking now of your favourite of whom you have talked to me sometimes,
and read me, too, some of his letters, of Mozart. How was it with him
in his day? Who controlled things in his times and ruled the roost and
gave the tone and counted for something? Was it Mozart or the business
people, Mozart or the average man? And in what fashion did he come to
die and be buried? And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the same
and always will be, and what is called history at school, and all we
learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine
emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters
for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of
years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world,
money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To
the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yes, eternity.”
“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”
“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that
all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the
schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious
call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much
and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if
there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if
there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom
of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your
great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and
suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of
every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity
just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it
or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity.”
“You are right.”
“The pious,” she went on meditatively, “after all know most about this.
That is why they set up the saints and what they call the communion
of the saints. The saints, that is to say, the true men, the younger
brothers of the Saviour. We are with them all our lives long in every
good deed, in every brave thought, in every love. The communion of the
saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven,
shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what
I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the kingdom on
the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is
our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason,
Steppenwolf, we long for death. There you will find your Goethe again
and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher, Philip of Neri
and all. There are many saints who at first were sinners. Even sin
can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice. You will laugh at me, but
I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding.
Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before
we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our
home-sickness.”
With the last words her voice had sunk again and now there was a
stillness of peace in the room. The sun was setting; it lit up the gilt
lettering on the back of my books. I took Hermine’s head in my hands
and kissed her on the forehead and leant my cheek to hers as though she
were my sister, and so we stayed for a moment. And so I should have
liked best to stay and to have gone out no more that day. But Maria had
promised me this night, the last before the great Ball.
But on my way to join Maria I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine
had said. It seemed to me that it was not, perhaps, her own thoughts
but mine. She had read them like a clairvoyant, breathed them in and
given them back, so that they had a form of their own and came to me as
something new. I was particularly thankful to her for having expressed
the thought of eternity just at this time. I needed it, for without
it I could not live and neither could I die. The sacred sense of
beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the
substance of which was divine had been given back to me to-day by this
friend of mine who taught me dancing.
I was forced to recall my dream of Goethe and that vision of the old
wiseacre when he laughed so inhumanly and played his joke on me in the
fashion of the immortals. For the first time I understood Goethe’s
laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an
object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left
over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices,
mistakes, passions and misunderstandings of men and got through to
eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than
the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to say, and its
transformation again into space.
I went to meet Maria at the place where we usually dined. However, she
had not arrived, and while I sat waiting at the table in the quiet
and secluded restaurant, my thoughts still ran on the conversation
I had had with Hermine. All these thoughts that had arisen between
her and me seemed so intimate and well known, fashioned from a
mythology and an imagery so entirely my own. The immortals, living
their life in timeless space, enraptured, re-fashioned and immersed
in a crystalline eternity like ether, and the cool starry brightness
and radiant serenity of this world outside the earth--whence was
all this so intimately known? As I reflected, passages of Mozart’s
_Cassations_, of Bach’s _Well-tempered Clavier_ came to my
mind and it seemed to me that all through this music there was the
radiance of this cool starry brightness and the quivering of this
clearness of ether. Yes, it was there. In this music there was a
feeling as of time frozen into space, and above it there quivered a
never-ending and superhuman serenity, an eternal, divine laughter.
Yes, and how well the aged Goethe of my dreams fitted in too! And
suddenly I heard this fathomless laughter around me. I heard the
immortals laughing. I sat entranced. Entranced, I felt for a pencil in
my waistcoat pocket, and looking for paper saw the wine card lying on
the table. I turned it over and wrote on the back. I wrote verses and
forgot about them till one day I discovered them in my pocket. They ran: