At this moment Pablo appeared in the doorway and beamed on us out of
his jolly eyes that really were animal’s eyes except that animal’s
eyes are always serious, while his always laughed, and this laughter
turned them into human eyes. He beckoned to us with his usual friendly
cordiality. He had put on a gorgeous silk smoking-jacket. His limp
collar and tired white face had a withered and pallid look above its
red facings; but the impression was erased by his radiant black eyes.
So was reality erased, for they too had the witchery.
We joined him when he beckoned and in the doorway he said to me in a
low voice: “Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For
madmen only, and one price only--your mind. Are you ready?”
Again I nodded.
The dear fellow gave us each an arm with kind solicitude, Hermine his
right, me his left, and conducted us upstairs to a small round room
that was lit from the ceiling with a bluish light and nearly empty.
There was nothing in it but a small round table and three easy chairs
in which we sat ourselves.
Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No,
I was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in
a stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme.
Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it
not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it
not, too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a
lost and frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermine’s grey ones?
Pablo looked at us good-naturedly as ever and with something
ceremonious in his friendliness; and he talked much and long. He whom
I had never heard say two consecutive sentences, whom no discussion
nor thesis could interest, whom I had scarcely credited with a single
thought, discoursed now in his good-natured warm voice fluently and
without a fault.
“My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long
wished for and of which he has long dreamed. The hour is a little late
and no doubt we are all slightly fatigued. So, first, we will rest and
refresh ourselves a little.”
From a recess in the wall he took three glasses and a quaint little
bottle, also a small oriental box inlaid with differently coloured
woods. He filled the three glasses from the bottle and taking three
long thin yellow cigarettes from the box and a box of matches from the
pocket of his silk jacket he gave us a light. And now we all slowly
smoked the cigarettes whose smoke was as thick as incense, leaning back
in our chairs and slowly sipping the aromatic liquid whose strange
taste was so utterly unfamiliar. Its effect was immeasurably enlivening
and delightful--as though one were filled with gas and had no longer
any gravity. Thus we sat peacefully exhaling small puffs and taking
little sips at our glasses, while every moment we felt ourselves
growing lighter and more serene.
From far away came Pablo’s warm voice.
“It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have the privilege of being
your host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely
weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You
have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate
to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of
course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own
soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for
which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being
within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture-gallery but your
own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key.
I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.”
Again he put his hand into the pocket of his gorgeous jacket and drew
out a round looking-glass.
“Look, it is thus that you have so far seen yourself.”
He held the little glass before my eyes (a childish verse came to my
mind: “Little glass, little glass in the hand”) and I saw, though
indistinctly and cloudily, the reflection of an uneasy self-tormented,
inwardly labouring and seething being--myself, Harry Haller. And within
him again I saw the Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with
frightened eyes that smouldered now with anger, now with sadness. This
shape of a wolf coursed through the other in ceaseless movement, as
a tributary pours its cloudy turmoil into a river. In bitter strife,
each tried to devour the other so that his shape might prevail. How
unutterably sad was the look this fluid inchoate figure of the wolf
threw from his beautiful shy eyes.
“There you see yourself,” Pablo remarked and put the mirror away in his
pocket. I was thankful to close my eyes and take a sip of the elixir.
“And now,” said Pablo, “we have had our rest. We have had our
refreshment and a little talk. If your fatigue has passed off I will
conduct you to my peep-show and show you my little theatre. Will you
come?”
We got up. With a smile Pablo led. He opened a door, and drew a curtain
aside and we found ourselves in the horseshoe-shaped corridor of a
theatre, and exactly in the middle. On either side, the curving passage
led past a large number, indeed an incredible number, of narrow doors
into the boxes.
“This,” explained Pablo, “is our theatre, and a jolly one it is. I hope
you’ll find lots to laugh at.” He laughed aloud as he spoke, a short
laugh, but it went through me like a shot. It was the same bright and
peculiar laugh that I had heard before from below.
“This little theatre of mine has as many doors into as many boxes
as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door
exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures,
my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through
it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what
you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed
long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or
however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means
simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is
the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter the theatre as you
are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry and the old
spectacles of the Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to lay these
spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed
personality here in the cloak-room where you will find it again when
you wish. The pleasant dance from which you have just come, the
treatise on the Steppenwolf, and the little stimulant that we have only
this moment partaken of may have sufficiently prepared you. You, Harry,
after having left behind your valuable personality, will have the left
side of the theatre at your disposal, Hermine the right. Once inside,
you can meet each other as you please. Hermine will be so kind as to
go for a moment behind the curtain. I should like to introduce Harry
first.”
Hermine disappeared to the right past a gigantic mirror that covered
the rear wall from floor to vaulted ceiling.
“Now, Harry, come along be as jolly as you can. To make it so and to
teach you to laugh is the whole aim in getting up this entertainment--I
hope you will make it easy for me. You feel quite well, I trust? Not
afraid? That’s good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with
unfeigned pleasure, enter our visionary world. You will introduce
yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide, since this is the
custom.”
He took out the pocket-mirror again and held it in front of my face.
Again I was confronted by the same indistinct and cloudy reflection,
with the wolf’s shape encircling it and coursing through it. I knew it
too well and disliked it too sincerely for its destruction to cause me
any sorrow.
“You will now extinguish this superfluous reflection, my dear friend.
That is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet
it, if your mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school
of humour. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humour begins when a
man ceases to take himself seriously.”
I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the
wolf were going through their convulsions. For a moment there was
a convulsion deep within me too, a faint but painful one like
remembrance, or like homesickness, or like remorse. Then the slight
oppression gave way to a new feeling like that a man feels when a tooth
has been extracted with cocaine, a sense of relief and of letting out a
deep breath, and of wonder, at the same time, that it has not hurt in
the least. And this feeling was accompanied by a buoyant exhilaration
and a desire to laugh so irresistible that I was compelled to give way
to it.
The mournful image in the glass gave a final convulsion and vanished.
The glass itself turned grey and charred and opaque, as though it had
been burnt. With a laugh Pablo threw the thing away and it went rolling
down the endless corridor and disappeared.
“Well laughed, Harry,” cried Pablo. “You will learn to laugh like the
immortals yet. You have done with the Steppenwolf at last. It’s no good
with a razor. Take care that he stays dead. You’ll be able to leave
the farce of reality behind you directly. At our next meeting we’ll
drink brotherhood, dear fellow. I never liked you better than I do
to-day. And if you still think it worth your while we can philosophise
together and argue and talk about music and Mozart and Gluck and Plato
and Goethe to your heart’s content. You will understand now why it was
so impossible before. I wish you good riddance of the Steppenwolf for
to-day at any rate. For naturally, your suicide is not a final one.
We are in a magic theatre; a world of pictures, not realities. See
that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that you really
are not in love with your highly questionable personality any longer.
Should you still, however, have a hankering after it, you need only
have another look in the mirror that I will now show you. But you know
the old proverb: ‘A mirror in the hand is worth two on the wall?’ Ha!
ha!” (again that laugh, beautiful and frightful!) “And now there only
remains one little ceremony and quite a jolly one. You have now to cast
aside the spectacles of your personality. So come here and look in a
proper looking-glass. It will give you some fun.”
Laughingly with a few droll caresses he turned me about so that I faced
the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself.
I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked
unusually good-humoured, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely
had time to recognise myself before the reflection fell to pieces.
A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till
the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or bits of
him, each of which I saw only for the instant of recognition. Some
of these multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some
very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys,
scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap
frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy
and comic, well dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long
haired, and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash,
recognised and gone. They sprang from each other in all directions,
left and right and into the recesses of the mirror and clean out of
it. One, an elegant young fellow, leapt laughing into Pablo’s arms
and embraced him and they went off together. And one who particularly
pleased me, a good looking and charming boy of sixteen or seventeen
years, sprang like lightning into the corridor and began reading the
notices on the doors. I went after him and found him in front of a door
on which was inscribed:
ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT
The dear boy hurled himself forward, made a leap and, falling head
first into the slot himself, disappeared behind the door.
Pablo too had vanished. So apparently had the mirror and with it all
the countless figures. I realised that I was now left to myself and to
the theatre, and I went with curiosity from door to door and read on
each its alluring invitation.