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Title: Steppenwolf

Author: Hermann Hesse

Translator: Basil Creighton

Release date: March 30, 2025 [eBook #75756]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPPENWOLF ***





                              STEPPENWOLF

                                  BY
                             HERMANN HESSE

                      TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
                                  BY
                            BASIL CREIGHTON

                            [Illustration]

                               NEW YORK
                        HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




                           COPYRIGHT, 1929,
                                  BY
                     HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC.


                            PRINTED IN THE
                       UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                PREFACE


This book contains the records left us by a man whom, according to
the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf.
Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to
question. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages to those of
the Steppenwolf in which I try to record my recollections of him. What
I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins
I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has
remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.

Some years ago the Steppenwolf, who was then approaching fifty, called
on my aunt to inquire for a furnished room. He took the attic room on
the top floor and the bedroom next it, returned a day or two later with
two trunks and a big case of books and stayed nine or ten months with
us. He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the fact that our
bedrooms were next door to each other--which occasioned a good many
chance encounters on the stairs and in the passage--we should have
remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man.
Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced
in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the
Steppes, a strange, wild, shy--very shy--being from another world
than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on
account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted
this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read
the records he left behind him. Yet, before that, from our occasional
talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I
found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement
with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had
given me.

By chance I was there at the very moment when the Steppenwolf entered
our house for the first time and became my aunt’s lodger. He came at
noon. The table had not been cleared and I still had half an hour
before going back to the office. I have never forgotten the odd and
very conflicting impressions he made on me at this first encounter. He
came through the glazed door, having just rung the bell and my aunt
asked him in the dim light of the hall what he wanted. The Steppenwolf,
however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed
around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his
name.

“Oh, it smells good here,” he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt
smiled too. For my part, I found this manner of introducing himself
ridiculous and was not favourably impressed.

“However,” said he, “I’ve come about the room you have to let.”

I did not get a good look at him until we were all three on our way up
to the top floor. Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man.
He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well,
though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed
here and there a streak of grey. He carried himself in a way I did not
at all like at first. There was something weary and undecided about it
that did not go with his keen and striking profile nor with the tone of
his voice. Later, I found out that his health was poor and that walking
tired him. With a peculiar smile--at that time equally unpleasant to
me--he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall
old cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please and at the
same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having
come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps. He found it
all very charming and a little odd. I cannot deny that he was polite,
even friendly. He agreed at once and without objection to the terms
for lodging and breakfast and so forth, and yet about the whole man
there was a foreign and, as I chose to think, disagreeable or hostile
atmosphere. He took the room and the bedroom too, listened attentively
and amiably to all he was told about the heating, the water, the
service and the rules of the household, agreed to everything, offered
at once to pay a sum in advance--and yet he seemed at the same time
to be outside it all, to find it comic to be doing as he did and not
to take it seriously. It was as though it were a very odd and new
experience for him, occupied as he was with quite other concerns, to
be renting a room and talking to people in German. Such more or less
was my impression and it would certainly not have been a good one if
it had not been revised and corrected by many small instances. Above
all, his face pleased me from the first, in spite of the foreign air it
had. It was a rather original face and perhaps a sad one, but alert,
thoughtful, strongly marked and highly intellectual. And then, to
reconcile me further, there was his polite and friendly manner, which
though it seemed to cost him some pains, was all the same quite without
pretention; on the contrary, there was something almost touching,
imploring in it. The explanation of it I found later, but it disposed
me at once in his favour.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before we had done inspecting the rooms and going into the
arrangements, my luncheon hour was up and I had to go back to business.
I took my leave and left him to my aunt. When I got back at night,
she told me that he had taken the rooms and was coming in in a day or
two. The only request he had made was that his arrival should not be
notified to the police, as in his poor state of health he found these
formalities and the standing about in official waiting-rooms more than
he could tolerate. I remember very well how this surprised me and how
I warned my aunt against giving in to his stipulation. This fear of
the police seemed to me to agree only too well with the mysterious and
alien air the man had and struck me as suspicious. I explained to my
aunt that she ought not on any account to put herself in this equivocal
and in any case rather peculiar position for a complete stranger; it
might well turn out to have very unpleasant consequences for her. But
it then came out that my aunt had already granted his request, and,
indeed, had let herself be altogether captivated and charmed by the
strange gentleman. For she never took a lodger with whom she did not
contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or,
rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this
weakness of hers. And thus for the first weeks things went on; I had
many a fault to find with the new lodger, while my aunt every time
warmly took his part.

As I was not at all pleased about this business of neglecting to notify
the police, I wanted at least to know what my aunt had learnt about
him; what sort of family he came of and what his intentions were. And,
of course, she had learnt one thing and another, although he had only
stayed a short while after I left at noon. He had told her that he
thought of spending some months in our town to avail himself of the
libraries and to see its antiquities. I may say it did not please my
aunt that he was only taking the rooms for so short a time, but he had
clearly quite won her heart in spite of his rather peculiar way of
presenting himself. In short, the rooms were let and my objections came
too late.

“Why on earth did he say that it smelt so good here?” I asked.

“I know well enough,” she replied, with her usual insight. “There’s
a smell of cleanliness and good order here, of comfort and
respectability. It was that that pleased him. He looks as if he weren’t
used to that of late and missed it.”

Just so, thought I to myself.

“But,” I said aloud, “if he isn’t used to an orderly and respectable
life, what is going to happen? What will you say if he has filthy
habits and makes dirt everywhere, or comes home drunk at all hours of
the night?”

“We shall see, we shall see,” she said, and laughed; and I left it at
that.

And in the upshot my fears proved groundless. The lodger, though he
certainly did not live a very orderly or rational life, was no worry or
trouble to us. Yet my aunt and I bothered our heads a lot about him,
and I confess I have not by a long way done with him even now. I often
dream of him at night, and the mere existence of such a man, much as I
got to like him, has had a thoroughly disturbing and disquieting effect
on me.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two days after this the stranger’s luggage--his name was Harry
Haller--was brought in by a porter. He had a very fine leather trunk,
which made a good impression on me, and a big flat cabin-trunk that
showed signs of having travelled far--at least it was plastered with
labels of hotels and travel agencies of various countries, some
overseas.

Then he himself appeared, and the time began during which I gradually
got acquainted with this strange man. At first I did nothing on my side
to encourage it. Although Haller interested me from the moment I saw
him I took no steps for the first two or three weeks to run across him
or to get into conversation with him. On the other hand I confess that
I did, all the same and from the very first, keep him under observation
a little and also went into his room now and again when he was out and
my curiosity drove me to do a little spy-work.

I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf’s outward
appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a
significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was
intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his
features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate
sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case,
dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that
came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his
spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters
of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of
thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who
have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down,
or to appear always in the right.

I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I
can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I
mean. It was when a celebrated historian and art critic, a man of
European fame, had announced a lecture in the Aula. I had succeeded
in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had
little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other.
When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many
of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed
by his rather spruce and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by
way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience,
thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf
threw me a quick look, a look which criticised both the words and
the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke
volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticise that lecturer,
annihilating the celebrated man with its crushing yet delicate irony.
That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed
utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly
of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual
with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer
and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude
of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture
was announced--no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch,
its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the
whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated
intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below
the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our
culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke
eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one
who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: “See
what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!” and at once all renown, all
intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards
the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a
monkey’s trick!

With this I have gone far ahead and, contrary to my actual plan and
intention, already conveyed what Haller essentially meant to me;
whereas my original aim was to uncover his picture by degrees while
telling the course of my gradual acquaintance with him.

Now that I have gone so far ahead it will save time to say a little
more about Haller’s puzzling “strangeness” and to tell in detail how I
gradually guessed and became aware of the causes and meaning of this
strangeness, this extraordinary and frightful loneliness. It will be
better so, for I wish to leave my own personality as far as possible in
the background. I do not want to put down my own confessions, to tell a
story or to write an essay on psychology, but simply as an eye-witness
to contribute something to the picture of the peculiar individual who
left this Steppenwolf manuscript behind him.

At the very first sight of him, when he came into my aunt’s home,
craning his head like a bird and praising the smell of the house, I was
at once astonished by something curious about him; and my first natural
reaction was repugnance. I suspected (and my aunt, who unlike me is the
very reverse of an intellectual person, suspected very much the same
thing)--I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in
some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him
with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time
replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so
long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In
course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction
was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of
gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller
was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings
of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a
boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that
the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for
however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in
his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and
foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he
hated and despised.

And here I cannot refrain from a psychological observation. Although I
know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good
reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very
pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine, that makes
the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.
But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break
the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud
and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only
in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent
and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth
of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose
upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could
command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr.
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic
and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no
harm, for the love of his neighbour was as deeply in him as the hatred
of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s
neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate
is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds
the same cruel isolation and despair.

It is now time, however, to put my own thoughts aside and to get
to facts. What I first discovered about Haller, partly through my
espionage, partly from my aunt’s remarks, concerned his way of living.
It was soon obvious that his days were spent with his thoughts and
his books, and that he pursued no practical calling. He lay always
very late in bed. Often he was not up much before noon and went
across from his bedroom to his sitting-room in his dressing-gown.
This sitting-room, a large and comfortable attic room with two
windows, after a few days was not at all the same as when occupied
by other tenants. It filled up; and as time went on it was always
fuller. Pictures were hung on the walls, drawings tacked up--sometimes
illustrations cut out from magazines and often changed. A southern
landscape, photographs of a little German country town, apparently
Haller’s home, hung there, and between them were some brightly painted
water-colours, which, as we discovered later, he had painted himself.
Then there were photographs of a pretty young woman, or--rather--girl.
For a long while a Siamese Buddha hung on the wall, to be replaced
first by Michelangelo’s “Night,” then by a portrait of the Mahatma
Gandhi. Books filled the large book-case and lay everywhere else as
well, on the table, on the pretty old bureau, on the sofa, on the
chairs and all about on the floor, books with notes slipped into them
which were continually changing. The books constantly increased, for
besides bringing whole armfuls back with him from the libraries he
was always getting parcels of them by post. The occupant of this room
might well be a learned man; and to this the all-pervading smell of
cigar-smoke might testify as well as the stumps and ash of cigars all
about the room. A great part of the books, however, were not books
of learning. The majority were works of the poets of all times and
peoples. For a long while there lay about on the sofa where he often
spent whole days all six volumes of a work with the title _Sophia’s
Journey from Memel to Saxony_--a work of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean
Paul showed signs of wear, also Novalis, while Lessing, Jacobi and
Lichtenberg were in the same condition. A few volumes of Dostoievski
bristled with pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and
papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box,
generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave
nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle
usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little
shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of Burgundy as well
as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly
emptied in a very brief space--after which it disappeared in a corner
of the room, there to collect the dust without further diminution of
its contents. I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried
on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of
intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the
same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a
middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality;
I am also an abstainer and non-smoker, and these bottles in Haller’s
room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.

He was just as irregular and irresponsible about his meal times as he
was about his hours of sleep and work. There were days when he did not
go out at all and had nothing but his coffee in the morning. Sometimes
my aunt found nothing but a banana peel to show that he had dined.
Other days, however, he took his meals in restaurants, sometimes in the
best and most fashionable, sometimes in little out-lying taverns. His
health did not seem good. Besides his limping gait that often made the
stairs fatiguing to him, he seemed to be plagued with other troubles
and he once said to me that it was years since he had had either a
good digestion or sound sleep. I put it down first and last to his
drinking. When, later on, I accompanied him sometimes to his haunts
I often saw with my own eyes how he drank when the mood was on him,
though neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk.

I have never forgotten our first encounter. We knew each other then
only as fellow-lodgers whose rooms were adjoining ones. Then one
evening I came home from business and to my astonishment found Haller
seated on the landing between the first and second floors. He was
sitting on the top step and he moved to one side to let me pass. I
asked him if he was all right and offered to take him up to the top.

Haller looked at me and I could see that I had awoken him from a kind
of trance. Slowly he began to smile his delightful sad smile that has
so often filled my heart with pity. Then he invited me to sit beside
him. I thanked him, but said it was not my custom to sit on the stairs
at other people’s doors.

“Ah, yes,” he said, and smiled the more. “You’re quite right. But wait
a moment, for I really must tell you what it was made me sit here for a
bit.”

He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where
a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the
stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall
cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of
the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an
araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked
very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had
often noticed with pleasure.

“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria
and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a
moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and
extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s
so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably
clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath
of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is
here--the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine
blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of
superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done
and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind
that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless
mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s
little habits and tasks.”

“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing
in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the
world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in
another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a
house with araucarias. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still
I’m the son of a mother and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife
and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and
neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me
by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so here I sat me
down then and there; and I look into this quiet little garden of order
and rejoice that such things still are.”

He wanted to get up, but found it difficult; and he did not repulse me
when I offered him a little help. I was silent, but I submitted just
as my aunt had done before me to a certain charm the strange man could
sometimes exercise. We went slowly up the stairs together, and at his
door, the key in his hand, he looked me once more in the eyes in a
friendly way and said: “You’ve come from business? Well, of course,
I know little of all that. I live a bit to one side, on the edge of
things, you see. But you too, I believe, interest yourself in books and
such matters. Your aunt told me one day that you had been through the
Gymnasium and were a good Greek scholar. Now, this morning I came on a
passage in Novalis. May I show it you? It would delight you, I know.”

He took me into his room, which smelt strongly of tobacco, and took
out a book from one of the heaps, turned the leaves and looked for the
passage.

“This is good too, very good,” he said, “listen to this: ‘A man
should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high
estate.’ Fine! Eighty years before Nietzsche. But that is not the
sentence I meant. Wait a moment, here I have it. This: ‘Most men will
not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they
won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And
naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought.
Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business,
he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water
all the same, and one day he will drown.”

He had got hold of me now. I was interested; and I stayed on a short
while with him; and after that we often talked when we met on the
stairs or in the street. On such occasions I always had at first the
feeling that he was being ironical with me. But it was not so. He had
a real respect for me, just as he had for the araucaria. He was so
convinced and conscious of his isolation, his swimming in the water,
his uprootedness, that a glimpse now and then of the orderly daily
round--the punctuality, for example, that kept me to my office hours,
or an expression let fall by a servant or tramway-conductor--acted on
him literally as a stimulus without in the least arousing his scorn. At
first all this seemed to me a ridiculous exaggeration, the affectation
of a gentleman of leisure, a playful sentimentality. But I came to
see more and more that from the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness
he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as
something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever
remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them. He
took off his hat to our charwoman, a worthy person, every time he met
her, with genuine respect; and when my aunt had any little occasion to
talk to him, to draw his attention, it might be, to some mending of his
linen or to warn him of a button hanging loose on his coat, he listened
to her with an air of great attention and consequence, as though it
were only with an extreme and desperate effort that he could force his
way through any crack into our little peaceful world and be at home
there if only for an hour.

During that very first conversation, about the araucaria, he called
himself the Steppenwolf, and this too estranged and disturbed me a
little. What an expression! However, custom did not only reconcile me
to it, but soon I never thought of him by any other name; nor could I
to-day hit on a better description of him. A wolf of the Steppes that
had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd,
a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his
savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.

I was able once to observe him for a whole evening. It was at a
Symphony concert, where to my surprise I found him seated near me. He
did not see me. First some Handel was played, noble and lovely music.
But the Steppenwolf sat absorbed in his own thoughts, detached alike
from the music and his surroundings. Unheeding and alone, he sat with
downcast eyes, and a cold but sorrowful expression. After the Handel
came a little Symphony of Friedman Bach and after a few notes I was
astonished to see him begin to smile and give himself up to the music.
He was abstracted--but happily so--and lost in such pleasant dreams,
that for at least ten minutes I paid more attention to him than to the
music. When the piece ended he woke up, and made a movement to go;
but after all he kept his seat and heard the last piece too. It was
_Variations_ by Reger, a composition that many found rather long
and tiresome. The Steppenwolf, too, who at first made up his mind to
listen, wandered again, put his hands into his pockets and sank once
more into his own thoughts, not happily and dreamily as before, but
sadly and finally irritated. His face was once more vacant and grey.
The light in it was quenched and he looked old, ill and discontented.

I saw him again after the concert in the street and walked along behind
him. Wrapped in his cloak he went his way joylessly and wearily in the
direction of our quarter, but stopped in front of a small old-fashioned
inn, and after looking irresolutely at the time, went in. I obeyed a
momentary impulse and followed him; and there he sat at a table in the
backroom of the bar, greeted by hostess and waitress as a well-known
guest. Greeting him, too, I took my seat beside him. We sat there for
an hour, and while I drank two glasses of mineral water, he accounted
for a pint of red wine and then called for another half. I remarked
that I had been to the concert, but he did not follow up this topic. He
read the label on my bottle and asked whether I would not drink some
wine. When I declined his offer and said that I never drank it, the old
helpless expression came over his face.

“You’re quite right there,” he said. “I have practised abstinence
myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find
myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid
constellation.”

And then, when I playfully took up his allusion and remarked how
unlikely it seemed to me that he really believed in astrology, he
promptly resumed the too polite tone which often hurt me and said: “You
are right. Unfortunately, I cannot believe in that science either.”

I took my leave and went. It was very late before he came in, but his
step was as usual, and as always, instead of going straight to bed, he
stayed up an hour longer in his sitting-room, as I from my neighbouring
room could hear plainly enough.

There was another evening which I have not forgotten. My aunt was out
and I was alone in the house, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door
and there stood a young and very pretty woman, whom, as soon as she
asked for Mr. Haller, I recognised from the photograph in his room.
I showed her his door and withdrew. She stayed a short while above,
but soon I heard them both come down stairs and go out, talking and
laughing together very happily. I was much astonished that the hermit
had his love, and one so young and pretty and elegant; and all my
conjectures about him and his life were upset once more. But before an
hour had gone he came back alone and dragged himself wearily upstairs
with his sad and heavy tread. For hours together he paced softly to and
fro in his sitting-room, exactly like a wolf in its cage. The whole
night till close on morning there was light in his room. I know nothing
at all about this occasion, and have only this to add. On one other
occasion I saw him in this lady’s company. It was in one of the streets
of the town. They were arm in arm and he looked very happy; and again I
wondered to see how much charm--what an even child-like expression--his
care-ridden face had sometimes. It explained the young lady to me,
also the predilection my aunt had for him. That day, too, however, he
came back in the evening, sad and wretched as usual. I met him at the
door and under his cloak, as many a time before, he had the bottle of
Italian wine, and he sat with it half the night in his hell upstairs.
It grieved me. What a comfortless, what a forlorn and shiftless life he
led!

And now I have gossiped enough. No more is needed to show that the
Steppenwolf lived a suicidal existence. But all the same I do not
believe that he took his own life when, after paying all he owed but
without a word of warning or farewell, he left our town one day and
vanished. We have not heard from him since and we are still keeping
some letters that came for him after he had left. He left nothing
behind but his manuscript. It was written during the time he was here,
and he left it with a few lines to say that I might do what I liked
with it.

It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related
in Haller’s manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most
part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention.
They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has
attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.
The partly fantastic occurrences in Haller’s fiction come presumably
from the later period of his stay here, and I have no doubt that even
they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time our guest did in
fact alter very much in behaviour and in appearance. He was out a great
deal, for whole nights sometimes; and his books lay untouched. On the
rare occasions when I saw him at that time I was very much struck by
his air of vivacity and youth. Sometimes, indeed, he seemed positively
happy. This does not mean that a new and heavy depression did not
follow immediately. All day long he lay in bed. He had no desire for
food. At that time the young lady appeared once more on the scene, and
an extremely violent, I may even say brutal, quarrel occurred which
upset the whole house and for which Haller begged my aunt’s pardon for
days after.

No, I am sure he has not taken his life. He is still alive, and
somewhere wearily goes up and down the stairs of strange houses,
stares somewhere at clean-scoured parquet floors and carefully tended
araucarias, sits for days in libraries and nights in taverns, or lying
on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum
of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not
killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to
drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it
is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made
life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy
in me. Oh, on the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a
narrow, middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so
we can think of him peacefully and affectionately, my aunt and I. She
would have more to say of him than I have, but that lies buried in her
good heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now that we come to these records of Haller’s, these partly
diseased, partly beautiful and thoughtful fantasies, I must confess
that if they had fallen into my hands by chance and if I had not
known their author, I should most certainly have thrown them away in
disgust. But owing to my acquaintance with Haller I have been able,
to some extent, to understand them, and even to appreciate them. I
should hesitate to share them with others if I saw in them nothing but
the pathological fancies of a single and isolated case of a diseased
temperament. But I see something more in them. I see them as a document
of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not
the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times
themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs,
a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless
only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and
richest in gifts.

These records, however much or however little of real life may lie at
the back of them, are not an attempt to disguise or to palliate this
widespread sickness of our times. They are an attempt to present the
sickness itself in its actual manifestation. They mean, literally, a
journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey
through the chaos of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey
undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to
the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full.

It was some remembered conversation with Haller that gave me the key
to this interpretation. He said to me once when we were talking of
the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: “These horrors were really
non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of
our present day life as something far more than horrible, far more than
barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its
own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and
ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up
patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering,
to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man
of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate
miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now
there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between
two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all
power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no
simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally
strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills
more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and
misunderstood, thousands suffer to-day.”

I often had to think of these words while reading the records. Haller
belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside
of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate
it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch
of a personal torture, a personal hell.

There, as it seems to me, lies the meaning these records can have for
us, and because of this I decided to publish them. For the rest, I
neither approve nor condemn them. Let every reader do as his conscience
bids him.




HARRY HALLER’S RECORDS




“FOR MADMEN ONLY”


The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance
with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or
two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours,
as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the
pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its
kindly warmth. Three times the post had come with undesired letters and
circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found
it convenient to-day to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an
hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns pencilled
against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the
old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all,
it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a
day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one
of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the
moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days
of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without
special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days which
put the question quietly of their own accord whether the time has
not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal
accident while shaving.

He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or
those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a
spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture,
or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when,
on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the
world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying,
vulgar, brazen glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of
an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focussed to the last pitch
of the intolerable upon your own sick self--he who has known these
days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like
to-day. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure
yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and
no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no peculiarly
disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance.
Thankfully you tune the strings of your mouldering lyre to a moderated,
to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving
and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly muzzy half-and-half
god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom
and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half
god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm
look as like each other as two peas.

There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these
bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is
audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is
that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short
time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation
I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that
cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain
and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these
so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul
that I smash my mouldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the
slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn
in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong
emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless,
flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something,
a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to
pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious
schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one
or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For
what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this
contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved
optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of
mediocrity.

It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and
very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming
a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle.
Instead I put on my shoes ill-humouredly, discontented and disgusted
with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy
streets to drink what men according to an old convention call “a glass
of wine,” at the sign of the Steel Helmet.

In this plight then, I went down the steep stairs from my attic-cell
among strangers, those smug and well-brushed stairs of a three-storey
house, let as three flats to highly respectable families. I don’t know
how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the
hater of life’s petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just
such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither
in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and
deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle
class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is
a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love
of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood,
and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though
with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I
like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly
disorderly existence and this middle-class family-life. I like to
breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness
and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me
in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the
threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead,
cigar-ash and wine-bottles among the heaped-up books and there is
nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books,
manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely
men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new
orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.

And now I came to the araucaria. I must tell you that on the first
floor of this house the stairs pass by a little vestibule at the
entrance to a flat which, I am convinced, is even more spotlessly swept
and garnished than the others; for this little vestibule shines with a
super-human housewifery. It is a little temple of order. On the parquet
floor, where it seems desecration to tread, are two elegant stands and
on each a large pot. In the one grows an azalea. In the other a stately
araucaria, a thriving, straight-grown baby-tree, a perfect specimen,
which to the last needle of the topmost twig reflects the pride of
frequent ablutions. Sometimes, when I know that I am unobserved, I use
this place as a temple. I take my seat on a step of the stairs above
the araucaria and, resting awhile with folded hands, I contemplate
this little garden of order and let the touching air it has and its
somewhat ridiculous loneliness move me to the depths of my soul. I
imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of
the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of
sound respectability--early rising, attention to duty, restrained but
cheerful family gatherings, Sunday church-going, early to bed.

Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow
streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the
chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground.
The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the
dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed
their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I
strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless
winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and
full of poetry which later I wrote down by candle-light sitting on
the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and
would never be filled again. Was that a matter for regret? No, I did
not regret the past. My regret was for the present day, for all the
countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought
me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening. But, thank God, there
were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that
brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back
again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and
yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences.
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of
the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped
through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped
all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted
all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very
long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at
night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it
now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading
my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was
blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks
as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in
verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to
think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished;
and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old
brittle husk. Once it came to me while reading a poet, while pondering
a thought of Descartes, of Pascal; again it shone out and drove its
gold track far into the sky while I was in the presence of my beloved.
Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of
this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness,
with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I
fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one
of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for
long in either theatre or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper,
seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they
are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the
packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and
variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot
understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for
which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to
me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy
and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in
life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this
music of the cafés, these mass-enjoyments and these Americanised men
who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast
astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that
is strange and incomprehensible to him.

With these familiar thoughts I went along the wet street through one
of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side
there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed
with pleasure. Old and serene, it stood between a little church and an
old hospital and often during the day I let my eyes rest on its rough
surface. There were few such quiet and peaceful spaces in the centre
of the town where from every square foot some lawyer, or quack, or
doctor, or barber, or chiropodist shouted his name at you. This time,
too, the wall was peaceful, and serene and yet something was altered
in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic
arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether
this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. It
looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed portal
with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago onto
a sleepy convent yard, and did so still, even though the convent was
no longer there. Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not
noticed it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh and caught my eye for
that reason. I paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing
over, as the street between was so deep in mud and water. From the
sidewalk where I stood and looked across it seemed to me in the dim
light that a garland, or something gaily coloured, was festooned round
the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a
bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written.
I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went
across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on
the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing
and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more. So that’s
it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric
sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared
again for an instant; but they were hard to read even by guess work,
for they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly,
and then abruptly vanished. Whoever hoped for any result from a display
like that was not very smart. He was a Steppenwolf, poor fellow. Why
have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the
Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they
so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in
catching several words on end. They were:

                             MAGIC THEATRE
                       ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The
display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its
uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but
no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood
waiting in the mud, but in vain.

Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few coloured
letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front
of me. I read:

                            FOR MADMEN ONLY!

My feet were wet and I was chilled to the bone. Nevertheless, I stood
waiting. Nothing more. But while I waited, thinking how prettily the
letters had danced in their ghostly fashion over the damp wall and
the black sheen of the asphalt, a fragment of my former thoughts came
suddenly to my mind; the similarity to the track of shining gold which
suddenly vanishes and cannot be found.

I was freezing and walked on following that track in my dreams, longing
too for that doorway to an enchanted theatre, which was for madmen
only. Meanwhile I had reached the Market Place, where there is never a
lack of evening entertainments. At every other step were placards and
posters with their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété,
Cinema, Ball. But none of these were for me. They were for “everybody,”
for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. In spite
of that my sadness was a little lightened. I had had a greeting from
another world, and a few dancing, coloured letters had played upon my
soul and sounded its secret strings. A glimmer of the golden track had
been visible once again.

I sought out the little ancient tavern where nothing had altered since
my first visit to this town a good twenty-five years before. Even the
landlady was the same as then and many of the patrons who sat there in
those days sat there still at the same places before the same glasses.
There I took refuge. True, it was only a refuge, something like the
one on the stairs opposite the araucaria. Here, too, I found neither
home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where
strange people played strange parts. None the less, the quiet of the
place was worth something; no crowds, no music; only a few peaceful
townsfolk at bare wooden tables (no marble, no enamel, no plush, no
brass) and before each his evening glass of good old wine. Perhaps this
company of habitués, all of whom I knew by sight, were all regular
Philistines and had in their Philistine dwellings their altars of the
home dedicated to sheepish idols of contentment; perhaps, too, they
were solitary fellows who had been sidetracked, quiet, thoughtful
topers of bankrupt ideals, lone wolves and poor devils like me. I could
not say. Either homesickness or disappointment, or need of change drew
them there, the married to recover the atmosphere of his bachelor days,
the old official to recall his student years. All of them were silent,
and all were drinkers who would rather, like me, sit before a pint of
Elsasser than listen to a Ladies’ Orchestra. Here I cast anchor, for
an hour, or it might be two. With the first sip of Elsasser I realised
that I had eaten nothing that day since my morning roll.

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I
read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who
chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out
again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole
column of it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver
of a slaughtered calf. Odd indeed! The best was the Elsasser. I am
not fond, for every-day at least, of racy, heady wines that diffuse a
potent charm and have their own particular flavour. What I like the
best is a clean, light, modest country vintage of no special name. One
can carry plenty of it and it has the good and homely flavour of the
land, and of earth and sky and woods. A pint of Elsasser and a piece
of good bread is the best of all meals. By this time, however, I had
already eaten my portion of liver (an unusual indulgence for me, as I
seldom eat meat) and the second pint had been set before me. And this
too was odd: that somewhere in a green valley vines were tended by
good, strong fellows and the wine pressed so that here and there in the
world, far away, a few disappointed, quietly drinking townsfolk and
feckless Steppenwolves could sip a little heart and courage from their
glasses.

For me, at least, the charm worked. As I thought again of that
newspaper article and its jumble of words, a refreshing laughter rose
in me, and suddenly the forgotten melody of those notes of the piano
came back to me again. It soared aloft like a soap-bubble, reflecting
the whole world in miniature on its rainbow surface, and then softly
burst. Could I be altogether lost when that heavenly little melody had
been secretly rooted within me and now put forth its lovely bloom with
all its tender hues? I might be a beast astray, with no sense of its
environment, yet there was some meaning in my foolish life, something
in me gave an answer and was the receiver of those distant calls from
worlds far above. In my brain were stored a thousand pictures:

Giotto’s flock of angels from the blue vaulting of a little church in
Padua, and near them walked Hamlet and the garlanded Ophelia, fair
similitudes of all sadness and misunderstanding in the world, and
there stood Gianozzo, the aeronaut, in his burning balloon and blew a
blast on his horn, Attila carrying his new headgear in his hand, and
the Borobudur reared its soaring sculpture in the air. And though all
these figures lived in a thousand other hearts as well, there were ten
thousand more unknown pictures and tunes there which had no dwelling
place but in me, no eyes to see, no ears to hear them but mine. The
old hospital wall with its grey-green weathering, its cracks and
stains in which a thousand frescoes could be fancied, who responded
to it, who looked into its soul, who loved it, who found the charm of
its colours ever delicately dying away? The old books of the monks,
softly illumined with their miniatures, and the books of the German
poets of two hundred and a hundred years ago whom their own folk have
forgotten, all the thumbed and dampstained volumes, and the works in
print and manuscripts of the old composers, the stout and yellowing
music sheets dreaming their music through a winter sleep--who heard
their spirited, their roguish and yearning tones, who carried through
a world estranged from them a heart full of their spirit and their
charm? Who still remembered that slender cypress on a hill over Gubbio,
that though split and riven by a fall of stone yet held fast to life
and put forth with its last resources a new sparse tuft at top? Who
read by night above the Rhine the cloud-script of the drifting mists?
It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his life pursued
its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming
meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret
at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s
presence?

I held my hand over my glass when the landlady wanted to fill it once
more, and got up. I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed
and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an
hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the
need to suffer torment, fear or shame.

A cold wind was sifting the fine rain as I went out into the deserted
street. It drove the drops with a patter against the street-lamps where
they glimmered with a glassy sparkle. And now, whither? If I had had
a magic wand at this moment I should have conjured up a small and
charming Louis Seize music-room where a few musicians would have played
me two or three pieces of Handel and Mozart. I was in the very mood for
it, and would have sipped the cool and noble music as gods sip nectar.
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room,
dreaming by candle light and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How
I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing
the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music
we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! Once, in
years gone by, I had often known such happiness, but this too time had
taken away. Withered years lay between those days and now.

I loitered as I wended my way homeward; turned up my collar and struck
my stick on the wet pavement. However long I lingered outside I should
find myself all too soon in my top-floor room, my makeshift home,
which I could neither love nor do without; for the time had gone by
when I could spend a wet winter’s night in the open. And now my prayer
was not to let the good mood the evening had given me be spoilt,
neither by the rain, nor by gout, nor by the araucaria; and though
there was no chamber-music to be had nor a lonely friend with his
violin, still that lovely melody was in my head and I could play it
through to myself after a fashion, humming the rhythm of it as I drew
my breath. Reflecting thus, I walked on and on. Yes, even without the
chamber-music and the friend. How foolish to wear oneself out in vain
longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and
with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it
was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of
space in which the stars revolve.

From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively
jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment.
This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret
charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable
to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage
gaiety reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest
sensuality.

I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw
music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after
it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade
and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental
and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a
whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music
in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and
real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our
art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real
culture. And this music had the merit of a great sincerity. Amiably
and unblushingly negroid, it had the mood of childlike happiness.
There was something of the nigger in it, something of the American,
who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childlike to us
Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the way already?
Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be,
of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a pigheaded
minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom to-morrow would forget
or deride? Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we
called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only
a few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed
never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our
heads about never been anything but a phantom?

I was now in the old quarter of the town. The little church stood up
dim and grey and unreal. At once the experience of the evening came
back to me, the mysterious Gothic doorway, the mysterious tablet
above it and the illuminated letters dancing in mockery. How did the
writing run? “Entrance not for Everybody.” And: “For madmen only.” I
scrutinised the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic
night might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little
doorway give me admittance. There perhaps lay my desire, and there
perhaps would my music be played.

The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off in a
deep twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway
anywhere and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a
smile I went on, giving it a friendly nod. “Sleep well. I will not
awake you. The time will come when you will be pulled down or plastered
with covetous advertisements. But for the present, there you stand,
beautiful and quiet as ever, and I love you for it.”

From the black mouth of an alley a man appeared with startling
suddenness at my elbow, a lone man going his homeward way with weary
step. He wore a cap and a blue blouse, and above his shoulders he
carried a signboard fixed on a pole, and in front of him an open tray
suspended by straps such as pedlars carry at fairs. He walked on
wearily in front of me without looking round. Otherwise I should have
bidden him a good evening and given him a cigar. I tried to read the
device on his standard--a red signboard on a pole--in the light of the
next lamp; but it swayed to and fro and I could decipher nothing. Then
I called out and asked him to let me read his placard. He stopped and
held his pole a little steadier. Then I could read the dancing reeling
letters:

                    ANARCHIST EVENING ENTERTAINMENT
                             MAGIC THEATRE
                       ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

“I’ve been looking for you,” I shouted with delight. “What is this
Evening Entertainment? Where is it? When?”

He was already walking on.

“Not for everybody,” he said dully with a sleepy voice. He had had
enough. He was for home, and on he went.

“Stop,” I cried, and ran after him. “What have you got there in your
box? I want to buy something from you.”

Without stopping, the man felt mechanically in his box, pulled out a
little book and held it out to me. I took it quickly and put it in my
pocket. While I felt for the buttons of my coat to get out some money,
he turned in at a doorway, shut the door behind him and disappeared.
His heavy steps rang on a flagged yard, then on wooden stairs; and
then I heard no more. And suddenly I too felt very tired. It came over
me that it must be very late--and high time to go home. I walked
on faster and, following the road to the suburb, I was soon in my
own neighbourhood among the well-kept gardens, where in clean little
apartment houses behind lawn and ivy are the dwellings of officialdom
and people of modest means. Passing the ivy and the grass and the
little fir tree I reached the door of the house, found the keyhole and
the switch, slipped past the glazed doors, and the polished cupboards
and the potted plants and unlocked the door of my room, my little
pretence of a home, where the armchair and the stove, the ink-pot and
the paint-box, Novalis and Dostoievski, awaited me just as do the
mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of
more sensible people.

As I threw off my wet coat I came upon the little book, and took it
out. It was one of those little books wretchedly printed on wretched
paper that are sold at fairs, “Were you born in January?” or “How to be
twenty years younger in a week.”

However, when I settled myself in my armchair and put on my glasses, it
was with great astonishment and a sudden sense of impending fate that I
read the title on the cover of this companion volume to fortune-telling
booklets. “_Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Not for Everybody._”

I read the contents at a sitting with an engrossing interest that
deepened page by page.


TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two
legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in
reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learnt a good deal of all that
people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow.
What he had not learnt, however, was this: to find contentment in
himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the
bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that
he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes. Clever men
might argue the point whether he truly was a wolf, whether, that is,
he had been changed, before birth perhaps, from a wolf into a human
being, or had been given the soul of a wolf, though born as a human
being; or whether, on the other hand, this belief that he was a wolf
was no more than a fancy or a disease of his. It might, for example,
be possible that in his childhood he was a little wild and disobedient
and disorderly, and that those who brought him up had declared a war of
extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him
the idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only
a thin covering of the human. On this point one could speak at length
and entertainingly, and indeed write a book about it. The Steppenwolf,
however, would be none the better for it, since for him it was all one
whether the wolf had been bewitched or beaten into him, or whether it
was merely an idea of his own. What others chose to think about it or
what he chose to think himself was no good to him at all. It left the
wolf inside him just the same.

And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This
was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional
one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog
or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any
extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and
the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one
even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to
such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or
the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the
case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and
the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and
deadly enmity. The one existed simply and solely to harm the other,
and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly
enmity, then life fares ill. Well, to each his lot, and none is light.

Now with our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived
now as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed
beings. But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever
on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he
was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had
a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a
so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed
and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime
was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his
heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and
now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf.
Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and
misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt
and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and
enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners
and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched
the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for
him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.

Thus it was then with the Steppenwolf, and one may well imagine that
Harry did not have an exactly pleasant and happy life of it. This does
not mean, however, that he was unhappy in any extraordinary degree
(although it may have seemed so to himself all the same, inasmuch as
every man takes the sufferings that fall to his share as the greatest).
That cannot be said of any man. Even he who has no wolf in him, may be
none the happier for that. And even the unhappiest life has its sunny
moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. So
it was, then, with the Steppenwolf too. It cannot be denied that he was
generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is,
when he loved them or they him. For all who got to love him, saw always
only the one side in him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and
interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come
upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every
sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just
with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal
and belie the wolf. There were those, however, who loved precisely the
wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and
strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable
when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had
hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart,
to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these were the
most disappointed and angry of all; and so it was that the Steppenwolf
brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others
besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.

Now, whoever thinks that he knows the Steppenwolf and that he can
imagine to himself his lamentably divided life is nevertheless in
error. He does not know all by a long way. He does not know that, as
there is no rule without an exception and as one sinner may under
certain circumstances be dearer to God than ninety and nine righteous
persons, with Harry too there were now and then exceptions and strokes
of good luck, and that he could breathe and think and feel sometimes as
the wolf, sometimes as the man, clearly and without confusion of the
two; and even on very rare occasions, they made peace and lived for one
another in such fashion that not merely did one keep watch whilst the
other slept but each strengthened and confirmed the other. In the life
of this man, too, as well as in all things else in the world, daily
use and the accepted and common knowledge seemed sometimes to have no
other aim than to be arrested now and again for an instant, and broken
through, in order to yield the place of honour to the exceptional and
miraculous. Now whether these short and occasional hours of happiness
balanced and alleviated the lot of the Steppenwolf in such a fashion
that in the upshot happiness and suffering held the scales even, or
whether perhaps the short but intense happiness of those few hours
outweighed all suffering and left a balance over is again a question
over which idle persons may meditate to their hearts’ content. Even the
wolf brooded often thereover, and those were his idle and unprofitable
days.

In this connection one thing more must be said. There are a good many
people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These
persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and
the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity
for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state
of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the
wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live
at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and
indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so
high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of
it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.
Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise
all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for
an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines
like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and
as a happiness of their own. All these men, whatever their deeds and
works may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are not
their own and have no form. They are not heroes, artists or thinkers
in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or
schoolmasters. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and
torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to
see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and
works that shine out above the chaos of such a life. To such men the
desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of
human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the
primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them,
too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not
merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to
immortality.

Men of every kind have their characteristics, their features, their
virtues and vices and their deadly sins. It was part of the sign manual
of the Steppenwolf that he was a night prowler. The morning was a bad
time of day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On
no morning of his life has he ever been in good spirits nor done any
good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure
for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and
became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he
productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound
up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man
with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he. In
his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread,
he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger
his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or
an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a
hundred times what in the world’s eyes was his advantage and happiness
in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and
distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and
conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. He hated all
kinds of offices, governmental or commercial, as he hated death, and
his worst nightmare was confinement in barracks. He contrived, often
at great sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments. It was here that
his strength and his virtue rested. On this point he could neither
be bent nor bribed. Here his character was firm and indeflectable.
Only, through this virtue, he was bound the closer to his destiny of
suffering. It happened to him as it does to all; what he strove for
with the deepest and stubbornest instinct of his being fell to his
lot, but more than is good for men. In the beginning his dream and
his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power
is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by
subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He
was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his
ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and
to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine
impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained
Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he
stood alone. The world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace. Other
men concerned him no longer. He was not even concerned about himself.
He began to suffocate slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere
of remoteness and solitude. For now it was his wish no longer, nor his
aim, to be alone and independent, but rather his lot and his sentence.
The magic wish had been fulfilled and could not be cancelled, and it
was no good now to open his arms with longing and goodwill to welcome
the bonds of society. People left him alone now. It was not, however,
that he was an object of hatred and repugnance. On the contrary, he had
many friends. A great many people liked him. But it was no more than
sympathy and friendliness. He received invitations, presents, pleasant
letters; but no more. No one came near to him. There was no link left,
and no one could have had any part in his life even had any one wished
it. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere
in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable
of relationship, an atmosphere again which neither will nor longing
availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.

Another was that he was numbered among the suicides. And here it
must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy
themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a
sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no
necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little
personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their
end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the
suicide by inclination; while on the other hand, of those who are to
be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many,
perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves. The
“suicide,” and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly
close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide.
What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly,
is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of
nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary
risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a
crag whence a slight push from without or an instant’s weakness from
within suffices to precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in
the case of these men is marked by the belief they have that suicide
is their most probable manner of death. It might be presumed that such
temperaments, which usually manifest themselves in early youth and
persist through life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the
contrary, among the “suicides” are to be found unusually tenacious and
eager and also hardy natures. But just as there are those who at the
least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides,
and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least
shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage and
authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the mechanism
merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the nature of an
anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact would be familiar
to every one.

What was said above on the subject of suicides touches obviously
nothing but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore, partly
physics. Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a
much clearer aspect. In this aspect suicides present themselves as
those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals,
those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and
moulding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the
mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly
incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a
profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides
none the less; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They
are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and
to go back to the beginning.

As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances
must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and
a support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does so more often than
not. The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of these. As thousands
of his like do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the
melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death
was open to him at any moment. It is true that with him, as with all
men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every untoward predicament
at once called forth the wish to find an escape in death. By degrees,
however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy
that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through
familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open,
and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it
went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious
pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can
endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to
open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to whom this
thought imparts an uncommon strength.

On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting
against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well
in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a
mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered
by life than to fall by one’s own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid
conscience whose source is much the same as that of the militant
conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of
suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation.
They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The Steppenwolf
was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a
change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or thereabouts, a
happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he often derived
some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which
he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according
to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him
to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might,
illness, poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit.
It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number
daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously
would have cost him severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps
to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason
it went particularly badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties
were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life,
he could say to his tormentors: “Only wait, two years and I am your
master.” And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his
fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he,
relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door
behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all
pains of head and body could look for another victim.

       *       *       *       *       *

It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated
phenomenon, in his relation, for example, to the bourgeois world, so
that his symptoms may be traced to their source. Let us take as a
starting point, since it offers itself, his relation to the bourgeoisie.

To take his own view of the matter, the Steppenwolf stood entirely
outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor
social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as
a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed
from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had
something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the
ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. Nevertheless his
life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary. He had money in the
bank and supported poor relations. He was dressed respectably and
inconspicuously, even though without particular care. He was glad to
live on good terms with the police and the tax collectors and other
such powers. Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted
to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes
with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest
air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it,
with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius,
but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the
bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and
exceptional persons nor with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his
abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards
and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might
be one of contrast and revolt. Moreover, he had been brought up in
a provincial and conventional home and many of the notions and much
of the examples of those days had never left him. In theory he had
nothing whatever against the servant class; yet in practice it would
have been beyond him to take a servant quite seriously as his equal.
He was capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or
intellectual seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother,
but as for theft and robbery, murder and rape, he would not have known
how to deplore them otherwise than in a thoroughly bourgeois manner.

In this way he was always recognising and affirming with one half of
himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against
and denied. Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved
manner, he never tore part of his soul loose from its conventionalities
even after he had long since individualised himself to a degree beyond
its scope and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and
beliefs.

Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be
found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance.
It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and
opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is
immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up
wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of
saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely
to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all
his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path
leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to
God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the
flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the
middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a
martyr nor agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is
not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for
the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be
ready to serve God, but not by giving up the flesh-pots. He is ready
to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world
as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two
extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and
in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life
and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely
except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing
more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the
cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His
harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as
he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant
temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is
consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful
of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted
majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for
responsibility.

It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he
exists, cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as his can
play no other rôle in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free
roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures
are uppermost, the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes
under; indeed at times he even appears to rule the world. How is this
possible? Neither the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common
sense, nor organisation could avail to save it from destruction. No
medicine in the world can keep a pulse beating that from the outset was
so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers. Why?

The answer runs: Because of the Steppenwolves. In fact, the vital
force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its
normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous “outsiders”
who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can
embrace. There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who
share the life of the fold. Our Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic
example. He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the
bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy
joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common
sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape
it. And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed
numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every
one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the
call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments
of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense
life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation
and service. For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula for
the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.

If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him
distinct from the bourgeois in the higher development of his
individuality--for all extensions of the individuality revolve upon the
self and tend to destroy it. We see that he had in him a strong impulse
both to the saint and the profligate; and yet he could not, owing
to some weakness or inertia, make the plunge into the untrammelled
realms of space. The parent constellation of the bourgeoisie binds
him with its spell. This is his place in the universe and this his
bondage. Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type.
Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of
the Bourgeois-Earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign
themselves, or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet
belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last
resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives
of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but
they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in
this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free
seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendour. They
wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however,
who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps
much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet
a sovereign world, humour. The lone wolves who know no peace, these
victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied
and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves
summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere--for them is
reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic
enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humour. Humour has
always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is
incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and
many-faceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here
it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one
breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too,
in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and
to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either
saint or sinner (nor for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as
well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humour alone, that magnificent
discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest
endeavour, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts
as in affliction, humour alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant
achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every
aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the
world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to
stand above it, to have possessions as though “one possessed nothing,”
to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and
often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in
the power of humour alone to make efficacious.

And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and
resources in plenty, in decocting this magic draught in the sultry
mazes of his hell, his rescue would be assured. Yet there is much
lacking. The possibility, the hope only are there. Whoever loves him
and takes his part may wish him this rescue. It would, it is true, keep
him forever tied to the bourgeois world, but his suffering would be
bearable and productive. His relation to the bourgeois world would lose
its sentimentality both in its love and its hatred, and his bondage to
it would cease to cause him the continual torture of shame.

To attain to this, or, perhaps it may be, to be able at last to dare
the leap into the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look
at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and
plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed
to him at once in all its changelessness, and it would be impossible
for him ever after to escape first from the hell of the flesh to the
comforts of a sentimental philosophy and then back to the blind orgy
of his wolfishness. Man and wolf would then be compelled to recognise
one another without the masks of false feeling and to look one another
straight in the eye. Then they would either explode and separate
forever, and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they would
come to terms in the dawning light of humour.

It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter
alternative. It is possible that he will learn one day to know himself.
He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may encounter the
Immortals. He may find in one of our magic theatres the very thing that
is needed to free his neglected soul. A thousand such possibilities
await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those
outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic
possibilities. A mere nothing suffices--and the lightning strikes.

And all this is very well known to the Steppenwolf, even though his
eye may never fall on this fragment of his inner biography. He has
a suspicion of his allotted place in the world, a suspicion of the
Immortals, a suspicion that he may meet himself face to face; and he is
aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter need
to look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear.

       *       *       *       *       *

For the close of our study there is left one last fiction, a
fundamental delusion to make clear. All interpretation, all psychology,
all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of
theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respecting author should not
omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as
may be in his power. If I say “above” or “below,” that is already a
statement that requires explanation, since an above and a below exist
only in thought, only as abstractions. The world itself knows nothing
of above or below.

So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry
feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile
and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological
simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept
without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes
in, and tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a
Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being
more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must
now endeavour to put in its true light.

The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which
Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a
very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a
plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that contradiction which
this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be
the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds
in himself a “human being,” that is to say, a world of thoughts and
feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this
he finds within himself also a “wolf,” that is to say, a dark world
of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature.
In spite of this apparently clear division of his being between two
spheres, hostile to one another, he has known happy moments now and
then when the man and the wolf for a short while were reconciled with
one another. Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment
of his life, any single act, what part the man had in it and what part
the wolf, he would find himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole
beautiful wolf-theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single
human being, not even the primitive negro, not even the idiot, who
is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum
of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man
as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly
childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not
of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two
poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but
between thousand and thousands.

We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as
Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and
complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary
and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and
even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees
the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and
artless simplifications--and most of all himself. For it appears to
be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a
unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered,
it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and
looks into his face, and at one moment recognises all the emotions
and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul
and hears the murderer’s voice as his own is at the next moment one
and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of
his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to
death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon
men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that,
as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of
the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of
selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them
under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania
and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth
from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words,
why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident,
when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore,
who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is
already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting
person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is
in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos
of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It
appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for
everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of
his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed
phenomenon. Even the best of us share the delusion.

The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone
is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate
achievement, we find this customary concern with apparently whole and
single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has
been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since
it offers (or might offer) the greatest possibilities of representing
the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes
us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by
lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once
and for all. An artless æsthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest
praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes
his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only from
afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this
is perhaps a cheap and superficial æsthetic philosophy; and that we
make a mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent
conceptions of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions
are not native to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it
is in them, with their common source in the visible body, that the
origin of the fiction of an ego, an individual, is really to be found.
There is no trace of such a notion in the poems of ancient India. The
heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of
individualities in a series incarnations. And in modern times there are
poems, in which, behind the veil of a concern with individuality and
character that is scarcely, indeed, in the author’s mind, the motive
is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to recognise
this must resolve once and for all not to regard the characters of
such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects
of a higher unity, in my opinion, of the poet’s soul. If “Faust,” is
treated in this way, Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and the rest form
a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity
alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true
nature of the soul is revealed. When Faust, in a line immortalised
among schoolmasters and greeted with a shudder of astonishment by the
Philistine, says: “Two souls, alas, inhabit in my breast!” he has
forgotten Mephisto and a whole crowd of other souls that he has in his
breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls
(wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably
cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but
the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in
number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture
made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough,
and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking
the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many
changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years
to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard
to maintain and strengthen.

If we consider the Steppenwolf from this standpoint it will be clear
to us why he suffered so much under his ludicrous dual personality. He
believes, like Faust, that two souls are far too many for a single
breast and must tear the breast asunder. They are on the contrary far
too few, and Harry does shocking violence to his poor soul when he
endeavours to apprehend it by means of so primitive an image. Although
he is a most cultivated person, he proceeds like a savage that cannot
count further than two. He calls himself part wolf, part man, and
with that he thinks he has come to an end and exhausted the matter.
With the “man” he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated or
even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that
is instinctive, savage and chaotic. But things are not so simple in
life as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic
language; and Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this
niggardly wolf-theory. He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul
to the “man” which are a long way from being human, and parts of his
being to the wolf that long ago have left the wolf behind.

Like all men Harry believes that he knows very well what man is and
yet does not know at all, although in dreams and other states not
subject to control he often has his suspicions. If only he might not
forget them, but keep them, as far as possible at least, for his own.
Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of
suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal
of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He
is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and
spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God.
His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the
two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute. What is commonly
meant, meanwhile, by the word “man” is never anything more than a
transient agreement, a bourgeois compromise. Certain of the more naked
instincts are excluded and penalised by this concordat; a degree of
human consciousness and culture are won from the beast; and a small
modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even encouraged. The “man”
of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a
timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the
angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal father Spirit of
their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the
two of them. For this reason the bourgeois to-day burns as heretics and
hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments to-morrow.

That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the
spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that
the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance
and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom
it is the scaffold to-day and the monument to-morrow--all this the
Steppenwolf, too, suspected. What, however, he calls the “man” in
himself, as opposed to the wolf, is to a great extent nothing else than
this very same average man of the bourgeois convention.

As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it
is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few
hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs
of loneliness. But as for striving with assurance, in response to that
supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going
the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows
too well that it leads to still greater sufferings, to proscription,
to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even though
the enticement of immortality lies at the journey’s end, he is still
unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these deaths.
Though the end of manhood is better known to him than to the bourgeois,
still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved to forget that the desperate
clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest
way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self
naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with
them. When he worships his favourites among the immortals, Mozart,
it may be, he regards him always in the long run with the bourgeois
eye. His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as
a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as
the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his
indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under
that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the
bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become
men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane.

This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian
two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the
body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is
only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony.
He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to
renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf’s life. It may be
presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done
so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in
spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being
of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The
wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads
nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again
and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even
the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of
manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls
in his wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the
same forgetfulness as the man who sings: “If I could be a child once
more!” He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of
the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has
quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and
complexities and capable of all suffering.

There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From
the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created
thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has
been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back
again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God
leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever
further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Suicide, even, unhappy
Steppenwolf, will not seriously serve your turn. You will find yourself
embarked on the longer and wearier and harder road to human life. You
will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate
your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and
simplifying your soul, you will at last take the whole world into
your soul, cost what it may, before you are through and come to rest.
This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether
consciously or not, in so far as fortune favoured his quest. All births
betoken the parting from the All, the confinement within limitation,
the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return
into the All betokens the lifting of the personality through suffering
till it reaches God, the expansion of the soul until it is able once
more to embrace the All.

We are not dealing here with man as he is known to economics and
statistics, as he is seen thronging the streets by the million, and of
whom no more account can be made than of the sand of the sea or the
spray of its waves. We are not concerned with the few millions less or
more. They are a stock-in-trade, nothing else. No, we are speaking of
man in the highest sense, of the end of the long road to true manhood,
of kingly men, of the immortals. Genius is not so rare as we sometimes
think; nor, certainly, so frequent as may appear from history books or,
indeed, from the newspapers. Harry has, we should say, genius enough
to attempt the quest of true manhood instead of discoursing pitifully
about his stupid Steppenwolf at every difficulty encountered.

It is as much a matter for surprise and sorrow that men of such
possibilities should fall back on Steppenwolves and “Two souls, alas!”
as that they reveal so often that pitiful love for the bourgeoisie. A
man who can understand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and
hell of humanity ought not to live in a world ruled by “common sense”
and democracy and bourgeois standards. It is only from cowardice that
he lives in it; and if its dimensions are too cramping for him and
the bourgeois parlour too confined, he lays it at the wolf’s door,
and refuses to see that the wolf is as often as not the best part
of him. All that is wild in himself he calls wolf and considers it
wicked and dangerous and the bugbear of all decent life. He cannot
see, even though he thinks himself an artist and possessed of delicate
perceptions, that a great deal else exists in him besides and behind
the wolf. He cannot see that not all that bites is wolf and that
fox, dragon, tiger, ape and bird of paradise are there also. Yet he
allows this whole world, a garden of Eden in which are manifestations
of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness, of strength and
tenderness, to be huddled together and shut away by the wolf-legend,
just as is the real man in him by the shams and pretences of a
bourgeois existence.

Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a
thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables.
Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other
distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this
garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting
flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a
loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the
thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either
man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all that he imputes to
“man”! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean--while to the
wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master,
is set down all that is strong and noble.

Now we bid Harry good-bye and leave him to go on his way alone. Were he
already among the immortals--were he already there at the goal to which
his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would
look back to all this coming and going, all this indecision and wild
zig-zag trail. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and
joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.

When I had read to the end it came to my mind that some weeks before
I had written one night a rather peculiar poem, likewise about the
Steppenwolf. I made a search among the snow-drift of papers on my
writing table, found it, and read:


    The Wolf trots to and fro,
    The world lies deep in snow,
    The raven from the birch tree flies,
    But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe.
    The roe--she is so dear, so sweet--
    If such a thing I might surprise
    In my embrace, my teeth would meet,
    What else is there beneath the skies?
    The lovely creature I would so treasure,
    And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
    I would drink of her red blood full measure,
    Then howl till the night went by.
    Even a hare I would not despise;
    Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.
    Is everything to be denied
    That could make life a little bright?
    The hair on my brush is getting grey.
    The sight is failing from my eyes.
    Years ago my dear mate died.
    And now I trot and dream of a roe.
    I trot and dream of a hare.
    I hear the wind of midnight howl.
    I cool with the snow my burning jowl,
    And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.


So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait
in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with
the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew
more and yet less of me than I did myself. And both these pictures
of myself, my dispirited and halting poem and the clever study by an
unknown hand, equally afflicted me. Both were right. Both gave the
unvarnished truth about my shiftless existence. Both showed clearly
how unbearable and untenable my situation was. Death was decreed for
this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested
existence--unless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he
underwent a change and passed over to a self, new and undisguised.
Alas! this transition was not unknown to me. I had often experienced it
already, and always in times of the utmost despair. On each occasion
of this terribly uprooting experience myself, as it then was, was
shattered to fragments. Each time deep-seated powers had shaken and
destroyed it; each time there had followed the loss of a cherished
and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more.
Once, I had lost my profession and livelihood. I had had to forfeit
the esteem of those who before had touched their caps to me. Next, my
family life fell in ruins over night, when my wife, whose mind was
disordered, drove me from house and home. Love and confidence had
changed of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbours saw me
go with pitying scorn. It was then that my solitude had its beginning.
Years of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a
new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a
certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to
the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation.
But this mould, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted
and noble intent. A whirl of travel drove me afresh over the earth;
fresh sufferings were heaped up, and fresh guilt. And every occasion
when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful
vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and
unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair,
such as I had now to pass through once more.

It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I
had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in
spiritual growth and depth, but with it went an increased loneliness,
an increasing chill of severance and estrangement. Looked at with
the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one
shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from
all that was normal, permissible and healthful. The passing years
had stripped me of my calling, my family, my home. I stood outside
all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in
unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and
though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter
stranger to this world in all I thought and felt. Religion, country,
family, state all lost their value and meant nothing to me any more.
The pomposity of the sciences, societies, and arts disgusted me. My
views and tastes and all that I thought, once the shining adornments of
a gifted and sought-after person, had run to seed in neglect and were
looked at askance. Granting that I had in the course of all my painful
transmutations made some invisible and unaccountable gain, I had had
to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life was harsher, more
difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to wish to
continue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the smoke
in Nietzsche’s harvest song.

Oh, yes, I had experienced all these changes and transmutations that
fate reserves for her difficult children, her ticklish customers.
I knew them only too well. I knew them as well as a zealous but
unsuccessful sportsman knows the stands at a shoot; as an old gambler
on the Exchange knows each stage of speculation, the scoop, the
weakening market, the break and bankruptcy. Was I really to live
through all this again? All this torture, all this pressing need, all
these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness of my own self,
the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death. Wasn’t it
better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings and
to quit the stage? Certainly, it was simpler and better. Whatever
the truth of all that was said in the little book on the Steppenwolf
about “suicides,” no one could forbid me the satisfaction of invoking
the aid of a gas-stove or a razor or revolver, and so sparing myself
this repetition of a process whose bitter agony I had had to drink
often enough, surely, and to the dregs. No, in all conscience, there
was no power in the world that could prevail with me to go through
the mortal terror of another encounter with myself, to face another
reorganisation, a new incarnation, when at the end of the road there
was no peace or quiet--but forever destroying the self, in order to
renew the self. Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you
please, call it an infamous and ignominious escape; still, any escape,
even the most ignominious, from this treadmill of suffering was the
only thing to wish for. No stage was left for the noble and heroic
heart. Nothing was left but the simple choice between a slight and
swift pang and an unthinkable, a devouring and endless suffering. I had
played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put
honour before comfort, and heroism before reason. There was an end of
it!

Daylight was dawning through the window panes, the leaden, infernal
daylight of a rainy winter’s day, when at last I got to bed. I took
my resolution to bed with me. At the very last, however, on the last
verge of consciousness in the moment of falling asleep, the remarkable
passage in the Steppenwolf pamphlet which deals with the immortals
flashed through me. With it came the enchanting recollection that
several times, the last quite recently, I had felt near enough to the
immortals to share in one measure of old music their cool, bright,
austere and yet smiling wisdom. The memory of it soared, shone out,
then died away; and heavy as a mountain, sleep descended on my brain.

I woke about midday, and at once the situation, as I had disentangled
it, came back to me. There lay the little book on my bed-side table,
and my poem. My resolution, too, was there. After the night’s sleep
it had taken shape and looked at me out of the confusion of my youth
with a calm and friendly greeting. Haste makes no speed. My resolve to
die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had
grown slowly to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose
next breath would bring it to the ground.

I had in my medicine-chest an excellent means of stilling pain--an
unusually strong tincture of laudanum. I indulged very rarely in it
and often refrained from using it for months at a time. I had recourse
to the drug only when physical pain plagued me beyond endurance.
Unfortunately, it was of no use in putting an end to myself. I had
proved this some years before. Once when despair had again got the
better of me I had swallowed a big dose of it--enough to kill six
men, and yet it had not killed me. I fell asleep, it is true, and
lay for several hours completely stupefied; but then to my frightful
disappointment I was half awakened by violent convulsions of the
stomach and fell asleep once more. It was the middle of the next day
when I woke up in earnest in a state of dismal sobriety. My empty brain
was burning and I had almost lost my memory. Apart from a spell of
insomnia and severe pains in the stomach no trace of the poison was
left.

This expedient, then, was no good. But I put my resolution in this way:
the next time I felt that I must have recourse to the opium, I might
allow myself to use big means instead of small, that is, a death of
absolute certainty with a bullet or a razor. Then I could be sure.
As for waiting till my fiftieth birthday, as the little book wittily
prescribed--this seemed to me much too long a delay. There were still
two years till then. Whether it were a year hence or a month, were it
even the following day, the door stood open.

I cannot say that the resolution altered my life very profoundly. It
made me a little more indifferent to my afflictions, a little freer
in the use of opium and wine, a little more inquisitive to know the
limits of endurance, but that was all. The other experiences of that
evening had a stronger after-effect. I read the Steppenwolf treatise
through again many times, now submitting gratefully to an invisible
magician because of his wise conduct of my destiny, now with scorn and
contempt for its futility, and the little understanding it showed of
my actual disposition and predicament. All that was written there of
Steppenwolves and suicides was very good, no doubt, and very clever. It
might do for the species, the type; but it was too wide a mesh to catch
my own individual soul, my unique and unexampled destiny.

What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the
hallucination, or vision, of the church wall. The announcement made
by the dancing illuminated letters promised much that was hinted at
in the treatise, and the voices of that strange world had powerfully
aroused my curiosity. For hours I pondered deeply over them. On
these occasions I was more and more impressed by the warning of that
inscription--“Not for everybody!” and “For madmen only!” Madman, then,
I must certainly be and far from the mould of “everybody” if those
voices reached me and that world spoke to me. In heaven’s name, had I
not long ago been remote from the life of everybody and from normal
thinking and normal existence? Had I not long ago given ample margin
to isolation and madness? All the same, I understood the summons well
enough in my innermost heart. Yes, I understood the invitation to
madness and the jettison of reason and the escape from the clogs of
convention in surrender to the unbridled surge of spirit and fantasy.

One day after I had made one more vain search through streets and
squares for the man with the signboard and prowled several times past
the wall of the invisible door with watchful eye, I met a funeral
procession in St. Martin’s. While I was contemplating the faces of
the mourners who followed the hearse with halting step, I thought to
myself, “Where in this town or in the whole world is the man whose
death would be a loss to me? And where is the man to whom my death
would mean anything?” There was Erica, it is true, but for a long while
we had lived apart. We rarely saw one another without quarreling and at
the moment I did not even know her address. She came to see me now and
then, or I made the journey to her, and since both of us were lonely,
difficult people related somehow to one another in soul, and sickness
of soul, there was a link between us that held in spite of all. But
would she not perhaps breathe more freely if she heard of my death? I
did not know. I did not know either how far my own feeling for her was
to be relied upon. To know anything of such matters one needs to live
in a world of practical possibilities.

Meanwhile, obeying my fancy, I had fallen in at the rear of the funeral
procession and jogged along behind the mourners to the cemetery, an
up-to-date affair all of concrete, and complete with crematorium. The
deceased in question was not however to be cremated. His coffin was set
down before a simple hole in the ground, and I saw the clergyman and
the other vultures and functionaries of a burial establishment going
through their performances, to which they endeavoured to give all the
appearance of great ceremony and sorrow and with such effect that they
outdid themselves and from pure play-acting they got caught in their
own lies and ended by being comic. I saw how their black professional
robes fell in folds, and what pains they took to work up the company
of mourners and to force them to bend the knee before the majesty of
death. It was labour in vain. Nobody wept. The deceased did not appear
to have been indispensable. Nor could any one be talked into a pious
frame of mind; and when the clergyman addressed the company repeatedly
as “dear fellow-Christians,” all the silent faces of these shop-people
and master-bakers and their wives were turned down in embarrassment
and expressed nothing but the wish that this uncomfortable function
might soon be over. When the end came, the two foremost of the
fellow-Christians shook the clergyman’s hand, scraped the moist clay in
which the dead had been laid from their shoes at the next scraper and
without hesitation their faces again showed their natural expression;
and then it was that one of them seemed suddenly familiar. It was, so
it seemed to me, the man who had carried the signboard and thrust the
little book into my hands.

At the moment when I thought I recognised him he stopped and, stooping
down, carefully turned up his black trousers, and then walked away at
a smart pace with his umbrella clipped under his arm. I walked after
him, but when I overtook him and gave him a nod, he did not appear to
recognise me.

“Is there no show to-night?” I asked with an attempt at a wink such
as two conspirators give each other. But it was long ago that such
pantomime was familiar to me. Indeed, living as I did, I had almost
lost the habit of speech, and I felt myself that I only made a silly
grimace.

“Show to-night?” he growled, and looked at me as though he had never
set eyes on me before. “Go to the Black Eagle, man, if that’s what you
want.”

And, in fact, I was no longer certain it was he. I was disappointed and
feeling the disappointment I walked on aimlessly. I had no motives, no
incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I
felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that
life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets
in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial. I swore that
none of these death-vultures should stand at my grave, with cassocks
and fellow-christianly murmurings. Ah, look where I might and think
what I might, there was no cause for rejoicing and nothing beckoned
me. There was nothing to charm me or tempt me. Everything was old,
withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay.
Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and
poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals--and now
this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and every one
else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart
and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?

Passing by the Library I met a young professor of whom in earlier years
I used occasionally to see a good deal. When I last stayed in the town,
some years before, I had even been several times to his house to talk
oriental mythology, a study in which I was then very much interested.
He came in my direction walking stiffly and with a short-sighted air
and only recognised me at the last moment as I was passing by. In my
lamentable state I was half-thankful for the cordiality with which he
threw himself on me. His pleasure in seeing me became quite lively as
he recalled the talks we had had together and assured me that he owed a
great deal to the stimulus they had given him and that he often thought
of me. He had rarely had such stimulating and productive discussions
with any colleague since. He asked how long I had been in the town
(I lied and said “a few days”) and why I had not looked him up. The
learned man held me with his friendly eye and, though I really found
it all ridiculous, I could not help enjoying these crumbs of warmth
and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a starved dog. Harry,
the Steppenwolf, was moved to a grin. Saliva collected in his parched
throat and against his will he bowed down to sentiment. Yes, zealously
piling lie upon lie, I said that I was only here in passing, for the
purpose of research, and should of course have paid him a visit but
that I had not been feeling very fit. And when he went on to invite me
very heartily to spend the evening with him, I accepted with thanks and
sent my greetings to his wife, until my cheeks fairly ached with the
unaccustomed efforts of all these forced smiles and speeches. And while
I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street, flattered and surprised
and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellow’s kindly,
short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow
and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what
a funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and
curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be falling all over
myself in the eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting
of the first good honest fellow who came my way, to be wallowing
like a suckling-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and
friendly esteem. Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very
pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking one another,
watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in
such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all
this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or
whether this sentimental egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and
two-facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the
Steppenwolves. And if this nastiness was common to men in general, I
could rebound from it with renewed energy into hatred of all the world,
but if it was a personal frailty, it was good occasion for an orgy of
hatred of myself.

While my two selves were thus locked in conflict, the professor was
almost forgotten; and when the oppressiveness of his presence came
suddenly back to me, I made haste to be relieved of it. I looked after
him for a long while as he disappeared into the distance along the
leafless avenue with the good-natured and slightly comic gait of an
ingenuous idealist. Within me, the battle raged furiously. Mechanically
I bent and unbent my stiffened fingers as though to fight the ravages
of a secret poison, and at the same time had to realise that I had been
nicely framed. Round my neck was the invitation for 8:30, with all
its obligations of politeness, of talking shop and of contemplating
another’s domestic bliss. And so home--in wrath. Once there, I poured
myself out some brandy and water, swallowed some of my gout pills with
it, and, lying on the sofa, tried to read. No sooner had I succeeded
in losing myself for a moment in _Sophia’s Journey from Memel to
Saxony_, a delightful old book of the eighteenth century, than the
invitation came over me of a sudden and reminded me that I was neither
shaved nor dressed. Why, in heaven’s name, had I brought all this on
myself? Well, get up, so I told myself, lather yourself, scrape your
chin till it bleeds, dress and show an amiable disposition towards your
fellow-men. And while I lathered my face, I thought of that sordid
hole in the clay of the cemetery into which some unknown person had
been lowered that day. I thought of the pinched faces of the bored
fellow-Christians and I could not even laugh. There in that sordid hole
in the clay, I thought, to the accompaniment of stupid and insincere
ministrations and the no less stupid and insincere demeanour of the
group of mourners, in the discomforting sight of all the metal crosses
and marble slabs and artificial flowers of wire and glass, ended
not only that unknown man, and, to-morrow or the day after, myself
as well, buried in the soil with a hypocritical show of sorrow--no,
there and so ended everything; all our striving, all our culture, all
our beliefs, all our joy and pleasure in life--already sick and soon
to be buried there too. Our whole civilization was a cemetery where
Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but
the indecipherable names on mouldering stones; and the mourners who
stood round affecting a pretence of sorrow would give much to believe
in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one
heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more.
And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company
round a grave. As I raged on like this I cut my chin in the usual place
and had to apply a caustic to the wound; and even so there was my clean
collar, scarce put on, to change again, and all this for an invitation
that did not give me the slightest pleasure. And yet a part of me
began play-acting again, calling the professor a sympathetic fellow,
yearning after a little talk and intercourse with my fellow men,
reminding me of the professor’s pretty wife, prompting me to believe
that an evening spent with my pleasant host and hostess would be in
reality positively cheering, helping me to clap some court plaster to
my chin, to put on my clothes and tie my tie well, and gently putting
me, in fact, far from my genuine desire of staying at home. Whereupon
it occurred to me--so it is with every one. Just as I dress and go
out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere
compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with
the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives
and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry
on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs;
and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it
could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed
it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like
me, the critics of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and
shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and
the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a
thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing
their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring
into the void as I do who have left the track. Let no one think that
I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and
even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my
personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do
on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into
bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended
to myself or to others that that machine still revolved for me and that
I was still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world.

On all this the evening before me afforded a remarkable commentary.
I paused a moment in front of the house and looked up at the windows.
There he lives, I thought, and carries on his labours year by year,
reads and annotates texts, seeks for analogies between western Asiatic
and Indian mythologies, and it satisfies him, because he believes in
the value of it all. He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he
believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he
believes in progress and evolution. He has not been through the war,
nor is he acquainted with the shattering of the foundations of thought
by Einstein (that, thinks he, only concerns the mathematicians). He
sees nothing of the preparations for the next war that are going on
all round him. He hates Jews and Communists. He is a good, unthinking,
happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in fact, he is much to
be envied. And so, pulling myself together, I entered the house. A maid
in cap and apron opened the door. Warned by some premonition, I noticed
with care where she laid my hat and coat, and was then shown into a
warm and well-lighted room and requested to wait. Instead of saying a
prayer or taking a nap, I followed a wayward impulse and picked up the
first thing I saw. It chanced to be a small picture in a frame that
stood on the round table leaning back on its paste-board support. It
was an engraving and it represented the poet Goethe as an old man full
of character, with a finely chiseled face and a genius’ mane. Neither
the renowned fire of his eyes nor the lonely and tragic expression
beneath the courtly whitewash was lacking. To this the artist had given
special care, and he had succeeded in combining the elemental force of
the old man with a somewhat professional make-up of self-discipline
and righteousness, without prejudice to his profundity; and had made
of him, all in all, a really charming old gentleman, fit to adorn
any drawing room. No doubt this portrait was no worse than others of
its description. It was much the same as all those representations
by careful craftsmen of saviours, apostles, heroes, thinkers and
statesmen. Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a certain
pretentious virtuosity. In any case, and whatever the cause, this empty
and self-satisfied presentation of the aged Goethe shrieked at me at
once as a fatal discord, exasperated and oppressed as I was already. It
told me that I ought never to have come. Here fine Old Masters and the
Nation’s Great Ones were at home, not Steppenwolves.

If only the master of the house had come in now, I might have had the
luck to find some favourable opportunity for finding my way out. As
it was, his wife came in, and I surrendered to fate though I scented
danger. We shook hands and to the first discord there succeeded nothing
but new ones. The lady complimented me on my looks, though I knew only
too well how sadly the years had aged me since our last meeting. The
clasp of her hand on my gouty fingers had reminded me of it already.
Then she went on to ask after my dear wife, and I had to say that my
wife had left me and that we were divorced. We were glad enough when
the professor came in. He too gave me a hearty welcome and the awkward
comedy came to a beautiful climax. He was holding a newspaper to which
he subscribed, an organ of the militarist and jingoist party, and after
shaking hands he pointed to it and commented on a paragraph about a
namesake of mine--a publicist called Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten
patriot--who had been making fun of the Kaiser and expressing the view
that his own country was no less responsible for the outbreak of war
than the enemy nations. There was a man for you! The editor had given
him his deserts and put him in the pillory. However, when the professor
saw that I was not interested, we passed to other topics, and the
possibility that this horrid fellow might be sitting in front of them
did not even remotely occur to either of them. Yet so it was, I myself
was that horrid fellow. Well, why make a fuss and upset people? I
laughed to myself, but gave up all hope now of a pleasant evening.

I have a clear recollection of the moment when the professor spoke of
Haller as a traitor to his country. It was then that the horrid feeling
of depression and despair which had been mounting in me and growing
stronger and stronger ever since the burial scene condensed to a dreary
dejection. It rose to the pitch of a bodily anguish, arousing within me
a dread and suffocating foreboding. I had the feeling that something
lay in wait for me, that a danger stalked me from behind. Fortunately
the announcement that dinner was on the table supervened. We went into
the dining room, and while I racked my brains again and again for
something harmless to say, I ate more than I was accustomed to do and
felt myself growing more wretched with every moment. Good heavens, I
thought all the while, why do we put ourselves to such exertions? I
felt distinctly that my hosts were not at their ease either and that
their liveliness was forced, whether it was that I had a paralysing
effect on them or because of some other and domestic embarrassment.
There was not a question they put to me that I could answer frankly,
and I was soon fairly entangled in my lies and wrestling with my nausea
at every word. At last, for the sake of changing the subject, I began
to tell them of the funeral which I had witnessed earlier in the day.
But I could not hit the right note. My efforts at humour fell entirely
flat and we were more than ever at odds. Within me the Steppenwolf
bared his teeth in a grin. By the time we had reached dessert, silence
had descended on all three of us.

We went back to the room we had come from to invoke the aid of coffee
and cognac. There, however, my eye fell once more on the magnate of
poetry, although he had been put on a chest of drawers at one side
of the room. Unable to get away from him, I took him once more in my
hands, though warning voices were plainly audible, and proceeded to
attack him. I was as though obsessed by the feeling that the situation
was intolerable and that the time had come either to warm my hosts up,
to carry them off their feet and put them in tune with myself, or else
to bring about a final explosion.

“Let us hope,” said I, “that Goethe did not really look like this.
This conceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished
company, and beneath the manly exterior what a world of charming
sentimentality! Certainly, there is much to be said against him. I have
a good deal against his venerable pomposity myself. But to represent
him like this--no, that is going too far.”

The lady of the house finished pouring out the coffee with a deeply
wounded expression and then hurriedly left the room; and her husband
explained to me with mingled embarrassment and reproach that the
picture of Goethe belonged to his wife and was one of her dearest
possessions. “And even if, objectively speaking, you are right, though
I don’t agree with you, you need not have been so outspoken.”

“There you are right,” I admitted. “Unfortunately it is a habit, a vice
of mine, always to speak my mind as much as possible, as indeed Goethe
did, too, in his better moments. In this chaste drawing-room Goethe
would certainly never have allowed himself to use an outrageous, a
genuine and unqualified expression. I sincerely beg your wife’s pardon
and your own. Tell her, please, that I am a schizomaniac. And now, if
you will allow me, I will take my leave.”

To this he made objections in spite of his perplexity. He even went
back to the subject of our former discussions and said once more how
interesting and stimulating they had been and how deep an impression my
theories about Mithras and Krishna had made on him at the time. He had
hoped that the present occasion would have been an opportunity to renew
these discussions. I thanked him for speaking as he did. Unfortunately,
my interest in Krishna had vanished and also my pleasure in learned
discussions. Further, I had told him several lies that day. For
example, I had been many months in the town, and not a few days, as I
had said. I lived, however, quite by myself, and was no longer fit for
decent society; for in the first place, I was nearly always in a bad
temper and afflicted with the gout, and in the second place, usually
drunk. Lastly, to make a clean slate, and not to go away, at least, as
a liar, it was my duty to inform him that he had grievously insulted me
that evening. He had endorsed the attitude taken up by a reactionary
paper towards Haller’s opinions; a stupid bull-necked paper, fit for
an officer on half-pay, not for a man of learning. This bad fellow
and rotten patriot, Haller, however, and myself were one and the
same person, and it would be better for our country and the world in
general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood
for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with a blind
obsession for a new war. And so I would bid him good-bye.

With that I got up and took leave of Goethe and of the professor. I
seized my hat and coat from the rack outside and left the house. Loud
in my soul the wolf howled his glee, and between my two selves there
opened an immense field of operations. For it was at once clear to me
that this disagreeable evening had much more significance for me than
for the indignant professor. For him, it was a disillusionment and
a petty outrage. For me, it was a final failure and flight. It was
my leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world, and a
complete triumph for the Steppenwolf. I was sent flying and beaten from
the field, bankrupt in my own eyes, dismissed without a shred of credit
or a ray of humour to comfort me. I had taken leave of the world in
which I had once found a home, the world of convention and culture, in
the manner of the man with a weak stomach who has given up pork. In a
rage I went on my way beneath the street lamps, in a rage and sick unto
death. What a hideous day of shame and wretchedness it had been from
morning to night, from the cemetery to the scene with the professor.
For what? And why? Was there any sense in taking up the burden of more
such days as this or of sitting out any more such suppers? There was
not. This very night I would make an end of the comedy, go home and cut
my throat. No more tarrying.

I paced the streets in all directions, driven on by wretchedness.
Naturally it was stupid of me to bespatter the drawing-room ornaments
of the worthy folk, stupid and ill-mannered, but I could not help it;
and even now I could not help it. I could not bear this tame, lying,
well-mannered life any longer. And since it appeared that I could not
bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become
so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in
a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was
none. I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my
youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labours and aims of my
life. Nothing of them all was left me, not even repentance, nothing
but agony and nausea. Never had the clinging to mere life seemed so
grievous as now.

I rested a moment in a tavern in an outlying part of the town and
drank some brandy and water; then to the streets once more, with the
devil at my heels, up and down the steep and winding streets of the
Old Town, along the avenues, across the station square. The thought of
going somewhere took me into the station. I scanned the time-tables
on the walls; drank some wine and tried to come to my senses. Then
the spectre that I went in dread of came nearer, till I saw it plain.
It was the dread of returning to my room and coming to a halt there,
faced by my despair. There was no escape from this moment though I
walked the streets for hours. Sooner or later I should be at my door,
at the table with my books, on the sofa with the photograph of Erica
above it. Sooner or later the moment would come to take out my razor
and cut my throat. More and more plainly the picture rose before me.
More and more plainly, with a wildly beating heart, I felt the dread
of all dreads, the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death.
Although I saw no other way out, although nausea, agony and despair
threatened to engulf me; although life had no allurement and nothing
to give me either of joy or hope, I shuddered all the same with an
unspeakable horror of a gaping wound in a condemned man’s flesh.

I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose
that to-day cowardice won a victory over despair, to-morrow and each
succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt.
It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it
was done. Better to-day then. I reasoned with myself as though with
a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It
wanted to live. I renewed my fitful wanderings through the town,
making many detours not to return to the house which I had always
in my mind and always deferred. Here and there I came to a stop and
lingered, drinking a glass or two, and then, as if pursued, ran around
in a circle whose centre had the razor as a goal, and meant death.
Sometimes from utter weariness I sat on a bench, on a fountain’s rim,
or a curb-stone and wiped the sweat from my forehead and listened to
the beating of my heart. Then on again in mortal dread and an intense
yearning for life.

Thus it was I found myself late at night in a distant and unfamiliar
part of the town; and there I went into a public house from which there
came the lively sound of dance music. Over the entrance as I went in
I read “The Black Eagle” on the old signboard. Within I found it was
a free night--crowds, smoke, the smell of wine, and the clamour of
voices, with dancing in a room at the back, whence issued the frenzy
of music. I stayed in the nearer room where there were none but simple
folk, some of them poorly dressed, whereas behind in the dance-hall
smart people were also to be seen. Carried forward by the crowd, I
soon found myself near the bar, wedged against a table at which sat a
pale and pretty girl against the wall. She wore a thin dance-frock cut
very low and a withered flower in her hair. She gave me a friendly and
observant look as I came up and with a smile moved to one side to make
room for me.

“May I?” I asked and sat down beside her.

“Of course, you may,” she said. “But who are you?”

“Thanks,” I replied. “I cannot possibly go home, cannot, cannot. I’ll
stay here with you if you’ll let me. No, I can’t go back home.”

She nodded as though to humour me, and as she nodded I observed the
curl that fell from her temple to her ear, and I saw that the withered
flower was a camellia. From within crashed the music and at the buffet
the waitresses hurriedly shouted their orders.

“Well, stay here then,” she said with a voice that comforted me. “Why
can’t you go home?”

“I can’t. There’s something waiting for me there. No, I can’t--it’s too
frightful.”

“Let it wait then and stay here. First wipe your glasses. You can see
nothing like that. Give me your handkerchief. What shall we drink?
Burgundy?”

While she wiped my glasses, I had the first clear impression of her
pale, firm face, with its clear grey eyes and smooth forehead, and the
short, tight curl in front of her ear. Good-naturedly and with a touch
of mockery she began to take me in hand. She ordered the wine, and as
she clinked her glass with mine, her eyes fell on my shoes.

“Good Lord, wherever have you come from? You look as though you had
come from Paris on foot. That’s no state to come to a dance in.”

I answered “yes” and “no,” laughed now and then, and let her talk. I
found her charming, very much to my surprise, for I had always avoided
girls of her kind and regarded them with suspicion. And she treated
me exactly in the way that was best for me at that moment, and so she
has since without an exception. She took me under her wing just as I
needed, and mocked me, too, just as I needed. She ordered me a sandwich
and told me to eat it. She filled my glass and bade me sip it and not
drink too fast. Then she commended my docility.

“That’s fine,” she said to encourage me. “You’re not difficult. I
wouldn’t mind betting it’s a long while since you have had to obey any
one.”

“You’d win the bet. How did you know it?”

“Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing
like it if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to
do as I tell you?”

“Very glad. You know everything.”

“You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what
it is that’s waiting for you at home and what you dread so much.
But you know that for yourself. We needn’t talk about it, eh? Silly
business! Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure
enough, and he’ll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living
and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.”

“Oh,” I cried, “if only it were so simple. I’ve bothered myself enough
with life, God knows, and little use it has been to me. To hang
oneself is hard, perhaps. I don’t know. But to live is far, far harder.
God, how hard it is!”

“You’ll see it’s child’s play. We’ve made a start already. You’ve
polished your glasses, eaten something and had a drink. Now we’ll go
and give your shoes and trousers a brush and then you’ll dance a shimmy
with me.”

“Now that shows,” I cried in a fluster, “that I was right! Nothing
could grieve me more than not to be able to carry out any command of
yours, but I can dance no shimmy, nor waltz, nor polka, nor any of the
rest of them. I’ve never danced in my life. Now you can see it isn’t
all as easy as you think.”

Her bright red lips smiled and she firmly shook her waved and shingled
head; and as I looked at her, I thought I could see a resemblance to
Rosa Kreisler, with whom I had been in love as a boy. But she had a
dark complexion and dark hair. I could not tell of whom it was she
reminded me. I knew only that it was of someone in my early youth and
boyhood.

“Wait a bit,” she cried. “So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even a
one-step? And yet you talk of the trouble you’ve taken to live? You
told a fib there, my boy, and you shouldn’t do that at your age. How
can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even
dance?”

“But if I can’t--I’ve never learnt!”

She laughed.

“But you learnt reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and
French and Latin and a lot of other things? I don’t mind betting you
were ten or twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could
as well. Perhaps you’ve even got your doctor’s degree and know Chinese
or Spanish. Am I right? Very well then. But you couldn’t find the time
and money for a few dancing lessons! No, indeed!”

“It was my parents,” I said to justify myself. “They let me learn
Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. But they didn’t let me learn
to dance. It wasn’t the thing with us. My parents had never danced
themselves.”

She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something
in her face reminded me of my youth.

“So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you
might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a
long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were
too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t
believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with
yourself all these years?”

“Well,” I confessed, “I scarcely know myself--studied, played music,
read books, written books, travelled--”

“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and
complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. No
time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not
your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the
bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.”

“Don’t scold me,” I implored. “It isn’t as if I didn’t know I was mad.”

“Oh, don’t make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman,
Professor. You’re not half mad enough to please me. It seems to me
you’re much too clever in a silly way, just like a professor. Have
another roll. You can tell me some more later.”

She got another roll for me, put a little salt and mustard on it, cut a
piece for herself and told me to eat it. I did all she told me except
dance. It did me a prodigious lot of good to do as I was told and to
have some one sitting by me who asked me things and ordered me about
and scolded me. If the professor or his wife had done so an hour or two
earlier, it would have spared me a lot. But no, it was well as it was.
I should have missed much.

“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly.

“Harry.”

“Harry? A babyish sort of name. And a baby you are, Harry, in spite of
your few grey hairs. You’re a baby and you need some one to look after
you. I’ll say no more of dancing. But look at your hair! Have you no
wife, no sweetheart?”

“I haven’t a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but
she doesn’t live here. I don’t see her very often. We don’t get on very
well.”

She whistled softly.

“You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what
was up in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of
your wits? Down on your luck? Lost at cards?”

This was not easy to explain.

“Well,” I began, “you see, it was really a small matter. I had an
invitation to dinner with a professor--I’m not one myself, by the
way--and really I ought not to have gone. I’ve lost the habit of being
in company and making conversation. I’ve forgotten how it’s done. As
soon as I entered the house I had the feeling something would go wrong,
and when I hung my hat on the peg I thought to myself that perhaps I
should want it sooner than I expected. Well, at the professor’s there
was a picture that stood on the table, a stupid picture. It annoyed
me--”

“What sort of picture? Annoyed you--why?” she broke in.

“Well, it was a picture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know.
But it was not in the least as he really looked. That, of course,
nobody can know exactly. He has been dead a hundred years. However,
some artist of to-day had painted his portrait as he imagined him to
have been and prettified him, and this picture annoyed me. It made me
perfectly sick. I don’t know whether you can understand that.”

“I understand all right. Don’t you worry. Go on.”

“Before this in any case I didn’t see eye to eye with the professor.
Like nearly all professors, he is a great patriot, and during the
war did his bit in the way of deceiving the public, with the best
intentions, of course. I, however, am opposed to war. But that’s all
one. To continue my story, there was not the least need for me to look
at the picture--”

“Certainly not.”

“But in the first place it made me sorry because of Goethe, whom I
love very dearly, and then, besides, I thought--well, I had better say
just how I thought, or felt. There I was, sitting with people as one
of themselves and believing that they thought of Goethe as I did and
had the same picture of him in their minds as I, and there stood that
tasteless, false and sickly affair and they thought it lovely and had
not the least idea that the spirit of that picture and the spirit of
Goethe were exact opposites. They thought the picture splendid, and so
they might for all I cared, but for me it ended, once and for all, any
confidence, any friendship, any feeling of affinity I could have for
these people. In any case, my friendship with them did not amount to
very much. And so I got furious, and sad, too, when I saw that I was
quite alone with no one to understand me. Do you see what I mean?”

“It is very easy to see. And next? Did you throw the picture at them?”

“No, but I was rather insulting and left the house. I wanted to go
home, but--”

“But you’d have found no mummy there to comfort the silly baby or scold
it. I must say, Harry, you make me almost sorry for you. I never knew
such a baby.”

So it seemed to me, I must own. She gave me a glass of wine to drink.
In fact, she was like a mother to me. In a glimpse, though, now and
then I saw how young and beautiful she was.

“And so,” she began again, “Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and
you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head
of what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose.
But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has
no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else--because
you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting
and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist
and the professor--laugh and be done with it. If you were out of your
senses, you’d smash the picture in their faces. But as you’re only a
little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. I’ve understood
your story very well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You make me laugh. But
don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise you’ll get
hot. But you have to be told everything--like a little child.”

She admonished me with the look of a severe governess of sixty.

“Oh, I know,” I said contentedly. “Only tell me everything.”

“What shall I tell you?”

“Whatever you feel like telling me.”

“Good. Then I’ll tell you something. For an hour I’ve been saying
‘thou’ to you, and you have been saying ‘you’ to me. Always Latin and
Greek, always as complicated as possible. When a girl addresses you
intimately and she isn’t disagreeable to you, then you should address
her in the same way. So now you’ve learnt something. And secondly--for
half an hour I’ve known that you’re called Harry. I know it because I
asked you. But you don’t care to know my name.”

“Oh, but indeed--I’d like to know very much.”

“You’re too late! If we meet again, you can ask me again. To-day I
shan’t tell you. And now I’m going to dance.”

At the first sign she made of getting up, my heart sank like lead. I
dreaded her going and leaving me alone, for then it would all come back
as it was before. In a moment, the old dread and wretchedness took hold
of me like a toothache that has passed off and then comes back of a
sudden and burns like fire. Oh, God, had I forgotten, then, what was
waiting for me? Had anything altered?

“Stop,” I implored, “don’t go. You can dance of course, as much as you
please, but don’t stay away too long. Come back again, come back again.”

She laughed as she got up. I expected that she would have been taller.
She was slender, but not tall. Again I was reminded of some one. Of
whom? I could not make out.

“You’re coming back?”

“I’m coming back, but it may be half an hour or an hour, perhaps. I
want to tell you something. Shut your eyes and sleep for a little.
That’s what you need.”

I made room for her to pass. Her skirt brushed my knees and she
looked, as she went, in a little pocket mirror, lifted her eyebrows,
and powdered her chin; then she disappeared into the dance hall. I
looked round me; strange faces, smoking men, spilt beer on marble-tops,
clatter and clamour everywhere, the dance music in my ear. I was to
sleep, she had said. Ah, my good child, you know a lot about my sleep
that is shyer than a weasel. Sleep in this hurly-burly, sitting at a
table, amidst the clatter of beer-pots! I sipped the wine and, taking
out a cigar, looked round for matches, but as I had after all no
inclination to smoke, I put down the cigar on the table in front of me.
“Shut your eyes,” she had said. God knows where the girl got her voice;
it was so deep and good and maternal. It was good to obey such a voice,
I had found that out already. Obediently I shut my eyes, leant my head
against the wall and heard the roar of a hundred mingled noises surge
around me and smiled at the idea of sleep in such a place. I made up my
mind to go to the door of the dance-hall and from there catch a glimpse
of my beautiful girl as she danced. I made a movement to go, then felt
at last how unutterably tired out I was from my hours of wandering and
remained seated; and, thereupon I fell asleep as I had been told. I
slept greedily, thankfully, and dreamt more lightly and pleasantly than
I had for a long while.

I dreamt that I was waiting in an old-fashioned ante-room. At first
I knew no more than that my audience was with some Excellency or
other. Then it came to me that it was Goethe who was to receive me.
Unfortunately I was not there quite on a personal call. I was a
reporter, and this worried me a great deal and I could not understand
how the devil I had got into such a fix. Besides this, I was upset by a
scorpion that I had seen a moment before trying to climb up my leg. I
had shaken myself free of the black crawling beast, but I did not know
where it had got to next and did not dare make a grab after it.

Also I was not very sure whether I had been announced by a mistake
to Matthisson instead of to Goethe, and him again I mixed up in my
dream with Bürger, for I took him for the author of the poem to Molly.
Moreover I would have liked extremely to meet Molly. I imagined her
wonderful, tender, musical. If only I were not here at the orders of
that cursed newspaper office. My ill-humour over this increased until
by degrees it extended even to Goethe, whom I suddenly treated to all
manner of reflections and reproaches. It was going to be a lively
interview. The scorpion, however, dangerous though he was and hidden
no doubt somewhere within an inch of me, was all the same not so bad
perhaps. Possibly he might even betoken something friendly. It seemed
to me extremely likely that he had something to do with Molly. He might
be a kind of messenger from her--or an heraldic beast, dangerously and
beautifully emblematic of woman and sin. Might not his name perhaps be
Vulpius? But at that moment a flunkey threw open the door. I rose and
went in.

There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic
breast, sure enough, was the corpulent star of some Order. Not for
a moment did he relax his commanding attitude, his air of giving
audience, and of controlling the world from that museum of his at
Weimar. Indeed, he had scarcely looked at me before with a nod and a
jerk like an old raven he began pompously: “Now, you young people have,
I believe, very little appreciation of us and our efforts.”

“You are quite right,” said I, chilled by his ministerial glance. “We
young people have, indeed, very little appreciation of you. You are
too pompous for us, Excellency, too vain and pompous, and not outright
enough. That is, no doubt, at the bottom of it--not outright enough.”

The little old man bent his erect head forward, and as his hard
mouth with its official folds relaxed in a little smile and became
enchantingly alive, my heart gave a sudden bound; for all at once the
poem came to my mind--“The dusk with folding wing”--and I remembered
that it was from the lips of this man that the poem came. Indeed, at
this moment I was entirely disarmed and overwhelmed and would have
chosen of all things to kneel before him. But I held myself erect
and heard him say with a smile: “Oh, so you accuse me of not being
outright? What a thing to say! Will you explain yourself a little more
fully?”

I was very glad indeed to do so.

“Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised
and felt the riddle and the hopelessness of human life, with its
moments of transcendence that sink again to wretchedness, and the
impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost
of many days’ enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent
longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the
equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole
frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to
the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and
dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human
state is condemned--to its consuming despair. You have known all this,
yes, and said as much over and over again; yet you gave up your whole
life to preaching its opposite, giving utterance to faith and optimism
and spreading before yourself and others the illusion that our
spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf
ear to those that plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that
told the truth of despair, and not in yourself only, but also in Kleist
and Beethoven. Year after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating
knowledge and collecting objects, writing letters and gathering them
in, as though in your old age you had found the real way to discover
the eternal in the momentary, though you could only mummify it, and to
spiritualise nature though you could only hide it with a pretty mask.
This is why we reproach you with insincerity.”

The old big-wig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.

Then to my surprise, he asked, “You must have a strong objection, then,
to the _Magic Flute_ of Mozart?”

And before I could protest, he went on:

“The _Magic Flute_ presents life to us as a wondrous song. It
honours our feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and
divine. It agrees neither with Herr von Kleist nor with Herr Beethoven.
It preaches optimism and faith.”

“I know, I know,” I cried in a rage. “God knows why you hit of all
things on the _Magic Flute_ that is dearer to me than anything
else in the world. But Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He did
not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly
and to exalted dignity as you did. He did not think himself so
important! He sang his divine melodies and died. He died young--poor
and misunderstood--”

I lost my breath. A thousand things ought to have been said in ten
words. My forehead began to sweat.

Goethe, however, said very amiably: “It may be unforgivable that I
lived to be eighty-two. My satisfaction on that account was, however,
less than you may think. You are right that a great longing for
survival possessed me continually. I was in continual fear of death and
continually struggling with it. I believe that the struggle against
death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the
motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
My eighty-two years showed just as conclusively that we must all die
in the end as if I had died as a schoolboy. If it helps to justify
me I should like to say this too: there was much of the child in my
nature--curiosity and love of wasting time in play. Well, and so it
went on and on, till I saw that sooner or later there must be enough of
play.”

As he said this, his smile was quite cunning--a downright roguish
leer. He had grown taller and his erect bearing and the constrained
dignity of his face had disappeared. The air, too, around us was now
ringing with melodies, all of them songs of Goethe’s. I heard Mozart’s
_Violets_ and Schubert’s _Again thou fillest brake and vale_
quite distinctly. And Goethe’s face was rosy and youthful, and he
laughed; and now he resembled Mozart like a brother, now Schubert, and
the star on his breast was composed entirely of wild flowers. A yellow
primrose blossomed luxuriantly in the middle of it.

It did not altogether suit me to have the old gentleman avoid my
questions and accusations in this sportive manner, and I looked at him
reproachfully. At that he bent forward and brought his mouth, which had
now become quite like a child’s, close to my ear and whispered softly
into it: “You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend.
You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does
them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously.
We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It
consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high
a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that
reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there
is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a
joke.”

And indeed there was no saying another serious word to the man. He
capered joyfully and nimbly up and down and made the primrose shoot out
from his star like a rocket and then he made it shrink and disappear.
While he flickered to and fro with his dance-steps and figures, it was
borne in upon me that he at least had not neglected learning to dance.
He could do it wonderfully. Then I remembered the scorpion, or Molly,
rather, and I called out to Goethe: “Tell me, is Molly there?”

Goethe laughed aloud. He went to his table and opened a drawer; took
out a handsome leather or velvet box, and held it open under my eyes.
There, small, faultless, and gleaming, lay a diminutive effigy of a
woman’s leg on the dark velvet, an enchanting leg, with the knee a
little bent and the foot pointing downwards to end in the daintiest of
toes.

I stretched out my hand, for I had quite fallen in love with the little
leg and I wanted to have it, but just as I was going to take hold of
it with my finger and thumb, the little toy seemed to move with a tiny
start and it occurred to me suddenly that this might be the scorpion.
Goethe seemed to read my thought, and even to have wanted to cause
this deep timidity, this hectic struggle between desire and dread.
He held the provoking little scorpion close to my face and watched
me start forward with desire, then start back with dread; and this
seemed to divert him exceedingly. While he was teasing me with the
charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once more, very, very
old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and his withered
greybeard’s face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him
to the depths with abysmal old man’s humour.

When I woke I had forgotten the dream; it did not come back to me till
later. I had slept for nearly an hour, as I never thought I could
possibly have done at a café-table with the music and the bustle all
round me. The dear girl stood in front of me with one hand on my
shoulder.

“Give me two or three marks,” she said. “I’ve spent something in there.”

I gave her my purse. She took it and was soon back again.

“Well, now I can sit with you for a little and then I have to go. I
have an engagement.”

I was alarmed.

“With whom?” I asked quickly.

“With a man, my dear Harry. He has invited me to the Odéon Bar.”

“Oh! I didn’t think you would leave me alone.”

“Then you should have invited me yourself. Some one has got in before
you. Well, there’s good money saved. Do you know the Odéon? Nothing
but champagne after midnight. Armchairs like at a club, nigger band,
jolly fine.”

I had never considered all this.

“But let me invite you,” I entreated her. “I thought it was an
understood thing, now that we’ve made friends. Invite yourself wherever
you like. Do, please, I beg you.”

“That is nice of you. But, you see, a promise is a promise, and I’ve
given my word and I shall keep it and go. Don’t worry any more over
that. Have another drink of wine. There’s still some in the bottle.
Drink it up and then go comfortably home and sleep. Promise me.”

“No, you know that’s just what I can’t do--go home.”

“Oh--you--with your tales! Will you never be done--with your Goethe?”
(The dream about Goethe came back to me at that moment.) “But if you
really can’t go home, stay here. There are bedrooms. Shall I see about
one for you?”

I was satisfied with that and asked where I could find her again? Where
did she live? She would not tell me. I should find her in one place or
another if I looked.

“Mayn’t I invite you somewhere?”

“Where?”

“Where and when you like.”

“Good. Tuesday for dinner at the old Franciscan. First floor.
Good-bye.”

She gave me her hand. I noticed for the first time how well it matched
her voice--a beautiful hand, firm and intelligent and good-natured. She
laughed at me when I kissed it.

Then at the last moment she turned once more and said: “I’ll tell you
something else--about Goethe. What you felt about him and finding the
picture of him more than you could put up with, I often feel about the
saints.”

“The saints? Are you so religious?”

“No, I’m not religious, I’m sorry to say. But I was once and shall be
again. There is no time now to be religious.”

“No time. Does it need time to be religious?”

“Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more,
independence of time. You can’t be religious in earnest and at the same
time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and
money and the Odéon Bar and all that.”

“Yes, I understand. But what was that you said about the saints?”

“Well, there are many saints I’m particularly fond of--Stephen, St.
Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Saviour
and the Virgin--such utterly lying and false and silly pictures--and
I can put up with them just as little as you could with that picture
of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviours or St.
Francises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying,
I feel it is an insult to the real Saviour and it makes me think: Why
did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly
as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own
picture of the Saviour or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls
short of the original, and that the Saviour Himself would find the
picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly
reproductions. I don’t say this to justify you in your ill-temper and
rage with the picture of Goethe. There’s no justification. I say it
simply to show you that I can understand you. You learned people and
artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads;
but you’re human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our
dreams and fancies. I noticed, for example, learned sir, that you felt
a slight embarrassment when it came to telling me your Goethe story.
You had to make a great effort to make your ideas comprehensible to a
simple girl like me. Well, and so I wanted to show you that you needn’t
have made such an effort. I understand you all right. And now I’ve
finished and your place is in bed.”

She went away and an old house porter took me up two flights of stairs.
But first he asked me where my luggage was, and when he heard that I
hadn’t any, I had to pay down what he called “sleep-money.” Then he
took me up an old dark staircase to a room upstairs and left me alone.
There was a bleak wooden bedstead and on the wall hung a sabre and a
coloured print of Garibaldi and also a withered wreath that had once
figured in a club festival. I would have given much for pyjamas. At any
rate there was water and a small towel and I could wash. Then I lay
down on the bed in my clothes, and, leaving the light on, gave myself
up to my reflections. So I had settled accounts with Goethe. It was
splendid that he had come to me in a dream. And this wonderful girl--if
only I had known her name! All of a sudden there was a human being, a
living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me
like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful
and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that concerned me
again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden
a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could
live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen
asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily
spread its weak and tiny wings. Goethe had been with me. A girl had
bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and
had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this
wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even
when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone. I was not an
incomprehensible and ailing exception. There were people akin to me. I
was understood. Should I see her again? Yes, for certain. She could be
relied upon. “A promise is a promise.”

And before I knew, I was asleep once more and slept four or five
hours. It had gone ten when I woke. My clothes were all creases. I
felt utterly exhausted. And in my head was the memory of yesterday’s
half-forgotten horror; but I had life, hope and happy thoughts. As I
returned to my room I experienced nothing of that terror that this
return had had for me the day before. On the stairs above the araucaria
I met the “aunt,” my landlady. I saw her seldom but her kindly nature
always delighted me. The meeting was not very propitious, for I was
still unkempt and uncombed after my night out, and I had not shaved. I
greeted her and would have passed on. As a rule, she always respected
my desire to live alone and unobserved. To-day, however, as it turned
out, a veil between me and the outer world seemed to be torn aside, a
barrier fallen. She laughed and stopped.

“You have been on a spree, Mr. Haller. You were not in bed last night.
You must be pretty tired!”

“Yes,” I said, and was forced to laugh too. “There was something lively
going on last night, and as I did not like to shock you, I slept at an
hotel. My respect for the repose and dignity of your house is great. I
sometimes feel like a ‘foreign body’ in it.”

“You are poking fun, Mr. Haller.”

“Only at myself.”

“You ought not to do that even. You ought not to feel like a ‘foreign
body’ in my house. You should live as best pleases you and do as best
you can. I have had before now many exceedingly respectable tenants,
jewels of respectability, but not one has been quieter or disturbed us
less than you. And now--would you like some tea?”

I did not refuse. Tea was brought me in her drawing-room with the
old-fashioned pictures and furniture, and we had a little talk.
In her friendly way she elicited this and that about my life and
thoughts without actually asking questions and listened attentively
to my confessions, while at the same time she did not give them more
importance than an intelligent and motherly woman should to the
peccadilloes of men. We talked, too, of her nephew and she showed
me in a neighbouring room his latest hobby, a wireless set. There
the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the
apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on
pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made
it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every
thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent
and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had
a slight leaning to piety and religious topics were not unwelcome to
her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was
well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a
small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that
is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in
their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known
to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This
science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this
“discovery,” also, and then the inventors would get busy over it.
The discovery would be made--and perhaps very soon--that there were
floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient
present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard
in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the
past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well
look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the
disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or
Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as to-day was
the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service
to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means
of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and
useless activities. But instead of embarking on these familiar topics
with my customary bitterness and scorn for the times and for science,
I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, and we sat together for an
hour or so and drank our tea with much content.

It was for Tuesday evening that I had invited the charming and
remarkable girl of the Black Eagle, and I was a good deal put to it to
know how to pass the time till then; and when at last Tuesday came, the
importance of my relation to this unknown girl had become alarmingly
clear to me. I thought of nothing but her. I expected everything from
her. I was ready to lay everything at her feet. I was not in the least
in love with her. Yet I had only to imagine that she might fail to keep
the appointment, or forget it, to see where I stood. Then the world
would be a desert once more, one day as dreary and worthless as the
last, and the deathly stillness and wretchedness would surround me once
more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except the
razor. And these few days had not made me think any the more fondly of
the razor. It had lost none of its terror. This was indeed the hateful
truth: I dreaded to cut my throat with a dread that crushed my heart.
My fear was as wild and obstinate as though I were the healthiest of
men and my life a paradise. I realised my situation recklessly and
without a single illusion. I realised that it was the unendurable
tension between inability to live and inability to die that made the
unknown girl, the pretty dancer of the Black Eagle, so important to me.
She was the one window, the one tiny crack of light in my black hole
of dread. She was my release and my way to freedom. She had to teach
me to live or teach me to die. She had to touch my deadened heart with
her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch of life it would either leap
again to flame or subside in ashes. I could not imagine whence she
derived these powers, what the source of her magic was, in what secret
soil this deep meaning she had for me had grown up; nor did it matter.
I did not care to know. There was no longer the least importance for me
in any knowledge or perception I might have. Indeed it was just in that
line that I was overstocked, for the ignominy under which I suffered
lay just in this--that I saw my own situation so clearly and was so
very conscious, too, of hers. I saw this wretch, this brute beast of
a Steppenwolf as a fly in a web, and saw too the approaching decision
of his fate. Entangled and defenceless he hung in the web. The spider
was ready to devour him, and further off was the rescuing hand. I
might have made the most intelligent and penetrating remarks about the
ramifications and the causes of my sufferings, my sickness of soul, my
general bedevilment of neurosis. The mechanism was transparent to me.
But what I needed was not knowledge and understanding. What I longed
for in my despair was life and resolution, action and reaction, impulse
and impetus.

Although during the few days of waiting I never despaired of my friend
keeping her word, this did not prevent my being in a state of acute
suspense when the day arrived. Never in my life have I waited more
impatiently for a day to end. And while the suspense and impatience
were almost intolerable, they were at the same time of wonderful
benefit to me. It was unimaginably beautiful and new for me who for a
long while had been too listless to await anything or to find joy in
anything--yes, it was wonderful to be running here and there all day
long in restless anxiety and intense expectation, to be anticipating
the meeting and the talk and the outcome that the evening had in store,
to be shaving and dressing with peculiar care (new linen, new tie, new
laces in my shoes). Whoever this intelligent and mysterious girl might
be and however she got into this relation to myself was all one. She
was there. The miracle had happened. I had found a human being once
more and a new interest in life. All that mattered was that the miracle
should go on, that I should surrender myself to this magnetic power and
follow this star.

Unforgettable moment when I saw her once more! I sat in the
old-fashioned and comfortable restaurant at a small table that I had
quite unnecessarily engaged by telephone, and studied the menu. In a
tumbler were two orchids I had bought for my new acquaintance. I had
a good while to wait, but I was sure she would come and was no longer
agitated. And then she came. She stopped for a moment at the cloakroom
and greeted me only by an observant and rather quizzical glance from
her clear grey eyes. Distrustful, I took care to see how the waiter
behaved towards her. No, there was nothing confidential, no lack of
distance. He was scrupulously respectful. And yet they knew each other.
She called him Emil.

She laughed with pleasure when I gave her the orchids.

“That’s sweet of you, Harry. You wanted to make me a present, didn’t
you, and weren’t sure what to choose. You weren’t quite sure you would
be right in making me a present. I might be insulted, and so you chose
orchids, and though they’re only flowers they’re dear enough. So I
thank you ever so much. And by the way I’ll tell you now that I won’t
take presents from you. I live on men, but I won’t live on you. But how
you have altered! No one would know you. The other day you looked as if
you had been cut down from a gallows, and now you’re very nearly a man
again. And now--have you carried out my orders?”

“What orders?”

“You’ve never forgotten? I mean, have you learnt the fox-trot? You said
you wished nothing better than to obey my commands, that nothing was
dearer to you than obeying me. Do you remember?”

“Indeed I do, and so it shall be. I meant it.”

“And yet you haven’t learnt to dance yet?”

“Can that be done so quickly--in a day or two?”

“Of course. The fox-trot you can learn in an hour. The Boston in two.
The Tango takes longer, but that you don’t need.”

“But now I really must know your name.”

She looked at me for a moment without speaking.

“Perhaps you can guess it. I should be so glad if you did. Pull
yourself together and take a good look at me. Hasn’t it ever occurred
to you that sometimes my face is just like a boy’s? Now, for example.”

Yes, now that I looked at her face carefully, I had to admit she was
right. It was a boy’s face. And after a moment I saw something in her
face that reminded me of my own boyhood and of my friend of those days.
His name was Herman. For a moment it seemed that she had turned into
this Herman.

“If you were a boy,” said I in amazement, “I should say your name was
Herman.”

“Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in woman’s clothing,” she
said, joking.

“Is your name Hermine?”

She nodded, beaming, delighted at my guess. At that moment the waiter
brought the food and we began to eat. She was as happy as a child. Of
all the things that pleased and charmed me about her, the prettiest and
most characteristic was her rapid changes from the deepest seriousness
to the drollest merriment, and this without doing herself the least
violence, with the facility of a gifted child. Now for a while she
was merry and chaffed me about the fox-trot, trod on my feet under
the table, enthusiastically praised the meal, remarked on the care I
had taken dressing, though she also had many criticisms to make on my
appearance.

Meanwhile I asked her: “How did you manage to look like a boy and make
me guess your name?”

“Oh, you did all that yourself. Doesn’t your learning reveal to you
that the reason why I please you and mean so much to you is because I
am a kind of looking-glass for you, because there’s something in me
that answers you and understands you. Really, we ought all to be such
looking-glasses to each other and answer and correspond to each other,
but such owls as you are a bit peculiar. They give themselves on the
slightest provocation over to the strangest notions that they can see
nothing and read nothing any longer in the eyes of other men and then
nothing seems right to them. And then when an owl like that after
all finds a face that looks back into his and gives him a glimpse of
understanding--well, then he’s pleased, naturally.”

“There’s nothing you don’t know, Hermine,” I cried in amazement. “It’s
exactly as you say. And yet you’re so entirely different from me. Why,
you’re my opposite. You have all that I lack.”

“So you think,” she said shortly, “and it’s well you should.”

And now a dark cloud of seriousness spread over her face. It was indeed
like a magic mirror to me. Of a sudden her face bespoke seriousness
and tragedy and it looked as fathomless as the hollow eyes of a mask.
Slowly, as though it were dragged from her word for word, she said:

“Mind, don’t forget what you said to me. You said that I was to command
you and that it would be a joy to you to obey my commands. Don’t forget
that. You must know this, my little Harry--just as something in me
corresponds to you and gives you confidence, so it is with me. The
other day when I saw you come in to the Black Eagle, exhausted and
beside yourself and scarcely in this world any longer, it came to me at
once: This man will obey me. All he wants is that I should command him.
And that’s what I’m going to do. That’s why I spoke to you and why we
made friends.”

She spoke so seriously from a deep impulse of her very soul that I
scarcely liked to encourage her. I tried to calm her down. She shook
her head with a frown and with a compelling look went on: “I tell you,
you must keep your word, my boy. If you don’t you’ll regret it. You
will have many commands from me and you will carry them out. Nice ones
and agreeable ones that it will be a pleasure to you to obey. And at
the last you will fulfil my last command as well, Harry.”

“I will,” I said, half giving in. “What will your last command be?”

I guessed it already--God knows why.

She shivered as though a passing chill went through her and seemed to
be waking slowly from her trance. Her eyes did not release me. Suddenly
she became still more sinister.

“If I were wise, I shouldn’t tell you. But I won’t be wise, Harry, not
for this time. I’ll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You
will hear it and forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will
weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life and
death, little brother, and before we begin the game I’m going to lay my
cards on the table.”

How beautiful she looked, how unearthly, when she said that! Cool and
clear, there swam in her eyes a conscious sadness. These eyes of hers
seemed to have suffered all imaginable suffering and to have acquiesced
in it. Her lips spoke with difficulty and as though something hindered
them, as though a keen frost had numbed her face; but between her
lips at the corners of her mouth where the tip of her tongue showed
at rare intervals, there was but sweet sensuality and inward delight
that contradicted the expression of her face and the tone of her voice.
A short lock hung down over the smooth expanse of her forehead, and
from this corner of her forehead whence fell the lock of hair, her
boyishness welled up from time to time like a breath of life and cast
the spell of an hermaphrodite. I listened with an eager anxiety and yet
as though dazed and only half aware.

“You like me,” she went on, “for the reason I said before, because
I have broken through your isolation. I have caught you from the
very gates of hell and wakened you to new life. But I want more from
you--much more. I want to make you in love with me. No, don’t interrupt
me. Let me speak. You like me very much. I can see that. And you’re
grateful to me. But you’re not in love with me. I mean to make you fall
in love with me, and it is part of my calling. It is my living to be
able to make men fall in love with me. But mind this, I don’t do it
because I find you exactly captivating. I’m as little in love with you
as you with me. But I need you as you do me. You need me now, for the
moment, because you’re desperate. You’re dying just for the lack of a
push to throw you into the water and bring you to life again. You need
me to teach you to dance and to laugh and to live. But I need you, not
to-day--later, for something very important and beautiful too. When you
are in love with me I will give you my last command and you will obey
it, and it will be the better for both of us.”

She pulled one of the brown and purple green-veined orchids up a
little in the glass and bending over stared a moment at the bloom.

“You won’t find it easy, but you will do it. You will carry out my
command and--kill me. There--ask no more.”

When she came to the end her eyes were still on the orchid, and her
face relaxed, losing its strain like a flower-bud unfolding its petals.
In an instant there was an enchanting smile on her lips while her eyes
for a moment were still fixed and spell-bound. Then she gave a shake
of her head with its little boyish lock, took a sip of water, and
realising of a sudden that we were at a meal fell to eating again with
appetite and enjoyment.

I had heard her uncanny communication clearly word for word. I had even
guessed what her last command was before she said it and was horrified
no longer. All that she said sounded as convincing to me as a decree of
fate. I accepted it without protest. And yet in spite of the terrifying
seriousness with which she had spoken I did not take it all as fully
real and serious. While part of my soul drank in her words and believed
in them, another part appeased me with a nod and took note that Hermine
too, for all her wisdom and health and assurance, had her fantasies and
twilight states. Scarcely was her last word spoken before a layer of
unreality and ineffectuality settled over the whole scene.

All the same I could not get back to realities and probabilities with
the same lightness as Hermine.

“And so I shall kill you one day?” I asked, still half in a dream while
she laughed, and attacked her fowl with great relish.

“Of course,” she nodded lightly. “Enough of that. It is time to eat.
Harry, be an angel and order me a little more salad. Haven’t you any
appetite? It seems to me you’ve still to learn all the things that
come naturally to other people, even the pleasure of eating. So look,
my boy, I must tell you that this is the celebration of the duck, and
when you pick the tender flesh from the bone it’s a festal occasion and
you must be just as eager and glad at heart and delighted as a lover
when he unhooks his lady-love for the first time. Don’t you understand?
Oh, you’re a sheep! Are you ready? I’m going to give you a piece off
the little bone. So open your mouth. Oh, what a fright you are! There
he goes, squinting round the room in case any one sees him taking a
bite from my fork. Don’t be afraid, you prodigal son, I won’t make a
scandal. But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without
asking other people’s permission.”

The scene that had gone before became more and more unreal. I was less
and less able to believe that these were the same eyes that a moment
before had been fixed in a dread obsession. But in this Hermine was
like life itself, one moment succeeding to the next and not one to be
foreseen. Now she was eating, and the duck and the salad, the sweet and
the liqueur were the important thing, and each time the plates were
changed a new chapter began. Yet though she played at being a child she
had seen through me completely, and though she made me her pupil there
and then in the game of living for each fleeting moment, she seemed to
know more of life than is known to the wisest of the wise. It might
be the highest wisdom or the merest artlessness. It is certain in any
case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the
present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside
and the light that plays on every passing moment. Was I to believe that
this happy child with her hearty appetite and the air of a gourmet was
at the same time a victim of hysterical visions who wished to die? or
a careful calculating woman who, unmoved herself, had the conscious
intention of making me her lover and her slave? I could not believe it.
No, her surrender to the moment was so simple and complete that the
fleeting shadows and agitation to the very depths of the soul came to
her no less than every pleasurable impulse and were lived as fully.

Though I saw Hermine only for the second time that day, she knew
everything about me and it seemed to me quite impossible that I
could ever have a secret from her. Perhaps she might not understand
everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my
relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire. This too,
however, was open to question. Probably it would give her as little
trouble as the rest. And anyway, what was there left of my spiritual
life? Hadn’t all that gone to atoms and lost its meaning? As for the
rest, my more personal problems and concerns, I had no doubt that she
would understand them all. I should very soon be talking to her about
the Steppenwolf and the treatise and all the rest of it, though till
now it had existed for myself alone and never been mentioned to a
single soul. Indeed, I could not resist the temptation of beginning
forthwith.

“Hermine,” I said, “an extraordinary thing happened to me the other
day. An unknown man gave me a little book, the sort of thing you’d buy
at a Fair, and inside I found my whole story and everything about me.
Rather remarkable, don’t you think?”

“What was it called,” she asked lightly.

“Treatise on the Steppenwolf!”

“Oh, ‘Steppenwolf’ is magnificent! And are you the Steppenwolf? Is that
meant for you?”

“Yes, it’s me. I am one who is half-wolf and half-man, or thinks
himself so at least.”

She made no answer. She gave me a searching look in the eyes, then
looked at my hands, and for a moment her face and expression had that
deep seriousness and sinister passion of a few minutes before. Making
a guess at her thoughts I felt she was wondering whether I were wolf
enough to carry out her last command.

“That is, of course, your own fanciful idea,” she said, becoming serene
once more, “or a poetical one, if you like. But there’s something in
it. You’re no wolf to-day, but the other day when you came in as if you
had fallen from the moon there was really something of the beast about
you. It is just what struck me at the time.”

She broke off as though surprised by a sudden idea.

“How absurd those words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One
should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible
sometimes, but they’re much more right than men.”

“How do you mean--right?”

“Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those
beautiful great beasts in the Zoo, a puma or a giraffe. You can’t help
seeing that all of them are right. They’re never in any embarrassment.
They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don’t
flatter and they don’t intrude. They don’t pretend. They are as they
are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky. Don’t you agree?”

I did.

“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?”

I nodded again and again.

“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:


                             THE IMMORTALS

 Ever reeking from the vales of earth
 Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
 Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
 Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
 Greed without end, imprisoned air;
 Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
 Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
 Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
 Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
 Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
 Hatching war and lovely art,
 Decking out with idiot craze
 Bawdy houses while they blaze,
 Through the childish fair-time mart
 Weltering to its own decay
 In the glare of pleasure’s way,
 Rising for each new-born and then
 Sinking for each to dust again.

 But we above you ever more residing
 In the ether’s star translumined ice
 Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
 Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
 All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
 Your murders and lascivious delighting
 Are to us but as a show
 Like the suns that circling go
 Changing not our day for night;
 On your frenzied life we spy,
 And refresh ourselves thereafter
 With the stars in order fleeing;
 Our breath is winter; in our sight
 Fawns the dragon of the sky;
 Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
 Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.


Then Maria came and after a cheerful meal I accompanied her to our
little room. She was lovelier that evening, warmer and more intimate
than she had ever been. The love she gave me was so tender that I felt
it as the most complete abandon. “Maria,” said I, “you are as prodigal
to-day as a goddess. Don’t kill us both quite. To-morrow after all is
the Ball. Whom have you got for a cavalier to-morrow? I’m very much
afraid it is a fairy prince who will carry you off and I shall never
see you any more. Your love to-night is almost like that of good lovers
who bid each other farewell for the last time.”

She put her lips close to my ear and whispered:

“Don’t say that, Harry. Any time might be the last time. If Hermine
takes you, you will come no more to me. Perhaps she will take you
to-morrow.”

Never did I experience the feeling peculiar to those days, that
strange, bitter-sweet alternation of mood, more powerfully than on
that night before the Ball. It was happiness that I experienced. There
was the loveliness of Maria and her surrender. There was the sweet and
subtle sensuous joy of inhaling and tasting a hundred pleasures of the
senses that I had only begun to know as an elderly man. I was bathed
in sweet joy like a rippling pool. And yet that was only the shell.
Within all was significant and tense with fate, and while, love-lost
and tender, I was busied with the little sweet appealing things of love
and sank apparently without a care in the caress of happiness, I was
conscious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on at breakneck
speed, racing and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for the
precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the consummation
of death. Just as a short while before I had started aside in fear
from the easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love and felt a
dread of Maria’s beauty that laughingly offered itself, so now I felt
a dread of death, a dread, however, that was already conscious of its
approaching change into surrender and release.

Even while we were lost in the silent and deep preoccupation of our
love and belonged more closely than ever we had to one another, my soul
bid adieu to Maria, and leave of all that she had meant to me. I had
learnt from her, once more before the end, to confide myself like a
child to life’s surface play, to pursue a fleeting joy, and to be both
child and beast in the innocence of sex--a state that (in earlier life)
I had only known rarely and as an exception. The life of the senses and
of sex had nearly always had for me the bitter accompaniment of guilt,
the sweet but dread taste of forbidden fruit that puts a spiritual man
on his guard. Now, Hermine and Maria had shown me this garden in its
innocence, and I had been a guest there and thankfully. But it would
soon be time to go on further. It was too agreeable and too warm in
this garden. It was my destiny to make another bid for the crown of
life in the expiation of its endless guilt. An easy life, an easy love,
an easy death--these were not for me.

From what the girls told me I gathered that for the Ball next day, or
in connection with it, quite unusual delights and extravagances were
on foot. Perhaps it was the climax, and perhaps Maria’s suspicion was
correct. Perhaps this was our last night together and perhaps the
morning would bring a new unwinding of fate. I was aflame with longing
and breathless with dread; I clung wildly to Maria; and there flared
within me a last burst of wild desire....

       *       *       *       *       *

I made up by day for the sleep I had lost at night. After a bath I went
home dead tired. I darkened my bedroom and as I undressed I came on the
verses in my pocket; but I forgot them again and lay down forthwith.
I forgot Maria and Hermine and the Masked Ball and slept the clock
round. It was not till I had got up in the evening and was shaving that
I remembered that the Ball began in an hour and that I had to find
a dress shirt. I got myself ready in very good humour and went out
thereafter to have dinner.

It was the first Masked Ball I was to participate in. In earlier days,
it is true, I had now and again attended such festivities and even
sometimes found them very entertaining, but I had never danced. I had
been a spectator merely. As for the enthusiasm with which others had
talked and rejoiced over them in my hearing, it had always struck me as
comic. And now the day had come for me too to find the occasion one of
almost painful suspense. As I had no partner to take, I decided not to
go till late. This, too, Hermine had counselled me.

I had seldom of late been to the Steel Helmet, my former refuge, where
the disappointed men sat out their evenings, soaking in their wine and
playing at bachelor life. It did not suit the life I had come to lead
since. This evening, however, I was drawn to it before I was aware.
In the mood between joy and fear that fate and parting imposed on me
just now, all the stations and shrines of meditation in my life’s
pilgrimage caught once more that gleam of pain and beauty that comes
from things past; and so too had the little tavern, thick with smoke,
among whose patrons I had lately been numbered and whose primitive
opiate of a bottle of land-wine had lately heartened me enough to spend
one more night in my lonely bed and to endure life for one more day.
I had tasted other specifics and stronger stimulus since then, and
sipped a sweeter poison. With a smile I entered the ancient hostel.
The landlady greeted me and so, with a nod, did the silent company of
habitués. A roast chicken was commended and soon set before me. The
limpid Elsasser sparkled in the thick peasant glass. The clean white
wooden tables and the old yellow wainscoting had a friendly look. And
while I ate and drank there came over me that feeling of change and
decay and of farewell celebrations, that sweet and inwardly painful
feeling of being a living part of all the scenes and all the things of
an earlier life that has never yet been parted from, and from which the
time to part has come. The modern man calls this sentimentality. He
has lost the love of inanimate objects. He does not even love his most
sacred object, his motor-car, but is ever hoping to exchange it as soon
as he can for a later model. This modern man has energy and ability.
He is healthy, cool and strenuous--a splendid type, and in the next
war he will be a miracle of efficiency. But all that was no concern
of mine. I was not a modern man, nor an old-fashioned one either. I
had escaped time altogether, and went my way, with death at my elbow
and death as my resolve. I had no objection to sentimentalities. I was
glad and thankful to find a trace of anything like a feeling still
remaining in my burnt-out heart. So I let my memories of the old tavern
and my attachment to the solid wooden chairs and the smell of smoke and
wine and the air of use and wont and warmth and homeliness that the
place had carry me away. There is beauty in farewells and a gentleness
in their very tone. The hard seat was dear to me, and so was the
peasant glass and the cool racy taste of the Elsasser and my intimacy
with all and everything in this room, and the faces of the bent and
dreaming drinkers, those disillusioned ones, whose brother I had been
for so long. All this was bourgeois sentimentality, lightly seasoned
with a touch of the old-fashioned romance of inns, a romance coming
from my boyhood when inns and wine and cigars were still forbidden
things--strange and wonderful. But no Steppenwolf rose before me baring
his teeth to tear my sentiment to pieces. I sat there in peace in the
glow of the past whose setting still shed a faint after-glow.

A street seller came in and I bought a handful of roasted chestnuts.
An old dame came in with flowers and I bought a bunch of violets and
presented them to the landlady. It was not till I was about to pay my
bill and felt in vain for the pocket of the coat I usually wore that I
realised once more than I was in evening dress. The Masked Ball. And
Hermine!

It was still early enough, however. I could not convince myself to go
to the Globe Rooms straight away. I felt too--as I had in the case of
all the pleasures that had lately come my way--a whole array of checks
and resistances. I had no inclination to enter the large and crowded
and noisy rooms. I had a schoolboy’s shyness of the strange atmosphere
and the world of pleasure and dancing.

As I sauntered along I passed by a cinema with its dazzling lights and
huge coloured posters. I went on a few steps, then turned again and
went in. There till eleven I could sit quietly and comfortably in the
dark. Following the attendant with the pocket light I stumbled through
the curtains into the darkened hall, found a seat and was suddenly
in the middle of the Old Testament. The film was one of those that
are nominally not shown for money. Much expense and many refinements
are lavished upon them in a more sacred and nobler cause, and at
midday even school-children are brought to see them by their religious
teachers. This one was the story of Moses and the Israelites in Egypt,
with a huge crowd of men, horses, camels, palaces, splendours of the
Pharaohs and tribulations of the Jews in the desert. I saw Moses, whose
hair recalled portraits of Walt Whitman, a splendidly theatrical Moses,
wandering through the desert at the head of the Jews, with a dark and
fiery eye and a long staff and the stride of a Wotan. I saw him pray to
God at the edge of the Red Sea, and I saw the Red Sea parted to give
free passage, a deep road between piled-up mountains of water (the
confirmation classes conducted by the clergy to see this religious film
could argue without end as to how the film people managed this). I saw
the prophet and his awestruck people pass through to the other side,
and behind them I saw the war-chariots of Pharaoh come into sight and
the Egyptians stop and start on the brink of the sea, and then, when
they ventured courageously on, I saw the mountainous waters close over
the heads of Pharaoh in all the splendour of his gold trappings and
over all his chariots and all his men, recalling, as I saw it, Handel’s
wonderful duet for two basses in which this event is magnificently
sung. I saw Moses, further, climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy
wilderness of rocks, and I looked on as Jehovah in the midst of storm
and thunder and lightning imparted the Ten Commandments to him, while
his worthless people set up the golden calf at the foot of the mountain
and gave themselves over to somewhat roisterous celebrations. I found
it so strange and incredible to be looking on at all this, to be seeing
the sacred writ, with its heroes and its wonders, the source in our
childhood of the first dawning suspicion of another world than this,
presented for money before a grateful public that sat quietly eating
the provisions brought with it from home. A nice little picture,
indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of culture
in these days! My God, rather than come to such a pass it would have
been better for the Jews and every one else, let alone the Egyptians,
to have perished in those days and forthwith of a violent and becoming
death instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in
for to-day. Yes indeed!

My secret repressions and unconfessed fright in face of the Masked
Ball were by no means lessened by the feelings provoked in me by the
cinema. On the contrary, they had grown to uncomfortable proportions
and I had to shake myself and think of Hermine before I could go to
the Globe Rooms and dared to enter. It was late, and the Ball had been
for a long time in full swing. At once before I had even taken off my
things I was caught up, shy and sober as I was, in the swirl of the
masked throng. I was accosted familiarly. Girls summoned me to the
champagne rooms. Clowns slapped me on the back, and I was addressed
on all sides as an old friend. I responded to none of it, but fought
my way through the crowded rooms to the cloak-room, and when I got my
cloak-room ticket I put it in my pocket with great care, reflecting
that I might need it before very long when I had had enough of the
uproar.

Every part of the great building was given over to the festivities.
There was dancing in every room and in the basement as well. Corridors
and stairs were filled to overflowing with masks and dancing and
music and laughter and tumult. Oppressed in heart I stole through the
throng, from the nigger orchestra to the peasant band, from the large
and brilliantly lighted principal room into the passages and on to
the stairs, to bars, buffets and champagne parlours. The walls were
mostly hung with wild and cheerful paintings by the latest artists.
All the world was there, artists, journalists, professors, business
men, and of course every adherent of pleasure in the town. In one
of the orchestras sat Pablo, blowing with enthusiasm in his curved
mouth-piece. As soon as he saw me he sang out a greeting. Pushed hither
and thither in the crowd I found myself in one room after another,
upstairs here and downstairs there. A corridor in the basement had
been staged as hell by the artists and there a band of devils played
furiously. After a while, I began to look for Hermine or Maria and
strove time after time to reach the principal room; but either I missed
my way or had to meet the current. By midnight I had found no one, and
though I had not danced I was hot and giddy. I threw myself into the
nearest chair among utter strangers and ordered some wine, and came to
the conclusion that joining in such rowdy festivals was no part for
an old man like me. I drank my glass of wine while I stared at the
naked arms and backs of the women, watched the crowd of grotesquely
masked figures drifting by and silently declined the advances of a few
girls who wished to sit on my knee or get me to dance. “Old Growler,”
one called after me; and she was right. I decided to raise my spirits
with the wine, but even the wine went against me and I could scarcely
swallow a second glass. And then the feeling crept over me that the
Steppenwolf was standing behind me with his tongue out. Nothing
pleased me. I was in the wrong place. To be sure, I had come with the
best intentions, but this was no place for me to be merry in; and all
this loud effervescence of pleasure, the laughter and the whole foolery
of it on every side, seemed to me forced and stupid.

Thus it was that, at about one o’clock, in anger and disillusionment I
steered a course for the cloak-room, to put on my coat again and go. It
was surrender and backsliding into my wolfishness, and Hermine would
scarcely forgive it me. But I could not do otherwise. All the way as I
squeezed through the throng to the cloak-room, I still kept a careful
look-out in case I might yet see one of my friends, but in vain. Now I
stood at the counter. Already the attendant was politely extending his
hand for my number. I felt in my waistcoat pocket--the number was no
longer there! The devil was in it if even this failed me. Often enough
during my forlorn wanderings through the rooms and while I sat over my
tasteless wine I had felt in my pocket, fighting back the resolve to go
away again, and I had always found the round flat check in its place.
And now it was gone. Everything was against me.

“Lost your number?” came in a shrill voice from a small red and yellow
devil at my elbow. “Here, comrade, you can take mine,” and he held it
out to me without more ado. While I mechanically took it and turned it
over in my fingers the brisk little fellow rapidly disappeared.

When, however, I examined the pasteboard counter for a number, no
number was to be seen. Instead there was a scribble in a tiny hand. I
asked the attendant to wait and went to the nearest light to read it.
There in little crazy letters that were scarcely legible was scrawled:

                     TO-NIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATRE
                            FOR MADMEN ONLY
                     PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND.
                 NOT FOR EVERYBODY. HERMINE IS IN HELL.

As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes
to new life after a brief paralysis of death and coma and once more
plays its lively part, so did I at this jerk of the magic thread throw
myself with the elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from
which I had just retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly
years. Never did sinner show more haste to get to hell. A moment
before my patent-leather shoes had galled me, the heavily scented air
disgusted me, and the heat undone me. Now on my winged feet I nimbly
one-stepped through every room on the way to hell. The very air had
a charm. The warmth embedded me and wafted me on, and so no less did
the riotous music, the intoxication of colours, the perfume of women’s
shoulders, the clamour of the hundred tongues, the laughter, the rhythm
of the dance, and the glances of all the kindled eyes. A Spanish
dancing girl flung herself into my arms: “Dance with me!” “Can’t,” said
I. “I’m bound for hell. But I’ll gladly take a kiss with me.” The red
mouth beneath the mask met mine and with the kiss I recognised Maria. I
caught her tight in my arms and like a June rose bloomed her full lips.
By this time we were dancing, our lips still joined. Past Pablo we
danced, who hung like a lover over his softly wailing instrument. Those
lovely animal eyes embraced us with their half-abstracted radiance. But
before we had gone twenty steps the music broke off and regretfully I
let go of Maria.

“I’d have loved to have danced with you again,” I said, intoxicated
with her warmth. “Come with me a step or two, Maria. I’m in love with
your beautiful arm. Let me have it a moment longer! But, you see,
Hermine has summoned me. She is in hell.”

“I thought so. Farewell, Harry. I won’t forget you.” She left me--left
me indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer
rose so full and ripe a scent.

On I went through the long corridors, luxuriously thronged, and down
the stairs to hell. There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish
lights, and the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly. On a high
stool at the bar there was seated a pretty young fellow without a mask
and in evening dress who scrutinised me with a cursory and mocking
glance. Pressed to the wall by the swirl of dancers--about twenty
couples were dancing in this very confined space--I examined all the
women with eager suspense. Most were still in masks and smiled at me,
but none was Hermine. The handsome youth on the high stool glanced
mockingly at me. At the next pause, thought I, she will come and summon
me. The dance ended but no one came.

I went over to the bar which was squeezed into a corner of the small
and low room, and taking a seat near the young man ordered a whisky.
While I drank it I saw his profile. It had a familiar charm, like a
picture from long ago, precious for the very dust that has settled on
it from the past. Oh, then it flashed through me. It was Herman, the
friend of my youth.

“Herman!” I stammered.

She smiled. “Harry? Have you found me?”

It was Hermine, barely disguised by the make-up of her hair and a
little paint. The stylish collar gave an unfamiliar look to the pallor
of her intelligent face, the wide black sleeves of her dress-coat and
the white cuffs made her hands look curiously small, and the long black
trousers gave a curious elegance to her feet in their black and white
silk socks.

“Is this the costume, Hermine, in which you mean to make me fall in
love with you?”

“So far,” she said, “I have contented myself with turning the heads of
the ladies. But now your turn has come. First, let’s have a glass of
champagne.”

So we did, perched on our stools, while the dance went on around us
to the lively and fevered strain of the strings. And without Hermine
appearing to give herself the least trouble I was very soon in love
with her. As she was dressed as a boy, I could not dance with her nor
allow myself any tender advances, and while she seemed distant and
neutral in her male mask, her looks and words and gestures encircled
me with all her feminine charm. Without so much as having touched her
I surrendered to her spell, and this spell itself kept within the
part she played. It was the spell of a hermaphrodite. For she talked
to me about Herman and about childhood, mine and her own, and about
those years of childhood when the capacity for love, in its first
youth, embraces not only both sexes, but all and everything, sensuous
and spiritual, and endows all things with a spell of love and a
fairy-like ease of transformation such as in later years comes again
only to a chosen few and to poets, and to them rarely. Throughout she
kept up the part of a young man, smoking cigarettes and talking with a
spirited ease that often had a little mockery in it; and yet it was all
iridescent with the rays of desire and transformed, as it reached my
senses, into a charming seduction.

How well and thoroughly I thought I knew Hermine, and yet what a
completely new revelation of herself she opened up to me that night!
How gently and inconspicuously she cast the net I longed for around me,
and how playfully and how like a pixie she gave the sweet poison to
drink!

We sat and talked and drank champagne. We strolled through the rooms
and looked about us. We went on voyages of exploration to discover
couples whose love-making it amused us to spy upon. She pointed out
women whom she recommended me to dance with, and gave me advice as to
the methods of attack to be employed with each. We took the floor as
rivals and paid court for a while to the same girl, danced with her
by turns and both tried to win her heart. And yet it was all only a
carnival, only a game between the two of us that caught us more closely
together in our own passion. It was all a fairy tale. Everything had a
new dimension, a deeper meaning. Everything was fanciful and symbolic.
There was one girl of great beauty but looking tragic and unhappy.
Herman danced with her and drew her out. They disappeared to drink
champagne together, and she told me afterwards that she had made a
conquest of her not as a man but as a woman, with the spell of Lesbos.
For my part, the whole building, reverberating everywhere with the
sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by
degrees a wild dream of paradise. Flower upon flower wooed me with its
scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit. Serpents looked at me from green
and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes. Lotus blossoms luxuriated over
black bogs. Enchanted birds sang allurement from the trees. Yet all was
a progress to one longed-for goal, the summons of a new yearning for
one and one only. Once I was dancing with a girl I did not know. I had
swept her with the ardour of a lover into the giddy swirl of dancers
and while we hung in this unreal world, she suddenly remarked with
a laugh: “One wouldn’t know you. You were so dull and flat before.”
Then I recognised the girl who had called me “Old Growler” a few hours
before. She thought she had got me now, but with the next dance it was
another for whom my ardour glowed. I danced without ceasing for two
hours or more--every dance and some, even, that I had never danced
before. Every now and then Herman was near me, and gave me a nod and a
smile as he disappeared in the throng.

An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never
known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and
student--the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious
merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I
had often heard it spoken of. It was known, I knew, to every servant
girl. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me
of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious
smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom
rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile,
that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by
a common enthusiasm. I had seen it in drunken recruits and sailors,
and also in great artists in the enthusiasm, perhaps, of a musical
festival; and not less in young soldiers going to war. Even in recent
days I had marvelled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and
this smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the
blissful intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured
and ecstatic, he looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man
with the banjo. It had sometimes occurred to me that such a smile,
such a childlike radiance could be possible only to quite young persons
or among those peoples whose customs permitted no marked differences
between one individual and another. But to-day, on this blessed night,
I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam
in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy-tale. I myself breathed
the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and rhythm and
wine and women,--I, who had in other days so often listened with
amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ball-room
chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was
dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I
danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in
my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the
other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to
the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic
flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one
another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no
strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs
mine.

A new dance, a fox-trot, with the title _Yearning_, had swept the
world that winter. Once we had heard it we could not have enough of it.
We were all soaked in it and intoxicated with it and every one hummed
the melody whenever it was played. I danced without stop and with any
one who came in my way, with quite young girls, with women in their
earlier or their latter prime, and with those who had sadly passed them
both; and with them all I was enraptured--laughing, happy, radiant. And
when Pablo saw me so radiant, me whom he had always looked on as a very
lamentable poor devil, his eyes beamed blissfully upon me and he was so
inspired that he got up from his chair and blowing lustily in his horn
climbed up on it. From this elevation he blew with all his might, while
at the same time his whole body, and his instrument with it, swayed to
the tune of _Yearning_. I and my partner kissed our hands to him
and sang loudly in response. Ah, thought I, meanwhile, let come to me
what may, for once at least, I, too, have been happy, radiant, released
from myself, a brother of Pablo’s, a child.

I had lost the sense of time, and I don’t know how many hours or
moments the intoxication of happiness lasted. I did not observe
either that the brighter the festal fire burned the narrower were the
limits within which it was confined. Most people had already left.
The corridors were silent and many of the lights out. The stairs
were deserted and in the rooms above one orchestra after another had
stopped playing and gone away. It was only in the principal room and
in Hell below that the orgy still raged in a crescendo. Since I could
not dance with Hermine as a boy, we had only had fleeting encounters
in the pauses between the dances, and at last I lost sight of her
entirely--and not only sight but thought. There were no thoughts left.
I was lost in the maze and whirl of the dance. Scents and tones and
sighs and words stirred me. I was greeted and kindled by strange eyes,
encircled by strange faces, borne hither and thither in time to the
music as though by a wave.

And then of a sudden I saw, half coming to my senses for a moment,
among the last who still kept it up in one of the smaller rooms,
and filled it to overflowing--the only one in which the music still
sounded--of a sudden I saw a black Pierrette with face painted
white. She was fresh and charming, the only masked figure left and a
bewitching apparition that I had never in the whole course of the night
seen before. While in every one else the late hour showed itself in
flushed and heated faces, crushed dresses, limp collars and crumpled
ruffs, the black Pierrette stood there fresh and neat with her white
face beneath her mask. Her costume had not a crease and not a hair
was out of place. Her ruff and pointed cuffs were untouched. I rushed
towards her, put my arms around her, and drew her into the dance. Her
perfumed ruff tickled my chin. Her hair brushed my cheek. The young
vigour of her body answered my movements as no one’s else had done that
night, yielding to them with an inward tenderness and compelling them
to new contacts by the play of her allurements. I bent down to kiss her
mouth as we danced. Its smile was triumphant and long familiar. Of a
sudden I recognised the firm chin, the shoulders, arms and hands. It
was Hermine, Herman no longer. Hermine in a change of dress, fresh,
perfumed, powdered. Our lips met passionately. For a moment her whole
body to her knees clung in longing and surrender to mine. Then she drew
her mouth away and, holding back, fled from me as we danced. When the
music broke off we were still clasped where we stood. All the excited
couples round us clapped, stamped, cried out and urged the exhausted
orchestra to play _Yearning_ over again. And now a feeling that
it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the
curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us
symptoms of the weariness to come. Blindly, with bursts of laughter, we
flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more, into the music,
and the light that began to flood the room. Our feet moved in time to
the music as though we were possessed, every couple touching, and once
more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us. Hermine abandoned
her triumphant air, her mockery and coolness. She knew that there was
no more to do to make me in love with her. I was hers, and her way
of dancing, her looks and smiles and kisses all showed that she gave
herself to me. All the women of this fevered night, all that I had
danced with, all whom I had kindled or who had kindled me, all whom
I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had
followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one,
the one whom I held in my arms.

On and on went this nuptial dance. Time after time the music flagged.
The wind let their instruments fall. The pianist got up from the
piano. The first fiddle shook his head. And every time they were won
over by the imploring persistence of the last intoxicated dancers and
played once more. They played faster and more wildly. Then at last, as
we stood, still entwined and breathless after the last eager dance,
the piano was closed with a bang, and our arms fell wearily to our
sides like those of the wind and strings and the flutist, blinking
sleepily, put his flute away in its case. Doors opened, the cold air
poured in, attendants appeared with cloaks and the bar-waiter turned
off the light. The whole scene vanished eerily away and the dancers
who a moment ago had been all on fire shivered as they put on coats
and cloaks and turned up their collars. Hermine was pale but smiling.
Slowly she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one
arm caught the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran
from her arm-pit to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line
of shadow seemed to me to sum up all the charm and fascination of her
body like a smile.

We stood looking at one another, the last in the hall, the last in the
whole building. Somewhere below I heard a door bang, a glass break,
a titter of laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of
motor-cars starting up. And somewhere, at an indeterminable distance
and height, I heard a laugh ring out, an extraordinarily clear and
merry peal of laughter. Yet it was eerie and strange. It was a laugh,
made of crystal and ice, bright and radiant, but cold and inexorable.
Where had I heard this laugh before? I could not tell.

We stood and looked at one another. For a moment I came to my sober
self. I felt a fearful weariness descend upon me. I felt with
repugnance how moist and limp my clothing hung around me. I saw my
hands emerging red and with swollen veins from my crumpled and wilted
cuffs. But all at once the mood passed, banished by a look from
Hermine. At this look that seemed to come from my own soul all reality
fell away, even the reality of my sensuous love of her. Bewitched we
looked at one another, while my poor little soul looked at me.

“You’re ready?” asked Hermine, and her smile fled away like the shadows
on her breast. Far up in unknown space rang out that strange and eerie
laughter.

I nodded. Oh, yes, I was ready.

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.

The inscription

                             JOLLY HUNTING
                       GREAT HUNT IN AUTOMOBILES

attracted me. I opened the narrow door and stepped in.

I was swept at once into a world of noise and excitement. Motor-cars,
some of them armoured, were run through the streets chasing the
pedestrians. They ran them down and either left them mangled on the
ground or crushed them to death against the walls of the houses. I saw
at once that it was the long-prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war
between men and machines, now at last broken out. On all sides lay dead
and decomposing bodies, and on all sides, too, smashed and distorted
and half-burnt motor-cars. Aeroplanes circled above the frightful
confusion and were being fired upon from many roofs and windows with
rifles and machine guns. On every wall were wild and magnificently
stirring placards, whose giant letters flamed like torches, summoning
the nation to side with the men against the machines, to make an end
at last of the fat and well-dressed and perfumed plutocrats who used
machines to squeeze the fat from other men’s bodies, of them and their
huge fiendishly purring automobiles. Set factories afire at last! Make
a little room on the crippled earth! Depopulate it so that the grass
may grow again, and woods, meadows, heather, stream and moor return to
this world of dust and concrete. Other placards, on the other hand, in
wonderful colours and magnificently phrased, warned all those who had a
stake in the country and some share of prudence (in more moderate and
less childish terms which testified to the remarkable cleverness and
intellect of those who had composed them) against the rising tide of
anarchy. They depicted in a truly impressive way the blessings of order
and work and property and education and justice, and praised machinery
as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid,
men would be equal to the gods. I studied these placards, both the
red and the green, and reflected on them and marvelled at them. The
flaming eloquence affected me as powerfully as the compelling logic.
They were right, and I stood as deeply convinced in front of one as in
front of the other, a good deal disturbed all the time by the rather
juicy firing that went on all round me. Well, the principal thing was
clear. There was a war on, a violent, genuine and highly sympathetic
war where there was no concern for Kaiser or republic, for frontiers,
flags or colours and other equally decorative and theatrical matters,
all nonsense at bottom; but a war in which every one who lacked air
to breathe and no longer found life exactly pleasing gave emphatic
expression to his displeasure and strove to prepare the way for a
general destruction of this iron-cast civilisation of ours. In every
eye I saw the unconcealed spark of destruction and murder, and in mine
too these wild red roses bloomed as rank and high, and sparkled as
brightly. I joined the battle joyfully.

The best of all, however, was that my school-friend, Gustav, turned
up close beside me. I had lost sight of him for dozens of years, the
wildest, strongest, most eager and venturesome of the friends of my
childhood. I laughed in my heart as I saw him beckon me with his bright
blue eyes. He beckoned and at once I followed him joyfully.

“Good Lord, Gustav,” I cried happily, “fancy seeing you again. Whatever
has become of you?”

“Keep quiet with your questions and chatter! I’m a professor of
theology if you want to know. But, the Lord be praised, there’s no
occasion for theology now, my boy. It’s war. Come on!”

He shot the driver of a small car that came snorting towards us and
leaping into it as nimbly as a monkey, brought it to a standstill for
me to get in. Then we drove like the devil between bullets and crashed
cars out of town and suburbs.

“Are you on the side of the manufacturers?” I asked my friend.

“Oh, Lord, that’s a matter of taste, so we can leave it out of
account--though now you mention it, I rather think we might take
the other side, since at bottom it’s all the same, of course. I’m a
theologian and my predecessor, Luther, took the side of the princes and
plutocrats against the peasants. So now we’ll establish the balance a
little. This rotten car, I hope she’ll hold out another mile or two.”

Swift as the wind, that child of heaven, we rattled on, and reached a
green and peaceful countryside many miles distant. We traversed a wide
plain and then slowly climbed into the mountains. Here we made a halt
on a smooth and glistening road that led in bold curves between the
steep wall of rock and the low retaining wall. Far below shone the blue
surface of a lake.

“Lovely view,” said I.

“Very pretty. We’ll call it the Axle Way. A good many axles of one sort
or another are going to crash here, Harry, my boy. So watch out!”

A tall pine grew by the roadside, and among the tall branches we saw
something like a little hut made of boards to serve as an outlook and
point of vantage. Gustav smiled with a knowing twinkle in his blue
eyes. We hurried out of the car, climbed up the trunk and, breathing
hard, concealed ourselves in the outlook post, which pleased us much.
We found rifles and revolvers there and boxes of ammunition. We had
scarcely cooled down when we heard the hoarse imperious hoot of a
large touring-car from the next bend of the road. It came purring at
top speed up the smooth road. Our rifles were ready in our hands. The
excitement was intense.

“Aim at the chauffeur,” commanded Gustav quickly just as the heavy
car went by beneath us. I aimed, and fired at the chauffeur in his
blue cap. The man fell in a heap. The car careened on, charged the
cliff face, rebounded, attacked the lower wall furiously with all its
unwieldy weight like a great bumble bee and, tumbling over, crashed
with a brief and distant report into the depths below.

“Got him!” Gustav laughed. “My turn next.”

Another came as he spoke. There were three or four occupants packed in
the back seat. From the head of a woman a bright blue veil streamed out
behind. It filled me with genuine remorse. Who could say how pretty
a face it might adorn? Good God, though we did play the brigand we
might at least emulate the illustrious and spare pretty women. Gustav,
however, had already fired. The driver shuddered and collapsed. The car
leapt against the perpendicular cliff, fell back and overturned, wheels
uppermost. Its engine was still running and the wheels turned absurdly
in the air; but suddenly with a frightful explosion it burst into
flames.

“A Ford,” said Gustav. “We must get down and clear the road.”

We climbed down and watched the burning heap. It soon burnt out.
Meanwhile we made levers of green wood and hoisted it to the side
of the road and over the wall into the abyss, where for a long time
it went crashing through the undergrowth. Two of the dead bodies had
fallen out as we turned the car over and lay on the road with their
clothing partly burnt. One wore a pretty good coat. I searched the
pockets to see who he was. A leather case came to hand with some cards
in it. I took one and read: Tat Twam Asi.

“Very witty,” said Gustav. “Though, as a matter of fact, it is all one
what our victims are called. They’re poor devils just as we are. Their
names don’t matter. This world is done for and so are we. The least
painful solution would be to hold it under water for ten minutes. Now
to work--”

We threw the bodies after the car. Already another one was tooting. We
shot it down with a volley where we stood. It made a drunken swerve
and reeled on for a stretch, then turned over and lay gasping. One
passenger was still sitting inside, but a pretty young girl got out
uninjured, though she was white and trembling violently. We greeted her
politely and offered our assistance. She was too much shaken to speak
and stared at us for a while quite dazed.

“Well, first let us look after the old boy,” said Gustav and turned
to the occupant of the car who still clung to his seat behind the
chauffeur. He was a gentleman with short grey hair. His intelligent,
clear grey eyes were open, but he seemed to be seriously hurt; at
least, blood flowed from his mouth and he held his neck askew and rigid.

“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gustav. We have taken the
liberty of shooting your chauffeur. May we inquire whom we have the
honour to address?”

The old man looked at us coolly and sadly out of his small grey eyes.

“I am the Attorney-General Loering,” he said slowly. “You have not only
killed my poor chauffeur, but me too, I fancy. Why did you shoot on us?”

“For exceeding the speed limit.”

“We were not travelling at more than normal speed.”

“What was normal yesterday is no longer normal to-day, Mr.
Attorney-General. We are of the opinion that whatever speed a motor-car
travels is too great. We are destroying all motor-cars and all other
machines also.”

“Your rifles too?”

“Their turn will come, granted we have the time. Presumably by
to-morrow or the day after we shall all be done for. You know, of
course, that this part of the world was shockingly overpopulated.
Well, now we are going to let in a little air.”

“Are you shooting every one, without distinction?”

“Certainly. In many cases it may no doubt be a pity. I’m sorry, for
example, about this charming young lady. Your daughter, I presume.”

“No. She is my stenographer.”

“So much the better. And now will you please get out, or let us carry
you out, as the car is to be destroyed.”

“I prefer to be destroyed with it.”

“As you wish. But allow me to ask you one more question. You are a
public prosecutor. I never could understand how a man could be a public
prosecutor. You make your living by bringing other men, poor devils
mostly, to trial and passing sentence on them. Isn’t that so?”

“It is. I do my duty. It was my office. Exactly as it is the office of
the hangman to hang those whom I condemn to death. You too have assumed
a like office. You kill people also.”

“Quite true. Only we do not kill from duty, but pleasure, or much more,
rather, from displeasure and despair of the world. For this reason we
find a certain amusement in killing people. Has it never amused you?”

“You bore me. Be so kind as to do your work. Since the conception of
duty is unknown to you--”

He was silent and made a movement of his lips as though to spit. Only a
little blood came, however, and clung to his chin.

“One moment!” said Gustav politely. “The conception of duty is
certainly unknown to me--now. Formerly I had a great deal of official
concern with it. I was a professor of theology. Besides that, I was
a soldier and went through the war. What seemed to me to be duty
and what the authorities and my superior officers from time to time
enjoined upon me was not by any means good. I would rather have done
the opposite. But granting that the conception of duty is no longer
known to me, I still know the conception of guilt--perhaps they are the
same thing. In so far as a mother bore me, I am guilty. I am condemned
to live. I am obliged to belong to a State, to serve as a soldier, to
kill and to pay taxes for armaments. And now at this moment the guilt
of life has brought me once more to the necessity of killing people as
it did in the war. And this time I have no repugnance. I am resigned to
the guilt. I have no objection to this stupid congested world going to
bits. I am glad to help and glad to perish with it.”

The public prosecutor made an effort to smile a little with his lips on
which the blood had coagulated. He did not succeed very well, though
the good intention was manifest.

“Good,” said he. “So we are colleagues. Well, as such, please do your
duty.”

The pretty girl had meanwhile sat down by the side of the road and
fainted.

At this moment there was again the tooting of a car coming down the
road at full speed. We drew the girl a little to one side and, standing
close against the cliff, let the approaching car run into the ruins of
the other. The brakes were applied violently and the car reared up in
the air. It came to a standstill undamaged. We seized our rifles and
quickly had the newcomers covered.

“Get out!” commanded Gustav. “Hands up!”

Three men got out of the car and obediently held up their hands.

“Is any one of you a doctor?” Gustav asked.

They shook their heads.

“Then be so good as to remove this gentleman. He is seriously hurt.
Take him in your car to the nearest town. Forward, and get on with it.”

The old gentleman was soon lying in the other car. Gustav gave the word
and off they went.

The stenographer meanwhile had come to herself and had been watching
these proceedings. I was glad we had made so fair a prize.

“Madam,” said Gustav, “you have lost your employer. I hope you were not
bound to the old gentleman by other ties. You are now in my service.
So be our good comrade. So much for that; and now time presses. It will
be uncomfortable here before long. Can you climb, Madam? Yes? Then go
ahead and we’ll help you up between us.”

We all climbed up to our hut in the tree as fast as we could. The lady
did not feel very well up there, but we gave her some brandy, and she
was soon so much recovered that she was able to admire the wonderful
view over lake and mountains and to tell us also that her name was Dora.

Immediately after this, there was another car below us. It steered
carefully past the overturned one without stopping and then gathered
speed.

“Poltroon!” laughed Gustav and shot the driver. The car zig-zagged and
dashing into the wall stove it in and hung suspended over the abyss.

“Dora,” I said, “can you use firearms?”

She could not, but we taught her how to load. She was clumsy at first
and hurt her finger and cried and wanted court-plaster. But Gustav told
her it was war and that she must show her courage. Then it went better.

“But what’s going to become of us?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” said Gustav. “My friend Harry is fond of pretty girls.
He’ll look after you.”

“But the police and the soldiers will come and kill us.”

“There aren’t any police and such like any more. We can choose, Dora.
Either we stay quietly up here and shoot down every car that tries to
pass, or else we can take a car and drive off in it and let others
shoot at us. It’s all the same which side we take. I’m for staying
here.”

And now there was the loud tooting of another car beneath us. It was
soon accounted for and lay there wheels uppermost.

Gustav smiled. “Yes, there are indeed too many men in the world. In
earlier days it wasn’t so noticeable. But now that every one wants air
to breathe, and a car to drive as well, one does notice it. Of course,
what we are doing isn’t rational. It’s childishness, just as war is
childishness on a gigantic scale. In time, mankind will learn to keep
its numbers in check by rational means. Meanwhile, we are meeting
an intolerable situation in a rather irrational way. However, the
principle’s correct--we eliminate.”

“Yes,” said I, “what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it
is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man
overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters
that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise
ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are
extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression
and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely.
The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a
machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it
again.”

With a laugh Gustav replied: “You talk like a book, my boy. It is
a pleasure and a privilege to drink at such a fount of wisdom. And
perhaps there is even something in what you say. But now kindly re-load
your piece. You are rather too dreamy for my taste. Any moment may
bring a few buck, and we cannot kill them with philosophy. We must have
ball in our barrels.”

A car came and was dropped at once. The road was blocked. A survivor, a
stout red-faced man, gesticulated wildly over the ruins. Then he stared
up and down and, discovering our hiding place, came for us bellowing
and shooting up at us with a revolver.

“Get off with you or I’ll shoot,” Gustav shouted down. The man took aim
at him and fired again. Then we shot him.

After this two more came and were bagged. Then the road was silent and
deserted. Apparently the news had got about that it was dangerous. We
had time to enjoy the beauty of the view. On the far side of the lake a
small town lay in the valley. Smoke rose from it and soon we saw fire
leaping from roof to roof. Shooting could be heard. Dora cried a little
and I stroked her wet cheeks.

“Have we all got to die then?” she asked. There was no reply. Meanwhile
a man on foot went past below. He saw the smashed-up motor-cars and
began nosing round them. Leaning over into one of them he pulled out a
gay parasol, a ladies’ hand-bag and a bottle of wine. Then he sat down
contentedly on the wall, took a drink from the bottle and ate something
wrapped in tinfoil out of the hand-bag. After emptying the bottle he
went on, well pleased, with the parasol clasped under his arm; and I
said to Gustav: “Could you find it in you to shoot at this good fellow
and make a hole in his head? God knows, I couldn’t.”

“You’re not asked to,” my friend growled. But he did not feel very
comfortable either. We had no sooner caught sight of a man whose
behaviour was harmless and peaceable and childlike and who was still
in a state of innocence than all our praiseworthy and most necessary
activities became stupid and repulsive. Pah--all that blood! We were
ashamed of ourselves. But in the war there must have been Generals even
who felt the same.

“Don’t let us stay here any longer,” Dora implored. “Let’s go down. We
are sure to find something to eat in the cars. Aren’t you hungry, you
Bolsheviks?”

Down in the burning town the bells began to peal with a wild terror. We
set ourselves to climb down. As I helped Dora to climb over the breast
work, I kissed her knee. She laughed aloud, and then the planks gave
way and we both fell into vacancy--

       *       *       *       *       *

Once more I stood in the round corridor, still excited by the hunting
adventure. And everywhere on all the countless doors were the alluring
inscriptions:

                                MUTABOR
                TRANSFORMATION INTO ANY ANIMAL OR PLANT
                               YOU PLEASE

                               KAMASUTRAM
                 INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIAN ARTS OF LOVE
               COURSE FOR BEGINNERS; FORTY-TWO DIFFERENT
                         METHODS AND PRACTICES

                           DELIGHTFUL SUICIDE
                       YOU LAUGH YOURSELF TO BITS

                     DO YOU WANT TO BE ALL SPIRIT?
                        THE WISDOM OF THE EAST.

                          DOWNFALL OF THE WEST
                    MODERATE PRICES. NEVER SURPASSED

                           COMPENDIUM OF ART
                  TRANSFORMATION FROM TIME INTO SPACE
                           BY MEANS OF MUSIC

                             LAUGHING TEARS
                           CABINET OF HUMOUR

                           SOLITUDE MADE EASY
                  COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF
                              SOCIABILITY.

The series of inscriptions was endless. One was

                   GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE
                    PERSONALITY. SUCCESS GUARANTEED

This seemed to me to be worth looking into and I went in at this door.

I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a
large chess-board in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor.
At the first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate
a similar gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.

“Are you Pablo?” I asked.

“I am not anybody,” he replied amiably. “We have no names here and we
are not anybody. I am a chess-player. Do you wish for instruction in
the building up of the personality?”

“Yes, please.”

“Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal.”

“My pieces--?”

“Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up.
I can’t play without pieces.”

He held a glass up to me and again I saw the unity of my personality
broken up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased.
The pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen.
The player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers
and placed them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to
speak in the monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or
reading that he has often gone through before.

“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is
known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude
of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the
personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science
has invented the name Schizomania for it. Science is in this so far
right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a
certain order and grouping. It is wrong in so far as it holds that one
only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity
of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant
consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the
state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labours of
original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for
normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are
incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who
are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology
of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the
soul. We demonstrate to any one whose soul has fallen to pieces that he
can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases,
and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.
As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do
we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups,
with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are
eternally inexhaustible. Look!”

With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my
pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful
and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them
on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and
families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small
world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through
its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making
treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was
indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama.

Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the
pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a
new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships
and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first,
it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was
different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and
the situations differently presented.

And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after
another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and
every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged
recognisably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet
each was entirely new.

“This is the art of life,” he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an
artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may
complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just
as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is
schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy. Even learned
men have come to a partial recognition of this, as may be gathered,
for example, from _Prince Wunderhorn_, that enchanting book, in
which the industry and pains of a man of learning, with the assistance
of the genius of a number of madmen and artists shut up as such,
are immortalised. Here, take your little pieces away with you. The
game will often give you pleasure. The piece that to-day grew to the
proportions of an intolerable bugbear, you will degrade to-morrow to a
mere lay figure. The luckless Cinderella will in the next game be the
princess. I wish you much pleasure, my dear sir.”

I bowed low in gratitude to the gifted chess-player, put the little
pieces in my pocket and withdrew through the narrow door.

My real intention was to seat myself at once on the floor in the
corridor and play the game for hours, for whole eternities; but I was
no sooner in the bright light of the circular theatre passage than
a new and irresistible current carried me along. A dazzling poster
flashed before my eyes:

                  MARVELLOUS TAMING OF THE STEPPENWOLF

Many different emotions surged up in me at the sight of this
announcement. My heart was painfully contracted by all kinds of fears
and repressions from my former life and the reality I had left behind.
With trembling hand I opened the door and found myself in the booth
of a Fair with an iron rail separating me from a wretched stage.
On the stage I saw an animal-tamer--a cheap-jack gentleman with a
pompous air--who in spite of a large moustache, exuberantly muscular
biceps and his absurd circus get-up had a malicious and decidedly
unpleasant resemblance to myself. The strong man led on a leash like
a dog--lamentable sight--a large, beautiful but terribly emaciated
wolf, whose eyes were cowed and furtive; and it was as disgusting
as it was intriguing, as horrible as it was all the same secretly
entertaining, to see this brutal tamer of animals put the noble and yet
so ignominiously obedient beast of prey through a series of tricks and
sensational turns.

At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf
marvellously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command
and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip. He
went down on his knees, lay for dead, and, aping the lord of creation,
carried a loaf, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket in his mouth with
cheerful obedience; and he even had to pick up the whip that the tamer
had let fall and carry it after him in his teeth while he wagged his
tail with an unbearable submissiveness. A rabbit was put in front of
him and then a white lamb. He bared his teeth, it is true, and the
saliva dropped from his mouth while he trembled with desire, but he did
not touch either of the animals; and at the word of command he jumped
over them with a graceful leap, as they cowered trembling on the floor.
More--he laid himself down between the rabbit and the lamb and embraced
them with his foremost paws to form a touching family group, at the
same time eating a stick of chocolate from the man’s hand. It was an
agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the wolf had learnt to
belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.

There was some compensation, however, both for the horrified spectator
and for the wolf himself, in the second part of the programme. For
after this refined exhibition of animal-taming and when the man with a
winning smile had made his triumphant bow over the group of the wolf
and the lamb, the rôles were reversed. My engaging double suddenly
with a low reverence laid his whip at the wolf’s feet and became as
agitated, as shrunken and wretched, as the wolf had been before.
The wolf, however, licked his chops with a grin, his constraint and
dissimulation erased. His eyes kindled. His whole body was taut and
showed the joy he felt at recovering his wild nature.

And now the wolf commanded and the man obeyed. At the word of command
the man sank on his knees, let his tongue loll out and tore his clothes
off with his filed teeth. He went on two feet or all-fours just as the
wolf ordered him, played the human being, lay for dead, let the wolf
ride on his back and carried the whip after him. With the aptness of
a dog he submitted gladly to every humiliation and perversion of his
nature. A lovely girl came on to the stage and went up to the tamed
man. She stroked his chin and rubbed her cheek against his; but he
remained on all-fours, remained a beast. He shook his head and began to
show his teeth at the charming creature--so menacingly and wolfishly
at last, that she ran away. Chocolate was put before him, but with a
contemptuous sniff he thrust it from him with his snout. Finally the
white lamb and the fat piebald rabbit were brought on again and the
docile man gave his last turn and played the wolf most amusingly. He
seized the shrieking creatures in his fingers and teeth, tore them limb
from limb, grinningly chewed the living flesh and rapturously drank
their warm blood while his eyes closed in a dreamy delight.

I made for the door in horror and dashed out. This Magic Theatre was
clearly no paradise. All hell lay beneath its charming surface. O God,
was there even here no release?

In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and
chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other. I desired
nothing but to be beyond this wave of disgust. I wrestled with
myself for more bearable, friendlier pictures. “O Friend, not these
notes!” sang in my head, and with horror I remembered those terrible
photographs from the Front that one saw occasionally during the
war--those heaps of bodies entangled with each other, whose faces were
changed to grinning ghouls by their gas-masks. How silly and childish
of me, a humanely minded opponent of war though I was, to have been
horrified by those pictures. To-day I knew that no tamer of beasts, no
General, no insane person could hatch a thought or a picture in his
brain that I could not match myself with one every bit as frightful,
every bit as savage and wicked, as crude and stupid.

With an immense relief I remembered the notice I had seen on first
entering the theatre, the one that the nice boy had stormed so
furiously--

                          ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS

and it seemed to me, all in all, that there was really nothing else so
desirable as this. I was greatly cheered at finding that I could escape
from that cursed wolf-world, and went in.

The fragrance of spring-time met me. The very atmosphere of boyhood
and youth, so deeply familiar and yet so legendary, was around me and
in my veins flowed the blood of those days. All that I had done and
thought and been since, fell away from me and I was young again. An
hour, a few minutes before, I had prided myself on knowing what love
was and desire and longing, but it had been the love and the longing of
an old man. Now I was young again and this glowing current of fire that
I felt in me, this mighty impulse, this unloosening passion like that
wind in March that brings the thaw, was young and new and genuine. How
the flame that I had forgotten leaped up again, how darkly stole on my
ears the tones of long ago! My blood was on fire, and blossomed forth
as my soul cried aloud and sang. I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen
with my head full of Latin and Greek and poetry. I was all ardour and
ambition and my fancy was laden with the artist’s dreams. But far
deeper and stronger and more awful than all there burned and leapt in
me the flame of love, the hunger of sex, the fever and the foreboding
of desire.

I was standing on a spur of the hills above the little town where I
lived. The wind wafted the smell of spring and violets through my long
hair. Below in the town I saw the gleam of the river and the windows
of my home, and all that I saw and heard and smelt overwhelmed me, as
fresh and reeling from creation, as radiant in depth of colour, swayed
by the wind of spring in as magical a transfiguration, as when once I
looked on the world with the eyes of youth--first youth and poetry.
With wandering hand I pulled a half-opened leaf-bud from a bush that
was newly green. I looked at it and smelt it (with the smell everything
of those days came back in a glow) and then I put it between my lips,
lips that no girl had ever kissed, and began playfully to bite it. At
the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what
it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living
again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in
early spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and
greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly.

She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill towards me.
She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with
apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits,
with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw
for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful
and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful
and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs;
and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with
the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the girl
filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of
woman. In that moment was contained the shock and the forewarning of
enormous possibilities and promises, nameless delight, unthinkable
bewilderments, anguish, suffering, release to the innermost and deepest
guilt. Oh, how sharp was the bitter taste of spring on my tongue! And
how the wind streamed playfully through the loose hair beside her
rosy cheeks! She was close now. She looked up and recognised me. For
a moment she blushed a little and looked aside; but when I took off
my school-cap, she was self-possessed at once and, raising her head,
returned my greeting with a smile that was quite grown-up. Then,
entirely mistress of the situation, she went slowly on, in a halo of
the thousand wishes, hopes and adorations that I sent after her.

So it had once been on a Sunday thirty-five years before and all that
had been then came back to me in this moment. Hill and town, March wind
and buddy taste, Rosa and her brown hair, the welling-up of desire
and the sweet suffocation of anguish. All was as it was then, and it
seemed to me that I had never in my life loved as I loved Rosa that
day. But this time it was given me to greet her otherwise than on that
occasion. I saw her blush when she recognised me, and the pains she
took to conceal it, and I knew at once that she had a liking for me
and that this encounter meant the same for her as for me. And this time
instead of standing ceremoniously cap in hand till she had gone by, I
did, in spite of anguish bordering on obsession, what my blood bade me
do. I cried: “Rosa! Thank God, you’ve come, you beautiful, beautiful
girl. I love you so dearly.” It was not perhaps the most brilliant of
all the things that might have been said at this moment, but there was
no need for brilliance, and it was enough and more. Rosa did not put
on her grown-up air, and she did not go on. She stopped and looked at
me and, growing even redder than before, she said: “Heaven be praised,
Harry--do you really like me?” Her brown eyes lit up her strong face,
and they showed me that my past life and loves had all been false and
perplexed and full of stupid unhappiness from that very moment on a
Sunday afternoon when I had let Rosa pass me by. Now, however, the
blunder was put right. Everything went differently and everything was
good.

We clasped hands, and hand in hand walked slowly on as happy as we
were embarrassed. We did not know what to do or to say, so we began
to walk faster from embarrassment and then broke into a run, and ran
till we lost our breath and had to stand still. But we did not let go
our hands. We were both still children and did not know quite what to
do with each other. That Sunday we did not even kiss, but we were
immeasurably happy. We stood to get our breath. We sat on the grass
and I stroked her hand while she passed the other one shyly over my
hair. And then we got up again and tried to measure which of us was
the taller. In reality, I was the taller by a finger’s breath, but I
would not have it so. I maintained that we were of exactly the same
height and that God had designed us for each other and that later on
we would marry. Then Rosa said that she smelt violets and we knelt in
the short spring grass and looked for them and found a few with short
stalks and I gave her mine and she gave me hers, and as it was getting
chill and the sun slanted low over the cliffs, Rosa said she must go
home. At this we both became very sad, for I dared not accompany her.
But now we shared a secret and it was our dearest possession. I stayed
behind on the cliffs and lying down with my face over the edge of the
sheer descent, I looked down over the town and watched for her sweet
little figure to appear far below and saw it pass the spring and over
the bridge. And now I knew that she had reached her home and was going
from room to room, and I lay up there far away from her; but there was
a bond between her and me. The same current ran in both of us and a
secret passed to and fro.

We saw each other again here and there all through this spring,
sometimes on the cliffs, sometimes over the garden hedge; and when
the elder began to bloom we gave each other the first shy kiss. It
was little that children like us had to give each other and our kiss
lacked warmth and fullness. I scarcely ventured to touch the strands
of her hair about her ears. But all the love and all the joy that was
in us were ours. It was a shy emotion and the troth we plighted was
still unripe, but this timid waiting on each other taught us a new
happiness. We climbed one little step up on the ladder of love. And
thus, beginning from Rosa and the violets, I lived again through all
the loves of my life--but under happier stars. Rosa I lost, and Irmgard
appeared; and the sun was warmer and the stars less steady, but Irmgard
no more than Rosa was mine. Step by step I had to climb. There was
much to live through and much to learn; and I had to lose Irmgard and
Anna too. Every girl that I had once loved in youth, I loved again,
but now I was able to inspire each with love. There was something I
could give to each, something each could give to me. Wishes, dreams and
possibilities that had once had no other life than my own imagination
were lived now in reality. They passed before me like beautiful
flowers, Ida and Laura and all whom I had loved for a summer, a month,
or a day.

I was now, as I perceived, that good looking and ardent boy whom I had
seen making so eagerly for love’s door. I was living a bit of myself
only--a bit that in my actual life and being had not been expressed
to a tenth or a thousandth part, and I was living it to the full. I
was watching it grow unmolested by any other part of me. It was not
perturbed by the thinker, nor tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed
by the poet, the visionary or the moralist. No--I was nothing now but
the lover and I breathed no other happiness and no other suffering
than love. Irmgard had already taught me to dance and Ida to kiss, and
it was Emma first, the most beautiful of them all, who on an autumn
evening beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown breasts to kiss and the
cup of passion to drink.

I lived through much in Pablo’s little theatre and not a thousandth
part can be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved were mine.
Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she
alone knew how to take. Much love, much happiness, much indulgence,
and much bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share. All the
love that I had missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden during
this hour of dreams. There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones
that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust, inward
reverie, glowing melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I found
women who were only to be taken by storm and those whom it was a joy to
woo and win by degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if but
for a moment the voice of sex had called me, a woman’s glance kindled
me or the gleam of a girl’s white skin allured me, emerged again and
all that had been missed was made good. All were mine, each in her
own way. The woman with the remarkable dark brown eyes beneath flaxen
hair was there. I had stood beside her for a quarter of an hour in the
corridor of an express and afterwards she often appeared in my dreams.
She did not speak a word, but what she taught me of the art of love was
unimaginable, frightful, deathly. And the sleek, still Chinese, from
the harbour of Marseilles, with her glassy smile, her smooth dead-black
hair and swimming eyes--she too knew undreamed-of things. Each had
her secret and the bouquet of her soil. Each kissed and laughed in a
fashion of her own, and in her own peculiar way was shameful and in
her own peculiar way shameless. They came and went. The stream carried
them towards me and washed me up to them and away. I was a child in the
stream of sex at play in the midst of all its charm, its danger and
surprise. And it astonished me to find how rich my life--the seemingly
so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf--had been in the
opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled
before them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget
them. But here they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one
missing. And now that I saw them I gave myself up to them without
defence and sank down into the rosy twilight of their underworld. Even
that seduction to which Pablo had once invited me came again, and other
earlier ones, none of which at the time I had even fully grasped,
fantastic games for three or four, caught me into their gambols with a
laugh. Many things happened and many games were played not to be said
in words.

When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of
allurement and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent. I was
equipped, far gone in knowledge, wise, expert--ripe for Hermine. She
rose as the last figure in my populous mythology, the last name of an
endless series; and at once I came to myself and made an end of this
fairy-tale of love; for I did not wish to meet her in this twilight
of a magic mirror. I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my
game of chess--I belonged to her wholly. Oh, I would now so lay out the
pieces in my game that all was centred in her and led to fulfilment.

The stream had washed me ashore. Once again I stood in the silent
theatre passage. What now? I felt for the little figures in my
pocket--but already this impulse died away. Around me was the
inexhaustible world of doors, notices and magic mirrors. Listlessly I
read the first words that caught my eye, and shuddered.

                         HOW ONE KILLS FOR LOVE

was what it said.

Swiftly a picture was flashed upon my memory with a jerk and remained
there one instant. Hermine at the table of a restaurant, turning all
at once from the wine and food, lost in an abyss of speech, with a
terrifying earnestness in her face as she said that she would have one
aim only in making me her lover, and it was that she should die by my
hand. A heavy wave of anguish and darkness flooded my heart. Suddenly
everything confronted me once more. Suddenly once more the sense of the
last call of fate gripped my heart. Desperately I felt in my pocket
for the little figures so that I might practise a little magic and
rearrange the lay-out of the board. The figures were no longer there.
Instead of them I pulled out a knife. In mortal dread I ran along the
corridor, past every door. I stood opposite the gigantic mirror. I
looked into it. In the mirror there stood a beautiful wolf as tall as
myself. He stood still, glancing shyly from unquiet eyes. As he leered
at me, his eyes blazed and he grinned a little so that his chops
parted and showed his red tongue.

Where was Pablo? Where was Hermine? Where was that clever fellow who
had discoursed so pleasantly about the building up of the personality?

Again I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad.
There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw. It was
I, Harry. My face was grey, forsaken of all fancies, fordone with all
vice, horribly pale. Still it was a human being, some one one could
speak to.

“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing there?”

“Nothing,” said he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for
death.”

“Where is death then?”

“Coming,” said the other. And I heard from the empty spaces within the
theatre the sound of music, a beautiful and awful music, that music
from _Don Giovanni_ that heralds the approach of the guest of
stone. With an awful and an iron clang it rang through the ghostly
house, coming from the other world, from the immortals.

“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and
the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.

At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and
ice-cold laughter out of a world beyond unknown to men, a world born
of sufferings, purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through
with the blessing of this laughter, and there came Mozart. He passed
by me laughing as he went and, strolling quietly on, he opened the
door of one of the boxes and went in. Eagerly I followed the god of my
youth, the object, all my life long, of love and veneration. The music
rang on. Mozart was leaning over the front of the box. Of the theatre
nothing was to be seen. Darkness filled the boundless space.

“You see,” said Mozart, “it goes all right without the
saxophone--though to be sure, I shouldn’t wish to tread on the toes of
that famous instrument.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We are in the last act of _Don Giovanni_. Leporello is on his
knees. A superb scene, and the music is fine too. There is a lot in
it, certainly, that’s very human, but you can hear the other world in
it--the laughter, eh?”

“It is the last great music ever written,” said I with the pomposity
of a schoolmaster. “Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf
also, and I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You
frown, Maestro? Oh, yes, Beethoven--he is wonderful too. But all
that--beautiful as it may be--has something rhapsodical about it,
something of disintegration. A work of such plentitude and power as
_Don Giovanni_ has never since arisen among men.”

“Don’t overstrain yourself,” laughed Mozart, in frightful mockery.
“You’re a musician yourself, I perceive. Well, I have given up the
trade and retired to take my ease. It is only for amusement that I look
on at the business now and then.”

He raised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some
pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box
into immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there.
Mountains and sea-shores glimmered, and beneath us extended world-wide
a desert plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy
aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some
ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and
Mozart said:

“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take
him all his time.”

I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all
those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment
were superfluous.

“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with
a nod.

And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just
as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and
closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with
slow and sad step.

“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as
the most extreme contrasts conceivable.”

Mozart laughed.

“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little
distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick
orchestration was in any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal
failing. It was a fault of their time.”

“What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?” I cried in protest.

“Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the
debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to
themselves is left over to stand to their credit.”

“But they can’t either of them help it!”

“Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But
they have to pay for it all the same.”

“But that is frightful.”

“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are
responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You
must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not
know that.”

I was now thoroughly miserable. I saw myself as a dead-weary pilgrim,
dragging myself across the desert of the other world, laden with
the many superfluous books I had written, and all the articles and
feuilletons; followed by the army of compositors who had had the type
to set up, by the army of readers who had had it all to swallow. My
God--and over and above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the
whole of original sin. All this, then, was to be paid for in endless
purgatory. And only then could the question arise whether, behind all
that, there was anything personal, anything of my own, left over; or
whether all that I had done and all its consequences were merely the
empty foam of the sea and a meaningless ripple in the flow of what was
over and done.

Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault
in the air for laughter’s sake and played trills with his heels. At the
same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young man, you are biting your
tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers,
those carrion-feeders, and all your type-setters, those wretched
abettors, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I
shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with
printer’s ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if
that’ll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectakled and shackled,
and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally
no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and
slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings
and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”

This, however, was too much for me. Anger left me no time for
melancholy. I caught hold of Mozart by the pig-tail and off he flew.
The pig-tail grew longer and longer like the tail of a comet and I was
whirled along at the end of it. The devil--but it was cold in this
world we traversed! These immortals put up with a rarefied and glacial
atmosphere. But it was delightful all the same--this icy air. I could
tell that, even in the brief moment that elapsed before I lost my
senses. A bitter-sharp and steel-bright icy gaiety coursed through me
and a desire to laugh as shrilly and wildly and unearthily as Mozart
had done. But then breath and consciousness failed me.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I came to myself I was bewildered and done-up. The white light
of the corridor shone in the polished floor. I was not among the
immortals, not yet. I was still, as ever, on this side of the riddle of
suffering, of wolf-men and torturing complexities. I had found no happy
spot, no endurable resting place. There must be an end of it.

In the great mirror, Harry stood opposite me. He did not appear to
be very flourishing. His appearance was much the same as on that
night when he visited the professor and sat through the dance at the
Black Eagle. But that was far behind, years, centuries behind. He
had grown older. He had learnt to dance. He had visited the magic
theatre. He had heard Mozart laugh. Dancing and women and knives had
no more terrors for him. Even those who have average gifts, given a
few hundred years, come to maturity. I looked for a long time at Harry
in the looking-glass. I still knew him well enough, and he still bore
a faint resemblance to the boy of fifteen who one Sunday in March had
met Rosa on the cliffs and taken off his school-cap to her. And yet he
had grown a few centuries older since then. He had pursued philosophy
and music and had his fill of war and his Elsasser at the Steel Helmet
and discussed Krishna with men of honest learning. He had loved Erica
and Maria, and had been Hermine’s friend, and shot down motor-cars, and
slept with the sleek Chinese, and encountered Mozart and Goethe, and
made sundry holes in the web of time and rents in reality’s disguise,
though it held him a prisoner still. And suppose he had lost his pretty
chessmen again, still he had a fine blade in his pocket. On then, old
Harry, old weary loon.

Bah, the devil--how bitter the taste of life! I spat at Harry in the
looking-glass. I gave him a kick and kicked him to splinters. I walked
slowly along the echoing corridor, carefully scanning the doors that
had held out so many glowing promises. Not one now showed a single
announcement. Slowly I passed by all the hundred doors of the Magic
Theatre. Was not this the day I had been to a Masked Ball? Hundreds
of years had passed since then. Soon years would cease altogether.
Something, though, was still to be done. Hermine awaited me. A strange
marriage it was to be, and a sorrowful wave it was that bore me on,
drearily bore me on, a slave, a wolf-man. Bah, the devil!

I stopped at the last door. So far had the sorrowful wave borne me. O
Rosa! O departed youth! O Goethe! O Mozart!

I opened it. What I saw was a simple and beautiful picture. On a rug
on the floor lay two naked figures, the beautiful Hermine and the
beautiful Pablo side by side in a sleep of deep exhaustion after
love’s play. Beautiful, beautiful figures, lovely pictures, wonderful
bodies. Beneath Hermine’s left breast was a fresh round mark, darkly
bruised--a love bite of Pablo’s beautiful, gleaming teeth. There, where
the mark was, I plunged in my knife to the hilt. The blood welled out
over her white and delicate skin. I would have kissed away the blood
if everything had happened a little differently. As it was, I did
not. I only watched how the blood flowed and watched her eyes open
for a little moment in pain and deep wonder. What makes her wonder? I
thought? Then it occurred to me that I had to shut her eyes. But they
shut again of themselves. So all was done. She only turned a little
to one side, and from her arm-pit to her breast I saw the play of a
delicate shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what
I could not remember. Then she lay still.

For long I looked at her and at last I waked with a shudder and turned
to go. Then I saw Pablo stretch himself. I saw him open his eyes and
stretch his limbs and then bend over the dead girl and smile. Never,
I thought, will this fellow take anything seriously. Everything makes
him smile. Pablo, meanwhile, carefully turned over a corner of the
rug and covered Hermine up as far as her breast so that the wound
was hidden, and then he went silently out of the box. Where was he
going? Was everybody leaving me alone? I stayed there, alone with the
half-shrouded body of her whom I loved--and envied. The boyish hair
hung low over the white forehead. Her lips shone red against the dead
pallor of her blanched face and they were a little parted. Her hair
diffused its delicate perfume and through it glimmered the little
shell-like ear.

Her wish was fulfilled. Before she had ever been mine, I had killed my
love. I had done the unthinkable, and now I kneeled and stared and did
not know at all what this deed meant, whether it was good and right or
the opposite. What would the clever chess-player, what would Pablo have
to say to it? I knew nothing and I could not think. The painted mouth
glowed more red on the growing pallor of the face. So had my whole life
been. My little happiness and love were like this staring mouth, a
little red upon a mask of death.

And from the dead face, from the dead white shoulders and the dead
white arms, there exhaled and slowly crept a shudder, a desert
wintriness and desolation, a slowly, slowly increasing chill in which
my hands and lips grew numb. Had I quenched the sun? Had I stopped the
heart of all life? Was it the coldness of death and space breaking in?

With a shudder I stared at the stony brow and the stark hair and the
cool pale shimmer of the ear. The cold that streamed from them was
deathly and yet it was beautiful, it rang, it vibrated. It was music!

Hadn’t I once felt this shudder before and found it at the same time a
joy? Hadn’t I once caught this music before? Yes, with Mozart and the
immortals.

Verses came into my head that I had once come upon somewhere:


    We above you ever more residing
    In the ether’s star translumined ice
    Know nor day nor night nor time’s dividing,
    Wear nor age nor sex as our device.
    Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
    Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.


Then the door of the box opened and in came Mozart. I did not recognise
him at the first glance, for he was without pigtail, knee-breeches and
buckled shoes, in modern dress. He took a seat close beside me, and
I was on the point of holding him back because of the blood that had
flowed over the floor from Hermine’s breast. He sat there and began
busying himself with an apparatus and some instruments that stood
beside him. He took it very seriously, tightening this and screwing
that, and I looked with wonder at his adroit and nimble fingers and
wished that I might see them playing a piano for once. I watched
him thoughtfully, or in a reverie rather, lost in admiration of his
beautiful and skilful hands, warmed too, by the sense of his presence
and a little apprehensive as well. Of what he was actually doing and of
what it was that he screwed and manipulated, I took no heed whatever.

I soon found, however, that he had fixed up a wireless set and put it
in going order, and now he inserted the loud-speaker and said: “Munich
calling. Concerto Grosso in F major of Handel.”

At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish
metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial
slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophones and
wireless sets are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime
and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath
a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could
distinguish the majestic structure and the deep wide breath and the
full broad bowing of the strings.

“My God,” I cried in horror, “what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really
mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day,
the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art?
Must this be, Mozart?”

How the uncomfortable man laughed! And what a cold and eerie laugh!
It was noiseless and yet everything went to smithereens in it. He
marked my torment with deep satisfaction while he bent over the cursed
screws and attended to the metal trumpet. Laughing still, he let the
distorted, the murdered and murderous music ooze out and on; and
laughing still, he replied:

“Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando?
An inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of
this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like
gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless
heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without
either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this
hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine
music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe
what this crazy speaking-trumpet, apparently the most stupid, the most
useless and the most damnable thing that the world contains, contrives
to do. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without
distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it
into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all
this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only,
however it may meddle and mar, lay its senseless mechanism at its feet.
Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And
now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by wireless, is, all
the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as
well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all
life. When you listen to wireless you are a witness of the everlasting
war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between
the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the wireless for ten
minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the
most impossible places, into snug drawing-rooms and attics and into
the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners,
and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils
and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its
spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime
picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its
unappetising tone--slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere
it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and
vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All
life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not
asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics
of wireless or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn
what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. Or is it that you
have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and with better taste?
Oh, no, Mr. Harry, you have not. You have made a frightful history of
disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts. And you have,
as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a young lady
than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her. Was that right,
do you think?”

“Right?” I cried in despair. “No! My God, everything is so false, so
hellishly stupid and wrong! I am a beast, Mozart, a stupid, angry
beast, sick and rotten. There you’re right a thousand times. But as for
this girl--it was her own desire. I have only fulfilled her own wish.”

Mozart laughed his noiseless laughter. But he had the great kindness to
turn off the wireless.

My self-extenuation sounded unexpectedly and thoroughly foolish even to
me who had believed in it with all my heart. When Hermine had once, so
it suddenly occurred to me, spoken about time and eternity, I had been
ready forthwith to take her thoughts as a reflection of my own. That
the thought, however, of dying by my hand had been her own inspiration
and wish and not in the least influenced by me I had taken as a matter
of course. But why on that occasion had I not only accepted that
horrible and unnatural thought, but even guessed it in advance. Perhaps
because it had been my own. And why had I murdered Hermine just at the
very moment when I saw her lying naked in another’s arms? All-knowing
and all-mocking rang Mozart’s soundless laughter.

“Harry,” said he, “you’re a great joker. Had this beautiful girl really
nothing to desire of you but the stab of a knife? Keep that for some
one else! Well, at least you have stabbed her properly. The poor child
is as dead as a mouse. And now perhaps would be an opportune moment to
realise the consequences of your gallantry towards this lady. Or do you
think of evading the consequences?”

“No,” I cried. “Don’t you understand at all? I evade the consequences?
I have no other desire than to pay and pay and pay for them, to lay my
head beneath the axe and pay the penalty of annihilation.”

Mozart looked at me with intolerable mockery.

“How pathetic you always are. But you will learn humour yet, Harry.
Humour is always gallows-humour, and it is on the gallows you are now
constrained to learn it. You are ready? Good. Then off with you to the
public prosecutor and let the law take its course with you till your
head is coolly hacked off at break of dawn in the prison-yard. You are
ready for it?”

Instantly a notice flashed before my eyes:

                           HARRY’S EXECUTION

and I consented with a nod. I stood in a bare yard enclosed by four
walls with barred windows, and shivered in the air of a grey dawn.
There were a dozen gentlemen there in morning coats and gowns, and a
newly erected guillotine. My heart was contracted with misery and
dread, but I was ready and acquiescent. At the word of command I
stepped forward and at the word of command I knelt down. The public
prosecutor removed his cap and cleared his throat and all the other
gentlemen cleared their throats. He unfolded an official document and
held it before him and read out:

“Gentlemen, there stands before you Harry Haller, accused and found
guilty of the wilful misuse of our magic theatre. Haller has not alone
insulted the majesty of art in that he confounded our beautiful picture
gallery with so-called reality and stabbed to death the reflection of
a girl with the reflection of a knife; he has in addition displayed
the intention of using our theatre as a mechanism of suicide and shown
himself devoid of humour. Wherefore we condemn Haller to eternal life
and we suspend for twelve hours his permit to enter our theatre.
The penalty also of being laughed out of court may not be remitted.
Gentlemen, all together, one-two-three!”

On the word “three” all who were present broke into one simultaneous
peal of laughter, a laughter in full chorus, a frightful laughter of
the other world that is scarcely to be borne by the ears of men.

When I came to myself again, Mozart was sitting beside me as before.
He clapped me on the shoulder and said: “You have heard your sentence.
So, you see, you will have to learn to listen to more of the wireless
music of life. It’ll do you good. You are uncommonly poor in gifts, a
poor blockhead, but by degrees you will come to grasp what is required
of you. You have got to learn to laugh. That will be required of you.
You must apprehend the humour of life, its gallows-humour. But of
course you are ready for everything in the world except what will be
required of you. You are ready to stab girls to death. You are ready
to be executed with all solemnity. You would be ready, no doubt, to
mortify and scourge yourself for centuries together. Wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes, ready with all my heart,” I cried in my misery.

“Of course! When it’s a question of anything stupid and pathetic and
devoid of humour or wit, you’re the man, you tragedian. Well, I am not.
I don’t care a fig for all your romantics of atonement. You wanted to
be executed and to have your head chopped off, you Berserker! For this
imbecile ideal you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing
to die, you coward, but not to live. The devil, but you shall live!
It would serve you right if you were condemned to the severest of
penalties.”

“Oh, and what would that be?”

“We might, for example, restore this girl to life again and marry you
to her.”

“No, I should not be ready for that. It would bring unhappiness.”

“As if there were not enough unhappiness in all you have designed
already! However, enough of pathos and death-dealing. It is time to
come to your senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to
listen to life’s wireless music and to reverence the spirit behind it
and to laugh at the bim-bim in it. So there you are. More will not be
asked of you.”

Gently from behind clenched teeth I asked: “And if I do not submit? And
if I deny your right, Mozart, to interfere with the Steppenwolf, and to
meddle in his destiny?”

“Then,” said Mozart calmly, “I should invite you to smoke another of
my charming cigarettes.” And as he spoke and conjured up a cigarette
from his waistcoat pocket and offered it me, he was suddenly Mozart no
longer. It was my friend Pablo looking warmly at me out of his dark
exotic eyes and as like the man who had taught me to play chess with
the little figures as a twin.

“Pablo!” I cried with a convulsive start. “Pablo, where are we?”

“We are in my Magic Theatre,” he said with a smile, “and if you wish
at any time to learn the Tango or to be a General or to have a talk
with Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I’m bound
to say, Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself
badly. You broke through the humour of my little theatre and tried
to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty
picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you.
I hope, at least, you did it from jealousy when you saw Hermine and
me lying there. Unfortunately, you did not know what to do with this
figure. I thought you had learnt the game better. Well, you will do
better next time.”

He took Hermine who at once shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of
a toy-figure and put her in the very same waistcoat-pocket from which
he had taken the cigarette.

Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I was utterly
done-up and ready to sleep for a year.

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and
somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the
hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of
its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the
game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again
at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the
hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how
to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.


                                THE END




                          Transcriber’s Notes

 New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
 public domain.

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 Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.





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