Steppenwolf
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