Steppenwolf
“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