Steppenwolf
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