Steppenwolf
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