Steppenwolf
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