Steppenwolf
emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters
for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of
years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world,
money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To
the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yes, eternity.”
“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”
“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that
all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the
schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious
call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much
and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if
there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if
there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom
of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your
great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and
suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of
every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity
just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it
or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity.”
“You are right.”
“The pious,” she went on meditatively, “after all know most about this.
That is why they set up the saints and what they call the communion
of the saints. The saints, that is to say, the true men, the younger
brothers of the Saviour. We are with them all our lives long in every
good deed, in every brave thought, in every love. The communion of the
saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven,
shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what
I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the kingdom on
the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is
our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason,
Steppenwolf, we long for death. There you will find your Goethe again
and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher, Philip of Neri
and all. There are many saints who at first were sinners. Even sin
can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice. You will laugh at me, but
I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding.
Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before
we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our
home-sickness.”
With the last words her voice had sunk again and now there was a
stillness of peace in the room. The sun was setting; it lit up the gilt
lettering on the back of my books. I took Hermine’s head in my hands
and kissed her on the forehead and leant my cheek to hers as though she
were my sister, and so we stayed for a moment. And so I should have
liked best to stay and to have gone out no more that day. But Maria had
promised me this night, the last before the great Ball.
But on my way to join Maria I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine
had said. It seemed to me that it was not, perhaps, her own thoughts
but mine. She had read them like a clairvoyant, breathed them in and
given them back, so that they had a form of their own and came to me as
something new. I was particularly thankful to her for having expressed
the thought of eternity just at this time. I needed it, for without
it I could not live and neither could I die. The sacred sense of
beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the
substance of which was divine had been given back to me to-day by this
friend of mine who taught me dancing.
I was forced to recall my dream of Goethe and that vision of the old
wiseacre when he laughed so inhumanly and played his joke on me in the
fashion of the immortals. For the first time I understood Goethe’s
laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an
object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left
over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices,
mistakes, passions and misunderstandings of men and got through to
eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than
the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to say, and its
transformation again into space.
I went to meet Maria at the place where we usually dined. However, she
had not arrived, and while I sat waiting at the table in the quiet
and secluded restaurant, my thoughts still ran on the conversation
I had had with Hermine. All these thoughts that had arisen between
her and me seemed so intimate and well known, fashioned from a
mythology and an imagery so entirely my own. The immortals, living
their life in timeless space, enraptured, re-fashioned and immersed
in a crystalline eternity like ether, and the cool starry brightness
and radiant serenity of this world outside the earth--whence was
all this so intimately known? As I reflected, passages of Mozart’s
_Cassations_, of Bach’s _Well-tempered Clavier_ came to my
mind and it seemed to me that all through this music there was the
radiance of this cool starry brightness and the quivering of this
clearness of ether. Yes, it was there. In this music there was a
feeling as of time frozen into space, and above it there quivered a
never-ending and superhuman serenity, an eternal, divine laughter.
Yes, and how well the aged Goethe of my dreams fitted in too! And
suddenly I heard this fathomless laughter around me. I heard the
immortals laughing. I sat entranced. Entranced, I felt for a pencil in
my waistcoat pocket, and looking for paper saw the wine card lying on
the table. I turned it over and wrote on the back. I wrote verses and
forgot about them till one day I discovered them in my pocket. They ran:
THE IMMORTALS
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each new-born and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Then Maria came and after a cheerful meal I accompanied her to our
little room. She was lovelier that evening, warmer and more intimate
than she had ever been. The love she gave me was so tender that I felt
it as the most complete abandon. “Maria,” said I, “you are as prodigal
to-day as a goddess. Don’t kill us both quite. To-morrow after all is
the Ball. Whom have you got for a cavalier to-morrow? I’m very much
afraid it is a fairy prince who will carry you off and I shall never
see you any more. Your love to-night is almost like that of good lovers
who bid each other farewell for the last time.”
She put her lips close to my ear and whispered:
“Don’t say that, Harry. Any time might be the last time. If Hermine
takes you, you will come no more to me. Perhaps she will take you
to-morrow.”
Never did I experience the feeling peculiar to those days, that
strange, bitter-sweet alternation of mood, more powerfully than on
that night before the Ball. It was happiness that I experienced. There
was the loveliness of Maria and her surrender. There was the sweet and
subtle sensuous joy of inhaling and tasting a hundred pleasures of the
senses that I had only begun to know as an elderly man. I was bathed
in sweet joy like a rippling pool. And yet that was only the shell.
Within all was significant and tense with fate, and while, love-lost
and tender, I was busied with the little sweet appealing things of love
and sank apparently without a care in the caress of happiness, I was
conscious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on at breakneck
speed, racing and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for the
precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the consummation
of death. Just as a short while before I had started aside in fear
from the easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love and felt a
dread of Maria’s beauty that laughingly offered itself, so now I felt
a dread of death, a dread, however, that was already conscious of its
approaching change into surrender and release.
Even while we were lost in the silent and deep preoccupation of our
love and belonged more closely than ever we had to one another, my soul
bid adieu to Maria, and leave of all that she had meant to me. I had
learnt from her, once more before the end, to confide myself like a
child to life’s surface play, to pursue a fleeting joy, and to be both
child and beast in the innocence of sex--a state that (in earlier life)
I had only known rarely and as an exception. The life of the senses and
of sex had nearly always had for me the bitter accompaniment of guilt,
the sweet but dread taste of forbidden fruit that puts a spiritual man
on his guard. Now, Hermine and Maria had shown me this garden in its
innocence, and I had been a guest there and thankfully. But it would
soon be time to go on further. It was too agreeable and too warm in
this garden. It was my destiny to make another bid for the crown of
life in the expiation of its endless guilt. An easy life, an easy love,
an easy death--these were not for me.
From what the girls told me I gathered that for the Ball next day, or
in connection with it, quite unusual delights and extravagances were
on foot. Perhaps it was the climax, and perhaps Maria’s suspicion was
correct. Perhaps this was our last night together and perhaps the
morning would bring a new unwinding of fate. I was aflame with longing
and breathless with dread; I clung wildly to Maria; and there flared
within me a last burst of wild desire....
* * * * *
I made up by day for the sleep I had lost at night. After a bath I went
home dead tired. I darkened my bedroom and as I undressed I came on the
verses in my pocket; but I forgot them again and lay down forthwith.
I forgot Maria and Hermine and the Masked Ball and slept the clock
round. It was not till I had got up in the evening and was shaving that
I remembered that the Ball began in an hour and that I had to find
a dress shirt. I got myself ready in very good humour and went out
thereafter to have dinner.
It was the first Masked Ball I was to participate in. In earlier days,
it is true, I had now and again attended such festivities and even
sometimes found them very entertaining, but I had never danced. I had
been a spectator merely. As for the enthusiasm with which others had
talked and rejoiced over them in my hearing, it had always struck me as
comic. And now the day had come for me too to find the occasion one of
almost painful suspense. As I had no partner to take, I decided not to