Steppenwolf
myself with the elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from
which I had just retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly
years. Never did sinner show more haste to get to hell. A moment
before my patent-leather shoes had galled me, the heavily scented air
disgusted me, and the heat undone me. Now on my winged feet I nimbly
one-stepped through every room on the way to hell. The very air had
a charm. The warmth embedded me and wafted me on, and so no less did
the riotous music, the intoxication of colours, the perfume of women’s
shoulders, the clamour of the hundred tongues, the laughter, the rhythm
of the dance, and the glances of all the kindled eyes. A Spanish
dancing girl flung herself into my arms: “Dance with me!” “Can’t,” said
I. “I’m bound for hell. But I’ll gladly take a kiss with me.” The red
mouth beneath the mask met mine and with the kiss I recognised Maria. I
caught her tight in my arms and like a June rose bloomed her full lips.
By this time we were dancing, our lips still joined. Past Pablo we
danced, who hung like a lover over his softly wailing instrument. Those
lovely animal eyes embraced us with their half-abstracted radiance. But
before we had gone twenty steps the music broke off and regretfully I
let go of Maria.
“I’d have loved to have danced with you again,” I said, intoxicated
with her warmth. “Come with me a step or two, Maria. I’m in love with
your beautiful arm. Let me have it a moment longer! But, you see,
Hermine has summoned me. She is in hell.”
“I thought so. Farewell, Harry. I won’t forget you.” She left me--left
me indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer
rose so full and ripe a scent.
On I went through the long corridors, luxuriously thronged, and down
the stairs to hell. There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish
lights, and the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly. On a high
stool at the bar there was seated a pretty young fellow without a mask
and in evening dress who scrutinised me with a cursory and mocking
glance. Pressed to the wall by the swirl of dancers--about twenty
couples were dancing in this very confined space--I examined all the
women with eager suspense. Most were still in masks and smiled at me,
but none was Hermine. The handsome youth on the high stool glanced
mockingly at me. At the next pause, thought I, she will come and summon
me. The dance ended but no one came.
I went over to the bar which was squeezed into a corner of the small
and low room, and taking a seat near the young man ordered a whisky.
While I drank it I saw his profile. It had a familiar charm, like a
picture from long ago, precious for the very dust that has settled on
it from the past. Oh, then it flashed through me. It was Herman, the
friend of my youth.
“Herman!” I stammered.
She smiled. “Harry? Have you found me?”
It was Hermine, barely disguised by the make-up of her hair and a
little paint. The stylish collar gave an unfamiliar look to the pallor
of her intelligent face, the wide black sleeves of her dress-coat and
the white cuffs made her hands look curiously small, and the long black
trousers gave a curious elegance to her feet in their black and white
silk socks.
“Is this the costume, Hermine, in which you mean to make me fall in
love with you?”
“So far,” she said, “I have contented myself with turning the heads of
the ladies. But now your turn has come. First, let’s have a glass of
champagne.”
So we did, perched on our stools, while the dance went on around us
to the lively and fevered strain of the strings. And without Hermine
appearing to give herself the least trouble I was very soon in love
with her. As she was dressed as a boy, I could not dance with her nor
allow myself any tender advances, and while she seemed distant and
neutral in her male mask, her looks and words and gestures encircled
me with all her feminine charm. Without so much as having touched her
I surrendered to her spell, and this spell itself kept within the
part she played. It was the spell of a hermaphrodite. For she talked
to me about Herman and about childhood, mine and her own, and about
those years of childhood when the capacity for love, in its first
youth, embraces not only both sexes, but all and everything, sensuous
and spiritual, and endows all things with a spell of love and a
fairy-like ease of transformation such as in later years comes again
only to a chosen few and to poets, and to them rarely. Throughout she
kept up the part of a young man, smoking cigarettes and talking with a
spirited ease that often had a little mockery in it; and yet it was all
iridescent with the rays of desire and transformed, as it reached my
senses, into a charming seduction.
How well and thoroughly I thought I knew Hermine, and yet what a
completely new revelation of herself she opened up to me that night!
How gently and inconspicuously she cast the net I longed for around me,
and how playfully and how like a pixie she gave the sweet poison to
drink!
We sat and talked and drank champagne. We strolled through the rooms
and looked about us. We went on voyages of exploration to discover
couples whose love-making it amused us to spy upon. She pointed out
women whom she recommended me to dance with, and gave me advice as to
the methods of attack to be employed with each. We took the floor as
rivals and paid court for a while to the same girl, danced with her
by turns and both tried to win her heart. And yet it was all only a
carnival, only a game between the two of us that caught us more closely
together in our own passion. It was all a fairy tale. Everything had a
new dimension, a deeper meaning. Everything was fanciful and symbolic.
There was one girl of great beauty but looking tragic and unhappy.
Herman danced with her and drew her out. They disappeared to drink
champagne together, and she told me afterwards that she had made a
conquest of her not as a man but as a woman, with the spell of Lesbos.
For my part, the whole building, reverberating everywhere with the
sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by
degrees a wild dream of paradise. Flower upon flower wooed me with its
scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit. Serpents looked at me from green
and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes. Lotus blossoms luxuriated over
black bogs. Enchanted birds sang allurement from the trees. Yet all was
a progress to one longed-for goal, the summons of a new yearning for
one and one only. Once I was dancing with a girl I did not know. I had
swept her with the ardour of a lover into the giddy swirl of dancers
and while we hung in this unreal world, she suddenly remarked with
a laugh: “One wouldn’t know you. You were so dull and flat before.”
Then I recognised the girl who had called me “Old Growler” a few hours
before. She thought she had got me now, but with the next dance it was
another for whom my ardour glowed. I danced without ceasing for two
hours or more--every dance and some, even, that I had never danced
before. Every now and then Herman was near me, and gave me a nod and a
smile as he disappeared in the throng.
An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never
known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and
student--the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious
merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I
had often heard it spoken of. It was known, I knew, to every servant
girl. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me
of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious
smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom
rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile,
that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by
a common enthusiasm. I had seen it in drunken recruits and sailors,
and also in great artists in the enthusiasm, perhaps, of a musical
festival; and not less in young soldiers going to war. Even in recent
days I had marvelled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and
this smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the
blissful intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured
and ecstatic, he looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man
with the banjo. It had sometimes occurred to me that such a smile,
such a childlike radiance could be possible only to quite young persons
or among those peoples whose customs permitted no marked differences
between one individual and another. But to-day, on this blessed night,
I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam
in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy-tale. I myself breathed
the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and rhythm and
wine and women,--I, who had in other days so often listened with
amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ball-room
chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was
dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I
danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in
my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the
other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to
the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic
flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one
another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no
strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs
mine.
A new dance, a fox-trot, with the title _Yearning_, had swept the
world that winter. Once we had heard it we could not have enough of it.
We were all soaked in it and intoxicated with it and every one hummed
the melody whenever it was played. I danced without stop and with any
one who came in my way, with quite young girls, with women in their
earlier or their latter prime, and with those who had sadly passed them
both; and with them all I was enraptured--laughing, happy, radiant. And
when Pablo saw me so radiant, me whom he had always looked on as a very
lamentable poor devil, his eyes beamed blissfully upon me and he was so
inspired that he got up from his chair and blowing lustily in his horn
climbed up on it. From this elevation he blew with all his might, while
at the same time his whole body, and his instrument with it, swayed to
the tune of _Yearning_. I and my partner kissed our hands to him
and sang loudly in response. Ah, thought I, meanwhile, let come to me
what may, for once at least, I, too, have been happy, radiant, released
from myself, a brother of Pablo’s, a child.
I had lost the sense of time, and I don’t know how many hours or
moments the intoxication of happiness lasted. I did not observe
either that the brighter the festal fire burned the narrower were the
limits within which it was confined. Most people had already left.
The corridors were silent and many of the lights out. The stairs
were deserted and in the rooms above one orchestra after another had
stopped playing and gone away. It was only in the principal room and
in Hell below that the orgy still raged in a crescendo. Since I could
not dance with Hermine as a boy, we had only had fleeting encounters
in the pauses between the dances, and at last I lost sight of her
entirely--and not only sight but thought. There were no thoughts left.
I was lost in the maze and whirl of the dance. Scents and tones and
sighs and words stirred me. I was greeted and kindled by strange eyes,
encircled by strange faces, borne hither and thither in time to the
music as though by a wave.
And then of a sudden I saw, half coming to my senses for a moment,
among the last who still kept it up in one of the smaller rooms,