Steppenwolf
and filled it to overflowing--the only one in which the music still
sounded--of a sudden I saw a black Pierrette with face painted
white. She was fresh and charming, the only masked figure left and a
bewitching apparition that I had never in the whole course of the night
seen before. While in every one else the late hour showed itself in
flushed and heated faces, crushed dresses, limp collars and crumpled
ruffs, the black Pierrette stood there fresh and neat with her white
face beneath her mask. Her costume had not a crease and not a hair
was out of place. Her ruff and pointed cuffs were untouched. I rushed
towards her, put my arms around her, and drew her into the dance. Her
perfumed ruff tickled my chin. Her hair brushed my cheek. The young
vigour of her body answered my movements as no one’s else had done that
night, yielding to them with an inward tenderness and compelling them
to new contacts by the play of her allurements. I bent down to kiss her
mouth as we danced. Its smile was triumphant and long familiar. Of a
sudden I recognised the firm chin, the shoulders, arms and hands. It
was Hermine, Herman no longer. Hermine in a change of dress, fresh,
perfumed, powdered. Our lips met passionately. For a moment her whole
body to her knees clung in longing and surrender to mine. Then she drew
her mouth away and, holding back, fled from me as we danced. When the
music broke off we were still clasped where we stood. All the excited
couples round us clapped, stamped, cried out and urged the exhausted
orchestra to play _Yearning_ over again. And now a feeling that
it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the
curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us
symptoms of the weariness to come. Blindly, with bursts of laughter, we
flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more, into the music,
and the light that began to flood the room. Our feet moved in time to
the music as though we were possessed, every couple touching, and once
more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us. Hermine abandoned
her triumphant air, her mockery and coolness. She knew that there was
no more to do to make me in love with her. I was hers, and her way
of dancing, her looks and smiles and kisses all showed that she gave
herself to me. All the women of this fevered night, all that I had
danced with, all whom I had kindled or who had kindled me, all whom
I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had
followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one,
the one whom I held in my arms.
On and on went this nuptial dance. Time after time the music flagged.
The wind let their instruments fall. The pianist got up from the
piano. The first fiddle shook his head. And every time they were won
over by the imploring persistence of the last intoxicated dancers and
played once more. They played faster and more wildly. Then at last, as
we stood, still entwined and breathless after the last eager dance,
the piano was closed with a bang, and our arms fell wearily to our
sides like those of the wind and strings and the flutist, blinking
sleepily, put his flute away in its case. Doors opened, the cold air
poured in, attendants appeared with cloaks and the bar-waiter turned
off the light. The whole scene vanished eerily away and the dancers
who a moment ago had been all on fire shivered as they put on coats
and cloaks and turned up their collars. Hermine was pale but smiling.
Slowly she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one
arm caught the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran
from her arm-pit to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line
of shadow seemed to me to sum up all the charm and fascination of her
body like a smile.
We stood looking at one another, the last in the hall, the last in the
whole building. Somewhere below I heard a door bang, a glass break,
a titter of laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of
motor-cars starting up. And somewhere, at an indeterminable distance
and height, I heard a laugh ring out, an extraordinarily clear and
merry peal of laughter. Yet it was eerie and strange. It was a laugh,
made of crystal and ice, bright and radiant, but cold and inexorable.
Where had I heard this laugh before? I could not tell.
We stood and looked at one another. For a moment I came to my sober
self. I felt a fearful weariness descend upon me. I felt with
repugnance how moist and limp my clothing hung around me. I saw my
hands emerging red and with swollen veins from my crumpled and wilted
cuffs. But all at once the mood passed, banished by a look from
Hermine. At this look that seemed to come from my own soul all reality
fell away, even the reality of my sensuous love of her. Bewitched we
looked at one another, while my poor little soul looked at me.
“You’re ready?” asked Hermine, and her smile fled away like the shadows
on her breast. Far up in unknown space rang out that strange and eerie
laughter.
I nodded. Oh, yes, I was ready.
At this moment Pablo appeared in the doorway and beamed on us out of
his jolly eyes that really were animal’s eyes except that animal’s
eyes are always serious, while his always laughed, and this laughter
turned them into human eyes. He beckoned to us with his usual friendly
cordiality. He had put on a gorgeous silk smoking-jacket. His limp
collar and tired white face had a withered and pallid look above its
red facings; but the impression was erased by his radiant black eyes.
So was reality erased, for they too had the witchery.
We joined him when he beckoned and in the doorway he said to me in a
low voice: “Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For
madmen only, and one price only--your mind. Are you ready?”
Again I nodded.
The dear fellow gave us each an arm with kind solicitude, Hermine his
right, me his left, and conducted us upstairs to a small round room
that was lit from the ceiling with a bluish light and nearly empty.
There was nothing in it but a small round table and three easy chairs
in which we sat ourselves.
Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No,
I was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in
a stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme.
Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it
not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it
not, too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a
lost and frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermine’s grey ones?
Pablo looked at us good-naturedly as ever and with something
ceremonious in his friendliness; and he talked much and long. He whom
I had never heard say two consecutive sentences, whom no discussion
nor thesis could interest, whom I had scarcely credited with a single
thought, discoursed now in his good-natured warm voice fluently and
without a fault.
“My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long
wished for and of which he has long dreamed. The hour is a little late
and no doubt we are all slightly fatigued. So, first, we will rest and
refresh ourselves a little.”
From a recess in the wall he took three glasses and a quaint little
bottle, also a small oriental box inlaid with differently coloured
woods. He filled the three glasses from the bottle and taking three
long thin yellow cigarettes from the box and a box of matches from the
pocket of his silk jacket he gave us a light. And now we all slowly
smoked the cigarettes whose smoke was as thick as incense, leaning back
in our chairs and slowly sipping the aromatic liquid whose strange
taste was so utterly unfamiliar. Its effect was immeasurably enlivening
and delightful--as though one were filled with gas and had no longer
any gravity. Thus we sat peacefully exhaling small puffs and taking
little sips at our glasses, while every moment we felt ourselves
growing lighter and more serene.
From far away came Pablo’s warm voice.
“It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have the privilege of being
your host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely
weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You
have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate
to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of
course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own
soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for
which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being
within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture-gallery but your
own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key.
I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.”
Again he put his hand into the pocket of his gorgeous jacket and drew
out a round looking-glass.
“Look, it is thus that you have so far seen yourself.”
He held the little glass before my eyes (a childish verse came to my
mind: “Little glass, little glass in the hand”) and I saw, though
indistinctly and cloudily, the reflection of an uneasy self-tormented,
inwardly labouring and seething being--myself, Harry Haller. And within
him again I saw the Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with
frightened eyes that smouldered now with anger, now with sadness. This
shape of a wolf coursed through the other in ceaseless movement, as
a tributary pours its cloudy turmoil into a river. In bitter strife,
each tried to devour the other so that his shape might prevail. How
unutterably sad was the look this fluid inchoate figure of the wolf
threw from his beautiful shy eyes.
“There you see yourself,” Pablo remarked and put the mirror away in his
pocket. I was thankful to close my eyes and take a sip of the elixir.
“And now,” said Pablo, “we have had our rest. We have had our
refreshment and a little talk. If your fatigue has passed off I will
conduct you to my peep-show and show you my little theatre. Will you
come?”
We got up. With a smile Pablo led. He opened a door, and drew a curtain
aside and we found ourselves in the horseshoe-shaped corridor of a
theatre, and exactly in the middle. On either side, the curving passage
led past a large number, indeed an incredible number, of narrow doors
into the boxes.
“This,” explained Pablo, “is our theatre, and a jolly one it is. I hope
you’ll find lots to laugh at.” He laughed aloud as he spoke, a short
laugh, but it went through me like a shot. It was the same bright and
peculiar laugh that I had heard before from below.
“This little theatre of mine has as many doors into as many boxes
as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door
exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures,
my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through
it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what
you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed
long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or
however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means
simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is
the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter the theatre as you
are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry and the old
spectacles of the Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to lay these
spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed
personality here in the cloak-room where you will find it again when
you wish. The pleasant dance from which you have just come, the
treatise on the Steppenwolf, and the little stimulant that we have only
this moment partaken of may have sufficiently prepared you. You, Harry,