Steppenwolf
after having left behind your valuable personality, will have the left
side of the theatre at your disposal, Hermine the right. Once inside,
you can meet each other as you please. Hermine will be so kind as to
go for a moment behind the curtain. I should like to introduce Harry
first.”
Hermine disappeared to the right past a gigantic mirror that covered
the rear wall from floor to vaulted ceiling.
“Now, Harry, come along be as jolly as you can. To make it so and to
teach you to laugh is the whole aim in getting up this entertainment--I
hope you will make it easy for me. You feel quite well, I trust? Not
afraid? That’s good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with
unfeigned pleasure, enter our visionary world. You will introduce
yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide, since this is the
custom.”
He took out the pocket-mirror again and held it in front of my face.
Again I was confronted by the same indistinct and cloudy reflection,
with the wolf’s shape encircling it and coursing through it. I knew it
too well and disliked it too sincerely for its destruction to cause me
any sorrow.
“You will now extinguish this superfluous reflection, my dear friend.
That is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet
it, if your mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school
of humour. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humour begins when a
man ceases to take himself seriously.”
I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the
wolf were going through their convulsions. For a moment there was
a convulsion deep within me too, a faint but painful one like
remembrance, or like homesickness, or like remorse. Then the slight
oppression gave way to a new feeling like that a man feels when a tooth
has been extracted with cocaine, a sense of relief and of letting out a
deep breath, and of wonder, at the same time, that it has not hurt in
the least. And this feeling was accompanied by a buoyant exhilaration
and a desire to laugh so irresistible that I was compelled to give way
to it.
The mournful image in the glass gave a final convulsion and vanished.
The glass itself turned grey and charred and opaque, as though it had
been burnt. With a laugh Pablo threw the thing away and it went rolling
down the endless corridor and disappeared.
“Well laughed, Harry,” cried Pablo. “You will learn to laugh like the
immortals yet. You have done with the Steppenwolf at last. It’s no good
with a razor. Take care that he stays dead. You’ll be able to leave
the farce of reality behind you directly. At our next meeting we’ll
drink brotherhood, dear fellow. I never liked you better than I do
to-day. And if you still think it worth your while we can philosophise
together and argue and talk about music and Mozart and Gluck and Plato
and Goethe to your heart’s content. You will understand now why it was
so impossible before. I wish you good riddance of the Steppenwolf for
to-day at any rate. For naturally, your suicide is not a final one.
We are in a magic theatre; a world of pictures, not realities. See
that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that you really
are not in love with your highly questionable personality any longer.
Should you still, however, have a hankering after it, you need only
have another look in the mirror that I will now show you. But you know
the old proverb: ‘A mirror in the hand is worth two on the wall?’ Ha!
ha!” (again that laugh, beautiful and frightful!) “And now there only
remains one little ceremony and quite a jolly one. You have now to cast
aside the spectacles of your personality. So come here and look in a
proper looking-glass. It will give you some fun.”
Laughingly with a few droll caresses he turned me about so that I faced
the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself.
I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked
unusually good-humoured, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely
had time to recognise myself before the reflection fell to pieces.
A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till
the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or bits of
him, each of which I saw only for the instant of recognition. Some
of these multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some
very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys,
scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap
frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy
and comic, well dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long
haired, and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash,
recognised and gone. They sprang from each other in all directions,
left and right and into the recesses of the mirror and clean out of
it. One, an elegant young fellow, leapt laughing into Pablo’s arms
and embraced him and they went off together. And one who particularly
pleased me, a good looking and charming boy of sixteen or seventeen
years, sprang like lightning into the corridor and began reading the
notices on the doors. I went after him and found him in front of a door
on which was inscribed:
ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT
The dear boy hurled himself forward, made a leap and, falling head
first into the slot himself, disappeared behind the door.
Pablo too had vanished. So apparently had the mirror and with it all
the countless figures. I realised that I was now left to myself and to
the theatre, and I went with curiosity from door to door and read on
each its alluring invitation.
The inscription
JOLLY HUNTING
GREAT HUNT IN AUTOMOBILES
attracted me. I opened the narrow door and stepped in.
I was swept at once into a world of noise and excitement. Motor-cars,
some of them armoured, were run through the streets chasing the
pedestrians. They ran them down and either left them mangled on the
ground or crushed them to death against the walls of the houses. I saw
at once that it was the long-prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war
between men and machines, now at last broken out. On all sides lay dead
and decomposing bodies, and on all sides, too, smashed and distorted
and half-burnt motor-cars. Aeroplanes circled above the frightful
confusion and were being fired upon from many roofs and windows with
rifles and machine guns. On every wall were wild and magnificently
stirring placards, whose giant letters flamed like torches, summoning
the nation to side with the men against the machines, to make an end
at last of the fat and well-dressed and perfumed plutocrats who used
machines to squeeze the fat from other men’s bodies, of them and their
huge fiendishly purring automobiles. Set factories afire at last! Make
a little room on the crippled earth! Depopulate it so that the grass
may grow again, and woods, meadows, heather, stream and moor return to
this world of dust and concrete. Other placards, on the other hand, in
wonderful colours and magnificently phrased, warned all those who had a
stake in the country and some share of prudence (in more moderate and
less childish terms which testified to the remarkable cleverness and
intellect of those who had composed them) against the rising tide of
anarchy. They depicted in a truly impressive way the blessings of order
and work and property and education and justice, and praised machinery
as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid,
men would be equal to the gods. I studied these placards, both the
red and the green, and reflected on them and marvelled at them. The
flaming eloquence affected me as powerfully as the compelling logic.
They were right, and I stood as deeply convinced in front of one as in
front of the other, a good deal disturbed all the time by the rather
juicy firing that went on all round me. Well, the principal thing was
clear. There was a war on, a violent, genuine and highly sympathetic
war where there was no concern for Kaiser or republic, for frontiers,
flags or colours and other equally decorative and theatrical matters,
all nonsense at bottom; but a war in which every one who lacked air
to breathe and no longer found life exactly pleasing gave emphatic
expression to his displeasure and strove to prepare the way for a
general destruction of this iron-cast civilisation of ours. In every
eye I saw the unconcealed spark of destruction and murder, and in mine
too these wild red roses bloomed as rank and high, and sparkled as
brightly. I joined the battle joyfully.
The best of all, however, was that my school-friend, Gustav, turned
up close beside me. I had lost sight of him for dozens of years, the
wildest, strongest, most eager and venturesome of the friends of my
childhood. I laughed in my heart as I saw him beckon me with his bright
blue eyes. He beckoned and at once I followed him joyfully.
“Good Lord, Gustav,” I cried happily, “fancy seeing you again. Whatever
has become of you?”
“Keep quiet with your questions and chatter! I’m a professor of
theology if you want to know. But, the Lord be praised, there’s no
occasion for theology now, my boy. It’s war. Come on!”
He shot the driver of a small car that came snorting towards us and
leaping into it as nimbly as a monkey, brought it to a standstill for
me to get in. Then we drove like the devil between bullets and crashed
cars out of town and suburbs.
“Are you on the side of the manufacturers?” I asked my friend.
“Oh, Lord, that’s a matter of taste, so we can leave it out of
account--though now you mention it, I rather think we might take
the other side, since at bottom it’s all the same, of course. I’m a
theologian and my predecessor, Luther, took the side of the princes and
plutocrats against the peasants. So now we’ll establish the balance a
little. This rotten car, I hope she’ll hold out another mile or two.”
Swift as the wind, that child of heaven, we rattled on, and reached a
green and peaceful countryside many miles distant. We traversed a wide
plain and then slowly climbed into the mountains. Here we made a halt
on a smooth and glistening road that led in bold curves between the
steep wall of rock and the low retaining wall. Far below shone the blue
surface of a lake.
“Lovely view,” said I.
“Very pretty. We’ll call it the Axle Way. A good many axles of one sort
or another are going to crash here, Harry, my boy. So watch out!”
A tall pine grew by the roadside, and among the tall branches we saw
something like a little hut made of boards to serve as an outlook and
point of vantage. Gustav smiled with a knowing twinkle in his blue
eyes. We hurried out of the car, climbed up the trunk and, breathing
hard, concealed ourselves in the outlook post, which pleased us much.
We found rifles and revolvers there and boxes of ammunition. We had
scarcely cooled down when we heard the hoarse imperious hoot of a
large touring-car from the next bend of the road. It came purring at
top speed up the smooth road. Our rifles were ready in our hands. The
excitement was intense.
“Aim at the chauffeur,” commanded Gustav quickly just as the heavy
car went by beneath us. I aimed, and fired at the chauffeur in his
blue cap. The man fell in a heap. The car careened on, charged the
cliff face, rebounded, attacked the lower wall furiously with all its
unwieldy weight like a great bumble bee and, tumbling over, crashed
with a brief and distant report into the depths below.
“Got him!” Gustav laughed. “My turn next.”
Another came as he spoke. There were three or four occupants packed in
the back seat. From the head of a woman a bright blue veil streamed out
behind. It filled me with genuine remorse. Who could say how pretty