Steppenwolf
are sure to find something to eat in the cars. Aren’t you hungry, you
Bolsheviks?”
Down in the burning town the bells began to peal with a wild terror. We
set ourselves to climb down. As I helped Dora to climb over the breast
work, I kissed her knee. She laughed aloud, and then the planks gave
way and we both fell into vacancy--
* * * * *
Once more I stood in the round corridor, still excited by the hunting
adventure. And everywhere on all the countless doors were the alluring
inscriptions:
MUTABOR
TRANSFORMATION INTO ANY ANIMAL OR PLANT
YOU PLEASE
KAMASUTRAM
INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIAN ARTS OF LOVE
COURSE FOR BEGINNERS; FORTY-TWO DIFFERENT
METHODS AND PRACTICES
DELIGHTFUL SUICIDE
YOU LAUGH YOURSELF TO BITS
DO YOU WANT TO BE ALL SPIRIT?
THE WISDOM OF THE EAST.
DOWNFALL OF THE WEST
MODERATE PRICES. NEVER SURPASSED
COMPENDIUM OF ART
TRANSFORMATION FROM TIME INTO SPACE
BY MEANS OF MUSIC
LAUGHING TEARS
CABINET OF HUMOUR
SOLITUDE MADE EASY
COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF
SOCIABILITY.
The series of inscriptions was endless. One was
GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE
PERSONALITY. SUCCESS GUARANTEED
This seemed to me to be worth looking into and I went in at this door.
I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a
large chess-board in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor.
At the first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate
a similar gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.
“Are you Pablo?” I asked.
“I am not anybody,” he replied amiably. “We have no names here and we
are not anybody. I am a chess-player. Do you wish for instruction in
the building up of the personality?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal.”
“My pieces--?”
“Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up.
I can’t play without pieces.”
He held a glass up to me and again I saw the unity of my personality
broken up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased.
The pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen.
The player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers
and placed them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to
speak in the monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or
reading that he has often gone through before.
“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is
known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude
of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the
personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science
has invented the name Schizomania for it. Science is in this so far
right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a
certain order and grouping. It is wrong in so far as it holds that one
only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity
of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant
consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the
state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labours of
original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for
normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are
incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who
are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology
of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the
soul. We demonstrate to any one whose soul has fallen to pieces that he
can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases,
and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.
As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do
we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups,
with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are
eternally inexhaustible. Look!”
With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my
pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful
and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them
on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and
families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small
world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through
its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making
treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was
indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama.
Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the
pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a
new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships
and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first,
it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was
different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and
the situations differently presented.
And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after
another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and
every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged
recognisably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet
each was entirely new.
“This is the art of life,” he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an
artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may
complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just
as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is
schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy. Even learned
men have come to a partial recognition of this, as may be gathered,
for example, from _Prince Wunderhorn_, that enchanting book, in
which the industry and pains of a man of learning, with the assistance
of the genius of a number of madmen and artists shut up as such,
are immortalised. Here, take your little pieces away with you. The
game will often give you pleasure. The piece that to-day grew to the
proportions of an intolerable bugbear, you will degrade to-morrow to a
mere lay figure. The luckless Cinderella will in the next game be the
princess. I wish you much pleasure, my dear sir.”
I bowed low in gratitude to the gifted chess-player, put the little
pieces in my pocket and withdrew through the narrow door.
My real intention was to seat myself at once on the floor in the
corridor and play the game for hours, for whole eternities; but I was
no sooner in the bright light of the circular theatre passage than
a new and irresistible current carried me along. A dazzling poster
flashed before my eyes:
MARVELLOUS TAMING OF THE STEPPENWOLF
Many different emotions surged up in me at the sight of this
announcement. My heart was painfully contracted by all kinds of fears
and repressions from my former life and the reality I had left behind.
With trembling hand I opened the door and found myself in the booth
of a Fair with an iron rail separating me from a wretched stage.
On the stage I saw an animal-tamer--a cheap-jack gentleman with a
pompous air--who in spite of a large moustache, exuberantly muscular
biceps and his absurd circus get-up had a malicious and decidedly
unpleasant resemblance to myself. The strong man led on a leash like
a dog--lamentable sight--a large, beautiful but terribly emaciated
wolf, whose eyes were cowed and furtive; and it was as disgusting
as it was intriguing, as horrible as it was all the same secretly
entertaining, to see this brutal tamer of animals put the noble and yet
so ignominiously obedient beast of prey through a series of tricks and
sensational turns.
At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf
marvellously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command
and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip. He
went down on his knees, lay for dead, and, aping the lord of creation,
carried a loaf, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket in his mouth with
cheerful obedience; and he even had to pick up the whip that the tamer
had let fall and carry it after him in his teeth while he wagged his
tail with an unbearable submissiveness. A rabbit was put in front of
him and then a white lamb. He bared his teeth, it is true, and the
saliva dropped from his mouth while he trembled with desire, but he did
not touch either of the animals; and at the word of command he jumped
over them with a graceful leap, as they cowered trembling on the floor.
More--he laid himself down between the rabbit and the lamb and embraced
them with his foremost paws to form a touching family group, at the
same time eating a stick of chocolate from the man’s hand. It was an
agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the wolf had learnt to
belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.
There was some compensation, however, both for the horrified spectator
and for the wolf himself, in the second part of the programme. For
after this refined exhibition of animal-taming and when the man with a
winning smile had made his triumphant bow over the group of the wolf
and the lamb, the rôles were reversed. My engaging double suddenly
with a low reverence laid his whip at the wolf’s feet and became as
agitated, as shrunken and wretched, as the wolf had been before.
The wolf, however, licked his chops with a grin, his constraint and
dissimulation erased. His eyes kindled. His whole body was taut and
showed the joy he felt at recovering his wild nature.
And now the wolf commanded and the man obeyed. At the word of command
the man sank on his knees, let his tongue loll out and tore his clothes
off with his filed teeth. He went on two feet or all-fours just as the
wolf ordered him, played the human being, lay for dead, let the wolf
ride on his back and carried the whip after him. With the aptness of
a dog he submitted gladly to every humiliation and perversion of his
nature. A lovely girl came on to the stage and went up to the tamed
man. She stroked his chin and rubbed her cheek against his; but he
remained on all-fours, remained a beast. He shook his head and began to
show his teeth at the charming creature--so menacingly and wolfishly
at last, that she ran away. Chocolate was put before him, but with a
contemptuous sniff he thrust it from him with his snout. Finally the
white lamb and the fat piebald rabbit were brought on again and the
docile man gave his last turn and played the wolf most amusingly. He
seized the shrieking creatures in his fingers and teeth, tore them limb
from limb, grinningly chewed the living flesh and rapturously drank
their warm blood while his eyes closed in a dreamy delight.
I made for the door in horror and dashed out. This Magic Theatre was
clearly no paradise. All hell lay beneath its charming surface. O God,
was there even here no release?
In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and
chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other. I desired
nothing but to be beyond this wave of disgust. I wrestled with
myself for more bearable, friendlier pictures. “O Friend, not these
notes!” sang in my head, and with horror I remembered those terrible