Steppenwolf
photographs from the Front that one saw occasionally during the
war--those heaps of bodies entangled with each other, whose faces were
changed to grinning ghouls by their gas-masks. How silly and childish
of me, a humanely minded opponent of war though I was, to have been
horrified by those pictures. To-day I knew that no tamer of beasts, no
General, no insane person could hatch a thought or a picture in his
brain that I could not match myself with one every bit as frightful,
every bit as savage and wicked, as crude and stupid.
With an immense relief I remembered the notice I had seen on first
entering the theatre, the one that the nice boy had stormed so
furiously--
ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
and it seemed to me, all in all, that there was really nothing else so
desirable as this. I was greatly cheered at finding that I could escape
from that cursed wolf-world, and went in.
The fragrance of spring-time met me. The very atmosphere of boyhood
and youth, so deeply familiar and yet so legendary, was around me and
in my veins flowed the blood of those days. All that I had done and
thought and been since, fell away from me and I was young again. An
hour, a few minutes before, I had prided myself on knowing what love
was and desire and longing, but it had been the love and the longing of
an old man. Now I was young again and this glowing current of fire that
I felt in me, this mighty impulse, this unloosening passion like that
wind in March that brings the thaw, was young and new and genuine. How
the flame that I had forgotten leaped up again, how darkly stole on my
ears the tones of long ago! My blood was on fire, and blossomed forth
as my soul cried aloud and sang. I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen
with my head full of Latin and Greek and poetry. I was all ardour and
ambition and my fancy was laden with the artist’s dreams. But far
deeper and stronger and more awful than all there burned and leapt in
me the flame of love, the hunger of sex, the fever and the foreboding
of desire.
I was standing on a spur of the hills above the little town where I
lived. The wind wafted the smell of spring and violets through my long
hair. Below in the town I saw the gleam of the river and the windows
of my home, and all that I saw and heard and smelt overwhelmed me, as
fresh and reeling from creation, as radiant in depth of colour, swayed
by the wind of spring in as magical a transfiguration, as when once I
looked on the world with the eyes of youth--first youth and poetry.
With wandering hand I pulled a half-opened leaf-bud from a bush that
was newly green. I looked at it and smelt it (with the smell everything
of those days came back in a glow) and then I put it between my lips,
lips that no girl had ever kissed, and began playfully to bite it. At
the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what
it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living
again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in
early spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and
greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly.
She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill towards me.
She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with
apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits,
with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw
for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful
and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful
and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs;
and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with
the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the girl
filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of
woman. In that moment was contained the shock and the forewarning of
enormous possibilities and promises, nameless delight, unthinkable
bewilderments, anguish, suffering, release to the innermost and deepest
guilt. Oh, how sharp was the bitter taste of spring on my tongue! And
how the wind streamed playfully through the loose hair beside her
rosy cheeks! She was close now. She looked up and recognised me. For
a moment she blushed a little and looked aside; but when I took off
my school-cap, she was self-possessed at once and, raising her head,
returned my greeting with a smile that was quite grown-up. Then,
entirely mistress of the situation, she went slowly on, in a halo of
the thousand wishes, hopes and adorations that I sent after her.
So it had once been on a Sunday thirty-five years before and all that
had been then came back to me in this moment. Hill and town, March wind
and buddy taste, Rosa and her brown hair, the welling-up of desire
and the sweet suffocation of anguish. All was as it was then, and it
seemed to me that I had never in my life loved as I loved Rosa that
day. But this time it was given me to greet her otherwise than on that
occasion. I saw her blush when she recognised me, and the pains she
took to conceal it, and I knew at once that she had a liking for me
and that this encounter meant the same for her as for me. And this time
instead of standing ceremoniously cap in hand till she had gone by, I
did, in spite of anguish bordering on obsession, what my blood bade me
do. I cried: “Rosa! Thank God, you’ve come, you beautiful, beautiful
girl. I love you so dearly.” It was not perhaps the most brilliant of
all the things that might have been said at this moment, but there was
no need for brilliance, and it was enough and more. Rosa did not put
on her grown-up air, and she did not go on. She stopped and looked at
me and, growing even redder than before, she said: “Heaven be praised,
Harry--do you really like me?” Her brown eyes lit up her strong face,
and they showed me that my past life and loves had all been false and
perplexed and full of stupid unhappiness from that very moment on a
Sunday afternoon when I had let Rosa pass me by. Now, however, the
blunder was put right. Everything went differently and everything was
good.
We clasped hands, and hand in hand walked slowly on as happy as we
were embarrassed. We did not know what to do or to say, so we began
to walk faster from embarrassment and then broke into a run, and ran
till we lost our breath and had to stand still. But we did not let go
our hands. We were both still children and did not know quite what to
do with each other. That Sunday we did not even kiss, but we were
immeasurably happy. We stood to get our breath. We sat on the grass
and I stroked her hand while she passed the other one shyly over my
hair. And then we got up again and tried to measure which of us was
the taller. In reality, I was the taller by a finger’s breath, but I
would not have it so. I maintained that we were of exactly the same
height and that God had designed us for each other and that later on
we would marry. Then Rosa said that she smelt violets and we knelt in
the short spring grass and looked for them and found a few with short
stalks and I gave her mine and she gave me hers, and as it was getting
chill and the sun slanted low over the cliffs, Rosa said she must go
home. At this we both became very sad, for I dared not accompany her.
But now we shared a secret and it was our dearest possession. I stayed
behind on the cliffs and lying down with my face over the edge of the
sheer descent, I looked down over the town and watched for her sweet
little figure to appear far below and saw it pass the spring and over
the bridge. And now I knew that she had reached her home and was going
from room to room, and I lay up there far away from her; but there was
a bond between her and me. The same current ran in both of us and a
secret passed to and fro.
We saw each other again here and there all through this spring,
sometimes on the cliffs, sometimes over the garden hedge; and when
the elder began to bloom we gave each other the first shy kiss. It
was little that children like us had to give each other and our kiss
lacked warmth and fullness. I scarcely ventured to touch the strands
of her hair about her ears. But all the love and all the joy that was
in us were ours. It was a shy emotion and the troth we plighted was
still unripe, but this timid waiting on each other taught us a new
happiness. We climbed one little step up on the ladder of love. And
thus, beginning from Rosa and the violets, I lived again through all
the loves of my life--but under happier stars. Rosa I lost, and Irmgard
appeared; and the sun was warmer and the stars less steady, but Irmgard
no more than Rosa was mine. Step by step I had to climb. There was
much to live through and much to learn; and I had to lose Irmgard and
Anna too. Every girl that I had once loved in youth, I loved again,
but now I was able to inspire each with love. There was something I
could give to each, something each could give to me. Wishes, dreams and
possibilities that had once had no other life than my own imagination
were lived now in reality. They passed before me like beautiful
flowers, Ida and Laura and all whom I had loved for a summer, a month,
or a day.
I was now, as I perceived, that good looking and ardent boy whom I had
seen making so eagerly for love’s door. I was living a bit of myself
only--a bit that in my actual life and being had not been expressed
to a tenth or a thousandth part, and I was living it to the full. I
was watching it grow unmolested by any other part of me. It was not
perturbed by the thinker, nor tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed
by the poet, the visionary or the moralist. No--I was nothing now but
the lover and I breathed no other happiness and no other suffering
than love. Irmgard had already taught me to dance and Ida to kiss, and
it was Emma first, the most beautiful of them all, who on an autumn
evening beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown breasts to kiss and the
cup of passion to drink.
I lived through much in Pablo’s little theatre and not a thousandth
part can be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved were mine.
Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she
alone knew how to take. Much love, much happiness, much indulgence,
and much bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share. All the
love that I had missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden during
this hour of dreams. There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones
that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust, inward
reverie, glowing melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I found
women who were only to be taken by storm and those whom it was a joy to
woo and win by degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if but
for a moment the voice of sex had called me, a woman’s glance kindled
me or the gleam of a girl’s white skin allured me, emerged again and
all that had been missed was made good. All were mine, each in her
own way. The woman with the remarkable dark brown eyes beneath flaxen
hair was there. I had stood beside her for a quarter of an hour in the
corridor of an express and afterwards she often appeared in my dreams.
She did not speak a word, but what she taught me of the art of love was
unimaginable, frightful, deathly. And the sleek, still Chinese, from
the harbour of Marseilles, with her glassy smile, her smooth dead-black
hair and swimming eyes--she too knew undreamed-of things. Each had
her secret and the bouquet of her soil. Each kissed and laughed in a
fashion of her own, and in her own peculiar way was shameful and in
her own peculiar way shameless. They came and went. The stream carried
them towards me and washed me up to them and away. I was a child in the
stream of sex at play in the midst of all its charm, its danger and