Steppenwolf
surprise. And it astonished me to find how rich my life--the seemingly
so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf--had been in the
opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled
before them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget
them. But here they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one
missing. And now that I saw them I gave myself up to them without
defence and sank down into the rosy twilight of their underworld. Even
that seduction to which Pablo had once invited me came again, and other
earlier ones, none of which at the time I had even fully grasped,
fantastic games for three or four, caught me into their gambols with a
laugh. Many things happened and many games were played not to be said
in words.
When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of
allurement and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent. I was
equipped, far gone in knowledge, wise, expert--ripe for Hermine. She
rose as the last figure in my populous mythology, the last name of an
endless series; and at once I came to myself and made an end of this
fairy-tale of love; for I did not wish to meet her in this twilight
of a magic mirror. I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my
game of chess--I belonged to her wholly. Oh, I would now so lay out the
pieces in my game that all was centred in her and led to fulfilment.
The stream had washed me ashore. Once again I stood in the silent
theatre passage. What now? I felt for the little figures in my
pocket--but already this impulse died away. Around me was the
inexhaustible world of doors, notices and magic mirrors. Listlessly I
read the first words that caught my eye, and shuddered.
HOW ONE KILLS FOR LOVE
was what it said.
Swiftly a picture was flashed upon my memory with a jerk and remained
there one instant. Hermine at the table of a restaurant, turning all
at once from the wine and food, lost in an abyss of speech, with a
terrifying earnestness in her face as she said that she would have one
aim only in making me her lover, and it was that she should die by my
hand. A heavy wave of anguish and darkness flooded my heart. Suddenly
everything confronted me once more. Suddenly once more the sense of the
last call of fate gripped my heart. Desperately I felt in my pocket
for the little figures so that I might practise a little magic and
rearrange the lay-out of the board. The figures were no longer there.
Instead of them I pulled out a knife. In mortal dread I ran along the
corridor, past every door. I stood opposite the gigantic mirror. I
looked into it. In the mirror there stood a beautiful wolf as tall as
myself. He stood still, glancing shyly from unquiet eyes. As he leered
at me, his eyes blazed and he grinned a little so that his chops
parted and showed his red tongue.
Where was Pablo? Where was Hermine? Where was that clever fellow who
had discoursed so pleasantly about the building up of the personality?
Again I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad.
There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw. It was
I, Harry. My face was grey, forsaken of all fancies, fordone with all
vice, horribly pale. Still it was a human being, some one one could
speak to.
“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” said he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for
death.”
“Where is death then?”
“Coming,” said the other. And I heard from the empty spaces within the
theatre the sound of music, a beautiful and awful music, that music
from _Don Giovanni_ that heralds the approach of the guest of
stone. With an awful and an iron clang it rang through the ghostly
house, coming from the other world, from the immortals.
“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and
the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.
At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and
ice-cold laughter out of a world beyond unknown to men, a world born
of sufferings, purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through
with the blessing of this laughter, and there came Mozart. He passed
by me laughing as he went and, strolling quietly on, he opened the
door of one of the boxes and went in. Eagerly I followed the god of my
youth, the object, all my life long, of love and veneration. The music
rang on. Mozart was leaning over the front of the box. Of the theatre
nothing was to be seen. Darkness filled the boundless space.
“You see,” said Mozart, “it goes all right without the
saxophone--though to be sure, I shouldn’t wish to tread on the toes of
that famous instrument.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are in the last act of _Don Giovanni_. Leporello is on his
knees. A superb scene, and the music is fine too. There is a lot in
it, certainly, that’s very human, but you can hear the other world in
it--the laughter, eh?”
“It is the last great music ever written,” said I with the pomposity
of a schoolmaster. “Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf
also, and I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You
frown, Maestro? Oh, yes, Beethoven--he is wonderful too. But all
that--beautiful as it may be--has something rhapsodical about it,
something of disintegration. A work of such plentitude and power as
_Don Giovanni_ has never since arisen among men.”
“Don’t overstrain yourself,” laughed Mozart, in frightful mockery.
“You’re a musician yourself, I perceive. Well, I have given up the
trade and retired to take my ease. It is only for amusement that I look
on at the business now and then.”
He raised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some
pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box
into immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there.
Mountains and sea-shores glimmered, and beneath us extended world-wide
a desert plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy
aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some
ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and
Mozart said:
“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take
him all his time.”
I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all
those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment
were superfluous.
“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with
a nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just
as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and
closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with
slow and sad step.
“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as
the most extreme contrasts conceivable.”
Mozart laughed.
“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little
distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick
orchestration was in any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal
failing. It was a fault of their time.”
“What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?” I cried in protest.
“Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the
debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to
themselves is left over to stand to their credit.”
“But they can’t either of them help it!”
“Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But
they have to pay for it all the same.”
“But that is frightful.”
“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are
responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You
must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not
know that.”
I was now thoroughly miserable. I saw myself as a dead-weary pilgrim,
dragging myself across the desert of the other world, laden with
the many superfluous books I had written, and all the articles and
feuilletons; followed by the army of compositors who had had the type
to set up, by the army of readers who had had it all to swallow. My
God--and over and above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the
whole of original sin. All this, then, was to be paid for in endless
purgatory. And only then could the question arise whether, behind all
that, there was anything personal, anything of my own, left over; or
whether all that I had done and all its consequences were merely the
empty foam of the sea and a meaningless ripple in the flow of what was
over and done.
Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault
in the air for laughter’s sake and played trills with his heels. At the
same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young man, you are biting your
tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers,
those carrion-feeders, and all your type-setters, those wretched
abettors, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I
shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with
printer’s ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if
that’ll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectakled and shackled,
and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally
no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and
slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings
and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”
This, however, was too much for me. Anger left me no time for
melancholy. I caught hold of Mozart by the pig-tail and off he flew.
The pig-tail grew longer and longer like the tail of a comet and I was
whirled along at the end of it. The devil--but it was cold in this
world we traversed! These immortals put up with a rarefied and glacial
atmosphere. But it was delightful all the same--this icy air. I could
tell that, even in the brief moment that elapsed before I lost my
senses. A bitter-sharp and steel-bright icy gaiety coursed through me
and a desire to laugh as shrilly and wildly and unearthily as Mozart
had done. But then breath and consciousness failed me.
* * * * *
When I came to myself I was bewildered and done-up. The white light
of the corridor shone in the polished floor. I was not among the
immortals, not yet. I was still, as ever, on this side of the riddle of
suffering, of wolf-men and torturing complexities. I had found no happy
spot, no endurable resting place. There must be an end of it.
In the great mirror, Harry stood opposite me. He did not appear to
be very flourishing. His appearance was much the same as on that
night when he visited the professor and sat through the dance at the
Black Eagle. But that was far behind, years, centuries behind. He
had grown older. He had learnt to dance. He had visited the magic
theatre. He had heard Mozart laugh. Dancing and women and knives had
no more terrors for him. Even those who have average gifts, given a
few hundred years, come to maturity. I looked for a long time at Harry
in the looking-glass. I still knew him well enough, and he still bore
a faint resemblance to the boy of fifteen who one Sunday in March had
met Rosa on the cliffs and taken off his school-cap to her. And yet he
had grown a few centuries older since then. He had pursued philosophy
and music and had his fill of war and his Elsasser at the Steel Helmet
and discussed Krishna with men of honest learning. He had loved Erica
and Maria, and had been Hermine’s friend, and shot down motor-cars, and
slept with the sleek Chinese, and encountered Mozart and Goethe, and
made sundry holes in the web of time and rents in reality’s disguise,
though it held him a prisoner still. And suppose he had lost his pretty
chessmen again, still he had a fine blade in his pocket. On then, old
Harry, old weary loon.