Steppenwolf
Bah, the devil--how bitter the taste of life! I spat at Harry in the
looking-glass. I gave him a kick and kicked him to splinters. I walked
slowly along the echoing corridor, carefully scanning the doors that
had held out so many glowing promises. Not one now showed a single
announcement. Slowly I passed by all the hundred doors of the Magic
Theatre. Was not this the day I had been to a Masked Ball? Hundreds
of years had passed since then. Soon years would cease altogether.
Something, though, was still to be done. Hermine awaited me. A strange
marriage it was to be, and a sorrowful wave it was that bore me on,
drearily bore me on, a slave, a wolf-man. Bah, the devil!
I stopped at the last door. So far had the sorrowful wave borne me. O
Rosa! O departed youth! O Goethe! O Mozart!
I opened it. What I saw was a simple and beautiful picture. On a rug
on the floor lay two naked figures, the beautiful Hermine and the
beautiful Pablo side by side in a sleep of deep exhaustion after
love’s play. Beautiful, beautiful figures, lovely pictures, wonderful
bodies. Beneath Hermine’s left breast was a fresh round mark, darkly
bruised--a love bite of Pablo’s beautiful, gleaming teeth. There, where
the mark was, I plunged in my knife to the hilt. The blood welled out
over her white and delicate skin. I would have kissed away the blood
if everything had happened a little differently. As it was, I did
not. I only watched how the blood flowed and watched her eyes open
for a little moment in pain and deep wonder. What makes her wonder? I
thought? Then it occurred to me that I had to shut her eyes. But they
shut again of themselves. So all was done. She only turned a little
to one side, and from her arm-pit to her breast I saw the play of a
delicate shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what
I could not remember. Then she lay still.
For long I looked at her and at last I waked with a shudder and turned
to go. Then I saw Pablo stretch himself. I saw him open his eyes and
stretch his limbs and then bend over the dead girl and smile. Never,
I thought, will this fellow take anything seriously. Everything makes
him smile. Pablo, meanwhile, carefully turned over a corner of the
rug and covered Hermine up as far as her breast so that the wound
was hidden, and then he went silently out of the box. Where was he
going? Was everybody leaving me alone? I stayed there, alone with the
half-shrouded body of her whom I loved--and envied. The boyish hair
hung low over the white forehead. Her lips shone red against the dead
pallor of her blanched face and they were a little parted. Her hair
diffused its delicate perfume and through it glimmered the little
shell-like ear.
Her wish was fulfilled. Before she had ever been mine, I had killed my
love. I had done the unthinkable, and now I kneeled and stared and did
not know at all what this deed meant, whether it was good and right or
the opposite. What would the clever chess-player, what would Pablo have
to say to it? I knew nothing and I could not think. The painted mouth
glowed more red on the growing pallor of the face. So had my whole life
been. My little happiness and love were like this staring mouth, a
little red upon a mask of death.
And from the dead face, from the dead white shoulders and the dead
white arms, there exhaled and slowly crept a shudder, a desert
wintriness and desolation, a slowly, slowly increasing chill in which
my hands and lips grew numb. Had I quenched the sun? Had I stopped the
heart of all life? Was it the coldness of death and space breaking in?
With a shudder I stared at the stony brow and the stark hair and the
cool pale shimmer of the ear. The cold that streamed from them was
deathly and yet it was beautiful, it rang, it vibrated. It was music!
Hadn’t I once felt this shudder before and found it at the same time a
joy? Hadn’t I once caught this music before? Yes, with Mozart and the
immortals.
Verses came into my head that I had once come upon somewhere:
We above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know nor day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex as our device.
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Then the door of the box opened and in came Mozart. I did not recognise
him at the first glance, for he was without pigtail, knee-breeches and
buckled shoes, in modern dress. He took a seat close beside me, and
I was on the point of holding him back because of the blood that had
flowed over the floor from Hermine’s breast. He sat there and began
busying himself with an apparatus and some instruments that stood
beside him. He took it very seriously, tightening this and screwing
that, and I looked with wonder at his adroit and nimble fingers and
wished that I might see them playing a piano for once. I watched
him thoughtfully, or in a reverie rather, lost in admiration of his
beautiful and skilful hands, warmed too, by the sense of his presence
and a little apprehensive as well. Of what he was actually doing and of
what it was that he screwed and manipulated, I took no heed whatever.
I soon found, however, that he had fixed up a wireless set and put it
in going order, and now he inserted the loud-speaker and said: “Munich
calling. Concerto Grosso in F major of Handel.”
At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish
metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial
slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophones and
wireless sets are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime
and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath
a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could
distinguish the majestic structure and the deep wide breath and the
full broad bowing of the strings.
“My God,” I cried in horror, “what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really
mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day,
the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art?
Must this be, Mozart?”
How the uncomfortable man laughed! And what a cold and eerie laugh!
It was noiseless and yet everything went to smithereens in it. He
marked my torment with deep satisfaction while he bent over the cursed
screws and attended to the metal trumpet. Laughing still, he let the
distorted, the murdered and murderous music ooze out and on; and
laughing still, he replied:
“Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando?
An inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of
this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like
gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless
heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without
either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this
hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine
music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe
what this crazy speaking-trumpet, apparently the most stupid, the most
useless and the most damnable thing that the world contains, contrives
to do. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without
distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it
into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all
this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only,
however it may meddle and mar, lay its senseless mechanism at its feet.
Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And
now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by wireless, is, all
the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as
well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all
life. When you listen to wireless you are a witness of the everlasting
war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between
the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the wireless for ten
minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the
most impossible places, into snug drawing-rooms and attics and into
the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners,
and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils
and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its
spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime
picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its
unappetising tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere
it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and
vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All
life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not
asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics
of wireless or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn
what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. Or is it that you
have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and with better taste?
Oh, no, Mr. Harry, you have not. You have made a frightful history of
disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts. And you have,
as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a young lady
than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her. Was that right,
do you think?”
“Right?” I cried in despair. “No! My God, everything is so false, so
hellishly stupid and wrong! I am a beast, Mozart, a stupid, angry
beast, sick and rotten. There you’re right a thousand times. But as for
this girl--it was her own desire. I have only fulfilled her own wish.”
Mozart laughed his noiseless laughter. But he had the great kindness to
turn off the wireless.
My self-extenuation sounded unexpectedly and thoroughly foolish even to
me who had believed in it with all my heart. When Hermine had once, so
it suddenly occurred to me, spoken about time and eternity, I had been
ready forthwith to take her thoughts as a reflection of my own. That
the thought, however, of dying by my hand had been her own inspiration
and wish and not in the least influenced by me I had taken as a matter
of course. But why on that occasion had I not only accepted that
horrible and unnatural thought, but even guessed it in advance. Perhaps
because it had been my own. And why had I murdered Hermine just at the
very moment when I saw her lying naked in another’s arms? All-knowing
and all-mocking rang Mozart’s soundless laughter.
“Harry,” said he, “you’re a great joker. Had this beautiful girl really
nothing to desire of you but the stab of a knife? Keep that for some
one else! Well, at least you have stabbed her properly. The poor child
is as dead as a mouse. And now perhaps would be an opportune moment to
realise the consequences of your gallantry towards this lady. Or do you
think of evading the consequences?”
“No,” I cried. “Don’t you understand at all? I evade the consequences?
I have no other desire than to pay and pay and pay for them, to lay my
head beneath the axe and pay the penalty of annihilation.”
Mozart looked at me with intolerable mockery.
“How pathetic you always are. But you will learn humour yet, Harry.
Humour is always gallows-humour, and it is on the gallows you are now
constrained to learn it. You are ready? Good. Then off with you to the
public prosecutor and let the law take its course with you till your
head is coolly hacked off at break of dawn in the prison-yard. You are
ready for it?”
Instantly a notice flashed before my eyes:
HARRY’S EXECUTION
and I consented with a nod. I stood in a bare yard enclosed by four
walls with barred windows, and shivered in the air of a grey dawn.
There were a dozen gentlemen there in morning coats and gowns, and a